Saturday, March 20, 2004
There have been so many thoughts falling through my mind today, emotions roiling gently to the surface. After an intensive Hydro-fit class this morning (including a lovely sauna conversation with some of the senior citizens), then lunch and a slow walk around Greenlake with a friend, I was spent. I came home, ready for more play. A solid writing session. Or at least cleaning the house. But instead, I drifted through the afternoon, thinking. Took a long bath. Took a nap. Settled on the bed with the heating pad and never really moved away from it.
If the accident has taught me anything--and the list of those lessons is longer than I can list here--it has revealed to me how keenly I must listen to my body. If I have to spend the afternoon resting, instead of completing the plans I had intended, then the plans have to vanish. If my mind wants to dart faster than my body can move, then I have to let it. If the muscles in my neck ache, unexpectedly, after relative peace the day before, then I can do nothing but rest.
My friend at lunch asked me to tell him about the car accident. (I haven’t seen him since early December, a different lifetime.) “Or, you can tell me about something else, if you don’t want to start with that.” I laughed, then grew quiet. There’s not much else to talk about these days. It makes me sad that all my stories revolve around healing and resting days and lessons learned from my muscles. Me, who always has three thousand stories and the hand gestures to accompany them. (“Shauna, you can make a story out of any three minutes of your life,” a friend told me once.) Now, I can only pause, open up, and reveal deep-at-the-core-of-me stuff.
Or, I can try to go the other way. Become the happy chatterer, go back to old stories, play with words, turn on. And that's not a false self--everyone knows how gregarious I can be. When I’m happy these days, I’m happy with a capital H. I don’t have a headache! Life is beautiful! There has always been this dichotomy in me: talking and cheerful; quiet and solemn. Teacher; writer. Best friend/family member/kind to strangers; hours alone. But now the divide feels farther than before.
Last night, I turned into the happy chatterer. Blame the headache. I sat, trying to listen to this soft-spoken man beside me, with a table full of drunken-loud women behind me. The restaurant reverberated in my ears as soon as we walked in. My body flinched. I should have listened, asked to go to a quieter place. But I didn’t. I thought I could brave it out. Dismiss it. So as I sat amid clinking glasses, the spill of noise from the kitchen before us, tables full of Friday-night jubilance, and the individual sound of every fork on every plate, the headache snaked its way up my neck muscles. And as the headache crept up, I became brighter and brighter. By the end of the evening, even though I was enjoying myself, emotionally, I was miserable, physically. But I was still telling stories and making jokes. I just didn’t want to ruin the evening. I wasn’t being honest.
I hate that.
So this afternoon, when my friend wanted to know, I stayed soft. I let him see some of how difficult this has been, all the spiritual questing and stumblings. I told him how I lost my language for a time. How my super-sharp memory has been blunted. How there are still windows of time I walk into when I can’t remember the telephone number of my best friend. Or, as happened this week, I leave her a melancholy message on a Thursday, saying, “Where are you? We haven’t talked in days.” But we had talked for an hour and a half the night before. So my message was a repeat of details I had already shared. I didn’t know this until she laughed about it today.
What else am I forgetting?
My friend at lunch said, “That must have been really scary for you, considering how language is fundamental to who you are.”
And immediately, I said, “No it’s not. Words are important to me, deeply. But they’re not who I am at the core. They’re not fundamental to me. They’re not real. I don’t trust them.”
He blanched, since we have subsisted on word play and philosophical talks since we have known each other. “You wouldn’t have said that a year ago.”
“Oh, I might have danced around it. I knew it then, intellectually. But since I went into shock, I know it in my body.”
For some reason, lately, I keep going back to the hours after the car accident when I went into deep, deep shock. In some ways, from this distance, this was the scariest part of the entire experience. Because once the adrenaline drained from my body, and the ambulance raced to collect me from the curb, shaking, I lost myself. Everything faded.
In the back of the ambulance, I kept falling out of consciousness. The medic kept trying to shake me awake, to ask me questions, to keep me from going under. I remember him asking my name. Something about the urgency, even the annoyance, in his voice, cut through the fog. It made me realize that he had asked me three or four times before I could focus on his face, hovering above his blue uniform. I didn’t know some of the answers to his questions. I didn’t know much of anything.
I knew that my arms felt useless. I couldn’t feel my legs. I didn’t even remember that they existed. When we reached Harborview, the best trauma emergency room in Seattle, the nurses kept piling blanket after blanket on me. But nothing would stop my shivering, the trembling at the core of me. Vaguely, from a great distance, I heard the confusion, even the fear, in the nurse’s voices, when they wondered why they couldn’t warm me up. From a great distance, a thought arose, “Am I dying?” But the thought vanished, along with any fear of it. Not because I talked myself into feeling all right. Because my mind didn’t have the energy to care.
