Blessed By My Friend Kevin

(Kevin is back row, center, in the blue shirt)

(Thursday, November 1, 2007 - Transferred from a previous blog spot.)

This is a writing from my friend Kevin. I have known him for 30 years. He was in a terrible bike accident two years ago. I found his reflections quite moving. I just wanted to share this.
Chris

Seven Hundred Thirty Days

Seven hundred and thirty days ago my life changed.

I've read about life changing days, the ingredients and outcomes, but never had one of my own.
One of the problems I have had over the last seven hundred and thirty days is this: my life-changing day did not make me a better person, not yet at least. My life-changing day did not birth me back into the world where the little things that used to anger and frustrate me have no affect anymore. I'm still annoyed when the house is messy. I still get pissed off when people are stupid and phony. My life-changing day has not made me into a tranquil peace lover who can smile at dysfunction and live within it. I've not yet mastered the ancient art of "being" in the moment. I've not given speeches about my new life. People aren't flocking to hear about my fresh life strategy, the balanced life that was born from that day when I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I would never see my wife and our three children again.

Seven hundred and thirty days ago my life changed, and it's still changing, and I am growing weary of the recovery.

One year ago today, on the three hundred sixty fifth day since my life changed, we went to Disneyworld . I didn't want to be in town, didn't want to mark the year anniversary with anything normal, because normal is a far cry from what it used to be. We took the kids out of school, were gone for an entire week, and we pledged allegiance to the Mouse. On the first morning in the park, we stood in front of Cinderella's castle, taking pictures and basking in the shining opulence that results from the collision of materialism and fantasy. It was awesome, maybe even a panacea. And out of this sea of joy and bliss walked a Disney "cast member," that being the fantasized title given to anyone working within the park, who asked if we would like to be Grand Marshalls for the Disney Main Street Parade that afternoon.

If you have never been to Disneyworld , this is like being selected at random to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl or flip the switch to light the White House Christmas tree. Thousands of people will line the streets in the park, they will all wave and cheer, and they will wish they could be you, not watching the parade, but IN the parade. "Of course we would."
It was a different view, looking out from the cartoonish fire engine that carried the royal family. I was waving and the kids were laughing and I wondered what triumphant or tragic story brought these other people to Orlando . Me? I was escaping and celebrating simultaneously. And if they knew our story, would they really want to trade places? If there are ten million stories in a naked city, how many are their in a over clothed fantasy world? But one year ago there we were, and I am sure I wasn't the only one who needed the escape, the fantasy, the celebration.

A year earlier my wife received one of those phone calls, the kind that stops you in your tracks and brings other people to your side as they stand helpless and watch you run down the hall, get into your car and race to the hospital uncertain of what you will find when you arrive. She spent the next twelve days between the emergency room and the ICU, trips back and forth from our home to the hospital, sitting while I was in surgery, wondering when I would wake up and wondering in what condition her husband would be when he did wake up, if he woke up.
I'm no catch, believe me, I've always thought my wife could have done better, and she loves me fiercely. Even when I don't think she loves me, which is usually because of my frail insecurity and blinding selfishness, she really does love me, and those twelve days when I was unconscious drained some life from her. Our kids too.

After my wife got "the" phone call, after she rushed to the ER and sat with the chaplain and received the news about my injuries, after she saw me with blood pooling in my eye sockets and a head swelling as fast as a party balloon, she went home to tell the kids, "Daddy had a bicycle wreck this morning, and he is in the hospital, and..."

As I understand it, that is the point our youngest child held back her own tears and implored her mommy, "now don't you cry mommy. Don't you cry." I would suspect that for a five year old who has known only love, security and ease of life, such a thing is difficult to say to a mommy. "Don't you cry." That's what mommy's usually say to five year old little girls. But the tables were turned that day, and the youngest in the family did not want the gravity of the situation to rock her world anymore than it already had. "Now don't you cry mommy," offered not as a consolation but as a directive: You can't cry. I'll feel worse if you cry.

