The Death of Chronic Pain
3 min readAug 19, 2021
The pain cycle stops here
Mother kept her empty prescription bottles. There was a mound of amber tubes wrapped in white labels in her bedroom closet. At first it was one laundry basket full. Then, a second. They kept piling up, waiting in the closet for an unknown purpose…in the room where mother lay on ice, as life passed her by. At some point she stopped collecting them.
