Waking

by Matthew Sanford

  According to my mom, it was a tense five-and-a-half-hour drive through some hideous weather. I wouldn’t know; I was drugged and out of it. My head was held, positioned to look straight up at the ceiling, the entire time. Eventually, after radio consultation with the doctors at the Mayo Clinic, I was taken off the respirator. For the first time in more than five days, I was my own rhythm-maker, my own connection to time. Although the fresh air pouring through my body was shockingly cold, it was there with my consent.

  3

  Out of Body

  Aggressive treatment was what we wanted, aggressive treatment is what we got. I am met by a team of doctors and brought into an open area. There is no time lapse; there is only action. A curtain is drawn and suddenly I am enclosed in an artificial room. I suspect this is an emergency room, but there’s no telling. The view is not great from flat on my back.

  The lights overhead are bright and hot, and yet my vision is dim. The faces and voices are like shadows, conversations swirling, no apparent direction. I am surrounded by many bodies. Two men are standing particularly close, by each of my shoulders. They whisper to each other right over my chest. The quality of their voices reveals their importance: crisp, authoritative, calm, with a confident edge. But they have no faces. I see only their arms, hands, torsos, and the underside of their chins. They are holding some sort of hand tools. Unknown to me, I am about to have four metal screws twisted directly into my skull. It is the first step in getting a halo cast, the ultimate in neck stabilization.

  Suddenly, two other men appear from above me and hold down my arms. Two screwdrivers move toward my temples. My skin breaks, warmness runs into my hair. The pain is sharp and getting sharper. A horrible sound explodes in my head, not from the outside in, but from the inside out. The screws continue to twist into my skull. The pressure is slow at first, building, and then exponential. My head no longer exists in three dimensions, no space between collapsing sides, just two rocks grinding each other.

  Suddenly, it’s done. A semblance of vision returns. Then, out of nowhere, it begins again … twisting right above each ear. This time, I am not in that body; there is no subject of that experience. I land in profound silence, watching a boy. He is on a table, a sheet is draped loosely over his lower body. He seems so small. Time is off-track, and I am everywhere. The doctors move, but things are held up, stretched out, turned over, pulled apart—a silent movie on a faltering projector. Suddenly, time finds its rhythm, sounds appear again, the vacuum is broken. A timid voice that I recognize as my own, “Somebody help me.”

  A path of realization—big or small—almost always starts bumpy. In my case, I was thrown off a cliff. In retrospect, I realize that this halo experience altered the course of my life. It left me with an insight. At a moment of intense physical pain, the fragile state of my living was able to “move away” from my body. The potential for dislocation between mind and body was dramatically revealed. The insight, however, was not the ability to disassociate. It was the silence that I experienced while it happened. This silence not only allowed me to separate from my body, but it was also sticky enough to maintain a life-preserving connection. Somehow I stayed connected to that boy below me. The silence within my consciousness both separated me and connected me simultaneously. This paradoxical insight still guides my life.

  When I wake from my halo cast experience, I am in a different room. My awareness is scattered; it comes in phases, sometimes almost crisp, other times threadbare. Somehow, I hear the date—December second. Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday, and I need to show her, show everyone, that I am holding on, that I am okay. With my recently reacquired voice, I ask for my Aunt Kathy. Weakly, I inform her of my mom’s impending birthday. “Will you please get her something for me? She needs something.” There is a pause. I am on my back, and my neck is in traction. It’s impossible to turn my head. I push my eyes hard left. Silent tears are running down her cheeks, “Are you sure?” Yes, I say. She buys a silk scarf, green and tan, in a design I can hardly register. It is surprisingly nice for a hospital gift shop. I am pleased.

  It seems like I see this scarf every day for weeks. My mother wears it rolled up and clasped around her neck, with a tan turtle-neck sweater and slacks. Truthfully, I have no idea how often she wears it. The hours, the days, even the minutes have dropped their focus. But for me, the scarf is imprinted on my mind, a beacon of my choice.

