The suffering of pain – the physical, psychological, social, emotional and spiritual experience of it in one’s body – is so often an incomplete narrative of a person’s life. I enjoy reading stories since the good novelists have the knack to capture everyday human experiences in words that shine a certain light; a texture of life that is mostly missing in academic articles and books.

In her 2018 Man Booker prize- winning book “Flights”, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk writes this about pain: “A thing reaches completion, an internal process is finalized, eliminating all that is unnecessary. That’s why it hurts, but it’s just the pain of purging.” That’s one dimension of pain as merely pain, something we have to pass through. About life she writes this: “life on this planet gets developed by some powerful force contained in every atom of organic matter. It’s a force there is no physical evidence of…It’s a thing that consists in bursting open, thrusting forward, in constantly going beyond what is…This lives, has a million traits and qualities, so that everything is contained within it, and there is nothing that might lie outside of it, all death is part of life, and in some sense there is no death. There are no errors.”

This week’s blog is dedicated to the memory and life of Adam, son of Marlene, brother of Aimée. He died a year ago in the early hours of Friday, 25 August 2017 shortly before his sixteenth birthday, in the final grips of cerebral palsy. The photo is of the painting, “Pietà” by Manfred Zylla, with Adam lying on the lap of Marlene, who lives with the effects of post-polio. He experienced life and love, sensed meaning with his brittle bones and tired tendons. He was no error.