no consolation

05 Jun, 2026

for a long time i held this unchallenged soft belief that there was a kind of off-switch for physical pain. i say soft belief in the sense that i held it, on some level, without either directly considering or explicitly asserting it. or even really knowing that i held it, i think. it was the kind of thought that crosses my mind from time-to-time, and i do not challenge it, because i can see that it is a worm box. i think it was a kind of intentional naivety.

it is not that i thought pain doesn't exist - it clearly does. i have chronic back issues that cause all kinds of pathics of pain, and suffer worsening reynaud's. i have suffered acute insults. i have friends who suffer much worse chronic pain, and have suffered far worse acute injuries.

but i think the belief, specifically, was that maybe, when you are experiencing the pain of dying, in the acute sense - when there is no hope, when it is so extreme, when it is apropos only to death - that there is some kind of off-switch. some limitation, some conscious separation. i did not know how. maybe a biological fallback. maybe the grace of god, here, finally intercedes. i think this conception was aided by literature, where this kind of pain is usually elided. first-hand fictional accounts of death usually describe a kind of slipping away, a separation from pain.

and i have been around death. i have many more dead friends than is usual for my age, because of the kind of people i know and the way the world is around them. i have known people dying slowly from cancer or degenerative diseases. but i had never actually seen anyone die.

the kind of pain my cat experienced in his last hours was so inconceivably extreme. it was a sudden onset, without warning and with internal cause. the particular condition he experienced was especially painful because of a kind of tragic coincidence of feline biology. there was no chance he would survive. it took us around an hour to get him pain relief because we had to get a friend to drive us to a vet.

but maybe it is actually that it was so very conceivable, so direct. he was present and conscious for the entire time. i witnessed and felt his pain second-hand throughout. there was an empathic connection there, because he was, in the necessary sense, my child. a week later, i still cannot get the noises he made out of my head. the sight. i cannot stop thinking about how, had it occurred 15 minutes later, i would not have been at home - he would have died slowly, alone, over many hours, in this extreme, senseless, unmitigated pain.

and i know, really, i knew, already, that this happens. humans sometimes survive experiences like it, or they are relayed through observation. i have read accounts of the most terrifying pain that it is possible for people to experience. for instance, the experiences of "comfort women" during the japanese occupation of manchuria, or of people caught in the aftermath of atomic weapons. i mention these not to draw comparisons with any of those experiences, but only to note that i had been exposed to the knowledge of some of the most extreme examples. but i had not directly seen anything like it, and such accounts still tend to elide the actual experience of the raw physical pain itself - i think it is not possible to relay it in words - and these facilitated my continued belief in, my hope of, maybe, some final relief.

and this is, of course, likely to have been a kind of self-soothing belief. in the face of the deaths i have known. in the face of my own inevitable death. i do not usually fear death - sometimes i think it will be a relief. but i think i am scared of the pain of death.

but what really strikes me, is that i think that this was also maybe a kind of god-preserving belief. i am agnostic, probably. my experience leads me to believe there is Something. i know, well, i believe, there are unfalsifiable things that are true. i don't know what they are, but i like to think about it. i held a candle for a benevolent god.

but there is no benevolence. surely, there can be no benevolence? if there is god, it must be foundationally incompatible with us. it must be so fundamentally uncomprehending, incomprehensible, as to be cosmic horror, to render all theology nothing but roadside picnic. surely?

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