Waking

by Matthew Sanford

  The car accident happened to my family: to my father, my mother, my sister, my brother, and me. It also happened to Loren, Paula, Laura, James, and Matthew. They were and are individuals, each with voice intonations, unique ways of walking, different laughs, and distinct destinies. We made up a family, and we all crashed down that embankment together.

  My father, Loren, was an attorney, a partner in a leading firm in Duluth, Minnesota. He was born during the Depression, the second son of farmers who barely eked out a living on 164 acres of average farmland. He grew up poor, with the year-to-year uncertainty that comes with farm life. He was the first to leave the family farm, going to college and law school at the University of Minnesota and then choosing a life away from his heritage by marrying a big-city girl.

  Loren was a bright man, at times quite stoic, and dead at the age of forty-seven. He was thoughtful and powerful and loved to argue. He loved to take any opposing position, no matter how outrageous, and carry it to the breaking point. For example, he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention during the 1968 presidential campaign. He went down to Miami, wearing black horn-rimmed glasses and a green plaid sports coat, all under the auspices of supporting Richard Nixon, and then promptly voted for Nelson Rockefeller. This fateful whim so outraged the Minnesota Republican caucus that he was quietly but firmly purged from the party.

  Loren was athletic without being a great athlete, physically strong without an imposing presence. Being color-blind, he was a frightful dresser. Nowhere worse than on the golf course—imagine bright purple shorts, black socks, and a brown shirt. Unless my mother was around to stop him, he would ignore the entreaties of his embarrassed kids. This was particularly painful for my brother and me, as we often caddied for him. I could never tell if he wore such attire because he was color-blind or just loved to push our buttons.

  Wherever his life brought him, my father, at core, remained a farmer at heart: deeply connected to the land, to the discipline of hard work, and to planning for the future—all the while longing for the outdoors.

  My mother, Paula, was also born during the Depression but to a family of city dwellers. Her father was a charming man, an attorney, and a generally tame alcoholic. Her mother was an amazingly bright woman, was well-read, possessed an unfaltering memory, but was quietly broken by the addictive habits of her husband. Early on, Paula learned to willfully see the world as normal, despite the peaks and valleys of living with an alcoholic. She took care of things, exuded a quiet confidence, and made things all right for her younger sister. To this day, my mother’s most powerful quality is how deeply she loves—sometimes staying behind the scenes, sometimes invisible, always loyal, and always willing to see the best in people. She is kind and graceful and deeply committed to the well-being of her loved ones.

  Paula is also an artist, primarily a painter. In addition to making a wonderful and stable home for her family, she has always found time to create: taking the world—beautiful as she sees it—and translating its designs and patterns to paper and canvas. Imagine her in our damp basement—no windows and the lights overhead are quite dim. On a cheap plastic table sits the “Orange Peeler,” a ninety-dollar phonograph with an orange plastic lid and orange-faced speakers. The year is 1970. The music is either Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell, depending on how the six albums are stacked on the record player. I am with her, too young for school, and playing under a card table. My secret house is covered with a quilt, securing the hidden surveillance I need for playing spy. My mother is wearing an old pair of slacks, and an oversized man’s dress shirt drapes her body. Her hair is held at bay by a folded scarf, worn as a headband. Long pauses ensue as she tilts her head, rocks from foot to foot, and absorbs her work through the pores of her skin. As she extends her sense of beauty outward, I hear her paintbrush clinking out of the coffee cup, swishing through the cleansing water, mixing colors, and then rubbing against the textured surface of the canvas.

  This scene is repeated again and again over a lifetime, both with and without my presence—when I am there, when I am at school, before I was born, and after I move away for college. Having produced literally hundreds of pieces, she leaves quite a legacy for a woman who walks so lightly on her feet, sets things down so gently, and softly hums to herself as she paints.

