What we do for one another is a mystery.
Penny woke on Tuesday morning and cautiously assessed the level of pain. If she didn’t move at all, there was nothing but the familiar bone-deep ache in all her joints. That wasn’t so bad, nothing stabbing, nothing grinding. Penny smiled. Ann must be having a good day. Maybe even heading for another minor remission. This was much better than it had been on Saturday, when Ann’s pain had woken Penny with a shock; that time, she had flinched against it and made it worse. This was nothing more than the pain she had endured Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for the thirty years since her daughter’s birth. Still smiling, Penny eased herself to sitting and reached for the cane she kept hanging on the rail that ran along the wall. Once she had it she stood, breathing deliberately, as the smile became a grimace, then walked slowly to the bathroom, where she used the rail to lower herself carefully to the toilet seat.
That evening, as Penny was lying on the daybed grading papers for her next day’s classes, there was a knock at the door. She levered herself up slowly and walked toward it. Her ex-husband Noah was on the doorstep, his gleaming Viasolo parallel parked on the street. If he’d done that, and not pulled into her driveway, he must want a favour. Too bad the pain was too much for her to consider standing on the doorstep while she found out what it was. “Hi,” she said, warily. “Come in.”
“How are you?” he asked as he followed her into the living room. They had been divorced for more than twenty years, after a marriage of less than ten, but seeing Noah always provoked the same mixture of exasperation and weary affection. She could recall the times when catching sight of Noah had sent thrills running through her, and also the times when just hearing two words in his careful patronizing tone had made her want to kill him. Now what she felt was gratitude that he had always been there for Ann. Well, nearly always.
“I’m fine,” Penny said, easing herself back onto the daybed. She was stiff and exhausted from the day’s pain, but he knew all about that.
“Good. Good . . .” He moved books from the gray chair to the beige one and sat on the gray one. When he had lived here, the house had been tidier. “I hate to drop this on you, Pen, but can you possibly do tomorrow?”
“Oh no,” she said.
“Penny . . .” His entitlement pressed hard on the exact places where her affection had worn thin.
“No. I can’t. No way.” She cut him off. “You know I’m prepared to make reasonable accommodations, but not at the last minute like this. I’ve arranged my classes specifically, my whole schedule is set, and tomorrow I have three senior seminars, a lecture, and an important dinner meeting. And I haven’t had a day free this week. Janice is in the middle of a Crohn’s flare, so I took that Sunday so she could preach, and yesterday—”
“I have to fly to Port Moresby,” Noah interrupted. “I’m on my way to the airport now. Old Ishi has had a stroke, and Klemperer isn’t coping. I have to go. Our whole Papuan capacity is collapsing. I have to be there. It could be my career, Pen.” Noah leaned forward, his hands clasped together.
“Your career is not more important than my career,” Penny said, firmly, though the thought of going through the eleven-hour flight from Cleveland to Port Moresby with Ann’s pain was legitimately horrifying.
“I know, but this beyond my control. Ishi might be dying.” Noah’s big brown eyes, so like Ann’s, were fixed on Penny’s.
She had always liked Ishi, Noah’s senior partner. “Do give her my best when you speak to her. And Suellen too.” She deliberately looked down at the icon on the app that recorded how many papers she still had to grade, to harden her heart. “But I can’t take tomorrow. Ask Lionel.”
“I already did. I called him. He’s rehearsing all day. Coppélia. They open on Monday.” Noah shrugged.
Penny winced. She loved her son-in-law, but she wished sometimes that Ann had found a partner whose career made it possible for him to share a little more of the burden.
“If you can’t do it, there’s nothing else for it: Ann will just have to shoulder her own pain tomorrow,” Noah said.
The words “selfish bastard” flashed through Penny’s mind, but she didn’t utter them. She didn’t need to. Noah knew how hard Ann’s pain was to bear, and he knew how much easier it was to bear someone else’s pain than one’s own. So he knew that he was forcing Penny to accept another day of Ann’s pain, however inconvenient it was, because he knew she wouldn’t put their daughter through that. One of the things that had led to the divorce was when Noah had wished aloud that pain transference had never been invented. Penny never felt like that. Bad as enduring Ann’s pain could be, it was so much better to suffer it herself than to watch her daughter suffer. After all, Penny only took the pain. That was all people could do for each other. Ann still had to bear the underlying organic condition, and the eventual degeneration it would cause.
“I’ll take Thursday and Friday,” Noah said, into her silence. “I really can’t manage tomorrow; I have to get some sleep on the flight so I can cope when I arrive. But Thursday I’ll be there, I’ll have found my feet, it will be all right.”
Penny sighed. Mentally, she had already filed this with the many other arguments she had lost to Noah over the years. “Can you at least take the pain until you get on the plane?”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “I’ll take it right now. And thanks, Pen. You’re the best.” He tapped at the app, and the sensation as pain left her was so delightful that she almost bounced up off the bed. His face, in contrast, seemed to age a decade as the pain hit. She reached back for the cane she no longer needed, and handed it to him with a stretch that would have been impossible moments before. “Thanks,” he said, pulling himself up carefully. “Just until I get to the car. I always keep one there.”
She walked out with him. “Do you think it’s a bit better today?” she asked.
He grinned through the pain. “Better than sometimes, definitely. But you know that long-term it just gets worse.”
