The Hierarchy of Suffering

In which there isn’t one

My head throbs like thunder. My nose flows like a flood. My throat crackles like fire. My cough erupts like an explosion. 

After six months of infusions, in the final weeks of chemo, a stupid cold is what takes me down for days upon days. The wastebasket overflows with fluffy piles of soggy Kleenex, cough drop wrappers, and crumpled foil packaging from cold medicine. The bed becomes an island where I am marooned: everything within arms-reach, stuck here alone. Outside the foggy window, I spy nothing hopeful. The leaves are gone, the sky is gray. I am sick of being sick.

What right do I have to complain? I am my own trump card: a cold is not cancer. The world one-ups one further: cancer is not a war. My home has never been swept away by a storm or a flood, scorched in a fire, or exploded by a bomb. But I am sick of being sickened. War, again. Mass shootings, again. Terror in the streets, again. 

The kids are concerned. I assure them it’s what happens to a body without defenses. Once my immune system strengthens, I’ll be better again. Yet I wonder and worry like everyone else, an ocean away. Do the depths of others’ suffering demand my silence, in deference? Or my protest, in action?

What on earth can I do with this pain, if it matters at all?

// 

We are tempted to sort suffering. Classification makes sense of chaos.

Only. Early. Treatable. 
Extreme. Unprecedented. Staggering.

Who deserves to call themselves the undeserving, the unlucky, the winner of the losers? Could we claim fair versus unfair—lung cancer for smokers versus children caught in crossfire? (A terrible sentence to type: no and no.) Trying to honor the horror that happens to humans leaves us drawing ghastly conclusions. Does anyone deserve to die?

When we start to rank, everyone loses. Case-in-point: I could call the deaths of my twins worse than my miscarriage. But I lost children both ways. Another’s miscarriage might mean the loss of their only child. And what about infertility, losing the chance to conceive at all? What about wanting marriage and parenting but never finding a partner? 

Who tops the heap, when it’s dung?

No good comes of claiming a taxonomy of grief. I know it, because I have done it. Narrowed my eyes, muttered under my breath, judged hard when I was certain I got dealt a worse hand.

But without fail, playing the Pain Olympics devolves into a version of that least favorite baby shower game: Whose Birth Was Hardest. This is the flip side of well-meaning but unhelpful parental advice: there’s always someone better than you. There’s always someone worse than you, too. Or worse-off. 

Putting someone’s pain on a pedestal only serves to push it farther away from you.

(Shoving your own pain beyond reach leaves you lonely, too.) 

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When I ask what it means to deconstruct a hierarchy of suffering, wise friends and readers weigh in.

Kirby reminds me how Native people are constantly holding contradictions, the all-encompassing grief and the grounding goodness of everyday joys: “It’s always both because for Natives there is no non-grief point. We were all born into our post-apocalyptic world.” 

Cameron nudges me to learn from the Black church about suffering and enduring, and to remember the teachings of St. Óscar Romero: “This is a theology of solidarity, which is based on the idea that because of the extreme suffering that Jesus endured, wherever anyone suffers, God is present there. And wherever any human being suffers, there Jesus suffers.”

Natalie teaches me about the concept of Oppression Olympics: “The idea is that if we have marginalized groups or oppressed groups so caught up in proving they have it worse off, the oppressor ultimately wins because there is more focus on who has it worse than focusing on liberation.”

Stephanie shares wisdom from Holocaust survivor Edith Eger using the same words that echo through my thoughts: “I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There's nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another. People say to me, ‘Things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain—it's not Auschwitz.’ This kind of comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering…We're not seeing our choices. We're judging ourselves.” 

Kathie sends a book on suffering and nursing that quotes writer-physician Rachel Naomi Remen: “All judgment creates distance, a disconnection, an experience of difference. In fixing there is an inequality of expertise that can easily become a moral distance. We cannot serve at a distance. We can serve only that to which we are profoundly connected, that which we are willing to touch. This is Mother Teresa's basic message. We serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.”

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What is the opposite of a hierarchy?

I’ve poured through the thesaurus and remain unsatisfied with the antonyms. Suffering is not democracy: no one has a choice. Equality is the wrong word, too: we only wish we could flatten misery’s mountains. Neither it is chaos, divergence, mayhem, disorder et al. 

Perhaps community is the only word wide enough. The space of solidarity that we enter through different doors. Here we are, facing each other, turning in every direction to find more of us. Community provides a place of connection, offering the possibility of communion instead of comparison.

After all I have been through—and am still enduring—I can tell you one thing with confidence: suffering is not a hierarchy. It happens to all of us, by varying degrees, yes. But we share it, and our experiences are too personal and particular, too diverse and divergent, to scaffold.

No pecking order. No ranking. No echelons. 

Suffering is not a competitive sport. No one wins the Pain Olympics. It’s enough that we are all qualifiers, gathered here by our mortal bodies and sinful world.

Only the community of suffering. Only the communion of saints. 

//

Here is one small seedling of hope. 

Our sense of another’s suffering can tell us something important: where we are called. 

When we sense imbalance, we need not slip into silence or retreat out of respect. Instead we are beckoned to draw closer. This is part of the humility that makes us human: to grow in our understanding that when we believe someone has it “worse,” we are called toward them in compassion, not away in fear or false deference. Our own pain can turn into a path toward others. 

This is the humanity of suffering. The humility of suffering. The solidarity of suffering.

When I told one of my kids about the violence in Gaza and Israel, he looked at me aghast: “But that’s where Jesus lived!”

Later that night, he offered his own petition: “I pray for your cancer to be gone, and for your cold to get better, and for the people in the Holy Land to have peace.” My cancer is not gone, my cold is not better, the people do not have peace. But here is Jesus still living among us, Compassion Incarnate, suffering-with.

Nothing has changed this week. My cough and congestion worsen. The death toll piles up every day—names, not just numbers. Whole states are locked down, here and there. I want to burrow back into blankets, sick and tired. But these are the words that pull me up and out. 

If one part of the body suffers, all the parts suffer with it.
If one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.

Hiding behind a hierarchy of suffering brings no sharing, no joy. Honoring what hurts is the strange way that draws us together.