Frozen Teardrop

by Lucinda Ruh

  Once again it was “should have.” But it’s so true. I should have gone to numerous doctors for second opinions. My Russian coach and her son-in-law repeatedly called us, wanting us to come back to them to go to Boston where they knew of wonderful doctors that could help me and figure out what was wrong. But my mother and father believed in the Swiss doctor and they did not see enough reason to go there. It was my mistake too that I expected them to know what I was feeling and I did not push.

  Now we all see that there was way more than enough reason but at that time we did not see. I wanted them so much to believe me, their daughter, not some stranger or some doctor. I wanted my mother to see that I was in serious pain and I wanted her to take me to other doctors to see what was wrong with my spine. But nothing was done. They had accepted the diagnosis and once my parents agree on something they can’t be swayed and I believed them above anyone, even above myself. I was misunderstood once more and I did not know what more to do to get my message across. Die? Be permanently paralyzed? I was truly foolish for not speaking up. I was not used to voicing my opinion on a situation when everything always was decided for me. I thought it was enough to just show that I was injured. The rest of the things in my life I was accustomed to my mother handling. If she did not take me to another doctor, it meant no other doctor needed to be seen.

  But maybe these were just excuses. Maybe deep inside I also did not know what I would do without my life on the ice, and wanted to keep it going as well. I had no voice of my own. I was confused. We all were. My mother and I were one person. She was the puppeteer and I was the puppet. We were a great team with great consequences. How did we know that this doctor had not been prompted as to what to tell us by the Swiss skating federation? Or was this doctor naive and was this a misdiagnosis? To my expense we would not find out until many years later when the pain and destruction from this injury was so intense and severe that I could barely walk once again. It would ultimately end my career and in many ways my life the way I knew it. But it would be a blessing in disguise. A beautiful blessing in a horrendous disguise. Little do we know why things happen to us. Little do we realize what goes on around us let alone within us. Just how awake are we really in this world? What does it take to wake us up? We close our eyes, our ears, and our mouths, close tightly our hands and make them into fists and fight. Fight for what? For whom? To prove a point or to save our own ego or maybe to save others. I would later learn, however, that to fight for what you believe in is truly empowering and I had never had the chance to do it. We become senseless in more ways than one.

  I was confined to my bed once more and not able to move. I stared at the ceiling praying for guidance. I had no other help than my mother’s and father’s support that “all will end well.” They saw me go deep into a world of tears. I was in desperation. I longed for help, for guidance, for someone to pull me back up. I see now that most of all I was longing for my mother or father to lift off all the pressure and let me stop skating and everything that came with it. I wanted them to say it, so that I would not be blamed for anything. I know it was cowardly of me, yet when you believe in someone else other than yourself, you can also start to not believe in yourself at all. And this happened to me. I cried myself to sleep every night.

  This was the end, I thought. Everything would have to stop. There was no way in the world this could go on. I was now critically injured. I could not go on and I was sure my parents would never let me go on. This was rock bottom, I thought. I had reached it. All these were merely thoughts and thoughts, nothing much more than energy flowing through. The whole world, it seemed, was determined for whatever reason to prove my thoughts and me wrong. I would have to figure out why by myself when I was truly ready. God saw I was neither ready nor ripe. I was still a child in body and soul, trying to be an adult. I was not to be freed from my misery yet.

