It’s been almost 6 years to the day since I nearly died in a bicycle accident with the car. While I did lose my arm and much of my confidence in everyday safety within my environment, I still have much confidence remaining.
Today, I am on the dole – disability. I’m at the whim of who pays me money, how much they pay me, whatever benefits I might receive, including: healthcare, food stamps, and a host of other benefits designed to help me survive, but not really thrive.
Happily, I can see how these things have helped me have helped me over the past several years. Namely, I don’t have insurmountable medical bills, my student loans have been discharged, and I do pretty well living as I always have - on a shoestring budget with next to no possessions.
On the other hand, I have so much more remaining that I often feel precariously balanced between what I have and what I no longer have.
The one constant I do have is pain. More specifically, nerve pain, which has proven debilitating at times. Still, I’ve found that, no matter how bad the pain, distractions such as writing like this now mitigates the problem considerably, sometimes entirely.
Anyway, the dream I had last night was based on something I’ve thought of most of my adult life, and that’s how accomplished I once was a skier. In fact, everything I did revolved around skiing, particularly other sports.
Mountain biking, road biking, rollerblading and even hockey were all meant to bolster my passion for skiing. Running triathlon was a most enjoyable way to put all of those things together. Only more skiing itself would have been better.
The plan was simply to become a stronger skier during the off-season. As a skier at heart, the qualities required with each of these activities to me made perfect sense.
Increased aerobic capacity, stronger legs and hips, and a stronger sense of balance all contributed to improve performance further, flexibility and other forms of specific bodily improvement led to better performance within all these sports.
I was truly an athlete, more than I’d ever been and more than I would ever give myself credit for. But there I was, and here I’ll always remain.
Though my sporting pursuits had largely been fueled by anger at my past, violent upbringing, my youth was also the place where I developed my passion for cycling and skiing in the first place.
The cycling I had always done on my own, but the skiing I was initially introduced to by my parents, one of whom is prone to violence, and the other carries the terrible burden of emotional distance. Even so, I carried my passion for skiing with me long after I left my childhood home.
“Accidents can happen,“ goes the saying and it’s true. Looking into the cause of an accident too closely can lead to getting caught up in certain feelings behind their occurrence. “What did I do to deserve this? Nothing!“ “How can this happen to me? I don’t believe it.“ “Thank God it happened when I was in the prime of my physical strength.“
I’ve asked both of these questions and made this latter comment more times than I can count. And I’ve had good reason for it, as I suppose anybody might. But one of the things I learned about myself as a kid was that there was no place to go but up once the bottom was reached. Nobody taught me that; I learned it on my own.
I also learned that I could survive “the bottom,“ and that surviving it as I have so many times led me to not fear “the bottom.“
Though “the bottom“ can be defined so differently from person to person, I don’t think anybody can claim to not understand what that means.
Not fearing hitting rock-bottom has been a theme in my life perhaps, but it remains a life-saving theme as well.
Given my strict adherence to a healthy diet, regular exercise and a constant pursuit of a healthy love and family life, I remained captive to the sexy packaging of many things. Bicycle parts: frames, shoes, helmets, and more. Before that, it was skis, boots, poles etc.
Most recently, my prime attraction has been for comfort food, which is perhaps the most seductively package of all. Only the former two lists of seductive packaging we’re not inherently unhealthy. “Comfort food,“ which is just another name for junk food may be the sexiest of all to me, but that’s likely because I have forever tried to abstain completely from it instead of creating a comfortable balance, a positive compromise between consuming and abstaining.
My very youth would suggest that I could recover physically from some Oreos or M&M‘s now and then instead of creating a situation of wholesale deprivation. Junk food, then, was simply a form of self deprivation.
As a paperboy, I always had change for whatever I needed or wanted. Given a kid’s wants and needs, I knew that I was a success in this regard. It was about that time, the span of about 3 to 4 years that I also began realizing that this success could not last.
