I felt a funeral in my brain

Dispatches from a migraine

Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum -

Kept beating - beating - till I thought

My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

—“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” by Emily Dickinson

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Some people believe that Emily Dickinson describes the pain of migraine in her poem, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” Whether or not this is the intended meaning, her words offer an apt description of the condition—the boots of lead, the incessant treading, the beating of a drum, until you go insane, losing sense of space and time, dropping down into an abyss, finished knowing, slipping away.

“Wrecked, solitary, here,” as I’m left in the wake of an attack, a true dispatch would be impossible. Migraine is so debilitating that were I to issue a live report, it would be little more than tortured groans whispered through a bedspread. So consider this more of a briefing.

When migraine flares into my life, all I can do is lie in bed, in the dark, insulating myself as best I can from light and smells, an electronic heating pad strategically placed on my brow—willing the unrelenting throbbing in the right side of my head to subside, moaning in the style of a daytime soap actress in the throes of a hospital plot-arc, by which I mean, overdoing it. There is a melodrama to being ill.

It is so pitiful to be bed-bound, that my thoughts become pitiful too: Maybe I will feel this way forever, perhaps I’m being punished for some unknown transgression, there is no end in sight, and I should just give up on everything, abandon my future, rot away.

And the self-scolding: Why can’t I think this pain away, it’s all in my head, I’m wasting my day—wasting my life away. Oh poor, poor, miserable me.

It’s dismal. How despicable that the psychic and spiritual discomfort of migraine contorts itself to match the physical anguish. It becomes so that you’re under attack on all fronts. Besieged. Writhing. Mad.

And then there’s the worry that people don’t believe you.

Some people get their first migraine attack in childhood. I was lucky-ish: I didn’t get my first until my early thirties. Before I was afflicted, I’m ashamed to admit that I used to wrongly think that people complaining about migraine were exaggerating, hysterical, maybe even a little ridiculous.

We’ve all had a headache, I once thought. It’s annoying, sure, but excruciating, ruinous, day-destroying? C’mon. Now, almost a decade in to migraine, I’m here to tell you that, yes, it is all of those things and worse. The pain strobes your brain half-blind. Aromas, even pleasant ones like say—a waft of gardenia—become a fetid assault. And overhead lights! Villains. Migraine distorts ordinary lightbulbs into the swinging lamps of the dingy interrogation rooms in spy movies, looming above as they obscure your senses, menacing you—wincing, destroyed—into complete collapse.

In short: migraines are so awful that they are difficult to describe. And they are dramatic, maybe too dramatic to capture. My frustration from migraine is sometimes compounded by how hard it is to explain. All the words feel insufficient.

And yet—where there is drama, pain, and suffering, there is literary potential too. In the tension between experience and expression, there’s an elusive little pocket, a space for poetry.

In my most recent attack, a particularly acute two-dayer that forced me to cancel plans and abandon hopes of accomplishing my goals for the weekend, a thought pierced through the haze in a moment of lucidity: Are there notable people throughout history who also suffered with migraine? Were some of them writers?

If I had to marinate in my own misery, maybe I could at least find commiseration in the words of people I admire. To find the poetic little pocket that tells the truth about something hard and strange.

Now that I’ve looked into it, I can’t believe I never thought to google it before. Many great minds suffered from migraine: Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson—all afflicted. And they wrote about it too. Thank goodness. Feeling sometimes helpless to chronicle my experience, I’m grateful to have found some solace in their words.

And I’m not sure how I lived 40 years without coming across Virginia Woolf’s entire essay on the dramatics of illness, called literally, “On Being Ill,” in which she wonders, as I do, why there is not more literary attention paid to the all-consuming misery of maladies.

Woolf writes:

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels . . . when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache.”

Woolf realizes the difficulty of describing bodily pain is part of the issue. While volumes aplenty teem with poetics about emotional distress—she observes that physical torment is a different beast: “Among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.”

