Excerpt from Chapter One

Peace Comes from Within

I have to stop this cascade of memories, or at least take them out of their drawer only for a moment, have a brief look, and put them back. I know how to do it now: I have to take the key to acting and apply it to my life. There is no other way to survive except to be in the moment. Just as my accident and its aftermath caused me to redefine what a hero is, I've had to take a hard look at what it means to live as fully as possible in the present.

―Christopher Reeve

I woke up and it felt like I had entered a void. I could hear the beeping of machines around me and the sound of hushed voices. I realized that I was moving, that I was lying in a bed that was turning back and forth, right 90 degrees, flat, then left 90 degrees in slow motion, though it was still dizzying. There were people in the room with me and I could turn my head from side to side to see them, though they were just blurred outlines at first. I wanted to call out, but my mouth was blocked with tubes. The world seemed hazy and confusing, and I couldn’t figure out where I was or what was happening.

Pieces of time came back to me in little flashes. I remembered Jeff packing up the Volkswagen Beetle with his tools, our tent, and other supplies. I remembered the drive to Silver Lake Sand Dunes where we were going camping. Jeff called us “The Three Amigos,” me, him, and his six-year-old daughter, Melisa. We were excited and happy to be taking this trip together, and even though Jeff and I had only known each other for just over a year, there was no doubt in my mind that we were a family. We set off on the long car ride with Mel sleeping on my lap, Jeff driving. I dozed off a little myself, and then woke when Jeff said, “Look, we’re almost there. You can see the dunes.” I turned my head to look. A flash of color, a loud crash. The car swerved.

Then there was nothing.

No time, no place, no memory. It was like staring into a black screen after the movie has ended. There were little murmurs of static, just the tiniest wisps of memory, but they were absorbed by the blackness.

The feeling in my body was like a throbbing numbness, like when your foot falls asleep and you can’t shake it to get the blood flowing again. The sensation was difficult to pinpoint, as though the numbness was the physical version of constantly hearing a buzzing sound, a persistent annoyance that was not exactly pain but felt relentless.

The room was disorienting as I flipped slowly from viewing one side to another. I was on a ventilator, and would be for ten days, and the whoosh of air going in and out of my lungs formed a steady rhythm, accompanied by the beeping of machines I couldn't identify. Finally, my mother’s face appeared, a look that reflected joy and fear and hope as she called out to the nurse, “She’s awake, she’s awake!”

The quiet comfort of knowing my mother had been at my bedside calmed me a little in these inexplicable circumstances. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I knew my mother could handle anything, would handle anything, and therefore, so could I. Another flip, and I realized Jeff wasn’t there. A new fear for Jeff and Mel overtook anything I was feeling for myself. I knew without doubt that Jeff would be with me if he could. If he wasn’t here, there was a reason. I couldn’t speak because of the ventilator, but I think my mom must have known what I needed to hear.

“He’s alive. He’s still at Hackley Hospital in Muskegon. You were airlifted to Grand Rapids Blodgett.” She didn’t tell me anything else. I clung to the thought that as soon as he could, Jeff would be with me. I knew he would not give up on me.

The nurse checked on the machines that were keeping me alive, and I felt so much gratitude for her, for the machines, for the little bit of blue sky I could see through my window. I was still groggy, and it felt like some weird dream was happening that I couldn’t quite grasp.

Then the doctor came and stopped my bed from rotating while he was talking, which was a relief. He explained what had happened and what they had done to save me. We had been in a car accident, and I had been crushed inside the car after it rolled several times. The doctor said I had suffered a spinal cord injury at my C4-C5 vertebrae. He said I had been in a coma for two days. Two days? Two days. The loss of those two days hit me, but it was nothing like the loss unfolding before me.

I would be paralyzed for the rest of my life.

I heard the words he was saying, but it was almost as if they didn’t have meaning. I couldn’t grasp the situation, couldn’t believe this was happening to me, couldn’t fully understand what it meant. My first thought was that this couldn’t be real—there was no way this could be my life. That sense of the surreal made me feel almost disassociated from myself. There was the me who was the person I had always been, and there was the me who was the person in this bed. I kept thinking that there had to be some way to get back to that old me, the real me, to the real life I was supposed to live. If it just required a force of will, I knew I had that. If it was a matter of going back and undoing that one moment, I would figure out a way to do that.