  My sister, Laura, seven and a half years my elder, announced to our mom, “There is no need for any more babysitters.” This when she was nine. Laura was like a second mother and sister wrapped into one, intuitive enough to recognize changes in me and shift our relationship accordingly. For my eighth birthday, she gave me an oversized navy blue jersey, inscribed—in fire red—with SANFORD and the number 8. Earlier that year, she had joined an intramural touch-football team and received her own jersey. She saw how taken I was with it and with the idea of being on a team. So she made me my own team. For my ninth birthday, she took me out to breakfast before school. Having recently received her driver’s license, she took me to a Perkins restaurant—just the two of us—and then drove us around with the radio blaring. She showed me places where the high school kids hung out—Seven Bridges Road and Hawk’s Ridge—granting me precious glimpses into her older life. For my tenth birthday, she gave me my first rock and roll album: The Doobie Brothers, Living on the Fault Line. With this gift, she sent me into a new world of music, and I learned every word in every song.

  Laura was five foot six with brownish-blonde hair and was beautifully left-handed. Her penmanship was exquisite, not because it followed prescribed rules but because of the feeling it conveyed: precise, perfectly slanted, but flowing—fat, round a’s and p’s; unabashed loops around g’s, f’s, and y’s; and perfectly round o’s. Her writing looked so alive.

  She is lying in bed, knees propped in the air, and using her lap as a table. She is in high school. I watch, wondering what she writes, wondering how she stays quiet for so long. If I say anything, I become an annoying little brother and no longer welcome. So I admire the discipline of her journal writing, happy just to feel the outline of her intent. Her hands are soft but strong, her long fingers firmly clasping an extra-thick ballpoint pen. As her left hand slides smoothly across the page, a smile breaks cleanly through her expression. Even now, some twenty-five years later, as I survey one of these diaries, I know better than to read the particular words. They are hers. I must simply love the feel of her handwriting.

  When she died, Laura was twenty—just coming into her own. She had transformed from an average-looking and slightly overweight girl to a sexy and beautiful woman. An understated yet powerful confidence became her most attractive feature. This was not always the case. She had ample friends in high school but was by no means popular. The result was that she tried to see beyond her age, to be quietly above the fray. She worked to become wise.

  Laura liked making beautiful things, wrote poetry, and read avidly. She was the best storyteller I have ever known. In her short life, Laura was able to transform her natural tendency to give to others into a source of creativity. This was the Laura who took care of me when I was young, who listened to my life, saw it, smiled, and returned it to me. This was the Laura who awakened in college to major in art, her creativity finding a formal, artistic expression. Seeing and making designs was what she did best. She finally realized that being an artist could be her own path and not just an imitation of her mother’s.

  But still, her greatest strength was her power of perception. So thoughtful, so aware of other people’s feelings—qualities she exhibited without drawing attention to herself. She simply perceived, making you feel—in your bones—that she saw what was invisible about you. Her gifts of perception were powerful because they affirmed the secrets of who you were. She was easily loved.

  My brother, James, and I have always shared friends, even before the accident. This is somewhat surprising, considering that he is four and a half years my elder. Hero worship of an older brother is common, but James handled mine so gracefully. I wanted to do everything he did, and he was pat
iently obliging. He was the best source of entertainment I had growing up, making gripping games out of everything—and nothing. Twist hockey, a dignified precursor to video games, wasn’t just a contest between the Boston Bruins and the New York Rangers. It was the Stanley Cup, and we knew the names of all the best players and played our own best-of-seven series.

  Our backyard was the neighborhood Wiffle-ball park. Our green-shingled roof was called the “Green Monster” after the legendary fence at Fenway Park. A rotted, cut-to-the-ground tree stump was first base, the lilac bush was second, a select branch of the gigantic red pine was third, and a natural mound was home plate. A ball hit over the house was a home run, one hit down the driveway was a ground rule double, as was a ball lost in my mom’s garden. But it didn’t stop there. We kept replaying the 1973 World Series between the Oakland Athletics and the New York Mets. Since my brother and I were the best pitchers—we could throw the best junk—we were always on opposing teams. He was Ken Holtzman, the brash young pitcher for the A’s, and I was John Matlock, a crafty veteran from the Mets and my adopted namesake. It never grew tiresome.

