Father's Pain Temporarily Disappears After Paralysis

Hermann’s sudden paralysis and the disappearance of his pain mark a decisive reversal in his final illness: the disease takes away his ability to move, yet the same bodily change brings his first pain-free hours in nearly two years. The episode offers no cure or uncomplicated reprieve. It turns a night of unbearable suffering into a strange calm, and begins a period in which his wife cares for him and the two rediscover their closeness.

Causes and Context

The crisis follows a rapid sequence of illness and separation. After Hermann urinated blood, surgeons removed his affected kidney within twenty-four hours. He told Joachim that six years would have to pass before the risk of recurrence fell significantly, and that then his chances of living to an old age would be what they had been before the illness. Instead, the disease returned: pain in his leg led to another operation, and six weeks later tiny shadows appeared on his lungs. His leg was operated on and his lungs irradiated.

By then, Hermann’s marriage had also broken apart. After their children had left home and the family dog was gone, Hermann moved to Lübeck to live with a woman who had two young children. When the illness worsened, he tried to work again, but could not; clearing out his practice became one of the things he did for the last time. He increasingly felt like a burden in his new household and eventually returned to the family home, alone and sick, amid the psychiatric hospital grounds. The return placed him back in the house where Joachim had grown up, but did not restore his health or prospects.

The Pain Reaches Its Limit

Hermann’s pain is narrated as a force that repeatedly exceeds what he and those around him have learned to endure. Each time he believes he has reached its peak, it shifts into an adjoining organ or produces a worse new focus. What had seemed catastrophic two weeks earlier can look almost like a paradise in retrospect. Pain does not remain confined to Hermann’s body in the account: it radiates through his organs and bones, into his hospital room and across the house, reaching Joachim in his former bedroom.

Morphine came late. By the time Hermann began injecting it into his swollen abdomen, the pain had become so entrenched that only enormous doses could restrain it. The narrator describes a distinction between pain subdued from its first flare and pain damped only after it has become feral: the latter requires far more morphine. Hermann’s doses would have been fatal to a healthy person, while his craving made the otherwise invisible pain visible. Even with the drug, it gave him no pause; it pursued him day and night.

The crisis comes when the disease reaches Hermann’s spine, passes through the discs, and enters the spinal cord. On a warm night he screams, as do patients in the psychiatric hospital. Joachim repeatedly sits with him, but after about ten minutes the sight and sound of his father’s suffering overwhelm him and he retreats to his room. The scene makes the illness a shared ordeal without suggesting that witnessing it gives Joachim control over it.

Paralysis and the Sudden Cessation

By morning, the house is quiet. Joachim finds his mother slumped in Hermann’s chair and Hermann lying motionless in bed. At first she says he is not dead. She recounts the night: he first lost the ability to move his feet, then his legs; he sweated and screamed that his feet were burning as the heat seemed to climb toward the damaged place in his back. He struck his legs and, at one point, took his wife’s face in his hands. She thought he was dying.

Then the pain stopped. The narrator’s mother indicates the level on Hermann’s body from which the sensation is gone: downward from his breastbone, he is paralyzed. The report links the relief directly to the loss of movement, without presenting the paralysis as a treatment or a recovery. It is a bodily catastrophe and, at the same time, an abrupt end to the pain that had occupied the whole household.

Hours later, Hermann wakes, deeply marked by the night but unexpectedly cheerful. For the first time in almost two years, he is without pain. The reversal is striking precisely because it brings no restoration of his former body: the disease has left him paralyzed, while the pain that had seemed impossible to outlast has vanished.

Care, Aftermath, and Significance

A different period follows. Joachim begins taking small acting roles in Kassel, while the narrator’s mother devotes herself to caring for her paralyzed husband. When Joachim visits, he sees not merely two people bound by illness but two lovers: exhausted and unrestrained, sustained by attending to one another. He had never thought he would see his parents together in this way. Their closeness follows their separation and Hermann’s return to the family home, but it does not undo the losses that brought them there.

The reprieve lasts within an illness that continues to advance. After three or four months, Hermann has increasing difficulty breathing; pain forms anew in his shoulders, and fear of suffocation joins it. He still injects enormous quantities of morphine, develops withdrawal symptoms without it, and faces the drug’s threat to his breathing. He had wanted to die at home, but after another life-threatening choking episode he is taken to hospital. His wife moves in with him, and the two endure his final weeks together through the practical labor of dying, far from the theories that had once seemed capable of mastering life.

The episode’s force lies in its double reversal: paralysis ends the pain, but relief does not mean recovery, and the pain’s disappearance does not avert death. The narrative first makes suffering feel as though it fills a body, a room, and a house; then it renders the change through a precise bodily boundary and the stillness of morning. Hermann’s brief pain-free cheerfulness is real, as is the care and renewed intimacy that follow, but neither is mistaken for a cure.