  Although getting a present for my mother felt noble and necessary, it was motivated by denial. For the six days since the accident, my mother and brother poured everything imaginable—love, prayers, hope, fear, desperation, and, most powerfully, imprints of themselves—into my fragile state of living. They needed to tip the balance toward living: Three of five surviving was manageable; but if three of five die, the dam breaks, and death overwhelms our family. They gave as only loved ones can, throwing lifelines into a seamless dark. Finally, I reached a place where I could grab the other end. I pulled hard and fast. I didn’t want to feel my body. I wanted to feel my family instead.

  I am spitting into a metallic, crescent-shaped bowl. My saliva hangs and drops like a gummy paste, its cotton whiteness plopping against the shiny gray. The bowl’s design is intended to encircle the neck below the chin and allows for mess-free spitting. These mouth commodes are standard issue in a hospital and provide bedridden patients with a place to spit such things as toothpaste and mouthwash. Simple cleanliness habits like brushing my teeth, gargling with mouthwash, even picking my nose are beyond my reach. My arms are too weak, and I am lying on a Foster frame in the children’s intensive care unit at the Mayo Clinic.

  A Foster frame is hard for me to describe because I have never actually seen one. I have only been on one. They are used in critical care situations for maximal stabilization of back and neck injuries. I will live on one for weeks. The structure itself is made of two canvas stretchers attached to a frame; the frame allows the stretchers to turn 180 degrees abruptly. Every two hours I am sandwiched between the stretchers—one has an opening for my face—and in a whirl of motion my body can still feel but my mind cannot fathom, I am turned from stomach to back or from back to stomach.

  When on my stomach—my face protruding through the circular hole—the metallic mouth commode positioned about two feet below is a godsend. I have a tube running through my nose, down my throat, and into my stomach. A constant stream of greenish-black juices flows through this plumbing. It is spillage from my distraught digestive system, one that has lost any order in its functioning. My body is pouring its highly effective but corrosive digestive juices into all the wrong places. Thus far, they have burned a hole in my stomach and given me a screaming case of heartburn. My center chest is on fire. And the smell—oh how these juices smell. I now intimately grasp the guttural source of the word bile. The tube itself has given me a raging sore throat. My saliva must not take the road to my stomach. So I spit and spit, but I don’t really spit. I drop, it drops, into the bowl—plink, plink, plink— rhythmically marking time. And time passes, slowly, very slowly.

  While I am in this state, my mother reads to me. I can hardly hear, but it doesn’t matter. The cadence of her words holds me steady. The grayness of my sensation tells me that I am not really in that body, the one strewn over that Foster frame. I am above, not looking, just hovering—a presence spread thin, very thin. I am thankful for the sound of my mother’s voice, the reading of words, the turning of pages, and the occasional question. Blindly, I stay in that room and time continues to pass.

  More than twenty-five years later, I still carry that feeling of floating in grayness above the Foster frame. I know now that it is a perceptual expression of the silence, a dullness created by the separation of mind and body. It is also the sensation produced when the energies of life and death are overtly mixed. This is one of the mixtures that the practice of yoga seeks to clarify.

  It is easy to see how yoga clarifies the connection between mind and body. The mindful practice of particular physical movem
ents combines mind and body into a unified experience. Take one part away, however—for example, the full attention of the mind—and the overall experience changes significantly. The yoga practitioner becomes increasingly aware of the vital role that both mind and body play in any action.

  Harder to imagine is how yoga can also clarify our sense of life and death. Both life and death exist within the potential of the mind-body relationship—death being the complete absence of a connection between the two, and life being dependent on some degree of connection. In yoga, as one explores the fluctuating relationship between mind and body, one gains glimpses into the continuum of living and dying.