Perhaps it was because I lucked into my paper route, initially taking it as a replacement for the lawn mowing and yardwork I’d done for years. Maybe I’d like it, maybe I wouldn’t, but it was something I tried I’d have tried. And just maybe I’d have a little fun in the process, even if things didn’t work out.
Back then, people didn’t receive their news on smartphones, tablets or other digital formats. Then, an old-school copy of the daily was delivered to a customer’s front door. No real time news existed for most people. Aside from the evening paper, and radio and TV news, no real time news existed. Then, for most people’s tastes, that was plenty.
I saw myself as a news junkie then just as I remain today, though the old days it was in a far more limited capacity. I was hungry to open my world, to learn new things and meet new people, to soak up my surroundings like the sponge I truly was.
While I thought I was learning about the world, in hindsight I see that I was also learning what my place in the world might be. For some reason, maybe because all of the options available it seems so attractive I could never pick just one approach to the world in which is so myself.
There were so many ways in which I saw myself fitting in to the world that I was overwhelmed. Without direction, I might as well have been going nowhere.
So perhaps it was only natural that I concluded my successful youth would be punctuated by a later adulthood that would be neither noteworthy nor financially successful. I also forecast that I’d one day again see a degree of success reflective of that I enjoyed in my youth.
Though I knew it’d come later in adulthood, I couldn’t predict how, why, or what would happen to trigger it. I just consoled my mind with the knowledge and the comforting confidence in my belief.
Now, in my early 50s I suppose it’s fair to say that I’ve reached later adulthood and I that I’m also primed and ready to find that success I’d predicted would come all along. Once again, hindsight, illustrates that I have, indeed been building toward this moment, and the next and the next all along. With each breath I take it seems my resolve to reach that success grows.
Today, on the eve of my sixth anniversary in which I nearly died in a bicycle accident with a car I have pause to reflect on what happened and why. Though I will never have complete understanding of what the Universe was trying to teach me at the time, I don’t think it’s necessary or even worthwhile to try to figure it out.
It’s enough to say that I’ve survived perhaps the most physically violent sort of ordeal anyone can literally walk away from. I’ve taken literally everything that’s been thrown at me, up to and including death and managed to walk away largely intact.
Though today I have only one arm and a body and mind covered with scars, I survived. I am a survivor and, what’s more a proud survivor. Looking back on the things I’ve done all throughout life, my body and my mind were covered with scars long before my bicycle accident with that car.
Looking back, it’s clear that I’ve put myself in a position where I feel I could’ve died a million times over and perhaps that was my subconscious plan. But I didn’t know that then and anyway this plan did not fit in with what I predicted my life would become in my later years. Now I’m downright excited about what lies ahead.
I am an athlete and in my chest beats a heart that has always been active and alive and even largely satisfied. And I’m pretty happy in general, thank you very much. This, not despite my meager wants and needs but because of them. I’ve neither had much stuff nor much money. But I’ve been comfortable in remaining true to my myself and my values.
Though I learned early on that I might experience loss despite the importance of things then, I can’t imagine anything more personal than limb loss.
So, while beer cans, bottle caps, and baseball cards are temporary, limb loss lasts a lifetime and it doesn’t get more personal than that. And my limb loss occurred while I, not someone else was guiding my ship through life.
That said, I have always seemed to travel light when it comes to people as well, often for divergent reasons and also by design. I tend to not shed myself of acquaintances for any particular reason. Rather, I tend to replace former casual friends with new ones.
Perhaps early in life I understandably developed trust issues with others due to developmental trauma. While I’m sure that’s still buried in my mind somewhere, I’ve sustained enough concussions and a near fatal head trauma to lay claim to a highly unreliable short term memory.
A handful of people is my maximum number that allows me to best balance out my mental resources. Everything functions smoothest overall this way. Still, a handful of positive people occupy a permanent spot in my memory.
Among them are my ex-in-laws who, before, during and after the marriage have defined “friendship” in every way. They are as unconditionally loving and as thoughtful as anyone could ever hope to find in another person/people.
