"Deadkidistan"

“Deadkidistan”

By: Michelle Mirsky

"Pain, It Doesn't Get Easy"
Pain doesn't simply go away, instead someone must learn how
to live with it. It will always be a baggage that you carry with
you, but as you continue on your journey the baggage becomes
a little lighter.

Michelle Mirsky is a writer and a mother, and according to her website, michellemirsky.com, she is working on a full-length memoir based on a series of autobiographical columns that appeared originally on McSweeney's Internet Tendency between October 2011 and August 2012. “Deadkidistan” is featured in the 2013 edition of The Best American Essays” and it is the story of her journey on trying to find a way to cope with her eldest son’s death. The author has to work in the same hospital in which her son died of cancer, and she works with the parents of patients who also have cancer. She tries to come to terms with her son’s death, but nothing helped. All her life bad things had happened to her and she knew bad things never stopped coming. Years pass and she still feels as if she is drifting in an empty void, but one day she meets a tarot card reader and she realizes her pain will go away and all she has to do is give it some time.

At some point in our lives we are all going to feel pain, whether it be physical or emotional, and it will take time to learn how to deal with it. This was the whole purpose of “Deadkidistan”. Mirsky wanted to show the readers that it is normal to feel lost after a devastating loss in your life and it is okay to lose yourself in your pain, but eventually you have to learn to live with the pain because it will never go away completely. John Green once said “Pain demands to be felt” and he was right about it because you can’t just avoid pain. You have to feel the pain to be able to determine how to deal and cope with it. The context of this essay was simply to talk about suffering and understanding that it doesn’t get easy, and the audience she targeted was anybody who has felt extreme pain. The metaphors Mirsky uses in this essay really help get her point across because she really gives the reader an insight into how hard a loss can affect someone, and how it’s impossible to completely avoid pain. She helps the reader understand that pain hurts a great deal, and even though it may take a long time you will find a way to live with the pain.