Penny nodded. Wincing as he reached for it, Noah pulled his cane from his trunk, one of the high-tech lightweight models with a folding seat and a retractable snow spike. It looked as flashy next to her more traditional wooden cane as his zippy Viasolo did next to her sedate Solari.
When Penny went back in, she headed for the kitchen, almost dancing down the corridor. She was hungry, as she had not been all day. Moving without care felt like a luxury. She enjoyed standing to chop vegetables, relished taking a step to the fridge for a slice of lobster with no warning stab preventing her from moving. She sang as she stir-fried, and ate sitting at the kitchen table. If she hadn’t had this break from pain she’d have ordered banh mi, and this was so much nicer. She always liked to exercise on pain-free days. There wasn’t time to go to the dojo or the pool, but she did a few squats after dinner then sat at her desk to finish the grading. By the time Noah was on the plane and the pain hit her once more, she was ready for bed.
She woke Wednesday morning in absolute agony, pain tearing through her stomach like the worst imaginable period cramps, combining to set all Ann’s arthritic joint pain jangling. Penny blinked, and gasped aloud. When she tried to move, she could not suppress a cry. She called her daughter right away.
Ann sounded sleepy. “Mom?”
“This is really bad, sweetie. It might be some kind of warning sign. I think you should go to the doctor.”
“I’m so sorry!”
Penny hadn’t been living with Ann’s guilt for as long as Ann’s pain, so she wasn’t as used to it. Her daughter had been born with the joint condition, but the guilt developed as she grew, blossoming fully only in the last decade. Penny wondered sometimes what kind of mother-daughter relationship they would have without the existence of Ann’s disease. They loved each other. But Ann’s pain, and the question of who felt it, had always been between them, both binding them together and keeping them apart.
“I’m happy to bear it for you,” Penny said, even as a new ridge of pain ripped through her stomach. “Do you have your period?”
“Not until next week; you know that,” Ann said. “Why?”
“It’s just that this feels a bit like cramps,” Penny said, though she had never had any cramps one-tenth this bad.
“I never have cramps,” Ann said. “Let me feel this.”
“No, darling, you don’t want to,” Penny said.
“Mom, I am not a little kid anymore, and you have to let me make the decisions about my pain, just the same as anything else in my life. Let me feel it, and I’ll decide whether to go to the doctor. I can override you and just take it back.”
“Just for a minute, then.” Penny knew her daughter was right, but it was hard to let go all the same, to know that the agony would be inflicted on her. What kind of mother would she be if it didn’t hurt her as much emotionally as it relieved her physically to press the app to return her daughter’s pain? She pressed it decisively, and at once the arthritic ache was gone. Once the switch had been set up it really was that easy, though setting it up was a complicated process. For an instant Penny relaxed on the bed. “Mom?” Ann said. “This doesn’t feel any different from normal.” Penny hated to hear the pain, so familiar, coming through in her daughter’s voice. Then another cramp hit her.
“No, I guess these cramps are something else. Maybe Janice—though it doesn’t feel like that. And she’s considerate. She always calls. And anyway, her husband is taking her pain all this week.”
“It could be something of your own,” Ann said.
Penny laughed. The laughter hurt her stomach, so she stopped. “I didn’t even consider that possibility. I’m never ill. Maybe it’s some kind of menopause thing. I must be getting to that kind of age. Though I hadn’t heard that it feels like this.”
“Go to the doctor, Mom,” Ann said.
“I can’t today—I’m teaching, and it’s my really full day. I’ll make an appointment for tomorrow.” Penny stood up and walked toward the bathroom, taking the cane with her, because she’d need it soon enough, but swinging it like a baton.
“How come you had my pain if you’re teaching?” Ann asked. “Did Dad duck out of it again?”
“Didn’t Lionel tell you?” Penny asked, stepping under the shower.
“Dad asked Lionel?”
“He told me he had. He said Lionel’s in rehearsal for Coppélia.”
“That’s true. I’m so proud of him, Mom. This could be his big break, getting out of the corps, soloing. But he should have told me Dad called. I can cope with my own pain.”
“Sweetie—”
“Mom.” Ann’s voice was firm.
“But truly, it’s easier for me than it is for you.” The shower cycled to hot air. “There have been studies and everything.”
“Not when you have your own pain too,” Ann said. “Maybe you should give me that!” She sounded enthusiastic.
“What, I take yours and you take mine?” Penny joked, making her way back to the bedroom.
“No, seriously, Mom! I never get to do anything for you, because you never have any pain. But now I could! And you always say how much easier it is to bear somebody else’s pain. Everyone says that. Let me!”
“I’ll need it to show the doctor,” Penny said, pausing in pulling on her underwear and doubling up in pain as another cramp rocked her. “It wasn’t too bad in the shower, but now it’s biting again.”
“You said you were going to the doctor tomorrow, Mom. And if you have a full load teaching today, I should keep mine and yours!”
“No. That’s not happening. I’ve taught with yours before. I’m used to it. But if you really want to try trading, we could do that.” Penny pulled on a freshly printed academic robe.
“Fantastic!” Ann’s voice was bouncy. “Let’s switch, then.”
Penny hadn’t traded her own pain since they had tested the app with a needle jab. Unlike accepting and returning other people’s pain, which she had set as shortcuts, she had to go through several layers of menu. “Accept, accept, accept,” she heard Ann mutter, and as the cramps left her, Ann’s familiar grinding joint pain came back. She sat down fast on the edge of the bed.
