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So it was back to the dentist again, on a wet, white-sky morning in October. I’d been in pain since the summer. They’d ended up giving me a root canal, and then extracted a wisdom tooth “You don’t need your wisdom tooth,” my dentist had reassured me beforehand. “You can get along perfectly well without it.” The trouble was, the wound left by its extraction wasn’t healing, and now the root canal tooth had begun hurting again. How could it be hurting again? They’d taken the nerve out, scraped it away. I was supposed to be dead in there. I wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all.
I parked my car and paid for it on RingGo, a light rain falling on the backs of my fingers and laying itself on my phone screen in tiny rainbow dots. Crossing the footbridge over the railway, past the boarded-up Caribbean restaurant and the Travelodge, my phone rang. It was my sister. “Dad died in the night,” she said.
“Fuck off. What?” My tongue touched the wound in my gum again. It felt so big. “Okay, alright,” I said. “Can I call you back? I’ve got the dentist.”
The dental surgery would once have been a handsome Victorian home, but now its fireplaces had been covered over and photos of Provencal lavender fields and giant smiling mouths had been screwed to its walls. I lay back in the chair, a white light shining down on me. It was important to appear normal, even though I felt as if I was vibrating. Should I have cancelled my appointment, out of respect for my dead father? Should I have told the receptionist what had happened? I didn’t know. Probably not. This is England.
An assistant led me upstairs to a closet-sized room and x-rayed my jaw in a complicated machine that filled virtually the entire space. I followed her instructions in a supine silence, as if drugged. “Everything seems fine inside you,” the dentist told me, back downstairs. She had a European accent I couldn’t quite place. “There’s no nerve tissue left. But the wound from your extraction is quite inflamed. It might be a little infected, and that’s probably what’s making your other tooth hurt. We’ll give you antibiotics. When the inflammation goes down, the pain will pass.”
“How long will it take?”
“Not long, probably. Days.”
When I arrived at my parents’ house, a couple of hours later, there were police parked up the road, sitting in their car. I wonder if they’re for us? I found my mother sat downstairs with a neighbour. “I’ve lost a good friend today,” he said. I went upstairs to see the body, and wept.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. The sight of him lying there with his head on the pillow, discoloured. His glasses and watch laid neatly on the bedside table; an un-drunk cup of tea; a paperback half-read; his slippers beside each other, their toes touching the skirting board; his familiar brown corduroy trousers folded over the back of a chair, ready for tomorrow. It didn’t help that my gum was still bothering me. The wound was inflamed where the hole had been made. When I touched it with the tip of my tongue, it seemed so big and bloody and gruesome. But it wasn’t, in reality. The pain was commensurate with the wound, and the wound was small. It would pass in days.
That week went by in a daze, as I helped arrange live-in care for my mother, organise the funeral and drove to Canterbury where, in a room above a library, I registered the death. As tends to happen in times of stress, the storytelling capacities of my brain tightened up. I began seeing patterns everywhere, little narratives of cause and effect conjured by my jangled subconscious as it tried to make sense of what was happening. Heading out on a bike ride, early one morning, I encountered a pigeon at the top of my lane. Instead of flying off, as I approached, it just stood there in the mud at the side of the road, staring at me with a look of cold, contemptuous rage. I recognised that look immediately. It was unmistakable. It was Dad. Jesus Christ. As I rode away, picking up speed, I wondered if death released consciousness from the confines of the brain and, after we pass, we’re somehow everywhere, even in a pigeon. Could it be true? Surely not. But, also, maybe.
In connecting a pigeon to the death of my father, my mind was attempting to serve me by obliterating the inarguable facts of my inconsequence and lack of control and, in place of these truths, weaving a causal tale in which everything was connected to me and my life. It was a kind of narcissism, seductive yet ultimately maddening. Part of the seduction of these kinds of stories lies in the fact that they feel like they just make sense. The dots connect, it all adds up. Of course it does: causal storytelling is sense-making for the human brain, which is expert at finding connections between one thing and another, even when those connections don’t really exist. This is why madness never feels madness, but truth. It’s why we should be intensely watchful when the world starts to make too much sense. We might find it comforting to believe that ‘everything happens for a reason’, but that comfort is dangerous fruit. It’s yet more evidence that the human brain is not especially interested in logic and reason – it wants us to believe in stories.
But my mind kept working; kept on generating its sense-making tales. I dreamed about Dad. In my dream, he was looking me in the eye and saying, “Sorry.” When I told my wife’s friend, who was visiting for the weekend, she said, “I think it was him.”
“Oh, I don’t,” I said. But I thought, “It could’ve been. It might.”
In my dream, I was crying. But, in real life, I didn’t cry for my father again. After just a few days, the pain lifted. The wound in my gum healed too. It felt strange, having a tooth that had once been a part of me suddenly be missing, and for there to be nothing there but an empty space. But, just as my dentist had promised, it turned out that I didn’t actually need my wisdom tooth. It played no valuable part in my life. The pain had been commensurate with the wound, and the wound was small.
I know I was meant to read this today 😉, because I am working on a chapter for a book on data-driven decision making whose working title is “Cultivate and Fear Storytelling.” Carefully derived causal insights can be better-communicated with stories. But the latter can masquerade as the former if we do not guard against it….
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites toothache as one of two examples of natural evil (the other is hurricanes). Quote from LRB review of Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans.
My wife of 35 years is a dental technician by trade. Whenever she meets someone for the first time, she always looks at their teeth. She once told me that the reason she found me interesting when we first met - in addition to my charm - was my terrible bite. My mother never got around to telling the dentist to fit my mouth with braces when I was a child, probably too expensive. I've acquired a healthy respect for dental hygiene over the years (though I dread the annual visit for the cleaning and scraping of the enamel and gums).
Just before the Pandemic hit, and we all went into lockdown, my mother and stepfather died within 7 weeks of each other. First my stepfather of a blocked heart, and then my mother of overwhelming sadness. That's the causal tale I tell myself.
Thank you for this post.