We like to think that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, or more resilient, or . . . something. Deeper. Wiser. Enlarged. There is “glory in our sufferings,” the Bible promises. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” In this equation, no pain is too great to be good. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,” Dostoyevsky wrote. “The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” We atheists get in on the action by insisting that the agony of loss elucidates the worth of love. The hours spent staring into the dark, looping around our own personal grand prix of anxieties, are not a waste of time but a fundamental expression of our humanity. And so on. To be a person is to suffer.

But what if our worst feelings are just vestigial garbage? Hypervigilance and pricking fear were useful when survival depended on evading lions; they are not particularly productive when the predators are Alzheimer’s and cancer. Other excruciating feelings, like consuming sadness and aching regret, may never have had a function in the evolutionary sense. But religion, art, literature, and Oprah have convinced us that they are valuable—the bitter kick that enhances life’s intermittent sweetness. Pain is what makes joy, gratitude, mercy, hilarity, and empathy so precious. Unless it isn’t.

“I know the word ‘pain,’ and I know people are in pain, because you can see it,” Joanne Cameron, a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher, told me, in the cluttered kitchen of her century-old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands. Cameron has never experienced the extremes of rage, dread, grief, anxiety, or fear. She handed a cup of tea to Jim, her husband of twenty-five years, with whom she’s never had a fight. “I see stress,” she continued, “and I’ve seen pain, what it does, but I’m talking about an abstract thing.”

Because of a combination of genetic quirks, Cameron’s negative emotional range is limited to the kinds of bearable suffering one sees in a Nora Ephron movie. If someone tells Cameron a sad story, she cries—“easily! Oh, I’m such a softie.” When she reads about the latest transgression by Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, she feels righteous indignation. “But then you just go to a protest march, don’t you? And that’s all you can do.” When something bad happens, Cameron’s brain immediately searches for a way to ameliorate the situation, but it does not dwell on unhappiness. She inadvertently follows the creed of the Stoics (and of every twelve-step recovery program): Accept the things you cannot change.

Cameron, who has white hair and was wearing denim overalls over a purple striped shirt, has a bouncy, elfin energy. She described the closest she’d ever come to experiencing real terror: an incident when her son, Jeremy, a musician, was beaten up so badly at a gig that he had to be hospitalized. “He was defending someone,” Cameron said. “The lead singer was gay—we’re talking a good few years ago, when they weren’t quite as tolerated—and they started calling the gay chappie names, and then suddenly the whole lot of them came on top of Jeremy.”

“They punched him, and kicked him, stamped his head,” Jim, a tall, genial man, with a white beard and a thick brogue, added gravely.

When Cameron got the call, she remembers, “initially, I thought, Oh, God, I hope he doesn’t die—I felt that. Then we got in the car. I wasn’t fretting, I was just thinking, We’ve got to get to him, he needs me.” They drove a hundred and thirty miles on the single-track roads that wind east from their home in Foyers, near the snaky banks of Loch Ness, to Peterhead. “We got to the hospital about four or five in the morning. He looked like an elephant man, my handsome boy did,” Cameron said, laughing. “He looked like nothing on earth!”

In addition to Jeremy, who is forty-two, Cameron has a daughter, Amy, who is thirty. Her experience of motherhood has entailed none of the rumbling terror that most parents feel over their children’s safety. “Some time ago, someone said to me, ‘When the baby comes, the first thing you do is count the fingers and toes.’ I thought, I never looked at anything!” Cameron said. “I never dreamed of there being anything wrong.”

In sharp contrast to her near-inability to feel awful, Cameron has an expansive capacity for positive emotions. She is exceedingly loving and affectionate with her husband. When I first came to the door, she greeted me with an embrace, crying, “Ooh, I’m very huggy!” Her seventeen years as a special-education teacher required great reserves of compassion. “I had a Down-syndrome girl—who was actually quite high-functioning—and she would come in every morning and she’d walk up to me and spit in my face, and say, ‘I hate you, Jo Cameron! I hate you!’ And I’d stand there and say, ‘I don’t like being spat on, but I don’t hate you!’ ” Cameron told me, smiling. “Oh, I’ve had some very difficult students. I’ve been bitten; I’ve been spat on; I’ve been kicked!” Over the years, the Camerons have provided short-term foster care for four children. One of them stole all their vacation money from the cookie jar. “She did take things for the sake of taking them,” Cameron said pleasantly. “It took us years to catch up! When eight hundred pounds is gone from your vacation kitty, it takes a long time to recoup.”

“Think of this as intensive training for being in a can.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

Even seemingly sorrowful things, like the loss of her mother a year ago, can fill Cameron with appreciation and pleasure. “My mother’s death was the least saddest thing ever,” Cameron declared. “She used to say, ‘I’ve had the most wonderful life.’ And she died after she had an iced lolly and went to sleep.” When the doctor arrived, Cameron recalled, “she said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s the most beautiful corpse I’ve ever seen.’ Then we sat in the kitchen and had a fantastic wake: we toasted Mum with Tia Maria till the early morning.”

Cameron plans to leave her own corpse to science when she dies. “They’ll whisk the body away, and stick us in a drawer somewhere and chop us up, won’t they?” she said. “I don’t mind.” She will also spend a good deal of her remaining time alive being studied by scientists, who hope that her genetics will provide a path to new treatments for anxiety and trauma, as well as for pain management and healing. In addition to her unusual emotional composition, Cameron is entirely insensitive to physical pain. As a child, she fell and hurt her arm while roller-skating, but had no idea she’d broken it until her mother noticed that it was hanging strangely. Giving birth was no worse. “When I was having Jeremy, it was the height of everyone doing natural childbirths,” she said. “My friends would come up to me and say, ‘Don’t listen—it’s murder. If you’re in pain, take everything they give you.’ I went in thinking, As soon as it gets painful, I’ll ask for the drugs. But it was over before I knew it.”

Remarkably, Cameron didn’t realize that she was any different from other people until she was sixty-five. “Lots of people have high pain thresholds,” she said. “I didn’t think people were silly for crying. I could tell people were upset or hurt and stuff. I went through life and I just thought, I haven’t hurt myself as much as they have.”