  One day I notice that I am next to a window. There is talk about an almost constant stream of geese passing by the opening. This migration is a renowned seasonal event—masses of fowl fleeing the snapping cold of the Canadian winter to find warm, nourishing waters much farther south. Their major flight pattern covers the airspace over Rochester, Minnesota, and the sightline out my window. I cannot see them though, and my brother begins to problem-solve. He buys a tabletop facial mirror that rotates and carefully positions it so I can see the geese flying by.

  Arrow after arrow, these geese formations pass the window like silent waves. For me, their flow is continuous, for time has lost its edges. Most arrows are perfectly symmetrical, as if formed in some kind of mold. Occasionally, they are skewed, so that a contingent of three or four fly a little off center, a little behind. The unity of the arrow is not compromised, however, only misshapen, like the subtle differences among similar rocks. Once in a while, there is a goose that doesn’t fit with the arrow and flies a good distance behind. I wonder if it chooses this place, chooses to fly outside of the group. Perhaps it fell out of position and will soon reclaim its spot. Or maybe it’s losing the connection between it and the group. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Silence.

  When I tire of the geese, my brother finds a balancing marvel in the gift shop. On one side a silver ball rests in opposition to a silver seagull on the other. Exactly in the middle, a small sharp pin rests in a stand; the whole thing sits on the floor below me. The result is a delicate balance between the ball and the bird, making the arm holding the two capable of circular movement. Although I cannot set it in motion myself, others can. I watch for countless hours and am grateful for a way to mark time.

  In a couple of weeks, I will be moved to a room with a television in the upper corner. My brother finds another mirror. He perfectly positions the mirrors so that the TV’s image is reflected twice before it meets my eyes. Now I look forward to 3:30, when Spiderman begins. For a thirteen-year-old boy, this is progress.

  The car accident did not happen to one person, not even to one family. It happened to a group, to a circle of connection, to a community. We move forward into uncharted territory together.

  The core of my support is comprised of my mother; my brother; my Aunt Kathy; my father’s best friend, Lauren; and my sister’s almost-fiancé, Bob. Bob will be around a lot during my stay in Rochester. I do not realize how amazing this is until much later. We had heard his name for about two years and met him once when he was brought home to meet the family. We all suspected that he might be added to our ranks through marriage, but we didn’t know for sure. But he chooses to be here now, bonding quickly as a brother and a virtual son to my mother. Of course, he is here to support, but his presence also softens the grief, both his and ours. For me, my sister is still twenty and not exactly dead yet. I watch her through the sadness in Bob’s eyes.

  These people hand me off quietly, as if deftly passing a baton. One visitor is reading to me, an extra chair is pulled up, a book handed off, a shared odd encounter, a quick burst of laughter, and one becomes two. Another arrives, now briefly three, two leave for lunch, back to one, a new reading voice emerges, and I am in contact the whole time. So skillful are these exchanges, I never feel awkward or needy. I feel part of a group, of a team, but with the perpetual permission to drift off. There are no awkward silences, no forced interactions, nothing is wasted, just shared spaces—silent sustenance among the waiting.

  And yet this group also lives outside my room. They stand together in the cafeteria line and survey tired food propped up by heat lamps. They contemplate Jell-O with fruit in it, brown lettuce, rubber tomatoes, Salisbury steak, scary-looking gravy, and instant mashed potatoes. They walk down poorly lit hallways, past lime-green walls, whimpering voices, through countless double doors, and to the drone of unrelenting televisions. All this just to find an outside door, to feel the natural warmth of sunlight, or to have a fresh hit of uncirculated air. Somehow they find enough nourishment and bring it back to me, always me, carrying me forward. We are a rotating team as the timeless gray of trauma threatens to swallow us.

