The Five Year Anniversary

Over the days that followed, his pain became increasingly familiar to him.  It would come over him while he was reaching for the push-buttons on his bed or crossing the floor to the bathroom, when he was watching the sun bounce off the TV, watching the rain leave its cat’s paws on the window, a response he realized he’d been waiting for all along, as if he and his wounds were having a conversation at bedtime, interrupted by long moments of insensibility.  Oh, yes.  Where were we?  You were asking me a question, weren’t you?  He did not court the sensation, but he did not shrink away from it, either.  Whenever he felt it diminishing, a brief feeling of regret settled over him.  The fact that he was healing meant that he would be returning to his real life soon.
-Kevin Brockmeier, Illumination.  

I copied that wonderful quote on pain from the mighty Kevin Brockmeier’s Illumination because it spoke to me.  Every anniversary of the accident, the rainy season has passed and the worst of my pain with it.  Rather than struggling to cast my mind back, I decided to record those complaints so I’d have some fresher memories.  It also helps me keep my complaints to myself.

Friday, July 15th, 2011 - It’s a restless day for that creature.  You know what it looks like, the thing which lives inside your thigh, mouth wrapped around the end of your femur where it meets your hip: at the end of The Incredibles, Jack-Jack morphs into a little demon of flames and big teeth.  The end of your femur rests in it’s mouth like a dog sleeping with a chew toy.  The heat tingling from this creature’s mouth is like your nose in the corner of your vision, always there but forgotten unless you think about it.

Then a movement you’ve made a thousand times startles it for some reason.  It’s not quite awake, but it still bites.  Once, twice, three times, before settling back into that low heat.


Monday, July 18th - The aching bones in your leg bring to mind a rotten tooth.  Not a fresh nerve jangling pain, but something brittle you’d see in a skull in a museum.  No longer a tool for biting, but an object to gingerly ease from place to place.

This is not the case, obviously, but it feels so true you actually test holding your entire body with your leg.  You push up and down a few times for good measure, proving your leg is strong, solid, that the weakness is all in your mind.  Even this doesn’t convince you.  Your hollow bones ache like buzzing filament in a lightbulb, warning you to tread softly on what’s left.


Thursday, July 21st - It’s a day to lean forward in your chair because of your rib, the high one toward your back.  You’re a child, and a cruel adult is digging a thumb and forefinger into your back and side like a pincer.  The angle makes your hip worse, of course, so you lean back after a time.  Since most your day is spent in a chair the day passes this way, moving the pain back and forth between your hip and your rib.  


Friday, July 22nd - Your rib, the low one this time, toward the front.  It’s like sleeping on a fold-out cot, the metal hinge digging into your side.  You forget it’s there, and you slouch.  The weight of your upper body pushing down increases the annoying pressure into a deep throb.

You straighten up, which is fine.  You shouldn’t be slouching anyway.


Wednesday, August 23rd - Nothing which cut through the rush of work and wedding prep severely enough to report for a month, which is good.  A day with no relief, which is bad.

No standing position is comfortable, no sitting position is comfortable, laying down relieves the worst of the aches but it’s not an option.  Grit your teeth, get through it, hope tomorrow is better.


Thursday, August 24th - The day begins with some kind of object left inside your left buttcheek, something shaped like one of those trivets you leave on a stove for resting spoons while you cook.

As the day progresses, the object moves south.  It rests against your hip socket, then in your knee joint, and finally your ankle.  The ankle and knee pain always mystifies you.  Nothing happened to your ankle or your knee.  Supposedly getting in an accident is like jumping off a building, six stories for sixty miles-an-hour, seven stories for seventy miles-an-hour, etc.  Your legs absorb the shock of the car’s sudden stop.  But that only applies to head-on collisions, and if it had happened with you, the pain should be in both ankles.  Besides, what bruised bone still pains four years after the injury?

That’s another reason to keep the pain to yourself; the idea that it might be all in your head.


Friday, August 26th - Ribs poking the muscles in your back all day long at work.  Hip at a level you haven’t felt in years.  Blame it on the sudden temperature shift brought by the passing of hurricane Irene.


Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 (the Five-Year Anniversary) - You get the idea.  I stopped at that point but I realize this year that cold snaps in the winter aren’t any picnic, either.  Maybe last year’s rainy season was just extra-bad.  Here are two images I didn’t use but which I also see on certain days: my hip as a sea shell, or a two-by-four blackened and brittled by fire.

Yesterday I helped set up Books & Books’ booth for this weekend's South Beach Wine and Food Festival.  Lugging heavy cookbooks about led to a painful evening, but you know what?  No one likes a whiner.  I popped some Aleve and walked to Cub Scouts with Dylan.

I made a promise to myself after this accident that I'd never take my body for granted again.  The aches last night were worth getting out of the chair and doing something physical.  I should remember that.

The Four-Year Anniversary

If you can find the cracks, you should go to medical school

On February 23rd, 2007, I could have died.  

This statement is as close to meaningless as you can get.  I could have died on December 1st, 1982 or August 15th 1996.  I could have died yesterday, I could die today, and I could die tomorrow.  But could have died feels more honest than saying I almost died.  

True, fire rescue doesn’t airlift you to a trauma center specializing in car accidents and gunshots for fun (or for free), but when I hear “almost died,” I think of heart attacks and strokes, sudden collapses, defibrillators and emergency surgeries.  If the other car had been going faster, if he’d struck my car at weaker point... but those thoughts end with could have.  Almost feels like an exaggeration.

Semantics aside, what I want to talk about this anniversary is pain.  

Doctors told me most breaks heal in 6-8 weeks, which is not nearly specific enough when parts of you are sweating pain.  I spent much of late April and early May of 2007 Googling broken ribs.  Nothing I found encouraged me.  Most posts began with, “I broke my ribs a year ago...” or “I broke my ribs two years ago...” and the posters were still in pain.  

Yes, there’s still pain in my ribs.  No longer a constant arthritic ache, it comes and goes depending on what I’m doing.  Sit up straight in my chair at work for too long and the rib I broke up near my armpit feels the pressure, like a throat that can’t quite clear.  Slouch too long and the rib I broke down by my stomach feels the pinch, like an over-tight belt.  Ignore the discomfort long enough and it will deepen and stretch into a dull thrum.

When I imagine my hip, I always think of a wide-faced gremlin gnawing the end of one of those state fair ostrich legs.  It crackles on and off throughout the day; only rarely does it shoot all the way down to my knee.  

Even more rare is the dull nutcracker feeling clamped around my pelvis.  That doesn’t seem to have a trigger, it just throbs up every now and again to say, you broke me too, remember?   

Winter, even such as it is in Miami, intensifies both the level and frequency of these aches.  The rainy season is just as bad.  It’s a steady hum, like a chorus of strings, occasionally deepening to a throb of brass, every once in a while punctuated by a quick clatter of drumsticks over cymbals or the plaintive moan you might hear in a Pink Floyd song.

My body has aged beyond its years, but I’m less concerned these days with how all this will hang together on the seventy-year-old version of me than with how it’s affecting me now.  Recovering from the accident, when I could barely move, I promised myself I would never take my healthy body for granted again.  Well, guess what?  I’ve been driving to work more than I’ve been biking, and it shows.  It shows in my waistline, in the longer recovery time once I get to work, and my negative attitude.  

Getting back on the bike consistently this past week has meant more than a rush of endorphins and sweat, it’s told me that my aches and pains are not as bad as I think they are.  Just like when I pushed myself to start riding in the first place, the ache is temporary and the reward goes on.

Some lessons I need to learn again and again before they sink in.  That’s why the pain it still here.  Its most important lesson is that each day is a gift.

After all, I could be dead.     

2.23.2010 - The Three Year Anniversary

A friend of mine was mildly disfigured about the face in a car accident some years back. I say “mildly” because I think the scar is sexy, but I’m not a young, gorgeous woman, so what could I know about wearing it? And missing teeth are never sexy, except on hockey players. Anyway, she wrote her obituary afterwards as a cathartic exercise. After my own accident, she suggested I do the same.

