At almost exactly this time last year I wrote a blog about mourning. In the tenth year since the event that has come to be known as "the accident" in my life, I wrote about stages of mourning not according to the emotion we experience but according to the stage we pass without the person we left behind. As that date approaches once again I find myself thinking more about how we are told to experience trauma rather than mourning. Somebody, somewhere was paid a lot of money to explain that something that constitutes a "near-death experience" is hard to get over. Somebody published countless pages because they realized that we re-live bad experiences and bring a new emotion with each new trial. What's amazing about all of this is not what they discovered, but how much money someone could have saved if they asked the people doing the experiencing - rather than the people with the degrees. It's not unlike literature, really. I can sit with "Invisible Man" and spend the rest of my life talking about what it means, what each aspect represents, how it speaks to its author, culture, and other texts. The reality, however, is that decades of studying and countless degrees will still leave me less able to answer to that interpretation than the author himself. Considering his lifetime after that book was published, I imagine Ralph Ellison would agree.
But I digress. According to the Kubler-Ross Model, one stage of grief is anger. In the event of a fatal car accident, the anger can go a few ways. The easiest answer is anger with the person responsible for the accident. I still remember how my driver's ed teacher spent hours instructing us that there is no such thing as an "accident" because someone is always to blame. In my accident, R. O. was to blame. I know his name. I doubt I will ever forget his name. Still, what good would it do to be angry at him? What would that produce? The law looked at R.O., looked at my deceased friend and my mutilated body, and they said he failed to yield right of way. One $57 ticket later, he was a free man - as he should be. R. O. made a mistake that changed lives forever. If he's human, he is causing himself more grief than I ever could or would. If he hasn't brought grief on himself, there's nothing I could do that would change that. Getting angry at him won't change what happened, and of the two of us, I would be the only one who would ever know I was angry.
The next answer, of course, is that I could be angry at myself. I made mistakes that day. I don't know what would have happened differently if I had reacted differently, and I don't want to feel helpless in the face of my own emotions. I could be angry at how I am now. My entire life is harder. I think slower and remember less. My legs lost years of their lives as though they are independent of the rest of my body, and I can't change what they won't do. But I'm alive. It took me a long time to realize it was okay to be angry at my body and my brain when I'm blessed to be alive, and now I find myself waivering between an onslaught of frustration and the inevitable guilt that can follow.
The last answer is to be angry with Nicole. I won't do that, and I think this is a prime example of where the psychologists have failed. We are all incapable of feeling certain emotions in certain directions, and this one is mine.
After the stages of grief, there is the inevitable idea of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The very name gives me more frustration than a lifetime of knee surgeries. What must have made a psychologist realize that something like PTSD exists? Could it be the Vietnam veterans who have yet to return to civilization? The burn victims who are physically unable to approach a candle? Or, perhaps, could it be the obvious solution that Rome wasn't built in a day? Rome, in this case, being a person's ability to reconcile their past experience with their future expectations. Of course, PTSD seems not unlike a person's addiction. Once you are painted with this label, you will never really lose it.
In this respect, I've learned two things. First, you can't relive something you can't remember. As is apparently normal for near-death experiences, I have no direct recollection of what happened that day. I have countless imaginary "memories" and endless theories, but no matter what I picture or imagine I hear, nothing seems to click as what must have really occurred. Before the accident I recall leaving the mall. I remember we both agreed to take that road. Afterwards, I vaguely recall R. O. sticking something in my mouth (to prevent me from choking on my own tongue) and the sound of EMTs asking me questions, but I don't remember answering. In between, my mind is a blank.
Second, I've learned that a label is something you take with you as much as people assign it to you. In Iowa City, I felt like I would always be "that girl." People knew who I was and talked to me accordingly, but we'd never met. I had no reason to know who they were. After I left Iowa City, it felt unfamiliar to me to wear a pair of shorts and have to explain the scars (and so I stopped wearing shorts completely). I didn't understand when someone talked about a person dying in a car accident and nobody immediately looked to me (as though we are all in some super-secret club formed only of people involved in fatal accidents). Outside of that town, I had the opportunity to be whoever I wanted to be, which was exactly what I wanted. Then I realized that I don't know how to be anybody else. The label of being "that girl" was not assigned to me in a day and was not specific to one moment. That label encompasses who I am, what I've seen in the past, and how I look at everything I see in the present and in the future. I am a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter . . . and I'm "that girl."
