12 JULY, 2021

My dear Harry,

Yes, your pain. I promised more.

This happened many, many years later. Even after you died.

I’ve had a pain myself for years and years. I remember going to a doctor about it when I was still teaching at the University of Southern California, back in the early 1970s. Perhaps 1972, 1973? Around then.

The pain is a sharp one, intermittent, but nasty when it happens. It occurs on the left side, toward the center, right beneath the lowest ribs. I can almost feel it when I push my fingers in and up, relieving it a bit. I’ve sought medical advice on numerous occasions, but I have never received a convincing diagnosis, let alone a cure. It still bothers me sometimes today, though I have to say with less frequency than it used to. If I focus my attention, I can feel it there at almost any moment, but most of the time it just goes unnoticed.

Well, here’s the story. I don’t actually recall what took me to Ed Cohen’s home clinic in the first place, but what Ed offered was a very deep tissue massage—something like a rolfing. He was good at it, had good strong hands and knew how and where to use them to effect. I had recently learned the benefits of what I could call trance work, for want of a better word—suspending normal brain activity in order to go deep inside and activate the unconscious mind. Knowing your fascination with the reaches of the human mind, I’m sure this is something you would appreciate, even though I suspect it was not something you practiced or experienced—but Ed’s work provided an ideal space for this to happen. You would have relished the chance to spend time on his massage table.

So there I was, on that table, this one time, having told Ed about that recurring pain beneath my ribs. He worked the spot intensely—and, yes, painfully!—even as his voice invited me to experience the pain to the fullest and allow it to speak to me, until finally I heard the words in my own voice, arising spontaneously, clearly, though without my formulating them in any conscious way: “This is not my pain,” I said. “It’s not your pain.” I heard Ed’s voice, followed by a silence. Then: “Whose pain is it, then?” he asked.

“My father’s pain,” I said, with utter clarity. “This is my father’s pain.”

Odd, no? It made an immediate, intuitive sense to me that I had been carrying your pain for all those years. That your pain had been such an intense experience to me, as a child, that it had somehow imprinted itself in some dark recess of the mind; and had worked, from there, to reinvent itself in my body.

Was this a cure? For a while I imagined that it might be, and for a while it seemed it was. But after that while the pain began to recur in all its familiarity, and it still prods at me from time to time, reminding me that it has never really gone away. It’s back now, with me, as I write. I have taken it to other medical professionals since that experience with Ed. I have had examinations, x-rays, scans, but none of them has resulted in a diagnosis. There is no apparent cause, no medical problem doctors can identify. It remains a mystery.

I still think of it as “my father’s pain”—your pain. If that’s what it is, the wound is very deep, impossible to root out. I think it will be with me until the day I die.

But I think you’ll agree with me and with my diagnosis—which would probably be yours, even all that time ago. And yet still… it is odd. No? So much for today, then.

With love, Peter