“Oh, Mom,” Ann said, her voice full of concern. “Mom, I think you should go to the doctor now. Really. I don’t think this should wait until tomorrow.”
“Really?” Penny was surprised at the concern in Ann’s voice.
“Really. I’m happy to bear this for you, but what even is it? I’m worried. I’m making an appointment for you right now!” This was Ann’s lawyer voice, solicitous but with a competence and decisiveness she showed her clients but seldom her family. “There, she’ll see you at eleven thirty.”
“Give me my pain back, then, if I’m going to the doctor,” Penny said.
“No. I’ll drive over and we can go to the doctor together. I’m in court this afternoon, but this morning I’m working from home.”
“Pick me up from campus, then. I’ll take my first seminar and cancel the next. As long as I’m back by two for my lecture—is that when you’re due in court?”
As Penny drove her little Solari through the crisp fall morning, she tried to think what had been so different about her conversation with Ann. It had been like dealing with a friend, an equal. Maybe Ann was finally grown up enough that they could have a new kind of relationship? Or maybe it was having pain of her own to share. Apart from the usual array of viruses and skinned knees, all the pain Penny had ever experienced had been vicarious. It was hard to imagine that in the old days she’d barely have known what pain was, and been forced to endure the sight of other people suffering without being able to help at all.
In the ten o’clock seminar, the students were each giving five-minute presentations. The third student, Regina, was hit with pain and collapsed in the middle of hers. “Duleep!” she gasped.
The other students gasped too. “Lucky Reggie!” Danee observed. “I’ve been signed up for Duleep for two years, but never felt it.”
“While I’m sympathetic to your pain issue, let’s focus on our presentations now,” Penny said. “Could you continue until Regina is feeling better, Kim?” Kim came up to the podium, helped Regina to a seat in the front row, and began to speak.
Even hopelessly out-of-date Penny knew that Duleep was a Bollywood superstar who suffered from a kind of ulcer caused by the parasites endemic in the part of India where he had grown up. His pain was shared by his millions of fans worldwide. As with other celebrity figures who shared their pain, the recipients were thrilled to feel it. Regina’s writhings seemed exaggerated to Penny, but they wore off before she felt it necessary to comment. Once restored to her normal status, Regina sat quietly listening, and redid her presentation at the end. As class ended, all the other students crowded around to compliment her on her luck and stoicism. Penny left them to it and walked out the long way around, down the slope of the hill, avoiding the steps. Ann was waiting in the plaid Honda Sky she shared with Lionel.
When she slid in, Penny was horrified to see how drawn her daughter’s face was. “I’m glad we’re going to the doctor with this, because the sooner it’s fixed, the better,” Ann said, switching the car to self-drive mode. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not good, Mom.” She hugged Penny, who hugged her back.
The doctor’s office was traditionally paneled in supposedly soothing shades of beige and puce, and decorated with close-up photographs of aquatic birds. Penny had spent way too much time there with Ann.
Once her blood had been drawn and tested, the diagnosis was almost instant. The doctor frowned, and ran it again, while Penny frowned nervously at a grebe. The doctor handed the paper to Penny. “There’s no easy way to tell you this,” the doctor said.
Penny stared at the paper, hardly able to believe it. But the doctor had run it twice; it had to be right. “How can I be riddled with inoperable cancer?” she asked. “I didn’t feel a thing until today!”
The doctor frowned. “Have you been experiencing a lot of pain?” she asked. “Sometimes that can mask early symptoms.”
Penny handed Ann the prognosis as they got back into the car. Ann gasped, and hugged her again, then insisted on taking Penny’s pain back before they drove away. A chilly wind was blowing the leaves from the trees at the roadside. Before there were new green leaves, Penny would be dead. She couldn’t quite take it in.
“The first thing we need to do is sort out a pain management regime,” Ann said. “You’ve helped enough people. Lots of them will be happy to help you.”
“There are also painkillers, for cases like this,” Penny said.
Ann flinched as if her mother had said one of the five words you don’t say in church. “Mom. I love you. Other people love you. It won’t come to that. You don’t have to poison your body with those things, even if you are going to d-die.”
“This reminds me of the time when we got your diagnosis,” Penny said. “You were just a tiny baby. And you had this incurable disease that was going to give you pain forever. And your father and I were sure we could manage it. Delighted we lived now so that we could share the burden instead of being helpless and leaving you to suffer it alone.” They drove on, past the college, where Penny would not no longer teach out the school year. “What are you going to do, Ann?”
“I’ll cope,” Ann said, stalwartly. “Dad will be there. And Lionel will do what he can. I’ll find a way to manage. Don’t worry about me, now, Mom. Think about yourself.”
Penny looked out the car window, as helpless in the face of her daughter’s suffering as any parent had ever been.
“A Burden Shared” copyright © 2017 by Jo Walton
Art copyright © 2017 by Richie Pope
Great story with an interesting concept!
Maybe it’s my own chronic pain, but this story really struck a nerve. The desire to not burden others fights with the wish in the middle of the night that someone, anyone could take it away just for a couple of hours.
Thank you for this story.
This was really chilling, albeit in the best possible way.
