Phantom Limbs
Dear Rachel,
When I was a very young child, I met a man who was missing an arm. Being too young to be embarrassed (or polite), I must've stared a little too long and he noticed me looking at him. We talked about his arm and about how he came to lose it: Apparently there’d been a farm accident involving an auger or a reaper or something—I was too young to understand, or perhaps it was so long ago that I've simply forgotten. In the end he lost his arm and was lucky to have lived at all.
To a small child, this seemed an exciting (and slightly scary) story, but the most interesting thing he said was that, on occasion, the arm still hurt. I couldn’t imagine that, but he said that he sometimes still felt pain; when this happened, he said, it felt exactly as if the arm were still there.
That was the first time I’d heard about “phantom limbs.” Apparently it’s not uncommon, though. Something to do, perhaps, with neural pathways having been conditioned to interpret signals in a particular fashion and having no other way to interpret them, even when the limb that would normally send those signals is no longer present.
Missing you is a bit like having a phantom limb. You’re gone, but sometimes I’m struck by pain that come out of nowhere, from something I thought I’d gotten used to. But no, there’s no getting used to this, really. It’s kind of like having a phantom heart, I guess.
Love,
Dad
When I was a very young child, I met a man who was missing an arm. Being too young to be embarrassed (or polite), I must've stared a little too long and he noticed me looking at him. We talked about his arm and about how he came to lose it: Apparently there’d been a farm accident involving an auger or a reaper or something—I was too young to understand, or perhaps it was so long ago that I've simply forgotten. In the end he lost his arm and was lucky to have lived at all.
To a small child, this seemed an exciting (and slightly scary) story, but the most interesting thing he said was that, on occasion, the arm still hurt. I couldn’t imagine that, but he said that he sometimes still felt pain; when this happened, he said, it felt exactly as if the arm were still there.
That was the first time I’d heard about “phantom limbs.” Apparently it’s not uncommon, though. Something to do, perhaps, with neural pathways having been conditioned to interpret signals in a particular fashion and having no other way to interpret them, even when the limb that would normally send those signals is no longer present.
Missing you is a bit like having a phantom limb. You’re gone, but sometimes I’m struck by pain that come out of nowhere, from something I thought I’d gotten used to. But no, there’s no getting used to this, really. It’s kind of like having a phantom heart, I guess.
Love,
Dad
posted by Rod at 1:49 PM
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