My friend Sean has had arthritis since he was 17. His own body turned on itself, and has crabbed his joints and crippled his movements. The bones in his spine are too chalky to hold him up. His knuckles twist like old tree roots, and he can’t hold a book. He’s allergic to most pain medication, and the wet Irish winters warp his joints even more. It’s got so bad that a few years ago, in his middle forties, he had to retire from the work he was born to do in order to stay at home and nurse the pain.

When we’re talking, he often has to stop and go somewhere else in his mind. That’s when his face takes on a rigid cast, and while I wait for him to come back I can see the lines that suffering has drawn. They’re different from the usual laughing, talking, and frowning lines. These ones come from holding still, not from moving. He can’t stay in one position for long, and sometimes, when it’s very bad, he’s short with the three children whom he adores.

Arthritis isn’t who he is. It isn’t what he talks about, unless he’s asked. Only rarely does he pick morphine over lucidity, and apart from those moments when pain demands every scrap of his attention, he has great time for the world (as he’d say himself). For the buzz of Stephen’s Day at the races, he’ll make the private bargain of a week of extra suffering. For an eighty-mile car journey to see his granny, he sets aside three or four days payment in a currency only he can exchange. If he can’t sit through the whole school musical to see his daughter play Sandra Dee, he coaches himself to sit for twenty minutes.

When he was a teacher, he knew every twelve-year-old’s love interest, and it mortified us and drove us mad. But he also knew our fears and fights, and watched out for us. He still does. He likes to do things for people; quietly, if he can.

Arthritis isn’t who he is, and yet I’d guess his close relationship with suffering has given him a sense of the riptides that pull others down. A way of listening, maybe, or a different strain of patience. A curiosity about the places he won’t get to see, or the experiences his disease has put on a shelf he can’t reach. Whatever the quality, it has won and kept him dozens of friends, from three years old to ninety. And never for a moment, I believe, has any one of us thought the price he has paid for that extra layer of understanding was worth it. Not a minute of that pain.
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