What things are called -- and why
...a dispatch from bewilderness
We are rolling Play-Doh balls and pounding pegs in boards. I don’t know who’s here because they fell off the wagon or slid off a scaffold or tripped an IED in Iraq. Perhaps we served our country or pizza, pitched ball, patched roads. Perhaps we were bakers or builders or preachers or teachers or sat on a wall and had a great fall.
We acquired a new accidental brain – the brain that results from the accident or domestic dispute or dive or drive or forklift or war. Sometimes we have a vague notion of how it felt to write or dance or bake or bike or hike or tend a rose or swing a bat or catch the breeze off a beach.
Robin forgot the names of her kids. Steve forgot his mom and dad. The new “me” had never read books I used to love, never shared favorite times with my child. I couldn’t remember the sound of her voice or the scent of her hair.
Time is a means by which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future. It is also a way to measure intervals between events, or duration, like how long you’ve been where you are. Light-years, nanoseconds or between commercial breaks.
I’m in the bedroom, nursing my child thirty years ago. No, I have a crush on Bobby. I am sixteen years old. That’s nearly sixty years ago. Then I’m back in Brain Training. We are learning which is a cup and which is a hammer and which is a spoon or a bird or a bell.
I was hit by a drunk with a truck. One moment, I was a single mom – making dinner and deadlines all over the world, perking up headlines while picking up kids – and the next, I was on a gurney in an icy, airless room filled with words I didn’t know. That is called aphasia.
Imagine yourself streaming backward in time. You lose your rattle, your blankie, your mommy, your home, your child, your mind. You land stripped of all familiars somewhere you don’t recognize. As someone you don’t know. That is called amnesia.
My brain broke up with me. Or broke up in me. But there remains a spark of me in me which I fan into flame because no one else can. That is called grit.
A special note of gratitude to Noah Michelson, editor at HuffPost, for publishing a piece this weekend, which might just save a few lives.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/drunk-driver-car-crash-brain-damage_n_660ec5b3e4b083254eab4348
Thank you! I am honored by your words
Your beautiful, elegant prose conveys a very real sense of the disorientation closed head injury survivors feel daily. Thank you for admitting us into your world. Your shining prose tells us that hope is not only possible but in some respects mandatory if we are to survive & make a difference in this suffering world. “Life is a mutual aid society.” —P.G. Wodehouse.