After having gone through it, and studied up on it, I know that in deep shock, all the blood rushes from the extremities, toward the core, to protect the inner organs, the heart. That’s why my arms felt so flaccid at my sides, so foreign. That’s why my thinking nearly stopped. That’s why I can only remember it now in flashes of disconnected images.
But the studying hasn't helped. Now, I can only feel that hour or so of shock before they finally warmed me back to consciousness. It felt like death. How do I know? I don’t. But it feels like that’s what death will be like. I feel it deep in my bones. And what did it feel like? Utterly anonymous. Everything that was particular, individual, quirky, attached to the world, or what I identify as Shauna? It simply didn’t exist. It just slipped away. And in that way, it was wonderfully easy. There was no struggle. There was no great epiphany, no white light. I was simply fading out.
I haven’t been able to forget it since. Death has been sitting with me ever since.
And in some ways, that has been scary. Impossible to convey. And terribly lonely, because I don’t know many other people who understand this. This is the first time I’ve tried to write about it. I’ve just started talking about it this week. And every attempt with words is a failure.
But in other ways, it has been an enormous grace. This presence has meant that I can’t take anything for granted, can’t take anything too seriously, can’t wrap myself in senseless fear or stress. I know all those trivial details will slip away someday, so why waste my time with them now?
And there’s a comfort in knowing. Of having gone down to the core of me, and knowing that I don’t have to struggle. Or try to control everything. Anything. “Let life live itself.” One of my students brought this in the other day, when I asked them to find one sentence they adore. It has been tripping through my mind these past few days.
But more than that, I’m just so grateful to have this life, as it is: complicated, attached, quirky, and destined to fade away entirely. I’m so damned glad to be here. Because I know, wonderfully, what I am at the core. Not words. Not my stories, my wordplay, my brightness, my kind acts, my memories, my to-do list, my verbal acuity, my accomplishments, or my hopes for the next few days, the year, the rest of my life. I’m not a Shauna.
I’m not me.
What am I, at the core? Just life. Breath. Consciousness. The ability to hear the din of noise in a restaurant, feel the heating pad on my back, smell the acrid cologne of that man passing me on a sunlit day, taste the burger with white cheddar in my mouth, or see the craggy Olympic mountains rising high in the pale blue sky. A beating heart. An alive mind. This moment. Right now.
And the joy that comes from knowing this is immeasurable.
“....having a minute ago nearly gone mad with fear, she was now suffused with a slow, deep ecstasy at being at one with her body and the earth and everything that was matter.”
--Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Yes.
If the accident has taught me anything--and the list of those lessons is longer than I can list here--it has revealed to me how keenly I must listen to my body. If I have to spend the afternoon resting, instead of completing the plans I had intended, then the plans have to vanish. If my mind wants to dart faster than my body can move, then I have to let it. If the muscles in my neck ache, unexpectedly, after relative peace the day before, then I can do nothing but rest.
My friend at lunch asked me to tell him about the car accident. (I haven’t seen him since early December, a different lifetime.) “Or, you can tell me about something else, if you don’t want to start with that.” I laughed, then grew quiet. There’s not much else to talk about these days. It makes me sad that all my stories revolve around healing and resting days and lessons learned from my muscles. Me, who always has three thousand stories and the hand gestures to accompany them. (“Shauna, you can make a story out of any three minutes of your life,” a friend told me once.) Now, I can only pause, open up, and reveal deep-at-the-core-of-me stuff.
Or, I can try to go the other way. Become the happy chatterer, go back to old stories, play with words, turn on. And that's not a false self--everyone knows how gregarious I can be. When I’m happy these days, I’m happy with a capital H. I don’t have a headache! Life is beautiful! There has always been this dichotomy in me: talking and cheerful; quiet and solemn. Teacher; writer. Best friend/family member/kind to strangers; hours alone. But now the divide feels farther than before.
Last night, I turned into the happy chatterer. Blame the headache. I sat, trying to listen to this soft-spoken man beside me, with a table full of drunken-loud women behind me. The restaurant reverberated in my ears as soon as we walked in. My body flinched. I should have listened, asked to go to a quieter place. But I didn’t. I thought I could brave it out. Dismiss it. So as I sat amid clinking glasses, the spill of noise from the kitchen before us, tables full of Friday-night jubilance, and the individual sound of every fork on every plate, the headache snaked its way up my neck muscles. And as the headache crept up, I became brighter and brighter. By the end of the evening, even though I was enjoying myself, emotionally, I was miserable, physically. But I was still telling stories and making jokes. I just didn’t want to ruin the evening. I wasn’t being honest.
I hate that.