This is a revoltingly sexist story, because it says that women, specifically, are obliged to constantly sacrifice themselves for others for years and years; to never, ever think of themselves; and to never resent this role. The daughter is not a small child. She’s 30 years old and a successful lawyer. If experiencing chronic pain would damage her happiness and career, why is her mother’s happiness and career any less important? Not to mention that logically, in this world there would be a whole service industry of people willing to bear pain for a fee. And because it can be done part time, it wouldn’t necessarily ruin *their* whole lives. In my opinion, the mother has wasted her life for nothing.
This idea is explored in Rudyard Kipling’s wonderful 1924 short story The Wish House which people who enjoyed this story (and that certainly included me) should seek out.
@5 Frances Grimble
Penny chooses to make sacrifices in her life and career for her daughter’s health and well-being. This is something that parents do. When her mother needs help later on, Ann is willing to make sacrifices in her life and career for her mother’s health and well-being. This is something that children do. Loving other people means being willing to give up our own comfort, and sometimes our own well-being, to help the ones we love. This is not a bad thing.
“In my opinion, the mother has wasted her life for nothing.” If you consider relieving another person’s pain and suffering “nothing”, then you’re correct. The hypothetical service industry may be too expensive, just as home care is often too expensive in real life. When people don’t have enough money to pay for professionals, family members and friends have to step up and bear the burden of care, whether it is in the form of visits and assistance or pain transference.
There’s nothing demeaning or bad in caring for others, rather than only yourself. If the women in this story are willing to share the burden of pain, and the men aren’t, that doesn’t say something bad about women. Expectations should change so that men are more willing to share and sacrifice, not so that women are less so.
And women never resent sacrificing their time, money, careers, and in this case their lives because it’s *always* more important to care for others than for themselves? No way am I buying that! And no way would I ever do it; I have my own life to live and no, I don’t think I’m selfish. As soon as the daughter became a self-supporting adult she was old enough to bear her own pain, except maybe for the occasional holiday. If her mother could do it, so could she. Not to mention that a successful lawyer would be able to hire someone to bear the pain, either by paying them directly or using it as part of clients’ billing arrangements. In this society, as well as people taking on pain as a job, I suspect it would be assigned to prisoners as part of punishment and community service. But this story isn’t really science fiction; nothing in it is logical. It’s just maudlin mush designed to manipulate readers’ emotions.
What a chilling story. As I read, I kept thinking that there was a deep illogic at the root of it: a society with the technology to “share” pain would have the ability to suppress it completely. Penny’s reference to pain killers, and her daughter’s horror at the concept (“Mom. I love you. Other people love you. It won’t come to that. You don’t have to poison your body with those things, even if you are going to d-die.”) makes it clear that this society has chosen to preserve pain rather than fight it. It makes me wonder what evils we keep around out of some misguided sense that we are “caring”.
@8 Frances Grimble
You are arguing against a strawman. Of course many women resent giving up their time, money, careers, and lives for others. Some women- and men- don’t resent that sacrifice, and many more feel resentment but give up what they want anyway because they believe it’s the right thing to do. Right and wrong aren’t determined by our wants and feelings, and valuing other human beings means that sometimes we reach a compromise between what’s most comfortable for us and what’s best for them.
Many science fiction or fantasy stories require a certain degree of suspension of disbelief. For example, faster than light travel is not scientifically possible, but science fiction authors still use it in their writing. If you can’t suspend disbelief, or don’t want to, that’s fine. But the story isn’t about exploring the economic or scientific consequences of pain transference technology; it’s about a mother, a daughter, and their choice to support each other in hard times. The advanced technology is only a mechanism within the story that allows us to ask ourselves what we would do if we had the choice to take someone else’s pain.
Everyone has their own life to live. In that life, we have the opportunity to give up some of our own wants to make other people’s lives better. We can also decline to do so, to declare ourselves independent of freely chosen obligations to other people. Of course, if we do so, we may one day need help from someone who thinks the same way. Or we may receive help when we didn’t give it, benefiting from a generosity we didn’t show in our own actions.
@9 M.D. Flood
Painkillers are a valuable part of medicine. However, the strong painkillers needed to deal with particularly severe pain have side effects. I agree that a consequence-free “Pain Off” switch would be far better than a mechanism of sharing pain. Our world has no perfect method of removing pain, and the world described in this story doesn’t seem to have one either. If it did, no one would have qualms about simply turning the pain off, rather than transferring it to someone else. I think that you are right to consider this illogical, but the story isn’t about scientific realism. It’s about choices, relationships, and sacrifice. The technology is only a means to the end of storytelling.
I simply don’t believe that sacrificing for others is necessarily “right” and that not doing so is necessarily “wrong.” That is not some kind of moral given. It’s the belief of a few people on this forum, and apparently the author’s, but by no means everyone’s. There is also *no* societal guarantee, and *no* karma, where if you do things for others, *someone* will do the same for you. If you want medical care, buy good insurance and vote for politicians who will support single-payer insurance or at least, programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
I’ve been reading science fiction for decades, so I know about suspension of disbelief. I am, however, quite unable to suspend it for this story. The science just isn’t there at all. Why does this society choose to glorify pain (those fangirls are seriously messed up) instead of developing harmless or at least, the-best-possible alternatives? The story also does not ring true emotionally. Who suddenly hears they are about to die in six months and doesn’t freak out? Unless their life is so awful that death is a better alternative.