She was only five, and she wanted to cry, it was her right, her privilege as a child. With the news only moments old, her defiant response was to tell her mother not to cry, not because she couldn't handle her mother's tears, but because she wanted permission for her own, and if the only adult in the room was crying, where was she to lay her head for comfort? If someone stronger and braver than herself could not console her, what was she to do? "Now don't you cry mommy."

And for the next twelve days, waiting for daddy to wake up, people flooded our home, held vigil with my wife at the hospital, and cared for our children.

People still ask me about my "accident." And I've developed a script that I offer in response to that specific question. Maybe it's my way of coping, maybe it's my passive aggressive way of getting back at the woman who pulled in front of me and started this whole nightmare, but I correct anyone who uses the word "accident." Like some expert on a subject they know nothing about, I respond to my questioners, "None of my actions were accidental I can assure you. I did everything on purpose to try and miss that car, because I knew that when bike versus car, bike loses every time." I delve into this long litany about taking evasive action to miss the car, which is not easy when you are descending a hill going twenty four miles an hour with only fifteen feet to stop. And almost every time, when I finish the story, I wonder why I am still so needy that I have to give them all the facts. Can't I be done with this? Isn't it time to move on? Even so, I anxiously await the next opportunity to tell my story, and then when I finish, I'm left with a emotional hangover, feeling guilty and weak for vomiting my pain onto someone else. What I really want to say is that I am exhausted with trauma and I am having a difficult time doing the day to day stuff that comes from being a husband and a father and a minister while thinking about my life changing day, everyday, for the past two years.

I screamed "No" to the woman in the burgundy Honda, and two split seconds later, maybe less, maybe one or two seconds more, I had broken my back and a few ribs, crushed every bone in my face, and was on the side of the road doing everything in my power to stay conscious because my scrambled brain told me that if I went to sleep I would never wake up.

That was my moment. My moment of being one with life and death in the very presence of reality, and that very reality was consumed with staying awake to see my wife and children again. And because I was awake for the entire event, I was scared from what I could deduce. I stuck my tongue into the chasm in the roof on my mouth. The teeth on the left side of my face were pushed back and down about a half-inch. This was the line where the left side of my skull was separated from the right side, like two equal halves of a watermelon. The trauma surgeon later told my wife that every bone in my face was broken, with some fragments floating unattached to anything in my cranial space.

At the point of impact, when my face hit the pavement with the force of a catapult, I felt nothing, which might not be believable, given the extent of the damage. But I felt nothing.
I heard everything, however. Heard it? Yes. Think of a coarse cereal. Grape Nuts. When you eat Grape Nuts, you can hear the crunch radiate through your skull into your eardrums. That is what I heard in an instant. I initially felt no pain, but I heard the force of the impact. I heard the crunch of my skull. I can run my finger over my chin or around my eye socket today and feel the titanium that will hold me together for the rest of my life. And the sound echoes still.

I come from a great family. Mom and dad? Champion parents. My sister? Phenomenal. She loves me with all her heart, just like my mom and dad taught her to love her little brother. Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins. I am rich with best friends. I've had a legion of fantastic people cross my path and walk with me. And in those morning moments before I went to sleep for twelve days, I thought of none of these wonderful people on the side of the road. My awareness was focused on four people and the pool of blood that was pouring from my head on the ground beneath me. Amidst the crimson flood, I thought not of my life's entirety but rather the four people I do life with intimately; the people who see me at my best and worst and love me anyway, the ones who know the color of my underwear, who want me to tuck them in at night, two and three times, the one who has been uniquely present for my journey from teenager to middle aged man. I thought of these four people, my wife who is either yoked or stuck with me for the rest of our lives, and our three children who are the very product of love. They were born from love, wow, and on the side of the road all I could think about was staying awake so I could articulate just one more time my love for each of them. My life didn't flash before my eyes, just the lives of four people I would die for, and dammit, I didn't want to die on the side of the road seven hundred and thirty days ago. So I fought, drifting in and out of consciousness between the pain and the blood.