There are two more days until the anniversary is over, and I find the waiting exhausting. I'm not exhausted from anger because I feel that emotion assigned to me by a disembodied voice who doesn't know me or what I've been through. I disregard the idea of PTSD because, for most of us who experience PTSD, it's not a disorder; it's a way of life. Instead, I wait impatiently for another anniversary to pass, knowing all the while I will remember it again in the next stage of mourning, the next stage of frustration, and the next stage of grief. Like Ellison, I may spend the rest of my life trying to explain myself. I don't know if anyone else will understand or if they'll be able to see past what their degrees tell them they see. I don't even know why I have a "rest of my life" to do all of this, but I do know that there isn't a psychologist out there who can explain to me what I feel better than I can explain it for myself.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Letting Go of Dates
I've never really been sure why we insist on remembering dates. Birthdays, first date, first kiss, weddings, and more all seem to hang over us like annual obligations on the calendar. I've never been a big one for dates. I couldn't tell you when my husband and I started dating or even when we got engaged, and I only remember our anniversary because we got married on the first summer month that had the first day of the month on a Saturday. However, in lieu of all these wonderful memories I could associate with each passing year, I seem to be caught up the tragedies that have marked milestones in my life. I remember the date for most and the week for the rest, and no matter how old I get or how much life I live, I can't seem to leave them behind.
The first anniversary I remember is my grandfather dying. I was ten years old, and we had been living with my grandparents for a few years by then. His birthday was April 8, and he died on April 22nd. It was a Thursday. At fifty-six years old Paga (as we called him) had already lived through a stroke, cancer, and at least one heart attack. On more than one occasion the doctors had instructed his family to go in and say their final good byes, and each time he pulled through until this one last heart attack too him when he was still far too young. I don't feel this anniversary hanging over me in a tragic way, yet something prevents me from leaving the date behind.
Four years after Paga died, my grandmother took me and my sister to New York to visit our aunt. After spending about a week at her home in Oswego, we took off on the road to return to Saratoga Springs, the town where my grandparents raised my mother and her siblings. Along the way, we were rear-ended by a college student who was driving in excess of one hundred miles per hour on the interstate. I had been sitting at an angle in the backseat, and my head whipped back into the door on impact. Afterward, the man at the car garage asked if the person who made the dent in the door had survived. That was March 22, 1997, my first experience with brain damage and exactly one month before the anniversary of my grandfather's death. Again, I don't find myself pausing in life to recognize this date, yet I know when it is just the same.
At this point I could continue to list anniversaries that stay with me, but it's that time of year again that I find myself caught up in the date that does hang over me: May 24. On May 24, 2000 my life changed forever and another life ended far too soon. I've written blogs about it in the past, but I don't know how you can ever write enough about losing a friend in such a horrific tragedy. The day started so simple. I hate saying that. I hate the idea that, to the rest of the world, that day was like any other. The weather was clear and hot, and everyone was preparing for the end of the school year. Nicole and I drove to the mall during our open hour, and we took a shortcut on a gravel road to get back to school on time.
I won't get caught up in hindsight or retrospect on choosing that road now, but I think I'll always wonder what if. What if we had chosen a different road? What if we had driven a little faster or a little slower? What if that driver had paid a little more attention? Perhaps we wouldn't have been hit. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad. Perhaps I would be able to think better, smarter, faster if I hadn't had my second experience with brain damage. Perhaps Nicole would still be alive. Perhaps I could live one year without thinking of May 24 as the date that will haunt me forever.
I've noticed in years past that May 24 is unlike other anniversaries. Birthdates tend to be as short as a special meal or as long as the few days it takes to get from the date to the party. Anniversaries are as short as a date or as long as it takes to find the perfect present. May 24 is not like either of these. For me, May 24 is a month. It's week after week of waiting for something to go wrong. Listening for a phone call, watching for someone with bad news, and collapsing with relief when it's over.
In an earlier post I wrote about a man I met on the side of the road, P.J.C., who visits the place where his son died at least once a month. He explained how these visits ease his conscience and assauge his guilt as he leaves a physical reminder that he has not forgotten, will not forget, the son he lost that day. For him, it's been four years. He asked me that day if it gets easier, and I didn't have an answer for him. I still don't.
Instead, I've turned his question back on myself and wonder when it will be easier for me. Eleven years later, all I can think of is that day and wonder if it's going to happen again. I think about Nicole and find my mind going blank as I try to formulate questions about how she must feel, what she's doing, who she's with. I think about what I'll do on the actual day and wonder if everyone can tell just by looking at me that something isn't right. Still, I know that on May 25 everything will be over. Another year will have passed, and I'll find myself in a remission of sorts for eleven months - once again.
