Waking

by Matthew Sanford

  I do not feel bad for long. I simply believe them. The profound consequence of this healing story is practical: I stop listening to what is left of my mind-body relationship. No longer will I work to perceive anything from my paralyzed body. I accept that there is not and cannot be any remaining sensation, plain and simple. I actually feel silly to have thought otherwise. I move farther from my body and deeper into the silence.

  The phantom-feelings healing story had an immediate impact. I was a good kid, trying to work through what I was told. It led to the following conversation.

  “Mom, I’ve been thinking. My arms need to get really strong, right? If they have to do the work for both my arms and my legs, wouldn’t it make sense if I didn’t have legs? If they were amputated?” My mom sits in stunned silence. “My arms wouldn’t have so much to carry. I’d be better off. I mean … since my legs can’t help me anymore anyway, I could just lighten the load, couldn’t I?”

  “But Matt …” What do you say to a boy who is trying to jettison two of his limbs because it seems more functional? “You can’t do that.”

  “Why? It makes sense.”

  “Because it’s your body.”

  Such a notion doesn’t even faze me. My mind has set upon a solution. This feels like moving forward. I ask my doctor.

  “You don’t want to do that,” he replies.

  “Why not?”

  “Having your legs amputated is no little thing. It can never be undone. It’s the only body you will ever have.”

  “So. I’m not going to need my legs,” I say confidently. I have learned my part well. “Look, I’m trying to figure out my life. If my body weight is less, I will be more agile, better able to get around. It makes sense.” The doctor sees my determination and tries a different tack.

  “No, it doesn’t. Having legs is critical for sitting balance, especially for you, since you lack any abdominal control.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Balance is going to be a challenge for you without the muscles in your stomach. Your legs will provide the necessary counterweight and make sitting easier. What if you reach for something while sitting in your wheelchair? What’s going to keep you from falling onto the floor?”

  “My legs?” I ask.

  “Absolutely. See, you need them.”

  Not until this moment did I realize that my stomach muscles were also paralyzed. It never dawned on me. I have yet to sit up, roll over, or move around in bed. I haven’t yet reached for anything from my wheelchair. Nothing. There has been no need to use my stomach muscles. I just assumed that they worked. I feel sick. My sense of disconnection from my body grows deeper, even alarming. How could I have not known something so basic? I’m paralyzed from the chest down. Of course that includes my abdominal muscles. What was I thinking? The good news is that I now grasp why I need to keep my legs attached to my body. It’s a funny healing story: counterweight.

  I have lost my childhood, and I know it. I tell people that I am thirteen going on forty-one—another healing story. I mean it. I have lost two-thirds of my body, the joy of video games, and much of my identity. What I have gained is the knowledge that I am older, that I must push forward and make it work. I want a rite of passage. I need acknowledgment.

  My mind wanders to summers past. On warm nights, my mom and dad would sometimes sit on the patio drinking gin and tonics. I loved the smell, the color of the lime, and the sound of ice cubes clinking against our fancy glasses. Many times, I imagined being older, a time when I would enjoy this privilege of adulthood. That time has come. “Mom, I want a gin and tonic,” I announce. Arrangements are being made for my transport to Duluth. This time I will ride in a one-engine plane, surrounded by two paramedics. We will leave in less than a week. My mom looks at me as she considers my request. What can she possibly deny me? She knows what it means and why I ask. She has watched her boy shed his childhood. She knows he has lost a lifetime.

  Her friend Gudren Witrak is the smuggler. She sneaks into my room with a half-pint of gin, three six-ounce bottles of tonic, three glasses, a lime, and a knife, all packed into a mother’s vast purse. The sound of breaking seals. Ice chips—not cubes—wait in our glasses. The serrated knife cuts through the lime’s skin and the smell of forbidden alcohol permeates the room. I am expecting a loud transition. I am rejoining the group, but as an adult. We toast our departure, our journey home. Glasses clink in a triangle, and the adult wetness pours coolly into my mouth. I would be lying if I said it was everything I had hoped for. The moment after swallowing is nearly the same as the one before. I down the first and ask for another, hoping for the desired effect. My mom reluctantly agrees to a very light one. I drink it and wait. I look around the room, at their faces, and wonder, “Is this it?”

  The moment after gin and tonics, the realization that there is not a prize behind door number one, is a moment we all share. The answer to the question “Is this it?” is, of course, yes.

  We all want a simple story—I know I do. In a simple story, my paralysis and the loss of my father and sister would be the obstacles I overcome, the negatives that I turn into positives. My success would be the lessons I learned and a life of productive happiness.

  In another version, the dislocation I experienced between mind and body during these months would be the injury. Yoga would eventually be the remedy. Humpty Dumpty would get put back together again, and yoga would be the glue.

  My story is not simple. As I write this, I am both heartbroken and desperately in love. Living thus far has taken quite a toll. And yet, I would trade nothing. The richness and possibilities I can feel come directly from what I have experienced. I stand in awe of the transformative potential embodied by our consciousness.

