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.
No comments:
Post a Comment