Somewhere deep down I knew none of that was possible, but I wasn’t ready to face it yet. I think I was in shock. I would try to grasp the reality of the situation, but either my own mind or the drugs they were giving me would take over and it couldn’t quite sink in. Eventually, the details wormed their way into my brain, but it would take a long time for them to settle in. I didn’t know it in those first days, but ahead of me lay months of managing changing emotions and years of learning how to direct my mind toward the positive side of things, no matter what.

I could see my mother crying behind the doctor, but I kept telling myself, “At least I’m alive.” I firmly believed that where there is life, there is hope, and I wasn’t ready to give up hope yet. That would have meant giving up not only on myself, but on the value of life itself. Like trying on a new dress to see how it fits, I tried on this new version of my life by repeating to myself what the doctor had said. I would be paralyzed with feeling from my chest up, but nothing below that. I had the ability to move my head and my shoulders. When I got out of the hospital bed, it would be to sit in a wheelchair. It still wouldn’t quite register that this was really happening, that this would be my life.

The doctor turned the bed back on and I resumed my rotation from side to side. The movement was slow, almost meditative. I knew I was moving because I could see my view of the room change from side to side. In my chest, head, and shoulders, I still had feeling, so as my weight shifted, I could feel the pull of gravity first one way then the other, even though I was strapped into the bed. It was like some strange scene from a horror movie, but it was me, my life. I thought about what the doctor said, and I knew it must be true, but it still wasn’t registering. I couldn’t put together the words he said and see how they applied to me. My brain was still trying to work it out.

I had so many questions. Was there a chance I could get better? What would my life be like after this? Would I be able to do anything for myself? If I couldn’t walk again, what would I do? Where would I live? How would I live? Why was this happening to me? I couldn’t talk so these questions were unvoiced. I was locked inside a body that wouldn’t move and a mouth that couldn’t speak.

If they gave me the answers, I couldn't remember. I just tried to be calm and waited for Jeff. For the next couple days, my mother watched over me with my sister and brothers taking shifts with her. My family—Mom, Joanne, Tom, Dave, Mike, and Terry—had decided that I would never be left alone and set up a 24-hour rotation. They watched over me, a belated form of protection, which was wonderfully comforting. I knew that even if Jeff wasn’t there, he would come for me, even though nobody would let me know how he and Mel were doing. I knew they were in the car with me and had been injured, but not how badly. For some reason, the doctors thought it was better to leave it to my imagination rather than to tell me the facts. My mind swung between despair and hope as I was flipped from side to side in that ceaselessly moving bed. How would I live from now on? I knew that Jeff would never leave me, but I still worried. How would I live with this even if I had Jeff? We had gotten engaged, planned a life together, a life full of the things we loved, like camping, and travel, days at the beach, nights dancing under the stars. It wasn’t fair.

***

After I spent two more days in the hospital, Jeff burst into my room. He was okay, and Mel was okay. She had been released from the hospital after having at least 50 stitches. She had stitches in her knee and on her eyebrow, eventually leaving her with a scar in almost the same spot as one of mine. I was so relieved that she hadn’t suffered permanent injuries. If her head had been struck just two inches higher, she would have had a head injury and might still be in the hospital like me. Instead, she was with her mother.

Jeff told me how it happened. He talked and walked from one side of the room to the other so I could see him as I was flipped back and forth, captive of the Rota-Rest bed.

Memorial Day weekend was the busiest weekend of the year at the dunes. Lines of cars stretched along the single lane heading west, with just a few coming in the other direction. As Jeff was driving, a seven-year-old boy, he found out later, ran across the street to get the mail from the row of mailboxes there. Jeff said he could see the boy smiling as he ran into the front right quarter panel of the car without looking. Jeff swerved, but there was no time, the boy hit the car and rolled up into the windshield before being thrown onto the pavement. When Jeff realized he was facing oncoming traffic, he used all his strength to pull back into the lane to avoid hitting vehicles that might be coming at us from the other side of a hill. The car rolled. Jeff threw himself across the dashboard to try to take the force of the impact and protect Mel and me. The car rolled again. Jeff was thrown through the windshield. Mel was thrown from the vehicle. The car rolled a third time with just me in it. For Jeff, everything went black, and he didn’t know how much time passed after that.

Someone gave Jeff smelling salts and he woke up lying on the pavement with a pain in his abdomen and with his blood gushing onto the roadside. Mel was there, hurt but safe. An officer hovered over Jeff asking if he had been drinking or speeding or if there were drugs in the car. The cop was looking for an answer—how could there be such death and destruction without a discernible cause? For years we wrestled with the same questions. How could bad things happen to good people? How could such devastating consequences come when we had done nothing wrong? How could there be no one and nothing to blame? Why did this happen to us? How could a little boy be dead?