For most of the world, May 24 is just another date. It's an anniversary of other sorts for other people, but for me and a handful of other people I know, it's an era of mourning. Mourning Nicole didn't happen in a set of weeks, months, or years immediately after she died. Instead, mourning comes from a collection of one month anniversaries across countless years. Every May, I return to mourning. I can't remember most birthdates or happy anniversaries, but I remember this date more than any other. In truth, I don't know that I want to forget.
The first anniversary I remember is my grandfather dying. I was ten years old, and we had been living with my grandparents for a few years by then. His birthday was April 8, and he died on April 22nd. It was a Thursday. At fifty-six years old Paga (as we called him) had already lived through a stroke, cancer, and at least one heart attack. On more than one occasion the doctors had instructed his family to go in and say their final good byes, and each time he pulled through until this one last heart attack too him when he was still far too young. I don't feel this anniversary hanging over me in a tragic way, yet something prevents me from leaving the date behind.
Four years after Paga died, my grandmother took me and my sister to New York to visit our aunt. After spending about a week at her home in Oswego, we took off on the road to return to Saratoga Springs, the town where my grandparents raised my mother and her siblings. Along the way, we were rear-ended by a college student who was driving in excess of one hundred miles per hour on the interstate. I had been sitting at an angle in the backseat, and my head whipped back into the door on impact. Afterward, the man at the car garage asked if the person who made the dent in the door had survived. That was March 22, 1997, my first experience with brain damage and exactly one month before the anniversary of my grandfather's death. Again, I don't find myself pausing in life to recognize this date, yet I know when it is just the same.
At this point I could continue to list anniversaries that stay with me, but it's that time of year again that I find myself caught up in the date that does hang over me: May 24. On May 24, 2000 my life changed forever and another life ended far too soon. I've written blogs about it in the past, but I don't know how you can ever write enough about losing a friend in such a horrific tragedy. The day started so simple. I hate saying that. I hate the idea that, to the rest of the world, that day was like any other. The weather was clear and hot, and everyone was preparing for the end of the school year. Nicole and I drove to the mall during our open hour, and we took a shortcut on a gravel road to get back to school on time.
I won't get caught up in hindsight or retrospect on choosing that road now, but I think I'll always wonder what if. What if we had chosen a different road? What if we had driven a little faster or a little slower? What if that driver had paid a little more attention? Perhaps we wouldn't have been hit. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad. Perhaps I would be able to think better, smarter, faster if I hadn't had my second experience with brain damage. Perhaps Nicole would still be alive. Perhaps I could live one year without thinking of May 24 as the date that will haunt me forever.
I've noticed in years past that May 24 is unlike other anniversaries. Birthdates tend to be as short as a special meal or as long as the few days it takes to get from the date to the party. Anniversaries are as short as a date or as long as it takes to find the perfect present. May 24 is not like either of these. For me, May 24 is a month. It's week after week of waiting for something to go wrong. Listening for a phone call, watching for someone with bad news, and collapsing with relief when it's over.
In an earlier post I wrote about a man I met on the side of the road, P.J.C., who visits the place where his son died at least once a month. He explained how these visits ease his conscience and assauge his guilt as he leaves a physical reminder that he has not forgotten, will not forget, the son he lost that day. For him, it's been four years. He asked me that day if it gets easier, and I didn't have an answer for him. I still don't.
Instead, I've turned his question back on myself and wonder when it will be easier for me. Eleven years later, all I can think of is that day and wonder if it's going to happen again. I think about Nicole and find my mind going blank as I try to formulate questions about how she must feel, what she's doing, who she's with. I think about what I'll do on the actual day and wonder if everyone can tell just by looking at me that something isn't right. Still, I know that on May 25 everything will be over. Another year will have passed, and I'll find myself in a remission of sorts for eleven months - once again.
For most of the world, May 24 is just another date. It's an anniversary of other sorts for other people, but for me and a handful of other people I know, it's an era of mourning. Mourning Nicole didn't happen in a set of weeks, months, or years immediately after she died. Instead, mourning comes from a collection of one month anniversaries across countless years. Every May, I return to mourning. I can't remember most birthdates or happy anniversaries, but I remember this date more than any other. In truth, I don't know that I want to forget.
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