Resisting the powerful urge to edit, I present the obituary as I wrote it forty-eight days after the fact:

On February 23rd, 2007, Aaron John Curtis of Miami, Florida lost his life in a traffic accident at the age of 34. Paramedics airlifted him to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s famed Ryder Trauma Center, but he died on route due to injuries sustained at the scene. While Aaron eventually settled in Miami, he also lived in Richmond, Virginia, Syracuse, New York, and Akwesasne (the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation). Had Harper Collins published the book he finished but never quite liked, or had he finished the two books he liked very much and published them, or had he started the two potential Fantasy and Mystery series and had them published, any one of these places may have fought for the right to bury him rather than forgetting he had been there at all. In addition to these unseen works, he also never produced four scripts and never published 29 essays and 30 short stories of varying quality. Aaron is survived by everyone in his family he had known since he was born (except Uncle Fran and Grandma and Grandpa on his father’s side - and what a crazy fucking thought that is, considering all the white trash and filthy Injuns out there who are related to him), each relationship also of varying quality. He met his wife of eight years in 1992 and they never stopped loving each-other, so at least he did something right. Maybe the important thing.

Three years ago today, I knew I was going to die. The car came at me and color bled from the day as God took me out of the equation for a few moments. I didn’t know I’d be back. I didn’t see my life pass before my eyes, I felt my entire emotional life happening all at once, every friend and family member I’ve ever loved and who ever loved me. It was a moment that seemed to last forever, but I didn’t even have time to finish a single thought before the world went white.

If only- I thought, then nothing but white.

Given decades instead of milliseconds, I don’t know how I would have ended that sentence. Maybe the rest of my life is the end of that sentence.

I’ve rewritten my obituary a few times. Once, when I lost some time around an MTBI while biking (that’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, which is what they’re calling a mild concussion nowadays), I made that the inciting accident, but usually I just edit the emotional truth.

Let me make clear, I’ve never lived on Akwesasne. I’m a halfbreed, and we often have chips on our shoulders about not being Indian enough. I was up there a lot as a child and I’m closer with my mother’s side of the family, but I never lived there. I find it odd I’d want to die on a lie. Let’s call it dying on a wish.

I mentioned Harper Collins because they were looking at Scratch the Dead Places. At the time, it was still called Skritch Skratch Man. My cover letter was a chatty invitation for coffee with every cover letter cliché and mistake an aspiring writer is supposed to avoid. I even asked Stacy for some craptastic cover art. Of course they didn’t publish this unpalatable, unpublishable mess. Brimming with excitement at meeting my personal goal of writing a book, wildly optimistic when our Harper Collins sales rep offered to bring it back to the New York offices with him, I subjected an industry shaker with the insult of a first draft.

It was a difficult time for friends and family. To know me was to be subjected to three hundred pages of what amounted to a writing exercise.

“All the white trash and filthy Injuns.” From the litany of unpublished works listed in the obit, it’s clear I was worried no one would see and appreciate my work. My resentment at not having the right publishing pedigree manifested itself in this lame attempt at self-deprecating humor.

There was a question written on the back wall of my seventh grade English teacher’s classroom; “Will it matter that I was?” I think Mr. Genarro wanted to inspire us to greatness, not haunt us for life, but what are you gonna do? Since I almost ended, I was worried about my legacy.

Yes, getting outside notice feels good. Yes, I could use the validation and the money. Yes, it’s largely luck and who you know. But opportunity is luck plus preparation. I’m fortunate enough to love a profession which, all trumpeting over wunderkinds like Zadie Smith or Dave Eggers aside, embraces late-bloomers. Right now, I’m happy enough preparing.

The obit ends with the one thing which made me know I’d lived my life right; my marriage. Well, I still think I did the important thing right, warts and all. Love with your whole heart in this life, or get busy dying by slow degrees.

I suppose the only satisfying ending, the only fitting ending, is a three-year anniversary obituary.

Maybe later. Sorry to be a blog tease, but that sounds pretty fucking morbid.