So this afternoon, when my friend wanted to know, I stayed soft. I let him see some of how difficult this has been, all the spiritual questing and stumblings. I told him how I lost my language for a time. How my super-sharp memory has been blunted. How there are still windows of time I walk into when I can’t remember the telephone number of my best friend. Or, as happened this week, I leave her a melancholy message on a Thursday, saying, “Where are you? We haven’t talked in days.” But we had talked for an hour and a half the night before. So my message was a repeat of details I had already shared. I didn’t know this until she laughed about it today.
What else am I forgetting?
My friend at lunch said, “That must have been really scary for you, considering how language is fundamental to who you are.”
And immediately, I said, “No it’s not. Words are important to me, deeply. But they’re not who I am at the core. They’re not fundamental to me. They’re not real. I don’t trust them.”
He blanched, since we have subsisted on word play and philosophical talks since we have known each other. “You wouldn’t have said that a year ago.”
“Oh, I might have danced around it. I knew it then, intellectually. But since I went into shock, I know it in my body.”
For some reason, lately, I keep going back to the hours after the car accident when I went into deep, deep shock. In some ways, from this distance, this was the scariest part of the entire experience. Because once the adrenaline drained from my body, and the ambulance raced to collect me from the curb, shaking, I lost myself. Everything faded.
In the back of the ambulance, I kept falling out of consciousness. The medic kept trying to shake me awake, to ask me questions, to keep me from going under. I remember him asking my name. Something about the urgency, even the annoyance, in his voice, cut through the fog. It made me realize that he had asked me three or four times before I could focus on his face, hovering above his blue uniform. I didn’t know some of the answers to his questions. I didn’t know much of anything.
I knew that my arms felt useless. I couldn’t feel my legs. I didn’t even remember that they existed. When we reached Harborview, the best trauma emergency room in Seattle, the nurses kept piling blanket after blanket on me. But nothing would stop my shivering, the trembling at the core of me. Vaguely, from a great distance, I heard the confusion, even the fear, in the nurse’s voices, when they wondered why they couldn’t warm me up. From a great distance, a thought arose, “Am I dying?” But the thought vanished, along with any fear of it. Not because I talked myself into feeling all right. Because my mind didn’t have the energy to care.
After having gone through it, and studied up on it, I know that in deep shock, all the blood rushes from the extremities, toward the core, to protect the inner organs, the heart. That’s why my arms felt so flaccid at my sides, so foreign. That’s why my thinking nearly stopped. That’s why I can only remember it now in flashes of disconnected images.
But the studying hasn't helped. Now, I can only feel that hour or so of shock before they finally warmed me back to consciousness. It felt like death. How do I know? I don’t. But it feels like that’s what death will be like. I feel it deep in my bones. And what did it feel like? Utterly anonymous. Everything that was particular, individual, quirky, attached to the world, or what I identify as Shauna? It simply didn’t exist. It just slipped away. And in that way, it was wonderfully easy. There was no struggle. There was no great epiphany, no white light. I was simply fading out.
I haven’t been able to forget it since. Death has been sitting with me ever since.
And in some ways, that has been scary. Impossible to convey. And terribly lonely, because I don’t know many other people who understand this. This is the first time I’ve tried to write about it. I’ve just started talking about it this week. And every attempt with words is a failure.
But in other ways, it has been an enormous grace. This presence has meant that I can’t take anything for granted, can’t take anything too seriously, can’t wrap myself in senseless fear or stress. I know all those trivial details will slip away someday, so why waste my time with them now?
And there’s a comfort in knowing. Of having gone down to the core of me, and knowing that I don’t have to struggle. Or try to control everything. Anything. “Let life live itself.” One of my students brought this in the other day, when I asked them to find one sentence they adore. It has been tripping through my mind these past few days.
But more than that, I’m just so grateful to have this life, as it is: complicated, attached, quirky, and destined to fade away entirely. I’m so damned glad to be here. Because I know, wonderfully, what I am at the core. Not words. Not my stories, my wordplay, my brightness, my kind acts, my memories, my to-do list, my verbal acuity, my accomplishments, or my hopes for the next few days, the year, the rest of my life. I’m not a Shauna.
I’m not me.
What am I, at the core? Just life. Breath. Consciousness. The ability to hear the din of noise in a restaurant, feel the heating pad on my back, smell the acrid cologne of that man passing me on a sunlit day, taste the burger with white cheddar in my mouth, or see the craggy Olympic mountains rising high in the pale blue sky. A beating heart. An alive mind. This moment. Right now.
And the joy that comes from knowing this is immeasurable.
“....having a minute ago nearly gone mad with fear, she was now suffused with a slow, deep ecstasy at being at one with her body and the earth and everything that was matter.”
--Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Yes.
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