This could just as easily have been written as a horror story, where the mother suddenly realizes that her reward for being “good” is to die comparatively young, I’d guess in her mid 50s, because she constantly paid attention to her daughter’s pain but never her own. She could easily spend the rest of the story regretting her missed opportunities. I suppose partly what I dislike is the preachy treacle.
@11 Francis Grimble
It’s true that there are no guarantees in life. If you help other people, they might not return your help; if you ignore other people, they might treat you with unearned kindness. It is better to help with no expectation of reward, because there might not be one. The person who stops to share his food with the beggar by the side of the road won’t always magically receive repayment, but that’s not generally why he’s doing it.
Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery, then spent years of her life going back for other people. By your logic, she wasn’t necessarily doing the right thing in helping others, and it would have been just as good for her to stay home and let all the strangers she brought to freedom take care of themselves. Instead of learning about what a hero Harriet Tubman was, kids should discuss why she was silly enough to risk her own life and freedom for people she didn’t even know, and how she could have been rewarded for being “good” by dying young.
I don’t know if I would run into a burning building to save a stranger’s life, but I don’t deny the heroism of people who do. To the extent that our society is good, it’s because of people who didn’t sit back happily once they were comfortable, who fought for the rights and well-being of someone other than themselves.
I think Penny would prefer to be the kind of person who dies young, having helped the people she loves to the best of her ability, than the kind of person who lives to be a hundred and three and dies without having ever gone out of her way to help another. If you consider that “preachy treacle”, that’s your choice. You can take the benefits of altruism without repaying them, but you should remember that every act of unrewarded kindness you receive comes from somebody who went out of their way to put your well-being ahead of their convenience.
Fascinating concept and story, Jo! I really enjoyed it. I can easily see where a technology in which pain can be borne by another person rather than using chemicals to suppress it could lead to a culture where the painkillers are considered a horrible abuse of your body… or vice versa, whichever way you imagine the backstory.
Even in such a short piece, it hurt to see the way Penny allowed Noah’s manipulation to override her very valid arguments… but I know a lot of people who would do the same (both men and women, in each role). So… well done, creating a cast of believably flawed characters in such a short piece, and making me feel for them. (… even if what I feel for Lionel is a strong desire to slap him upside the head for bearing so little of the family’s shared burden!)
I believe that most professions benefit society in some way, from garbage collecting to astronomy and everything in between. And most people work, if they can get a job. They are benefiting society in that way, approximately 40 hours a week, which is most of their waking time. Also, most people obey the laws and avoid actually screwing other people over. That’s quite enough morality and altruism for me. I don’t think anyone is obligated to go to extraordinary lengths in caring for others, and the vast majority of people don’t. So no, I don’t believe that our society is based on any special degree of caring on the part of most people, but it gets along pretty well. Your garbage collection agency may not look glamorous or heroic, but you’d really miss them if they quit work. Again, I think this story is a distasteful emotional justification of a traditional and outdated female role, and that the mother should be standing up for herself and force her daughter to grow up and be independent. I know you don’t agree with that, so I think we’re quits.
BTW, when I was in grade school I learned all about the high ideals of our Founding Fathers, how they set up things in America so everyone was free and equal. My teachers never once mentioned that “everyone” did not include any people of color, any women, or even white men who were not property holders. So I’m not sure we should be feeding children high ideals in history class, instead of giving them a more balanced view.
@14, 15 Frances Grimble
I find it odd that, when discussing unequal gender roles, your solution involves women behaving more like men, rather than men behaving more like women. Perhaps we would be better off raising expectations for everyone?
I agree that solid, steady 40-hour weeks can sustain a pretty good society, and I respect the regular work of maintaining what we have. There’s nothing wrong with doing a job and collecting a paycheck. But extraordinary challenges require extraordinary work and sacrifice. Abolitionists and suffragettes and civil rights workers had to be willing to go the extra mile, to sacrifice their lives and freedom for the sake of their cause. Of course, if you’d been around back during those movements, you would have said that we had “quite enough morality and altruism”, and we’d still be a slaveowning republic with women as second-class citizens if everyone had taken your advice.
I didn’t use the Founding Fathers as an example of high ideals. I mentioned Harriett Tubman, a black female non-property owner. I’m also not in favor of whitewashing American history, but it is worth noting that when things changed for the better, it was because of people who weren’t satisfied with doing good work, collecting their pay, and avoiding any personal risk or discomfort.
Your mindset leads to a world without Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, or MLK. It leads to a world where no one does anything uncomfortable or difficult unless they’re paid to do it, and absolutely no one risks their life or health so that someone else can be free. I don’t think that’s a very good world to live in.
I’m 62, and I majored in history in college, so I’m not totally ignorant of the history of the civil rights movement or the history of the feminist movement. For the record, yes I do believe women should act more like men than they are traditionally conditioned to do. Or were conditioned, before the 1970s or so. This story is a 1950s blast from the past in terms of its message. Thankfully I’m not seeing much of that behavior these days.
The average person is not Harriet Tubman any more than the average person is Stephen Hawking–and I’m just fine with that.
The story is not about the civil rights movement, or a person who does anything at all heroic. It’s about a woman who’s so sunk into her identity as a mother that she has to baby a fully adult daughter for many years, believing her daughter’s life and career are always more important than her own, to the extent that she kills herself. She cannot lead her own independent life and she cannot allow her daughter to do so. That’s supremely foolish, and it’s really messed up. She should have gotten a life–literally.
