It's amazing how desperately people need to tell their stories -- and have someone hear them.

I mentioned the friend who ditched out on the music outing I was trying to arrange by callously getting sick. I also mentioned that the nature of the illness was intestinal and that she had thoughtfully withheld details. Well, she's finally up & around again, able to drink wine but not eat anything that anyone sensible would call food. You win some and lose some, I guess.

But that thoughtful reticence about the details of the personal plumbing is gone gone gone. Hooboy is it gone.

Now mothers are always alarmingly willing to share details of their labor and delivery experiences. The episiotomy stories are always my favorites. And if I had a coochie and some bastard had slit it so the damn kid could squeeze out, I would count that as a pretty significant event, and I would want some empathy and compassion for it. But I don't think I'd give details.

Similarly, I have to question the propriety of discussing intestinal blockage, including speculation about how it came to be and what might be done to clear it. Yet there we were on this long delayed date-of-sorts, and poking fun at the menu's description of the different wines could sustain the conversation only so long. Sooner or later, the word about two solid weeks of medical hell was going to come rushing out.

This is a smart, sensible woman raised in the fine old WASP tradition of suffering in silence. Yet she'd gone through so much in a surprise illness that just suddenly appeared, followed by an apalling string of indignities at the hands of the medical establishment, complete indifference of the damn care-givers since they're familiar with this drill and don't see it as anything surprising, annoyingly casual attitudes by family members including ungrateful kids who should care about their momma, gawddammit, etc. etc. We chewed over all of it in the course of the evening.

She kept saying "Enough! I've bored you with this story enough, and I don't want to think about it myself anymore." But the conversation just kept winding back to all that had happened and not happened, how the work people coped or didn't, attempts by the 88 year old mother to take charge, the black-sheep daughter's surprising strength and sensibility earning new respect from momma, etc. None of the details, or few anyway, were stated outright, but allusion can certainly get the job done where clinical detail would be too embarrassing.

And dammit, the woman has suffered a lot. It seems to be a basic human need to express that, vent it, have someone hear it and confirm the power of the experience. I'm just wondering a bit about the role of the audience in this process. It's not just emotional support, although that does help to vent the feelings. But the processing goes deeper than that. The social knowing involved seems to give the amorphous reality some handles by which to move it around and place it in the context of life. Something like what this blog experience does on a less directly personal basis, I guess.