SO MUCH PAIN
SO MUCH PAIN
BY John Tuft and Jennifer Aniston
Cora had a little bit of trouble with memory. She remembered her beautiful home on the shady street. She remembered the good life she had with Henry, the care he put into taking care of their home, their years of marriage that ended with his passing five years ago. She sold the house when her niece told her the memory problems were becoming too much for Cora to live alone safely. So with bitter disappointment and fear of the future, Cora moved into an independent living facility. As Cora settled in, she began to struggle with memory more and more. The facility became a grand hotel in Europe somewhere, the shopping center up the block was a row of quaint village shops, the elementary school across the street became a bustling train station, its passengers heading off to exotic locations, and the fire station beyond the school, for Cora, a place of war and conflict with red explosions and screams in the night.
Cora had a son, her only son. William was her pride and joy. William left college after 9/11 to go fight for the United States. On a secret mission along the border with Pakistan, William disappeared. Eventually, a video turned up online that showed William being tortured and beheaded. Henry saw the video when the Army showed it to him, but out of his love and devotion for Cora, he kept this from her. He made up a story about how William had been sent to Europe to train special forces and could not let his family know anything about it. As the years passed and William never came home and never wrote or called, Cora became more and more distressed. Still being protective of Cora, Henry kept the tragic secret, making up stories about why William could not return to them. After Henry died, Cora was left to bear this bitter grief on her own.
Cora began sneaking out of the facility each night to wander up the street to the village shops or across the busy road to the train station, searching for her long lost son. Sometimes she summoned all her courage and ventured onto the battlefield, among the behemoth machines of war and the men in uniform milling about. Each time, the police would turn up and bring a tired and confused Cora back to the grand hotel along the Seine. Sometimes she would go to the shops in the afternoon and buy small gifts to have ready for when William returned on the train. As she searched the faces of those disembarking from the trains, she kept murmuring, “So much pain. So much pain.”
The staff at the senior living facility debated what to do. To them, she was one more sad case of fading memory and harmless distraction. They asked Cora’s niece to speak to her to try and help her to understand that wandering around in the night was not safe. “Thank you for bringing me to Paris,” Cora said, warmth in her voice as she patted her niece on the knee. “Aunt Cora,” began the niece, “I found these in your room.” She held out a set of cheap pens, a watch, a pen knife, and some handkerchiefs. “Oh,” Cora smiled, “Those are for William. When he gets here, I’ll meet him at the train station and the gifts will assure him that I never forgot, I never stopped waiting for him.” The alarm sounded across the way in the fire station and Cora watched in terror as the great machines, manned by men in uniform rode off to battle. “So much pain,” she whispered.
The administrators assured the niece that they would be extra watchful. And for a while, it worked, much to Cora’s dismay. She took to wandering the hallways of the facility, searching the faces of those she encountered, her housecoat pockets bulging with the gifts for her William. Cora was so distraught that she couldn’t eat and her bright eyes sank into the hollows of their sockets. When the social workers and staff tried to comfort her or distract her, all she could manage was to whimper, “So much pain, so much pain.” Cora seemed to grow so frail, that the staff slipped in their vigilance. One night, Cora slipped away, out the door and toward the battle field. The fire station was empty. Cora’s heart lifted. Perhaps this meant the war was over. She hurried as best her weakened body could toward the train station, desperate not to miss William’s arrival safely home.
The next morning, a call came into the senior facility and the administrator hurried to the school. There, in the quiet of the sunrise, Cora sat on the bench where she faithfully waited for the trains to arrive. Her head rested against the slats of the bench, her face calm, as though she had simply drifted off to sleep. In her hand she clutched something that was oddly out of place. It was a chain of tarnished metal, tangled in her thin fingers, hanging on for dear life. From the chain dangled two flat pieces of metal. The niece arrived and she gently pried the chain from Cora’s grasp. She held them up into the sun so she could make out the writing stamped into them. Dog tags. She held dog tags. Not just any, however. They were William’s dog tags. And the faint smile etched on Cora’s face told the wondrous tale. No more pain…She and William were home.
Words are magic and writers are wizards.