If she liked her life in general, with the exception of an occasionally manipulative ex-husband and a self-absorbed son-in-law, who are you to say she should have done something different? Why should she accept the unhappiness of watching her daughter in pain, just so she could be more like your ideals?
It may be a shock to you, but many women don’t want to be more like men. Many women are happy being women. *gasp* And yes, I know what I’m talking about. I quit an engineering career because I would rather stay home and raise my family than have that career. It might not fit what you think women ought to want, but you know what? That doesn’t matter one iota. It’s what I chose to do.
As far as this story, it seems to have escaped your notice that for some 25 years, give or take a few, Penny and Noah have been taking turns bearing their daughter’s pain so that she could have a childhood, grow up, get an education, and have that vaunted career you seem to think all women should demand as their right. Sure, Noah has his moments of being selfish and putting his work ahead of Penny’s. And yes, he’s being a pig when he pulls the “Ann will have to bear her own pain for a day,” because he doesn’t really mean it – he knows Penny won’t let that happen. (It would have been far better, IMO, for him to go straight to Ann, explain the situation, and ask her if she could take it for a day. And she should have said yes.) At the same time, he takes the pain from Penny immediately and up until he boards his flight, and agrees to take the next two days to make up for her having two days in a row. So it’s not like Penny is doing this on her own – Noah takes Ann’s pain as often as Penny does, as near as we can tell.
In one short story, we encounter half a dozen people, and four of them spend time taking someone else’s pain. Every single one does it voluntarily, too. Penny and Noah take Ann’s pain in turns, the student takes the pop-star’s pain, and Ann takes Penny’s pain. (It’s implied that Lionel takes Ann’s pain part of the time, but we don’t see that on screen.) This doesn’t tell us much about the society as a whole; it tells us about a few individuals and the choices they make. It shows realistic, believable men and women making tough choices and working to make life better for people they love. The fact that those choices are not the ones you would make doesn’t detract in the slightest from the validity of this family making their own decisions and being the people they choose to be.
Why *shouldn’t* I say she should have done something different? And yes, there is no way I would give up a career for children. I didn’t have to think twice about that decision. I also don’t want to contribute to an already massive overpopulation problem. Why would *my* genes be so all-fired important that I have to crowd the planet with my descendants and their trash for umpteen generations?
As for the rest, what I am saying is that the story doesn’t have any plot, it’s just an emotional wail. It does not make sense even emotionally. Come on, someone receives an instant diagnosis of death in six months (highly improbable in itself) and their first reaction is warm happiness and contentment? It doesn’t make sense morally–self-sacrifice is not automatically good, it’s often just foolish. It’s not really science fiction–this is an interesting society in which the idea of transferring pain could be done in many ways, including ones that place no burden on the family. Finally, I find the story retrogressive and preachy. Your mileage obviously varies. But my views are just as good as yours.
@14 Frances Gimble “Again, I think this story is a distasteful emotional justification of a traditional and outdated female role” – I don’t think the story actually passed judgment on this one way or another. Having said that, if it has you asking yourself how you would respond in any of the characters’ places, then it has been effective storytelling, imho.
Different note – I sometimes hear a short piece of music, like a sonatina by Schubert or a short movement in a Beethoven string quartet – and think, there’s a theme that this composer, had they wished, could have done a whole lot more with, and created a concerto or symphony instead of a shorter work.
I think here we have multiple themes that Jo Walton could easily have created a larger work from, had she wished.
Excellent story, definitely hits the nerves!
There’s a bit from the intro to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness I really love:
Carework is something we piece together, in the US, from our kin networks (and the burden disproportionately falls on women), from friends and communities (including neighbors and religious communities), from bits of safety-net government programs…. I appreciate how Walton demonstrates that in “A Burden Shared” and sketches how it would look if we added an app but didn’t change any of those other underlying problems.
Just a quick reminder to those who might not be aware of our Moderation Policy, but we ask that everyone keep the discussion civil and try to avoid taking disagreements personally. We understand that fiction can stir up strong emotions, for better or worse, but let’s keep the tone as civil and respectful as possible, even (especially) when disagreeing. Thanks.
Frances, I agree with your response entirely. However, if you interpret this society as a dystopia, it makes more sense.
Speaking of taking things personally… :) (thanks moderator)
I’m a child who is now finally facing the role reversal of caring for an elderly and infirm parent who once cared for my daily needs and felt this story deeply. In my reading, the child’s being sheltered from pain from diagnosis was probably not good for her personal development, but it was done out of love by her parents and spouse. We do many things out of love that are not always ultimately the best for the loved one.
I’m not thinking about the story because it’s good. It’s just interesting to figure out exactly how it fails. It fails because it doesn’t, internally, either intellectually interest or emotionally convince. It skips any attempt to intrigue readers, assumes they are already emotionally convinced, and tries to succeed by tugging on a set of heartstrings it assumes are universal. They’re not.
Maria, I’ve seen both my parents and both my in-laws decline and die. It is a very difficult and painful situation. I found that it was best for me to think logically and act practically–as it is with most situations in life.