She laments, as I have from my crumpled sickbed, that the titans of lit haven’t gifted us the same library of work to help illustrate our corporeal troubles as they have so generously bequeathed us for the realm of heartbreak: “The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself . . . “

Absent a linguistic template, you must fumble on your own to paint the unpaintable. Thankfully, there are more words to use now. “On Being Ill” provides some fantastic language, but the essay can feel dense and obscure.

For more clarity (and brevity), the most straightforward account of migraine is Joan Didion’s essay, aptly titled, “In Bed.” The entire piece is worth a read, but there are some excerpts that really speak to some of the harder-to-explain aspects of migraine.

First, there’s the shame. And the nagging suspicion that you are disbelieved. Didion recounts:

“That in fact I spent one or two days a week almost unconscious with pain seemed a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.

For I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary.”

I’m relieved to only get one or two migraines a month—at most. Generally, they coincide with my menstrual cycle. But some of my friends, like Didion, get them much more frequently and without discernable reason. For many, the headaches strike at random, and deducing the triggers can become a maddening part-time job: recording notes in a diary, jotting down foods, sleep patterns, weather changes, exercise etc., all in an effort to make sense of the senseless.

Didion captures the infuriating chaos and variety of the triggers. And highlights that the only thing migraines seem to have in common is that they are usually hereditary. (I got mine from my mother. )

“Almost anything can trigger a specific attack of migraine: stress, allergy, fatigue, an abrupt change in barometric pressure, a contretemps over a parking ticket. A flashing light. A fire drill. One inherits, of course, only the predisposition. In other words I spent yesterday in bed with a headache not merely because of my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers and wrong-think, but because both my grandmothers had migraine, my father has migraine and my mother has migraine.”

Next, she gives a snapshot of the insanity of the pain itself. The lunacy. How the brain becomes unreliable, worthless, impotent. Here, she also describes her “aura,” an episode of bizarre sensory disturbances that precede a migraine. Not everybody with migraine has auras, but many do. (Thankfully, I only get aura prior to migraine a fraction of the time.)

Didion writes:

“Migraine gives some people mild hallucinations, temporarily blinds others, shows up not only as a headache but as a gastrointestinal disturbance, a painful sensitivity to all sensory stimuli, an abrupt overpowering fatigue, a strokelike aphasia, and a crippling inability to make even the most routine connections. When I am in a migraine aura (for some people the aura lasts fifteen minutes, for others several hours), I will drive through red lights, lose the house keys, spill whatever I am holding, lose the ability to focus my eyes or frame coherent sentences, and generally give the appearance of being on drugs, or drunk. The actual headache, when it comes, brings with it chills, sweating, nausea, a debility that seems to stretch the very limits of endurance.”

And finally, in her most evocative passage, she captures the resignation, the complete surrender to the agony, followed by a “convalescent euphoria,” when the pain finally subsides. Didion knows that resistance is futile:

“And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.”

I relate to this most of all. Having lost my senses for a period of 12-48 hours to migraine, they are heightened when I regain them. The breeze, the flower petals, the sunset, all so much richer in the aftermath—as if the world’s control panel has turned everything up to the highest setting. The roasted mahogany smell of my morning coffee, the soft satin of my pillowcase, the verdant brilliance of my houseplants: Up, up, up.

Or maybe it’s that the migraine turned up the settings—which is why the lights and sounds are too much during the attack—but once the veil of pain is lifted, the potency of the sense remains, and I can briefly bask in the brush strokes of heightened perception.

Woolf writes, “This monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.”

That cycle—the ceaseless taper and rise—is a fitting metaphor not only for migraine, but for life: Sometimes the ache swells into a skull-crush. The hurt is blinding, obscuring hope. Until one day the pain wanes, disappearing as it always does. And there the world is again: stunning, shimmering, vast.

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Do you suffer from migraine or another chronic or recurring ailment? Are there writers you love who are able to capture how your sickness feels in the body? If you feel comfortable, share your experience in the comments.