  I am featured in a Ripley’s “Believe It or NOT!” comic strip on 4/27/03. (Copyright 2003 Ripley Entertainment)

  Photo shoot on the famous Dolder Rink in Zurich, Switzerland, 2005 (Photo by Christian Lanz)

  The speed of my Biellmann spin created a blurred image during the Art on Ice show in 2003. (Photo by Erwin Zueger)

  My famous self-created “Lucinda Spin” at the Ice Theatre NY show (www.icetheatreny.org) (Photo by Diane Bidermann. © Ice Theatre of New York and Diane Bidermann)

  Skating on tour with one of my favorite dresses (Photo by Gerard Vandystadt)

  My famous layback spin photographed from above shows a wonderfully interesting angle. (Photo by Gerard Vandystadt)

  A striking ending pose in my famous, statuesque Gold Oscar costume (Photo by Gerard Vandystadt)

  Another one of my spin creations performed on tour aroundthe world (Photo by Gerard Vandystadt)

  Here I am performing a Biellmann spin at my first and favorite professional competition, the 2000 World Professional Figure Skating Championships in Washington D.C. I received several perfect scores of 10.0 and was the Hallmark moment of the day. Soon after this success I received an invitation to be a guest at the White House. (Photo courtesy of IMG)

  Photoshoot 2003 (Photo courtesy of Lucinda Ruh)

  Photoshoot, Los Angeles, CA, 2003 (Photo courtesy of Lucinda Ruh)

  Doug Aitken photographed my spinning for his “Sleepwalkers” exhibition at MOMA. (Doug Aitken, Sleepwalkers, 2007, courtesy of Museum of Modern Art, 303 Gallery Eva Presenhuber, Regen Projects, Victoria Miro Gallery)

  Antonio and I walk across Fifth Avenue on our wedding day after the ceremony held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, October 16, 2010. (Photo by Michael Vernadsky, courtesy of Lucinda Ruh)

  11

  Beginning of an End

  (ZURICH, TOKYO, HACKENSACK, SUN VALLEY)

  The blind were leading the blind.

  I must admit looking back that I think I was completely, truly, and utterly insane in many unclassified ways. No question about it. I did the same thing over and over and over again and I expected different results each time. It was not just me; it was all those around me who orchestrated and conducted my life. We continued in our ways, yet we were always hoping for a completely opposite outcome. You just try even harder than before, while never getting what you hope for, and all you do is ask “Why when working so hard, is so little achieved?” We never think to re-evaluate “how” we are doing it.

  There could be many various reasons for the mistakes of a failed execution, but if no one is able to pinpoint the core reason of why it failed, you will never ever be able to fully correct it and succeed. If we can’t see for ourselves the reason for our mistakes we need others to discover it for us. Yet when the others around you are living in your bubble as well, it also becomes impossible for them to see it. Sometimes in life stepping back is much more important than trying to move forward. This is when you learn the most about yourself. I was trying so hard with all my might to move forward yet just like I did with my famous spins, all I was doing was spinning in one place. I would never move from one place where I was digging a hole in the ice.

  That is what my life had become. I was drilling my own hole deeper and deeper into the earth, deeper into despair as I spun around and around, always returning to where I started. How ironic that my strongest trait on ice would be the way I live my life unconsciously off the ice as well. It was a mirror image not to vanish until I fell so hard right through the glass and shattered it to pieces.

  I longed for happier times. I wanted so much to go back to the time when I was little and engulfed in the fairy-tale life my mother and father had created for me. They were and are perfect parents in an imperfect world. The life they gave me had been so beautiful, so magical, so like a fantasy, and so angelic. Their hearts and souls are made of gold and they had been forced into a world built on mistrust, wrong judgment, and petty criticism. It was not my parents’ choice, yet skating had warped them into people they were not, and forced them to make decisions that no parent should have to make.

  I u
nderstand the famous singer’s wish to be like Peter Pan and never grow up. Long before this, I had thought that, too. I wanted never to grow up. My life as a kid was so glorious, so enchanting. It was what I, and children around the world, envision life to be and it wasn’t growing up that changed it, it wasn’t even skating. It was everything that surrounded skating in our world. Movement on the ice is pure. The frozen water that the clean sharp blade paints on is pure. The intention is pure. The face is pure. Yet every single thing that surrounds the outside of the circumference of the ice is not. Our bodies are made mostly of water and water holds every emotion within its structure. I wonder what kind of emotion each patch of ice held packed so tightly?