  But the world has not suddenly stopped. My seventh-grade classes continue without me. The varsity basketball team continues its undefeated season without me on the bench. Jobs continue, cars idle, people shovel snow, have dinner, and sleep in their own beds. So too the call of normal living pulls at my people. Lauren must return to his engineering and architecture firm. My Aunt Kathy has her own family and her own job coordinating the remedial reading program in the Kansas City public schools. They leave amid silence, tearful laughter, and promises of return. I feel them depart, feel the force of what has happened as the dance hall begins to clear. Bob must return to the University of Minnesota. He is studying business administration. I will see him often on weekends.

  My mother decides to hold fort in Rochester until she can personally bring me back to Duluth. But my brother … my brother must return home, an advance scout into an empty and unrecognizable life. He is in the midst of his senior year, his banner year of high school. He is tied as the top-ranked student in his class; he is the elected treasurer of the student forum; and he is a multisport athlete. All this and a wonderful girlfriend await him back in “normal” time. But how? Mid-December in Duluth is not particularly encouraging. The leaves are gone, the grass is brown. Lake Superior wind rips through your clothes, and the cold, sharp air alerts your nose that a long, dark winter lies ahead. Life stripped naked, barren, and waiting.

  How does he return to the death of our previous life? I cannot fathom what he is experiencing. I can only feel that he is leaving, and I am scared. The world makes more sense around my older brother; he sets things right. But now he steps through a time-warp and into his own private silence. I cannot help him. I can only long for his return.

  He survives the winter of his senior year, alone, in an empty house, cooking his own meals, and with four-fifths of his family in other worlds. I insist that he come every weekend, every bit of Christmas vacation. He makes the five-hour drive from Duluth to Rochester through the tundra of Minnesota winter. I do not know what I ask of him, nor how he gives it. I just know that I need him. He will graduate at the top of his class, having lettered in baseball, his eyes vacant but determined. He is the unseen hero. I love him.

  Thankfully, more people appear, other reservoirs of strength. My mom rents a two-bedroom motel suite, equipped with a kitchenette. They come to stay with her and visit me. My mom’s female peers are the best company. They expect little, accept much, and give tons. They share meals with my mom and talk to her late at night when the ache of silence is most acute. And they read to me, giving my mother a break, giving her time to absorb or just feel numb. The best are Lauren’s wife Catharine, my mom’s friend Ann, and our cousin Joan. They spend time with me, just willing to sit, be quiet as I spit, not wince when I beg for another pain shot. Always willing to extend maternal love to a hurting child.

  Other visitors are not so easy. They drive a long way and feel that they must accomplish something, achieve a definite interaction. I do not have interaction to give, but I find myself taking care of these visitors. Little things exhaust me: three consecutive replies, traveling with them through old memories, and, especially, knowing that I am not really there.

  Eventually, I see my two best fri
ends. Mark Drexler lives across a shared driveway. His dad, Dr. Drexler, makes the drive to Rochester so we can connect. I can’t say that I am excited; I’m not anything, really, except vaguely scared. Seeing my friend makes my experience more real, makes me feel what I am and what he is not. Mark struts in and gulps; his dad stands awkwardly behind him. I am tired and have very little to give. I fall in and out of time; there are long pauses where I drift. I smell of death. It becomes time for me to be turned, and they must step out. Because the drawn curtain makes only an artificial room, I hear frightened sobs and Mark saying, “He’s going to die, isn’t he!?” Apparently, I don’t look so good.

  This fact is confirmed with Roger’s visit. Roger and I have been friends since we were three. During that year, we had our first and only full-fledged fight. It was in the neighbor’s yard, over the use of a tree stump. I drew first tears, but then he knocked my head into the disputed real estate. We sat there, looking at each other, both crying tears of shock and betrayal. That day we entered into a silent pact: Fighting with each other was simply too painful and not to be done again.

  When Roger comes around the curtain, his face goes a greener shade of pale. He tries conversation but stumbles; and, thirty seconds after arriving, he faints and plummets toward the floor. Upon reviving, the visit starts for real. It is a good visit. I am told that Roger has the flu, but the source of his drop through the silence is clear.

  4

  Which Family Were We?