  My brother convinced the neighborhood rug rats to assume roles. This was true whether we were playing Wiffle ball, goal-line football, championship boot hockey, or whatever his latest invention was. James always had an amazing imagination, the ability to create a situation, paint it for us like a picture, and make it all seem bigger than life. In this way, he is wonderfully contagious.

  Today, James is married and a father of three. He runs his own law firm, is a fantastic cook, a lover of history, and fiercely competitive. He is a problem solver, a hard worker, and always a force to be reckoned with. He is my older brother.

  Now you have met my family. We were an average family, perhaps happier than some but by no means perfect. But now, my memories travel through the lens of death and trauma. It changes my perception, makes me treasure things that I might not have otherwise—my father’s hilariously stubborn tuft of hair or the playful bounce in my sister’s step when she was laughing. These things are made more meaningful by the death that became their lives.

  Death and trauma also bring questions. For starters, which family were we? An average one from a small city situated along Lake Superior’s north shore, a family who happened into some bad luck; or were we never average and always headed down that embankment? Which?

  A similar question shadows my own path. Has trauma brought me two lives: one as a walking person and another as a paralyzed one? Or has my life been a preparation for itself, for who I am now? Death and trauma reach through one’s life with stunning swiftness.

  It may seem that the car accident has led me to question fate, to wonder about destiny. Of course it has, but my interest is one of identity, both as a family and as an individual. What is identity in the face of a radical disruption? Who was I? Who am I? Who will I be? Truthful answers to these questions often take years and years to realize. This is true regardless of whether there is fate or whether there is a plan. To answer such questions, we need healing stories.

  Healing trauma requires opening one’s life to interpretation, creating a personal mythology to guide perception, and forging a set of healing stories that create or maintain a sense of identity.

  Perceiving foreknowledge of one’s fate is one way to do this. It is like saying, “See, I was here before you. I knew you were coming.” Such a healing story gives a measure of control where there seems to be none. Somehow, if you can see a punch coming, it’s better than being blindsided. We all experience mild versions of it, even in everyday life: “I was just thinking about you and you called,” or “I had a feeling it was going to be a bad day.” This longing for a connection deeper than random defines the human condition.

  I am ten—three years before the accident. I am sleeping soundly in bed when my brother rousts me awake. Recently, we have begun to share a room—my mother believes it is the best way to ensure a lifetime of closeness. She is right. So his trip to my bed is a short one, but his voice is breathless. Across the room, his bedside lamp shines—I can just make out his face. He is sitting on the floor with his knees pulled into his chest. He is rocking slightly, he has been crying.

  “Matt, I couldn’t find you. There was grass everywhere, tall grass, but you were nowhere.”

  “Huh?”

  “No one else was around, just you and me, but I couldn’t find you.”

  “James, what’s wrong? You’re scaring me.”

  “Something terrible happened. I can still feel it in my chest.”

  “It’s just a bad dream. I’m right here.”

  “I know, but I couldn’t find you.”

  This dream still haunts James and me to this day.

  A year or so later, my brother’s friend from junior high, someone he hasn’t seen for a couple years, calls and asks to come over. John has already started on a path that will lead him to become a Jesuit monk. As a consequence, he takes anything that feels prescient quite seriously—not an easy pressure on a young friendship. Visibly shaken, he tells my brother of a dream he had: Our family was in some kind of accident, someone died, and it felt so real. My brother, long out of the grip of his own dream, patiently listens but then sends John away, musing that his friend has gotten quite weird.

  Eerie in retrospect, like seeing someone for the last time before something awful happens, these dreams left no lasting imprint—at least not until the accident happened.