Lying on the side of the road with the police officer questioning him, Jeff didn’t have time to think of those things. That would come later. He looked around and couldn’t see me, and it hadn’t occurred to the officer that there might have been someone else in the vehicle. Jeff used the front of the officer’s shirt to pull him down to his level and yelled, “Why are you asking me this? Where’s my fiancée? Get my family to a hospital now!” Jeff gathered his strength and stood, searching for me along the side of the road, along with a couple of other officers. The car was a crushed orange ball of steel, and nobody thought it would even be possible for a person to be trapped inside, so they searched the area instead.

This was a time before seat belts were widely used. There were no booster seats for Mel. There was no annoying beeping to make you wear a seatbelt. No laws, not even a general awareness that they were needed—almost nobody I knew even thought about seat belts. It was natural to assume I had been thrown from the car. After looking and calling for a couple of minutes along the road, as a last resort, Jeff staggered over to the car, braced his foot against the side and pulled the mangled passenger door until he ripped it open. My arm fell out, dangling over the side of the wreckage, and they realized I was still inside. Each successive roll of the car crumpled the metal shell tighter around me until I was left with nothing but a tiny air pocket.

Jeff said it felt like forever before emergency personnel started to arrive, including the ambulance and fire department. It took them over two hours to cut me out of the Volkswagen Beetle, and by that time an airlift had arrived to take me to the hospital. If I had been conscious, I would have been crying for Jeff and Mel, who were taken by ambulance without me. I would have been terrified about what was happening to me. Or maybe I would have enjoyed the majestic view of the dunes with Lake Michigan beyond, but I have no memory of those moments.

When the helicopter arrived at Hackley Hospital, according to Jeff, the doctors took one look at me and said there was no way a small-town hospital like theirs had the resources to keep me alive through the night. So, there was another airlift, to Blodgett Hospital in Grand Rapids, where there was a little bit of hope, but only a little, of keeping me alive. The hospital room I ended up in there would be my home for months.

The doctors had kept Jeff and Mel at Hackley Hospital, miles away from me, recovering from stitches and all the injuries they sustained. The nurses and doctors wouldn’t tell him what had happened to me, and there were times when he believed I hadn’t survived. But when his parents finally told him I was at Blodgett and had woken up, he decided he had to come to see me. A nurse came into his room to find him taking the IV out of his arm.

“You aren’t strong enough to leave yet. We expect you to be here for at least ten days, and you haven’t even had four days to recover.”

“I have to see my fiancée. I need to see Mary K.,” Jeff told them. “If you would just tell me how she is, I could face it. I’ve already had to deal with one death. Can’t you see how I feel?” The nurse brought in the doctor.

“If you can stand up, get dressed and walk out of the room, I’ll discharge you,” the doctor told him, fully expecting Jeff to be unable to even move. He had been living with the death of that young boy. Jeff told me he had been living with the fear of another death, mine, and the thought that he couldn’t live without me, so he gathered up his strength and stood up beside his bed. He used his arm to brace himself on the bed for a moment because he was too dizzy to walk. After a minute, he knew he could walk, so he got dressed and the doctors discharged him, though they were pretty unhappy about it. He went with his parents to their house, got a car, and came directly to me.

When Jeff walked into my hospital room, I was still strapped in the bed, being turned from side to side.

“Mary,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”

I couldn't say anything, but tears were streaming down my face. That’s when I learned what it was like to cry and be unable to wipe away the tears or blow my own nose.

There was a part of me that realized how awful this was, that felt grief and sorrow for the boy’s family and their terrible loss. But I was still in a state where everything seemed unreal, as though I was watching a movie rather than living a life. So, there was a part of me that just wasn’t accepting what was happening. At this point, that was the biggest part. I was just so happy to see Jeff, so relieved that he and Mel were okay, that I’m not sure if my tears were tears of sorrow or of joy. I didn’t realize at the time how deeply this sorrow, guilt, and fear would seep into our lives. It would take years of talking together, of processing what happened, of trying to make amends to the world. Jeff suffered a form of PTSD, reliving the accident over and over, waking in the night screaming from nightmares. At those times, I wondered who was suffering most, him or me. As Mel grew up and our grandson JJ was born and grew happy and healthy, both Jeff and I would think of that little boy and his family. The loss was so great that sometimes it was unfathomable. We would remember him for a lifetime and for each milestone that Mel or later JJ experienced, we would hold him in our hearts as well.