The lessons I learned for myself are (a) Buy an elder-friendly house well before you need one. One story, flat lot, flat neighborhood. My husband and I even found out after we bought that all our doors (even closets!) are wheelchair compatible–it’s an old house that was custom built for an owner who had had polio. (b) Buy long-term care insurance so that professionals can take care of you if you can’t take care of yourself. There may well be no relatives around to do it and if there are, it is unreasonable to expect them to sacrifice their lives for yours.
Best wishes.
Now that I think, the daughter’s reaction is totally unbelievable. I was thinking before, she’s never been able to take care of herself in her entire life, so how can she take suddenly take care of anyone else? But even if she had been able to take care of herself, she’s not thinking or saying the things adult children actually think and say in this situation. She’s not thinking, “OMG, how catastrophic that my parent will die!” She’s not saying, “Let’s make an appointment for a second opinion, right away.” She’s not thinking, “What will this do to my law practice?” She’s not planning for in-home care help or elder care facilities. Just a warm fuzzy gladness that now she can take care of Mom. Very glib and facile compared to real life.
I was drawn to this story in the first few sentences. How you describe Penny’s waking and her inventory of “her” pain, is how I have awakened everyday for the past 30 years. This was an emotional story for me and it brought tears to my eyes from beginning to end. I currently have a family member dying of inoperable cancer, which was discovered less than a month ago. His cancer was masked by misdiagnosed joint pain and had traveled through his body by the time it was discovered.
Your story is and eye opening experience to those of us who suffer with chronic pain. It is important to pay attention, as it is sometimes difficult to determine if your pain is normal or a symptom of something else. If it is ok, I would like to share the link to your story with my PsA Facebook group.
#28 beccajane – I think you’re free to link it all over the place. :)
What a thoughtful, heart-wrenching, and unsettling story. As someone with chronic pain myself, I can’t help but think that Jo Walton (or someone very dear to her) has experienced chronic pain personally—the things she observes are intimate, dead-on, and ring all too true.
I’ve lost count of the times my own parents have said those exact words to me: “If I could take your pain, I would!”
The pain here is, very clearly, about actual pain—but I’m struck by how it’s also sort of a metaphor, expressing the burden of care that surrounds a chronic pain condition/illness. That is to say: all of the schedule negotiation, physical caretaking, driving to appointments, and everyone-worrying-about-everyone-else’s-needs that happens amongst close family and friends.
And, of course, the impact on women. Contrary to thinking it’s sexist, I actually find the framing of the argument scene between Noah and Penny to be clear-eyed, critical, and feminist. Walton’s pointing out that somehow—ugh, somehow!—the biggest part of the burden always ends up falling upon women, no matter how much they fight to make space for themselves and their lives … and that it’s an ongoing problem.
There are both acts of selflessness and selfishness in this story, and difficult emotional negotiations, and people making choices that feel right to them, just like in life. I feel like the author doesn’t come down in judgment, either way—just presents an insightful and compassionate picture of the situation. The feeling of having my life understood, as I read this story, brought me to tears.
Jo Walton, thank you so much for giving your readers this story. It touched me, and I think it’ll resonate with a lot of other readers with chronic pain. It’s something special.
The full burden of elder care has never fallen on me or indeed, any other family member. That’s what professionals are for–adult children and friends need to lead their own lives, too. When the time comes, I wouldn’t dream of imposing my own care on a network of unpaid people. That would be selfish of me. But even when you can hire caregivers for much of the work, and what this story fails to convey, it that it’s a truly awful situation. There is nowhere for the parent to go but downhill.
This is my favorite kind of horror story — the kind where a good half of it argues that the horrific element is actually a good thing.
For some reason, though, the voice in it brought to mind a somewhat old, very very different story “Earth Mother”, 1974. by Carolyn Gloeckner.
Imagine being able to let the doctor feel your pain.
Imagine being believed when you say how much it hurts.
This technology would be a miracle.
Well done story. But, then, I expect nothing less from Jo Walton. It also serves to re-emphasize why I could never be a parent. Okay, we don’t presently have devices that let you transfer pain. But, if we did, I wouldn’t take on anyone else’s pain, not even my child’s. Heck, I probably couldn’t even get through the diaper years, let alone being a pain martyr for my kid. It would hurt me to see my son or daughter hurting, but everyone has to live his or her own life and, sometimes, pain comes with it.
Beautiful!
Thank you to the people who like it!
I had the idea for this story when a friend and I were both experiencing chronic pain and I thought how much easier it would be to swap — because then it would be for something, not pointless.
For any SF idea there’s a way of writing it that’s simple, obvious, and boring. For this one, that would be the story of paying people to bear pain, oh look, rich people exploiting poor people, outsourcing literal pain, as much an allegory as a woman sitting on a lion with snakes and mirrors in her hands. This seemed to me a much more interesting approach.
One thing I do want to say in response to the negative remarks here — a life with chronic pain is not a life without value, and saying and implying that it is directly disparages not just my own lived experience but that of others. Please don’t do that.
Jo, I just have to say that the more I reflect on this story, the more realistic it seems. Whether or not any individual agrees with the choices made by the characters, it is a very human scenario. I can’t literally take on someone else’s pain, but as a daughter, a wife, and a mother, I can (and do) choose to take on other things for the people I love. Most people do, one way or another, right? And many of us long to have a way to take away someone else’s pain as you imagined, even if only for a few hours. There is meaning and purpose in helping someone else, and if we don’t all choose the same methods, we can still share the vision you wrote for us.
