Phantom Pain by Lucia Berlin

Even in absence, the pain is real.

Alzheimer’s is an awful disease.

Once again, Lucia Berlin flexes her ability to balance dark humor with pathos in her highly compact short-stories. There tends to be this melancholic undercurrent mixed with sharp wit, revealing the emotional complexities of her characters’ lives. The end result is often a deeply moving exploration of fragmented memories, loneliness, love, and human vulnerability just like we find in Phantom Pain. 

The title comes from the narrator's father's friend who are both in a nursing home. He is a double amputee who screams in agony from legs that aren’t even there. When the narrator asks if phantom pain is real, the orderly replies, “All pain is real.” 

This simple response becomes the metatpor for the narrator's complex relationship with her father. It sets the stage for a story that’s both deeply human and darkly humorous in the way only life can be. Just as the older man feels excruciating pain in limbs that no longer exist, the narrator experiences a kind of emotional phantom pain: grief, guilt, and longing for a relationship with her father that was always complicated, even in the best of times.

We’re taken back to the narrator’s childhood in rural Montana, where she climbs mountains with her father, back when their relationship was less complicated. But memory is fickle, and Berlin yanks us forward to the present, where the father is now an aging man with Alzheimer’s. The narrator, tasked with checking in on him at the nursing home, finds herself slipping into different roles (whatever he needs in that moment) because his mind no longer recognizes her as just his daughter.

Throughout the story, the father-daughter bond is shaped by distance, both physical and emotional. In childhood, they shared moments of closeness like on their camping trips. By the time the narrator is an adult, her father’s mind has eroded, and what’s left is a fragmented version of their past. Their relationship is contains a great deal of unresolved emotional pain. Ironically, despite the past hurt, she ends up feeling closer to him in his illness than she ever did before. The loss of who he was makes way for a tenderness they never quite shared when he was fully himself. It’s that aching kind of love that Berlin writes so damn well.

The narrator, in turn, becomes a kind of ghost limb in her father’s life—present, but unrecognizable. And yet, despite this erasure, she still feels the weight of their tumultuous past, of the father she used to know as a kid and the relationship they might have had if things were different. The climax of the story is particularly memorable as the narrator shares this beautiful moment with her father while on a seniors' field trip to the park. In classic Lucia Berlin style, she juxtaposes bittersweet melancholy with dark humor in a way that is strikingly poignant.