I never knew the color of spilt blood wasn't really red. In the blink of an eye, because her depth perception wasn't true or because she was day dreaming or because she never saw me at all, her left turn into my descending path put me face to face with the fact that blood, when pouring from one's skull, is not really red at all. It's deeper. It's scarlet, like an antique velvet quilt unseen for decades, or even some kind of haunting, bio-engineered purple seen only in your imagination, but it's definitely not red.

On the side of the road, the first drops hit my orange seat post, the steel tube that connects the saddle to the bottom bracket where the pedals are. Deep blood coursing through my face and cranium only seconds before was now painting a sick kaleidoscope on the ground beneath me. Blood on Molteni Orange bicycle paint. Blood on sandy black asphalt. Blood on blue grey cycling gloves. Blood in shade. Blood in sunlight. New colors I had never seen before.

Was this canvas being painted at the expense of my life? Must I stare death in the eye to see for myself the exact color of the blood in my skull? I'd have settled for just calling it red like everyone else, but I no longer had that option.

In the literal blink of an eye the drops went from a dribble to a pour, like someone holding a pitcher of tea next to my head and steadily pouring its contents on the ground; the color changed again. The first drops were already turning, slowly changing like an existential mood ring. "My blood should be inside me, not on the ground," and I think my blood was angry and scared about that too, so it changed color to tell me the situation was far less than optimal, in case I didn't know already. The drops at the edge of the purple pond were now almost brown.

I've heard that we humans carry a large volume of blood in our skulls. It facilitates cognition and sensory aptitude, but the funny thing is, with all that cognitive and sensory blood rushing out of my head I was still able to feel everything, and sense not only the loss of blood, but the possibility that I may lose more than that. "I may lose my life." I thought that thought. I felt that feeling. I lived both.

And at the moment that I was scared to death, literally scared because of my own death, I was alive…alive for my wife, alive for my children, and alive to see the color of my blood on the ground that was definitely not red.
That was seven hundred thirty days ago.

One year ago today trying to find normal, I was gleefully skipping around the pain at Disneyworld .

Today, two years to the day after my wreck, as if a counter balance to the Magic Kingdom , I started off the morning with a glass of water and my first anti-depressant. As I pulled out of the pharmacy parking lot on day seven hundred twenty nine reading the instructions on the pill bottle, "take one pill in the morning," I half chuckled at the irony.
My life changing day is now two years old. Not a day goes by that I don't recall that day, when I twist and my back shoots with pain or when the numbness in my face sends tingles down my neck, or when I see someone on a bicycle not wearing a helmet, or when an ambulance rushes past me with sirens blaring, or when I kiss that little five year old goodnight, she's now seven, that day has brought me to this one, taking a pill to help me cope. I quit rationalizing a long time ago how I was better than everyone else on prescription psychotropics. But still, I'd rather have been able to cope on my own, finding that great inner spiritual peace that I peddle, leaving people in my wake as I walked by, "wow, he's incredible, so strong, and so together." But instead, I've got this little pill, and I hope it helps.

I'm a Jesus man, I think. I love the person Jesus, I think. Love how he lived. Love how he died. Its not the only way to live, but it's the way I have chosen. Its hard, this way, but it is good. Oh sure, I claim the title of Christian, but that has become so convoluted and heavy laden I think it does more harm as a title than good, so I just say I'm a Jesus man. This colors most of my activity and response, but I recognize that its all mostly mystery, and I am OK with that, even as a vocational minister.
I came home from the hospital in a back brace, with my jaw wired shut and with a quarter sized hole in my neck as a result of the emergency tracheotomy. And as a cruel joke, I came home to a kitchen full of food that I could not eat. Actually, I drank some of it. If you've never had fried chicken and potatoes and gravy and a biscuit in a blender with milk, you should try it.
I also came home to a few mixed emotions. I cried when I walked through the front door. Actually, I whimpered. It's hard to cry when your jaw is surgically shut and there are pieces of wire woven through your gums to hold your teeth in place. So I whimpered, and I went to bed. I got out occasionally for a shower and for medicine routines. And I took some phone calls.