  It was just the start of the skating season yet my competition season was over. The injury that was so serious from pain and debilitation, yet had no diagnosis, would hamper me for a long time. I wasn’t talking much at all, not knowing what to say, and I started questioning my life. What was I to do if I could never skate again? My sadness and frustration was plainly visible and my parents thought that sending me to Tokyo for ten days would cheer me up. They knew I really missed my life there and they wanted me to just have some playtime. In Switzerland the physical therapists were not doing any good since their orders were to heal a torn muscle. They could not even really touch me when I was in so much pain, so they and we were at a loss.

  The last few years I lived in Tokyo I was treated by a famous Japanese doctor who worked with the best baseball and track and field teams as well as other athletes in Japan. I remember his office well. He was a very prestigious doctor with about twenty employees following his orders. He did massage, acupuncture, and all sorts of therapies. He had about five people on beds on which he would work at the same time, going from one to another all day long. He was a tiny guy with the most energy I have ever seen. He worked for about two hours on each patient. The minute your therapy was done another patient was waiting in the wings to take your place. You would think his office would be a palace but it was in the busiest part of Tokyo in the Shibuya area and crammed in between two high-rise buildings. It was a shack three stories high that looked like it could fall any minute. I remember vividly that whenever a big truck passed by the whole building and the beds would shake feverishly. Every single time before I entered the building I said a prayer and made the sign of the cross praying that there would be no earthquake while I was in there.

  I was in constant pain and could not truly bend in any direction or do any sort of exercise, but I could walk and I was excited to go back to my home. I was excited also to travel for once in my life without my skates. It felt awkward to not pack them but was secretly a little freeing as well. I needed a much-deserved break. Tokyo was wonderful, rekindling memories. Eating the food I had grown up with and revisiting my old school and teachers there was fantastic.

  Right away I took time to go to the Japanese doctor. He was thrilled to see me and mentioned how much I had grown. I had left Tokyo very tiny and I kept on growing since I left. I was twenty years old by now and my growth plates in my spine had still not closed. There were many reasons I always got injured so quickly: my height, my restricted diet, my imbalanced hormones, my not allowing my body to rest or heal, and my following bad coaching techniques. My restricted diet made my bones more brittle and did not let my body go through puberty, causing a domino effect in other areas of my body. Not resting and not allowing myself to heal and grow also stopped a lot of processes a woman needs to go through, and so my body was frozen in time. I suspect all this caused a lot of my problems that later escalated and caused major havoc in my life.

  I explained to the doctor what had happened with my back. I told him how much pain I was in and that the diagnosis did not seem to fit what I was feeling. He told me to lie down on the bed. He took one look at my back and stepped back. I knew he had seen everything, and in a land where no injury is really serious enough to stop you from training, I did not expect him to think much of my spine.

  He asked me if I knew that there was a huge bone protruding from my spine, and I told him I knew this. He looked completely stunned. He told me he couldn’t understand how I could even walk. He said I needed to get more X-rays, a second opinion right away about the nature of my injury He said he would not be able to do anything for me since he did not want to touch or treat someone with something like that. He said my whole back from the coccyx to the neck was now so tight and so cramped he would not be able to touch me. I left there feeling at least that someone saw something that matched what I was feeling and it confirmed that I was not crazy and delusional.

  I relayed the news to my parents and you could tell they were covering up their emotions as they told me, not to worry, just to have fun in Tokyo and that they would take care of it when I got back. I enjoyed the rest of the trip but I had this intense fear within me that if I moved the wrong way, in any minute I could become paralyzed. I did not want to voice this because I would sound like I was complaining, and since the medical doctor in Switzerland had said nothing was wrong, people would think I was talking nonsense. I kept the fear to myself but it was stronger than ever. I usually just dismissed an injury but this one struck a chord in many ways.