  There were also waking visions. My mother claims one as early as age twelve. There is a man whom she sees clearly, then an accident, and then a death, all coming in powerful flashes. Based on these visions, my mother comes to believe that she will die prematurely. Years later, she is twenty and driving with the man who will be my father. She identifies him with the earlier vision and wonders if she is to die soon. My mother has another vision, about a year before the accident. She is painting. She suddenly “sees” that she will have another lover—a strange thought for an incredibly devoted wife. She stops painting, sits down, and is seized with dread.

  On Halloween night, just twenty-seven days before the accident, I make an outrageously ironic comment. I am courting Sheila, my first junior high school crush. The evening is full of rowdiness and fun, but also talking. I find out that she has an older brother who lives with a spinal cord injury. He is paralyzed from the chest down. As she tells me, I feel a powerful rush of sympathy, both because I feel like I stumbled into a family secret and for the life her brother is forced to live. I am so struck by what I imagine to be his experience that I say, “I’d rather be dead than in a wheelchair.”

  My sister approaches both my mom and some of her friends and speaks of dying—this in the months just preceding her death. My Aunt Kathy, after adopting two children and trying to get pregnant for her entire adult life, quits smoking and accidentally conceives at the age of forty-one. Her child is born in April 1978, seven months before our crash. She unexpectedly names her little girl after my sister, Laura Kathleen. The second Laura Kathleen also dies young—at the age of twenty-three.

  During my sister’s sophomore year of college, she develops her own calligraphy. She copies, in black ink on gold paper, a stanza from a poem I do not know:

  Remember me,

  as I do you,

  with all tenderness

  which it is possible for one.

  She makes three copies and gives them to my mother. One of these now hangs framed on my office wall. I look at her beautiful handwriting and wonder if this is what she intended.

  I am not claiming anything about foreknowledge or about destiny. I am trying to prove nothing. These are simply instances thrown up by experience, from memory, that now take on heightened meaning. All can be explained in one way or another. Had we not tumbled down that embankment, these experiences would mean nothing and simply fall into the ever-receding pit of memory. But instead, they were brought forward by events and constructed into a mythology of healing stories that help my family feel a
sense of control. This mythology was constructed sometimes for our comfort, sometimes to raise the hair on the back of our necks, but always to feel a connection to the life that was ours.

  My life seems to have changed its course at least a few times—surviving the car accident at age thirteen, beginning to study Iyengar yoga twelve years later, and the birth of my twin sons nearly nine years after that. But I am no longer sure that this makes sense; I no longer feel changes of direction. Instead, as I grow older, I see a unity to the patterns of my life. I see that it has been feeding itself, like a river gaining current.

  According to my mom, when I was two months old and she was patting my back to burp me, I began patting on her back in return. Rather than feeling the attention solely on me, I redirected it outward. When I awoke from a coma years later, rather than dwelling on my own devastation, I shifted my focus toward the needs of my remaining family—an intuitive move that probably saved my life.

  As a kid, I was amazingly accident prone. Enduring a plethora of mishaps—requiring stitches four times and breaking two bones before reaching age ten—taught me something important about healing. How one handles pain and injury demonstrates character. Silly as it seems, my first inkling of this came when I was in the first grade. I was wearing my favorite pants—red corduroys with jamming metal studs along the side—and running full speed down the school playground’s slide. I slipped on someone’s spit and landed on my left knee. The result was a call to my mom, a trip to the emergency room, and three stitches. Rather than stay home and milk my mother for special attention, I chose to return to school, to show the other kids and especially my teacher that I was tough, that I could handle a little pain and return to life as usual. In retrospect, it feels like a blueprint for the future.

  I had a particularly disastrous summer between third and fourth grades. I broke my foot falling off a six-foot-tall rock, I cracked the growth plate on my right knee jumping on a huge inner tube in our neighbor’s driveway, and I deeply sliced my finger with a jackknife while on a family canoeing trip. I was proud of my list of injuries—they were like notches on my belt. My father didn’t share my swelling pride and sat me down for a talk.