I have spent countless hours reclined in dentists’ chairs, but this was the first time I had cried in one.

I was in for tooth pain and, as it happened, also at the end of my 16-year marriage. As I lay in the dentist’s chair while the hygienist scraped each tooth with a steel scaler, I wept, silently and irrepressibly, under a pair of oversized goggles. When she stopped poking under my gum lines and asked if I was OK, my ears were filled with tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m getting a divorce.”

I was almost 40 when I first came to see this dentist, bringing a mouth too complicated for the dentist before him and the one before that. I have what are called “supernumerary roots,” an excess of roots under my teeth. Which means — perhaps this goes without saying — a lot of nerves.

It was the first winter of the pandemic. My three children, from whom I had only ever spent a handful of nights apart, were doing school remotely from home. It seemed the minute they would leave for their father’s place on weekends, all I could do was cry. I tried to escape into “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and I tried meeting friends for outdoor drinks, but I was too raw, too thronged with the unprotected nerves I had in abundance.

The hygienist handed me a tissue before excusing herself. When she came back, she was accompanied by the dentist.

“What is it?” he said, crouching down.

“It hurts,” I said. “Everything hurts.”

He sat beside me on his little stool and said, “Can you show me where?”

I tried to point to where I felt discomfort, but the location got vaguer the further my finger got into my mouth.

“Is it pain?” he said.

It wasn’t pain. It was something like a sensation I couldn’t bear, but without the receptors to properly transmit the feeling. I thought the ache was in a tooth at the back, but the dentist had pulled that one years before. Like my marriage, the tooth was gone, but there was a tender place still aching.

He tapped the area with his tiny mirror. “Here?” he said, touching the nothingness where there once had been a healthy bone.

“Yes,” I said. I felt the tears welling up. “That’s it.”

My childhood was plagued with jitters and loss related to problems of the mouth: tooth decay, tooth grinding, erratic spacing, several missing molars that an early dentist joked made me either spectacularly evolved or prehistoric. But worst of all were the extra canals in my roots. Most teeth have one. Molars often have two. Three is unusual and four, as I have, is even more rare.

A root canal I had in my 20s turned complicated when a dentist failed to find multiple canals and, exasperated, quit halfway. This turned into bone loss around that tooth in my 30s and an excavation of the molar at 40. A titanium post eventually had to be implanted into my bone and a counterfeit tooth, a crown of porcelain, pushed in. It took multiple visits over several months, and was, after childbirth, the most painful thing I have experienced.

The office where my dentist works is in a busy center in Midtown Manhattan, 18 floors up. Lying in the ocean of anesthetizing dentist-office whirs, I didn’t know how I would ever get up from the chair. I couldn’t imagine the 45-minute subway ride home, the key turning the lock of my place, the emptiness that would meet me there.

Then my dentist, as though watching a film clip of my mind, took off his two layers of masks and said, “Listen to me.” His face was startlingly full of skin. “My wife left me and our sons when they were 2 and 4.” There was a long pause. “Then she died.”

I stared at him. I had met his now-teenage sons in the office. Their photo was above us on the wall.

“I thought I would die, too,” he said. “But I didn’t. I took a serotonin inhibitor for a year, and it got me through. I could get up in the morning. I could walk myself to work.”

I swallowed, my mouth sour.

“You need to get on something. This year will be the hardest, but it will get you through.”

I trembled in the plastic-covered chair, staring at my scuffed boots bolstered pitifully in front of me. Was I broken? Was medicating myself more or less the same as medicating a tooth in pain?

During our marriage, my husband and I shared a car that was always breaking down. The stories were terrible in the moment but good fodder later, at dinner with friends. The time our car died on the way upstate for Christmas with the back packed to the ceiling with presents. The time it died on a bridge out of the Bronx in a snowstorm with all three children in the back and no shoulder for a tow truck to pull in. I had to call 911 to be rescued while my husband, afraid we’d be accidentally hit, stood 30 feet behind our car, waving his hands at the traffic hurtling toward us.

Who would wave away danger now?

The next week, I walked to my primary care doctor’s office, where she asked me questions about my mental health history (the scale of my pain, the length of my despair), listened to my answers and wrote me a prescription. When I got home, I put the bottle in a cabinet, poured myself a whiskey and lay down on the couch.

It was a Friday afternoon, and I was without my children for the weekend. I had canceled plans to meet a friend for Korean barbecue that evening and decided I would instead lie very still for two days as a pain-control mechanism. I would lie motionless until my nerves stopped.

The next night, I got a call from my 7-year-old son at his father’s house, saying he was homesick. He cried bitterly on FaceTime, his face floating in and out of the frame, while he listed his grievances.

After reading him “Frog in Winter,” the story of a frog who suffers through the cold until springtime comes again, after feigning calm for him, feigning cheer to beget cheer, I hung up, walked to the cabinet, took a pill from the bottle and swallowed it.

When I was 9, a small-town dentist decided that I had a space between my teeth because the frenum — the soft tissue connecting the lips and gums — had grown in the way, so he cut it out. When I was 12, a different dentist declared that decision absurd and wedged in a veneer to close the gap. When I was 17, a third dentist touched my leg during an appointment and asked me to play tennis with him. When I slithered away and said no, he jammed a needle of anesthetic into my gum with so much force my jawbone ached for a week.

I have had many good dentists and at least one monster. I have at times seen my life as one long dental problem. But this dentist, the grieving empath, now seemed to me like a Greek oracle, an unlikely body offering divine advice at a moment when I didn’t think I could take one more step.

For six months I swallowed a pill every day. Slowly, I found myself packing up my youngest son’s shark T-shirts and beloved camo pants with less anguish, kissing my teenager’s head in the morning with more focus on Sunday night when they got back from their father’s. I started taking long walks in the morning with our dog and slow-cooking soup all day while I worked.

Nothing happened all at once or absolutely, but gradually I could open the door to the street where their father waited in an Uber, squeeze their bundled-up bodies and let them go.

When I went back to see my dentist, I was not crying. He could see right away I had taken his advice.

“You got help,” he said, patting me on the shoulder and settling me into an X-ray chair. “Good.”

On the grainy screen, I could see everything: the implanted post, standing stalwart; small sites of recovery where my mouth had been rebuilt. I looked with curiosity and then tenderness for everything that had happened in that complex and intimate place. A whole narrative was stretched out over 23 root chambers and 44 years.

When the dentist closed the digital files, they shrank into a tiny folder on the screen. It seemed natural for them to disappear. Like the photos from our married Christmases and road trips, they are records of the visible and invisible, the exposed nerves and soothing crowns, the absence and the abiding presence in a place called history.

Hillery Stone, a writer in Brooklyn, is working on a novel.

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