One was particularly poignant. A former church member, and I don't use that term loosely, called me and wished me well, and said, "You know, I think this might actually be good for our church. We've really rallied, and you know, we've come together in a way."
I had one of those moments of clarity when the words come to your mind quickly and you realize that there is one response to such a statement and one response only. I did so through clenched teeth not because of anger but because of necessity, fully aware that I was about to startle a church member who had no idea what she had just said, or how offensive it was to the hearer. I offered slowly in calculated response, very clearly to this sweet yet shallow soul, "Hell no this wasn't a good thing. I would never say my children wondering if their daddy would come home or not "good." I would never say what Alyson had to go through was "good" or beneficial to any congregation for that matter. This is hard on all of us, I hurt, Alyson is exhausted, the kids are scared and it's not "good," and the notion that my life can be disposable or of some utility so a congregation can be the better from my pain just doesn't fit with me or my Jesus."

I'm a Jesus man, and while I am still trying to figure out what that means, I am damn sure that Jesus didn't coordinate the breaking of my back and the exploding of my face to bring some unity to a little church.

She meant well, I guess, and like I said, she's a former church member now. Maybe I am too.

So I took this pill today. My family doctor and my therapist and my neurologist all are on the same page. They say the amount of psychic energy I am using to get through the day is spiking, and this pill can be useful in my entire course of therapy. They know I work in a helping profession, although I am not sure how much of a helper I have been in the last seven hundred and thirty days. They also know that my mother, who was standing in the kitchen in my home when I returned from the hospital, died eight months later. I preached her funeral and instead of sitting with tired shoulders on the front pew with my dad and my sister, I offered holy words for her. I had to postpone my grief, because I had to go to work. I did it lovingly. I don't begrudge the request she made of me, and that's another thing that sucks about being a minister. Don't get me wrong, its not all bad, there is good, but the worst thing is that in becoming a minister, you lose some of your humanity. People forget that you are human too, and the title doesn't mean you are any better at coping with trauma and loss yourself, at least not in my case anyway.

One month after I got out of the hospital, at the annual budget conference for the church, a senior gentleman stood up and made a motion to reduce my salary by twenty five percent because the pledges were not coming in like he thought they should and you get the point, "we gotta line this budget up with our pledges and the pastor makes more than anybody in our budget so..."

I was not there but I heard about it, and it infuriated me. Remember, my life-changing day did not give me that fresh outlook to suffer fools any better. And I wondered, while I was still in a back brace, while I still had a bandage over the hole in my neck, while I was facing monumental medical bills, why in the hell would a man who has gone to church his entire life, be him a Christian or a Jesus man or impostor, think this the best time to reduce my income by twenty five percent? Am I supposed to be so unattached to mammon that I would say, "sure, that's' a good idea?"

Maybe I am. I'll study that one. And I am human, and I want to send my kids to good universities, and pay for their straight teeth, and give them a good place to ride their bikes and play in the backyard, maybe a nice vacation every year.

I guess I am still angry with the woman who pulled out in front of me, maybe even madder that she never contacted me, never checked on me. Maybe I'm disappointed at the theology that allowed a woman to tell me that God wanted this to happen so a church could find some unity. Maybe I'm mad that a man I am pledged to serve would show so little care and concern for me and my family. Maybe I'm mad at myself for needing and wanting that twenty five percent. Maybe I'm mad that I can't call my mother anymore. Maybe I'm mad for not coping any better two years later.
Or, maybe I'm just me, and these last two years are the threads woven together to make a life. My life.

I guess I'll always be in recovery from something, or maybe even from myself.
And if I have learned anything between day one and seven hundred thirty, it is this: any love you get is enough to get you through.

And the fact that I am out of bed today is a pretty good sign. I just wrote nine pages without a break. This pill is good!

Actually, the pill isn't supposed to start working for another week; the doctor says it will take that long for the tiny magical chemicals to be absorbed into my system. So, I guess my recovery to date has more to do with me than the pill I took this morning.
Maybe I'm doing better than I thought?

Copyright 2007, Kevin M. Roberts