  This awe, however, still possesses the flavor of the moment just after gin and tonics. This fact does not weaken the drama of life. It begins it.

  Part Two

  Initiation

  8

  Into Your Arms

  The day I leave Rochester to return home to Duluth is bitterly cold. As the paramedics take me outside to load me into the plane’s fuselage, they insist that I keep my mouth covered with a blanket. It is well below zero, and I have been inside for nearly three months. They want to protect me from the harshness of a brutal winter. I am leaving Rochester and still flat on my back. I have no idea what this place looks like; I have never even seen a tree here. Is the hospital made of brick? Does it have a courtyard? I have no idea. What I do know is that I resent their assumption that I should not inhale the winter air. Do they have any idea of what I have already survived? And yet, I am also scared. I am in unknown country and going back to a home that harbors a broken life. Maybe they do know better than I. Maybe I do need to cover my mouth.

  The wheels underneath this stretcher are cheap or too hard, or the runway out to the plane is full of cracks. I feel every bump, every little rock. The vibrations jiggle through my body and tickle my ears as the rumbling sound makes my teeth grind. I see a sharp blue sky above and watch the exhaled breath of my couriers. Time is slow and meaningful. With the plane’s engine screaming against the piercing cold, I feel the weather’s bite on my forehead. I move to uncover my nose. Inwardly, I am telling myself: If I am careful and don’t overdo it, I know I can breathe this invisible threat. With the first breath, the hairs in my nose stick together. With the second, my mouth dries as it contacts a rush of freezing air. I quickly re-cover my nose. I say, “It’s not so bad.” I have taken a silent step toward healing.

  Often I am asked what led me to eventually practice yoga. The answer is moments like these, experiences that suddenly have texture, that set deeply for no apparent reason—an unrelished hot dog, a song called “Baker Street,” or stories about Australia. These are moments when somehow “more” is catalyzed, more is felt and revealed. I believe that it is the silence that makes this possible. The silence that I carried within me brought into relief these otherwise ordinary moments. I believe that the silence can deepen our p
erception and holds a key to our consciousness.

  The moment I was rolled out to the plane matters not because I was going against the advice of the paramedics, but rather because I did not become separated from something as ordinary as the cold air. I did not overdo it, nor did I expect a miraculous result—I simply took two breaths. To see my ill-advised breaths in terms of rebelling against the medical model is to miss the point. The point is about not turning away from what is simple and straightforward, even when the surroundings are unsure. Taking two breaths can define a lifetime.

  Once my mom gets me settled at the Polinsky Rehabilitation Center, she is met head-on by her broken life. She finds herself unable to plan the memorial service for my father and sister. That job has fallen to Lauren and Catherine, to the saving grace of friends. I cannot imagine what she feels as she walks through our house, as she stands next to my father’s marble-top desk, or when she sees his glass piggy bank, jammed full of Depression-era fifty-cent pieces, a symbolic safety net against the farm-driven poverty of his childhood. “We’ll never be poor as long as we have these coins,” he would joke.

  But now her partner is gone. All of my father’s planning for this horrific outcome—a tidy will, a tidy estate, a formidable life insurance policy—changes little. Nothing can soften his absence. My mother is awash in a downpour of details, the crushing shift of power from the shoulders of two to the shoulders of one. Signatures and stamps and title changes and money. Clothes and closets and plans and dreams. The loss of her firstborn, an inaccessible house for her now-crippled child. Wreckage.

  My mom has been avoiding this. In Rochester, the doctors, the nurses, the social workers, and even I tried to convince her to return to Duluth, to return to her house, to her life, to her other son. It would lessen the shock of it and begin the rebuilding. For my own reasons, I wanted her to go. I wanted to feel my new life on my own terms, like a kid’s desire to pitch a tent in the backyard and camp out. She held firm, her reasoning sound. “I will not leave my son behind.”

  With this choice, my mom put caring for me between herself and her pain. I am in desperate need and young and know so little. It makes sense that she would focus on me, but she also uses me as a temporary wedge between herself and her fate. Our return to Duluth brings the outer layers of this healing maneuver under fire. She does not need to sit by my side every minute. In fact, I must learn my own initial adjustments and do so with a measure of independence. So her previous life calls her back; it is out of her control, and she is overwhelmed. Against her will, practicality forces her forward.

  Not so her injured son. She can protect him from a pain she does not want to feel. My mother has decided that I will not attend the public memorial service. Instead, a small private service will be held across the hall from my hospital room in what turns out to be the mental health ward. Apparently, the mental health ward has extra meeting rooms; the rehabilitation ward does not.

  My mom imagines that the strain of a public memorial service may be too much for me. But what is she protecting? My body? My heart? I suspect not. I suspect it is her body and her heart that she wants to protect but is unable to. So she protects me instead.

