I remember that time, and the aftermath
of the brain injury, while on a bus, on the way home from his college class. I
remember after, looking into his eyes, unable to find him anywhere at all. I
remember him telling me that the part of him that oversaw his life and his
choices and his thoughts and his feelings was gone. That it scared him.
t
I already had a nine year old with a brain
injury. A year after his, I was rear-ended in a car accident and acquired a
brain injury. I found just plain difficult to believe the whole bizarre string
of events.
Before my eyes, this 18 year old was
transforming into Don Corleone. It was
explained to me how predictable this was.
His
17 year old girlfriend talked her very proper parents into renting her
an apartment for the summer, to learn how to be independent. You can just
imagine how that went down. Think about it.
So I go over there, to bring CSA vegetable
deliveries, and there would be 1,000 people in the apartment. A thousand more
in the complex. I went right in and got his cat, and brought her home.
One day some guys approach his girlfriend.
He goes and takes the door off of their car. A situation that just continued to
expand exponentially for several years. No one could believe it.
Near the culmination, he was driving along
the road that I now pass along each day. Nice new car. Friends and associates
packed in the back. It was winter. It was dark. Driving too fast.
The car hit some ice, and spun far up
through the air like a gentle flower.
And he was propelled out through the
windshield, spiraling off into the night, landing gently without an injury, on
the freshly fallen snow.
Others were severely damaged. Long
rehabilitation. They ended up keeping all their limbs. An experience they will
feel in their bodies for the rest of their lives.
Escaping consequences doesn't really help.
Sometimes it's good to be taken down by life, when you're spinning out of
control.
I remember being 18, being 21, and on my
own. I remember driving through Massachusetts and New York, New Hampshire and New Mexico, on to
California, Arizona, Montana, Mexico; driving at the speed of light. I remember
that at times, police would stop me. They never ever gave me a ticket. None of
them willing to bring me up short, in the face of the way I was behaving.
But no matter how many times we get a bye
in life, eventually it ends, and we are brought up short in some fashion or
another.
That's the lesson we wake to, in retrospect.
We can either stop ourselves, or we can let life do it for us. By our own
hands, a whole lot easier on the stomach.
Now he's great. Taken off with roaring
tenacity. Life cut him off at the knees, set him down, and grew a workaholic,
with extraordinarily gifts. What we call ‘transferable skills ‘ moving in a
good direction. It's kind of nice to survive our own calamities. Sometimes, we
get lucky.
I drive that road virtually every day.
Sometimes I am simply in the present moment, and that's all there is. The
present season. The fresh air through open windows. The burning sear of summer
sun. The endless mesmerizing fountain of snowfall.
But other mornings or afternoons, I'm
there, imagining my dear one, erupting up out of the car. My heart breaking on the replay. The glass shattering;
the miracle of the car not crushing him and ending it all.
Look carefully now. Can you see him ?
Sailing out into the dark winter’s night sky. His body turns and turns,
falling down into the snow unharmed.
Fallen angel.
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