They’re a terrific package deal with whom I’d hope to have become friends whether or not it was through a marriage. And, as friends, they’re an inspiration to me. Their brand of positive empowerment and support is unlikely I’ve known, or will ever know.
By now they know me, or at least enough of what makes me tick to put in their two cents on whatever they think I might like to have in my world. Velda, my ex-mother-in-law is a deceptively strong and wise person, hidden behind a sort of kewpie doll face.
But there’s nothing deceptive about her, for her apparent cover girl personality belies a certain diplomatic wisdom. She recently articulated something so quickly and so succinctly that I’d challenge even the best silver-tongued lawyer to outdo.
In so doing, she showed a rarely-seen (at least to me) side of her I’d never known was there except anecdotally through my ex-extended family.
Ken, my ex-father-in-law personifies my definition of what being a well-grounded and also a well-grounded person should be. Need some advice on your car? How about a word or two on just about any subject imaginable?
Just ask Ken and he’ll likely point out an answer or a suggestion in his own particular voice, which has yet to leave me feeling stupid or that he’s a smarty-pants know-it-all. His stream of consciousness fuels much of what he says, creating a degree of honest transparency I’ve yet known.
“Yeah, them Fords weren’t built to last for more than two hundred thousand miles,” he’ll say, “so you better start looking for a new one around one-seventy-five.”
Or “..the poor dairy farmer thought he’d lost thirteen head of cows when it turned out they had fallen into a sinkhole and were waiting to be rescued.”
Except perhaps for his view on Ford engines, these are contrived stories, of course. There can be no way to sum up anyone’s thinking in only a few sentences. But this offers a gist of the flavor behind Ken’s words and the mind behind them, too.
Though age would seem counterintuitive to any of our contemporaries being like parents to our inner child, they’ve always been the two safest people I’ve met. In fact, a big reason we’re close today is because they shredded my trust issues by drowning me in more loving acceptance than I ever knew existed.
I don’t mean this in a weird, holy-roller kind of way where they keep hitting you over the head with their mindset until you relent because you can’t take any more.
That’s not them at all. And don’t thake this to mean they are pushovers in any way, but they simply live the way they think, and Love is what they think. And anyone who gets to know them, myself included is better for their influence.
Spend any amount of time with them as I have over the last few days and you might not believe your eyes and ears. People are people first and foremost though certain people, family mostly understandably take priority.
But the seemingly endless string of unrelated and even unlikely people who make up their own group of acquaintances is remarkable. Take the forty-something Village Inn waitress who had one eye made up in red and the other in blue.
I at first mistook this woman to be a victim of domestic abuse until I realized that her eye coloring was intentional. Didn’t faze Ken and Velda a bit, not any more than seeing a picture of me racing a bicycle in tight short pants. The very notion strikes me as borderline ridiculous, and I am the one in the pictures!
Or how about the dyed-in-the-wool cowboy at the Chinese restaurant late one Friday night? This man was so happy to be enjoying the moment he was sharing with his kids that he simply had to share it with Ken and Velda. Since he was on the opposite side of the restaurant everyone heard about it, too.
But that was part of the charm behind his message: “Fourteen already,” he said to them, “enjoy it while you can, they grow up fast!” as if Ken and Velda were nervous teenagers expecting their first child.
I don’t know what Ken and Velda might have been thinking but the man’s words were reminiscent of birthday parties I’d once known as a kid myself. And, yep, I guess I did grow up fast, same as everyone does. I’d like to think Ken and Velda would have had similar thoughts.
As it happened, they knew the man’s kids and spoke a little of how they remembered this one at this age or another one at that age. I suppose it’s a certain deferential knowledge they have of their neighbors, and a certain willingness to call things as they are. Nothing offensive is ever intended from them and, far as I know none has ever been taken.
They remain great people to know and, if the measure of a marriage includes the friends you make throughout it then I’d say mine was a success. I’d like to think I’ve brought the best points of my own past to my friendship with those two though, even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter to them.