  I am not bothered. I have never been to a memorial service or even a funeral. I do not realize what they do, how they mix collective hurt and profound cleansing. I do not know such things. I am thirteen. For me, it is just another event along the path I am surviving, like a change of body cast or sitting up in a wheelchair. If my mom organizes a special service for me, if this is how it’s done, then so be it. Living within a world created by adults is nothing new, not for me, not for any child. It is how we live.

  The services, both public and private, are tomorrow. Surprisingly, I am worried about what to wear. What does one wear for a trip across the hall? I have not worn clothes in over three months, and never when confined to this position. Although I am finally free of my halo cast, I am still in this wheelchair. How does one dress up? What looks good? My goal is to look strong and in some semblance of control. Worrying about appearance in the face of unwanted emotion is an avoidance technique that we all share.

  When Bob, my sister’s almost-fiancé, visited me in Rochester, he often wore a fantastic shirt, a kelly green turtleneck with a band of colorful racing stripes running down each arm. It looked like a ski sweater. Over and over, I told him I wanted one. Today, the day before the services, he comes to visit us in Duluth for the first time. He is bringing my copy of his shirt. The timing seems perfect. I will wear it tomorrow. As I open the package, I am slightly disappointed. It is not the same color. Mine is bright blue, but at least it is the same design. I am relieved.

  I wonder if I am reaching for my sister, reaching through Bob in an unconscious expression of grief. I want to look like Bob, feel like Bob. Perhaps I imagine the shirt will protect me, connect me, help me feel through my skin what is denied through my mind.

  Our meeting room is narrow and dimly lit. The lights are not standard overhead fluorescents; instead they are trying-too-hard table lamps. There are not enough of them, and the bulbs are of low wattage. The effect is to amplify the dulling assault of the orange Berber carpet that so defines the late seventies. The chairs are stiff and square and covered with plaid patterned fabric—earth-tone yellows, tans, and browns. The tables are fake wood, plastic with a grain veneer. This is where we will pray.

  The day is overcast, and too many of us are stuffed into this space. There is no commanding place for the minister to stand; the result is a collective fidget. Thankfully, there is a window. Of course, it does not open, because this is the mental health ward. No air, only a view, an exit chamber for the disembodied. I stare out that window as the service begins. The scene is a Duluth hillside, rusty and decayed, displaying a tiresome and deadening winter. I feel very little, except the need to look strong, to project a pretense of realized grief.

  Inwardly, I am most saddened by my appearance. I am thin and scrawny and sitting in a broken body. My plaster cast has been replaced by a removable plastic one. But I must wear it every minute of every day, even to this service. It is formed to snuggly fit my torso. It has two pieces—a front and a back—that are connected by strips of Velcro. My choices are either to wear my bright blue turtleneck underneath this body shell, a choice that would cover most of it up. Or I can wear the shirt over the body shell and look rigid and stiff, and not like a person at all. I choose the latter. In the background, I hear a blessing. It is for me and a speedy recovery. But I am disappointed … about my shirt.

  So begins my rehabilitation. But what is it that I am rehabilitating? What is it that I am trying to “restore to a condition of good health, operation, or ability to work”? The answer to this question may seem obvious. It is not. Obviously, my back has been broken, as well as my neck and wrists. I have also been lying in bed for over three months. All of this has dramatically weakened me, but at least I am eating again and ready to begin working.

  The rehabilitation model proposes that the strength in my upper body must not only be restored, but drastically increased. On top of that, the paralysis has robbed me of basic life skills. I no longer know how to dress myself, how to pee, poop, sit up from lying down, or get into a car. The focus must be to restore me to a basic level of life functionality.

  This is not wrong. I must learn to do these things. The problem is that there is much more that needs to be rehabilitated. What I have actually lost in my experience of myself is an inward connection to much of my body. Below my chest has become a mental dead end—my mind has been blocked from entering. The loss of basic life skills, including my ability to walk, is simply a symptom of this mind-body dislocation.

  Silence is what remains when mind becomes separated from body. My most basic unknown is how I will interact with this silence. The medical model’s answer is that I won’t interact with it at all. I am, instead, led to ignore it and to give up my paralyzed body as lost. Rather than working to integrate any residual silence that I might ex
perience into who I am, I am urged to overcome it, to step over my paralysis with a courageous exertion of will. The medical model deems the air of this silence as too cold for me to breathe.

  The relevance of this book turns on a simple thought. My traumatic experience of a spinal cord injury and its resulting paralysis has made more tangible a silence that exists in everyone’s consciousness, a silence that can be experienced in the gap between mind and body. How we relate to this silence, how we process it, is a fundamental issue presented by our consciousness.

  The solution presented by the medical model—overcoming the silence with my will—reflects a deeply embedded healing story. Thus far, human survival has been a confrontation, whether with nature, other animals, or each other. We have had to assert ourselves and become the fittest. We have taken our place at the top of the food chain. The process has not been pretty, nor has it been easy, but the ability to overcome adversity through the exertion of our will has been crucial to our survival.