The Pain of You

I told everyone I was fine. This is what 'fine' was costing me.

The chronic pain arrived when I was a teenager and never left. The pain sat beside me on concert stages through a career as a professional bassist, then claimed that career for itself. The pain followed me to the podium, through nearly a decade as a public educator and Orchestra Director, while I hid what every school day cost me.

That was the family craft. I learned the trade from my father, who carried his own pain the same way.

Starting in those same teenage years, a progressive disease began taking him in stages. For years, I was his caretaker, the strong one in every room, while my own body charged a fee for every hour I stood there.

This book is the bill for all of it: the managed answers I kept handing doctors, the truth I kept from everyone who loved me, the collapse that refused to stay hidden, and the woman who had been waiting twenty-three years for me to stop performing.

This is not a cure story, nor a self-help book. The pain is still with me as I write this. Instead, this is a true story of invisible illness, inherited silence, and a long-delayed love, written for anyone who has ever answered 'fine' and meant 'help.'