Again, it’s as unconditional a friendship as I’d ever known, and I’m grateful for that knowledge. Which leads me to my dream.
Last night I had one of those dreams during which I actually said the words “This is not a dream-it’s real!” In my dream I was an interesting and particularly physically able blend between my own, current body and that of another amputee I met two days before.
Though in real life our first meeting lasted only a few minutes, Dennis, who’d lost part of one arm and had only partial use of the other for 44 years said a few words that will forever have lasting impact for me.
“You learn to live with it.” Nobody else saying those words could ever have held my ear as his did that morning. I made a point to see him this morning, where we first met along a place called the Arkansas Riverwalk Trail. He, like me has a morning routine with his dog and I can only say that I knew he’d be there.
I told him a little about my dream which, as I figured he’d think was nonsense. In fact, I think I wanted him to think of my dream that way because I wanted to confirm that my understanding of him, albeit brief, was accurate.
He wasn’t abrupt or rude about it, just speaking in a manner that I understood right away to be consistent with his own beliefs. In short, he was also speaking with his own brand of deferential acceptance; we agree to disagree.
And in his disagreement lie his strength and my acceptance of him as a peer; not as another person with a visible disability but as a good person in general.
It was on the basis of this sudden, strong kinship that I know would have become a good friendship had I not already made plans to leave town, and the positive, enabling influence of Ken and Velda’s support that inspired my dream.
In it, not only did I still have both arms but they worked so completely and with such strength that I couldn’t even tell which of them I’d lost. In one part of the dream it was the right arm I’d recovered, in another the left.
All throughout I was skiing with the same strength and finesse that I’d ever had. What’s more, the skiing conditions were my absolute favorite; spring skiing in just bibs and a sweater. Sunglasses, and red-faced from my face’s first peek at the springtime sun.
But no matter, I had a whole season of skiing behind me and was just out for fun, not for a challenge. The snow was granular from repeated freeze-thaw cycles and the moguls were full and just waiting to be danced through.
One or two others who were also caught up in the moment and savoring the beginning of their downhill run shouted a greeting to me and I back to them. The air was full of joy and, at that moment nothing else in the world mattered. Nothing else could.
My memory of the dream ended with me in the midst of the bumps, as ever, thinking “I made it! Both my arms are working together and, look! My left arm is as strong as ever!”
As dreams tend to go, at least my dreams, a stranger momentarily appeared to whom I extended my hand, saying “Go ahead, shake it!” and giving his hand a hard squeeze. Then, returning my focus again to the bumps I shouted “This is no dream, it’s really happening!”
Then, of course I awoke from the dream knowing otherwise. But two differences stand out about this dream. First, I almost never, ever make any sort of remark about my limb loss as being anything more than that.
Still, I know that my right arm often wishes it weren’t so alone and that it still had the other to help carry the load and to provide some sorely missed balance to my upper body. It’s too heartbreaking for me to speak these words aloud so they only come out in my dreams, and even then.
Second, I awoke from this dream feeling good about myself and the sheer strength within me that lives on despite my limb loss. I felt downright great, and empowered enough to say aloud words that I almost never think: “I’m still an extremely strong man, not because I survived a horrific accident but on my own merits.”
Today, only two days before the sixth anniversary of my bicycle accident with a car and in the very midst of a Trauma Season that I’ve been determined to triumph over I’m feeling stronger than I ever have since my accident.
What’s more, I recognize that the physical strength I enjoyed up until the moment of impact was a completely different kind of strength than that which I now have. And the answer for that is simple: I have a very different, but no less strong body with which to work.
This isn’t a revelation to me, for I could have spoken these words many times over. It’s just now they carry meaning for me, and I finally accept it as truth.
Dedicated to my friends, Ken and Velda, and to my new friend, Dennis, whose curious dog Ruby and my finicky Sophie have more or less chosen to agree to disagree.
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