Somewhere in the summer of 1979, I lightened my load. You know, all that emotional baggage we carry around with us in our hearts and souls—stuff you can't see, but feel on a daily basis. In the pool of life, the water level is always changing. As children, we splash around the pool without a care, but as adults we tread that water cautiously, knowing full well it can kill us at any given moment.
The year before my decision to lighten up, my family had moved from Jackson out into the boondocks of Madison County. My wounds were still fresh after my retreat from Mississippi State University where almost three years of denial had finally caught up with me; years when I had systematically tucked away a barrage of life-altering incidents. I had choked them down and forced myself to ignore them in order to survive.
I knew I’d eventually have to deal with those events, but lumped together, they seemed utterly overwhelming. So when I had to, I put on the happy face, and when I was alone, I discarded it for something more appropriate.
A brief rundown of my downward spiral goes something like this: Age 15, in the fall of 1975 I am paralyzed from the chest down in a freak high school football accident and told by doctors that I will never walk again; January 1976 my grandfather dies; March 1976 (just 6 months after my accident) my father dies in a car wreck—actually a suicide; from October ‘75 to February ‘76 I remain in traction at Baptist Hospital and undergo two surgeries to replace my C4 vertebrae with a slice of my hip bone; March 76 I'm moved to the Methodist Rehab Center for tendon transfer surgery on my right arm.
I'm released in midsummer and try rejoining the real world and spend an eternity in my old surroundings in Newton. I wait there on a deserted carport for the past to revisit me, but after a flourish of friends’ visits, my company tapers off to nothing by summer's end. Emotionally, I begin to choke on my reality. That fall I return to rehab to finish my last few months. Late summer and fall 1977, I attend Mississippi State University. By semester’s end, my denial is wearing thin and I am finally forced on a cold and wet December day to admit to myself that all of this is killing me.
In the middle of the quad field at State, my wheelchair shorts out in the rain and I sit spinning uncontrollably in circles until I can convince strangers to shut the chair down. Wet, humiliated, and frustrated beyond imagination, the spinning chair was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. I left campus that day and never returned.
For the first time in my life, I had quit something. And I did it in a big way. I left college and pretty much stopped living. From that denial sprung a vast well of anger. A silent rage. Desolate nights followed where tears rolled off my cheeks and filled my ears, causing the world to take on a muffled hum. My nightly conversations with God were less than reverent. I was in life’s deep waters and could no longer swim.
Up until then, no matter where we lived, my dresser top was always covered in sports trophies and navy blue ribbons, all shiny silver and gold reminders of a past life — a jock’s life. In the summer of ‘79 I had someone load them in a big cardboard box and bring them to the dump. Slowly, I would have to wean myself from my past. If I didn't, it would drown me in a sea of self-pity. It was a symbolic and cathartic first step. But in the bigger picture of things, it was just a baby step toward salvation.
I'd taken to sleeping away most of the daylight hours and staying up late drinking too much wine and writing one peck at a time on an old IBM typewriter. I wrote the worst poetry and novel imaginable. I had found some drinking buddies and two or three nights a week Steve and Terry would drop by with their girlfriends and we'd crank up the music and get loaded. It was a tolerable escape.
Billy Joel's “The Stranger” and Steely Dan's “Aja” would resonate in my head as I wondered where my real friends were—my old pals from school. I missed them just as much or more than I missed my old body. Their phone numbers remained in my head. I stared at the receiver sometimes for hours.
Later, the move to Madison isolated me from those kids but it forced me to start evaluating myself and making changes. I’d sit out in the yard with speakers in my window blasting a stack of albums. I sat there alone with Jimmy Buffett and Dan Fogelberg, eyes locked on the horizon, drifting through time, trying to make sense of it all. I started reading to pass the time, since computers weren’t readily available yet. Those were lean times. I wanted to get better but still felt like dying.
I read a lot of different things from The Fountainhead to The Holy Bible. Gradually, the constant ache eased a little. My curious side was taking over and I placed the pain and defiance on a back burner. I went from curious to creative, writing more and using poetry as an outlet for my anger.
Restless, I traveled up and down our secluded road to a nearby lake. There I weighed suicide as a real option. Again, my conversations with God left me in tears. I wanted a real answer for my situation but there was no real and perfect answer. I wanted to affix blame. I was angry with my father for leaving us—I was infuriated with God for allowing this to be something permanent. I was sad because I actually had something nice to compare my present situation with—my past had been a near perfect childhood. How dare He give me the world and then snatch it away.
One day I redirected that question of blame to myself. What if it was my fault? I did love to compete. I was a fierce competitor. I had forced myself to make that tackle. Accepting blame was a concept I sold to myself over time. It wasn't an easy sell either, but it made a lot of sense. As I grew into the idea, the world again started to appeal to me. My hormones were screaming but my self-image had been decimated even more than my faith.
Innocent flirting with Angela, the girl next door, and rediscovering music, art and literature put me on an even keel. I gradually processed my loss and regained some personal identity. Mirrors drove me crazy. They still do. That and the way clothes hang on my body. It was a depressing thing to lose that part of me—that visual I had grown to know. The shape of my shadow takes the form of a chair now.
I've seen others who've lost their families, people gutted by cancer, infected by AIDS. I'm not the only one who understands misery. I know it’s a hot commodity. There's plenty of it to go around. Despair is like a starving dog that follows you home. When you finally look it in the eyes, it can devastate you.
At my annual rehab checkup, a girl named Stacey poked her phone number in my shirt pocket after she'd processed me. After that we talked on the phone and on Saturday nights she'd drive out. Sitting among a host of flickering candles listening to Greg Allman, I finally rediscovered a tiny piece of my past. I found out I could get lost in the feel of a girl’s hair on my face and the pleasure of her breath on my neck, and although she left that winter for Colorado, she left me in a far different place than she'd found me. In her arms, in the darkness, I didn’t feel like an outsider. I felt human again. I also discovered it didn't kill me to reach out, to open up. It kept me from hating myself as much as I had.
At that point I didn't realize the Staceys of this world were so rare. I didn't know a drought of lonely years would follow that sudden bliss. But as time passed, other Staceys came and went. After three decades, you start to see the writing on the wall. Life is like that. You just appreciate the good when it’s there.
Time pretty much takes everything—youth, looks, hopes—and leaves us second-guessing everything we know. What I do know is it’s nice to feel like you're alive. It's nice to have that even for a small stretch of time. Maybe life is a lot of little moments like that squeezed into a whole lot of anguish and self-doubt. Maybe the biggest thing we need to believe in when it’s all said and done is ourselves. Maybe that’s God's biggest message to us.
Life's got its own kind of ebb and flow. Sometimes it puts stuff on the beach and sometimes it just eats away at the shore slowly, giving and taking away. The inconstancy doesn't lessen the beauty.
When I left State that day after twirling around in the rain, I was scraping near the bottom. Sinking below the water line with the drain hole in clear view. It scared the piss out of me. As an athlete, I would knock your teeth out if you stood between the goal line and me. As a quadriplegic, the opponent was now my own body.
Sometimes getting better means you have to stop fighting yourself. You have to trade in the memories along with the hardware. You just have to stop and see things for what they really are. You have to accept the fact that you can't do everything on your own anymore. If somebody holds his or her hand out to you, you have to take it. You have to pull them in tight and hang on. If you don't, you'll never be able to stay afloat.
