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I’ll take physical pain over emotional agony any day.
So yes, I did start cutting for the usual reasons. (Well, if you can call your mom dying of terminal lung cancer usual.) But that’s not why I kept it up.
Near the end, Mom was in so much pain that nothing they gave her helped. The cancer had metastasized which is a technical way to say it spread all over and it was eating her up from the inside out. She would lie there in bed, her face shiny with sweat, and try to talk to me like nothing was happening. But I could see the pain in her gray-green eyes. And I could hear her moaning when she thought I couldn’t hear.
It was awful.
One day it was too much. I was sitting with her when she woke up crying, the pain was so bad. I rang for the nurse and then ran to the bathroom. I knew I ought to wait until I got home but I couldn’t help it—I needed to cut.
I took out the tiny, thin razor blade I had wrapped in tissue and hidden in the folds of my battered Choco Cat wallet. Mom had given it to me for my twelfth birthday when I was still into all things Hello Kitty. Remembering that made me want to cry, made me need to cut even more.
With trembling fingers I drew the blade across my arm, making a shallow slice just below the crook of my elbow. And suddenly, I felt it—an agony so deep and throbbing it took my breath away. It filled me like water fills a cup, pouring into my body until I didn’t think I could stand any more.
But at the same time, my mother’s cries lessened and then ceased. Despite the weird pain, I had a moment of blind panic—was she dead? Feeling like I was one big ache, I opened the bathroom door a crack to reassure myself that she was still all right. To my surprise, she was breathing peacefully, a look of relief on her thin, wasted face.
“Mom?” I made her name a question and she turned her head to look at me and smiled.
“Megan,” she whispered, smiling. “It’s gone. I don’t know why but the pain is gone.”
I frowned. “Did the nurse come already to give you something?”
She shook her head. “No, no one came. They’re giving me everything they can but up until now it wasn’t helping. Maybe…maybe it just kicked in.”
I had my doubts about that. But it seemed too far fetched to believe anything else.
“Maybe so,” I told her. “I’ll be right out.”
I retreated back into the bathroom and washed the shallow cut in the sink. I still felt the dull, aching pain but it seemed to lessen as the water ran clear and the blood stopped flowing from my wound. By the time I put a tiny bandage on the cut, the weird pain was almost gone.
I went out of the room, hoping to have a real conversation with my Mom for once, instead of just asking her if she was all right when I could see clearly that she wasn’t. But she was already asleep.
I kissed her forehead and left but the incident had planted an idea in my mind. An idea which refused to be uprooted or pushed aside, no matter how crazy it seemed.
Could it be that I had somehow eased my mother’s pain? Had I transferred it to myself in some way and given her a moment’s release? If so, would it be possible to do it again?
It was and I did.
I cut more often after that, but not because I needed to relieve my own emotional pain. The horrible feeling of helplessness was gone. Yes, my mother was still dying, yes I was going to lose her, but until that happened, I had found a way to ease her anguish and that stopped the endless loop in my head. So the cutting was no longer for me—it was for her.
I came to see her every day after school, cut in the bathroom, and then sat with her until visiting hours were over. I usually cut once more before I left, to give her a few more hours of peace. The effects of my strange little ritual seemed to last anywhere from two to five hours, depending on how bad the pain was and what state of mind she was in. Feeling her agony inside me every time wasn’t pleasant but I took it gladly. As I said before, I’ll take physical pain over the emotional variety any time.
Mom lasted another three months that way. I ran out of room on my forearms and started on my inner thighs instead. I knew I’d have the scars for life but I didn’t care. I didn’t care because it helped her. I didn’t know how—I didn’t believe in magic or witchcraft or things that go bump in the night—but somehow it helped.