  Once back home in Zurich, I knew it was time to discuss what our next step would be. A second doctor’s opinion never came up again. My parents were adamant that the injury was nothing serious and in a short while I would be fine again, and up and running, or more like up and skating, in no time. We always thought injuries would just heal on their own, as long as we did not think about them, touch them, or even mention them. My parents did not seem worried at all but maybe they were very good at hiding it. I hid it well too. They thought the less they talked about it the more I would forget about it, and the more quickly the injury would go away.

  My mother and father share the philosophy that a lot is produced in the mind and if the mind doesn’t accept the injury then there is none. Voilà! Just like that they desperately wanted the injury to disappear. All the discussions were about how to get back to skating. Many discussions became heated and my mother would frequently lash out again. You have to understand that skating had become my mother’s life, maybe even more so than mine. As much as I missed it she missed it a hundred times more. As much as I was in pain from the injury, she was in more pain from not seeing me skate. I was the one who couldn’t skate but she was still capable of going to the rink. For her not to have the schedule of bringing me to the rink and back, preparing me for skating, and the excitement of the whole journey, brought great frustration to her. While I enjoyed the freedom she missed not having a purpose. I had been her purpose and for me to take this away from her made me feel incredibly guilty and her feel helpless.

  Every day was tortuously long and filled with despair. I felt incapable of making the situation better. The only way I knew of helping everyone except me to get over this was to get back on the ice. My spins would heal them. From the time of the injury to the first time I went back on the ice was six months, but it felt much longer. That was the longest that I had not been on the ice. I went back on the ice for my mother and my father as I saw the longing in their tearful eyes. My mother said she and my father and the whole world were missing my spins.

  Guilt set in and I started back slowly. I made a promise to myself that I would do this for my parents and if something else happened to my spine and I was paralyzed it would prove that I had done everything I possibly could have to thank them for the devotion and utmost love to me. I was willing to take that risk for them as they had taken risks for me. It was a dangerous promise but I felt to skate was the least I could do for them. I owed it to them to bring them the fruit of their labor. I have to admit I was very scared about my body and I prayed that my angels would stay with me.

  It seems amazing that I started training again, carefully and cautiously. I did not know what I was training for but just left the goal in the hands of God. How quickly my life had changed. Just one year ago I ha
d basked in the spotlight excited about more great skating to come and now I was back to square one. A year ago finally Switzerland had wanted to give me many opportunities including ones in television, commercials, magazines and endless endorsements and now I to become just an invalid was hard to digest. When your whole career is based on your body and you lose that one thing, you feel you have lost your whole life.

  One day in the spring of 2000 we received a phone call from a skating agent who was in America. He wanted to represent me and he wanted me to turn professional. He told my mother my opportunities would be endless and that jumps would not be required of me. He could get me any show I wanted and my spinning would be my forte. He emphasized his point by bringing up the fact that no one was doing them like me and I had the big chance to be the “special one” and become famous. He reeled us in with grandiose words of persuasion. He said he could arrange right away to have me skate in Sun Valley, Idaho for the entire summer doing a show once a week. I could then decide how I would want to proceed. The shows in Sun Valley during the summer were very famous in the skating world and although we had heard of them, we had no real idea of the situation there.

  My mother, always loving any new adventure to do with skating, thought it was wonderful. We talked it over a little and since we were “yes” people we sprang at any opening. We never thought things through or weighed options. My parents and I were so accustomed to having a knee jerk reaction while having to make decisions very quickly. We were always on the go from one continent to another, and we never had had the chance to sit down and think things out or wait for other chances. Whatever first came up, due to pressure or the circumstance we were in, we always felt we had to take. The mentality with the Ruhs was “It’s better to have a sparrow in your hand than a pigeon on the roof that you could not catch at any moment. But what if you waited and baited that pigeon in? But waiting was not a word we used. We took the proposal. We did not want to commit to anything more quite yet but wanted to give it a chance to open my horizons.