25 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

There is one other, painful thing we have shared in common: cluster headaches.

Though Peggy mentioned migraines in her letters, I would not known you suffered from these excruciating episodes until Flora told me about them some time after your death. It was after I had been diagnosed with this horrible affliction—those blinding spasms that arrive in a series, peculiarly, at the exact same time each day and engulf the whole of one side of the head, eyes, teeth and jaws, in excruciating pain. As I imagine you well know—did you experience them in the same way?—they are so regular you can almost set your watch by them. They are usually of a fixed duration—mine, at the time I suffered from them most, were mercifully brief, a half hour to an hour, at most—but incredibly intense; they say that clusters are worse by far than any migraine. And they leave behind them, every day, a shadow that hangs around inside your head for much longer than the pain itself.

I wonder how you dealt with them? For me, the only relief I could find—and it was minimal—was rocking. I’d climb out of bed, if it came at night, and hold my head tight between my hands and rock back and forth for as long as I could stand it. I do know there was no medication that could touch it, though Peggy once mentioned something that you took whose effects were almost as dire as the headaches themselves. Perhaps they have since discovered a more effective drug.

And then finally, after a few days, a couple of weeks, the series would come to an end as inexplicably as it started, and the headaches would be gone for months at a time.

This memory was evoked by the strange recurrence, as I started these letters, of a series of blessedly mild and slightly different physical sensations that share much in common with those clusters. The pain is almost an exact replica, a brilliant, sparkling aura on the entire left side of the head, but thankfully far less intense; and instead of coming at the same time each day, they seem to arrive, oddly, almost exactly one hour later each day than the day before.

I have been unable to determine whether there’s a genetic trail that leads to these events. Neither one of my sons, your grandsons, has mentioned them to me—but they are now still only in their fifties, and I believe that clusters tend to occur in later years. Mine came and went away again when I was in my sixties. Until now. I’m not sure about yours, and Flora is not around to ask about them any more.

Anyway, thought I’d mention this, now that you are finally beyond pain…

With love, Peter