Very interesting! Fans of the Inklings may notice similarities between the story’s premise and Charles Williams’s theory of “Co-inherence” or Substituted Love (see e.g. http://web.sbu.edu/friedsam/inklings/coinheretance.htm). C.S. Lewis was quite taken with this concept, and apparently believed he experienced it himself with respect to his wife’s pain from cancer (see Hooper’s C.S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works, at 85).
This has a nice premise, but the story itself doesn’t feel as if it’s about real people. The first scene is good, setting up the main characters and their relationships, and does feel “real”. The mother is a martyr to her family, the father is (as the far as the limited perspective of the mother allows us to see) selfish (in that he only does his share when he can’t justify avoiding it), the daughter is in pain but allows herself to be almost bullied into passing it to her mother, and the daughter has chosen to be in a relationship with a man that is (unsurprisingly) much like her father. It’s a bit stilted and short, but the characters feel “true”. However, as the narrative progresses, the author was clearly writing towards the turnabout in the final scene. As it gets closer to that, all the characters become two dimensional, and new characters, bit players as they are with barely a line, barely make one dimension.
I know there’s a limit to what can be included in a short story, but a few sentences could add extra dimensions to the setting and characters. I think the first point it starts to lose its power is how *everyone* buys into the app. There are no nay-sayers. Humanity is never like that. I’ve seen it argued that this is a evolutionary trait, so that if the majority adopt an idea that is ultimately self-destructive, there’s a minority that will survive. In this particular story, I would have expected some to protest (even if it was just with a placard passed by in the car) that our pain helps us define ourselves (as Kirk argues in Star Trek V). Then an alternate view [from perhaps the doctor], suggesting that pain is a warning sign, and you shouldn’t take on (or at least not as much) of someone else’s pain because it drowns out yourown body trying to warn you something is wrong.
Also there’s no explanation of why it has to be an all or nothing deal: why can’t a recipient only take on some of the pain, or have it spread across a collection of people? There’s no technical explanation given for the process, so it’s limits aren’t defined that way, but a line or two wishing that the burden could be shared concurrently, not just sequentially would be good.
The last concern about the premise is there is no mention of paid surrogates. The fan girl taking in the celebrity’s pain shows there’s no immediate-family requirement to the technology. So why isn’t there a sub-economy of people willing to endure someone else’s pain in return for financial reward? I could potentially see laws that equate this to prostitution, and so it’s illegal, but there’s no reference to this in the narrative.
Then there’s the reactions to the pronouncement from the doctor. As well as the truncated and abbreviated way short stories have to be delivered, I’m also aware that the stages of grief are just guidelines. That different people go through them in different orders, and may skip some of the stages altogether. That doesn’t stop the reactions at the end of the story feeling unearned. There’s no denial. “Let’s get a second opinion.” No despair “how are we going going to cope with both my chronic condition and your illness?!” No anger at the unfairness. No bargaining or fighting against the inevitable. “We can look at getting you on early-state medical trials.” No grief.
Instead we get almost, well, joy from the daughter at the news, because it allows her to help her mother like her mother helped her. Although the decades her mother endured compared to the years her mother has left doesn’t seem a fair trade.
There’s also the suggestion of the sudden power-shift in the relationship. The Mother stops being in charge and the daughter starts making the decisions. That happens so swiftly it doesn’t feel earned.
I think part of it is that both the sudden acceptable and the power shift happens during the conversation in the car directly after the appointment. If it had taken place some time after (at least a couple of weeks), enough time for the news to sink in, it would have been more believable.
The last problem is how the the genders are portrayed. I’m deliberately not saying sexist, because the problem isn’t with individual characters, but the small cast. As I said at the beginning, the family dynamics set up with the opening paragraphs feel real and make sense. The problem is that when you divide the limited cast along gender lines, gender stereotypes appear. The two men (the father and the son-in-law) are both portrayed as self-centred, and seeking to avoid their responsibilities for the advantage it gives them in their career. The three women (the mother, the daughter, and the fan girl) are depicted as willing to take another’s pain, not just at cost to themselves but to their careers.
The way to avoid this was to make more explicit reference to individuals that don’t conform to these stereotypes. You don’t have to avoid stereotypes. Mad Max: Fury Road was full of stereotypes of women. I’ve seen it argued that the reason it’s such a feminist film is that the strong female protagonist is allowed to co-exist in a film with all the other stereotypes simultaneously. These references don’t even need to be more than a line. A brother that can’t take the burden because he’s already carrying someone else’s pain. A sister that refuses for the sake of her career or because she’s got a fundamentalist belief that taking another’s pain is wrong. The fan girl could easily be a fan boy. The visit to the doctor’s office could have included a male carer and their charge (a reflection, possibly, of the new relationship of the mother and daughter) being passed on the way in or as they exit. Basically by introducing and referencing more gender-specific minor characters that don’t conform to the stereotypes already used, it dilutes any unintended sexist overtones to how the main characters are portrayed.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering why I’ve spent so much time in this. Constructively critiquing this has helped me with problems with my own writing.
In part I’ve just rehashed what other commentators have already gone over. I just wanted to consolidate in one comment what worked for me, and what didn’t. Why some things worked and others didn’t, and how the story could have been improved so it worked for me. Your mileage may vary, obviously. :)