Overcoming Injury
On a rainless night in Seattle, at around 2:30 in the morning, Amber Olson was sitting on her idling moped at an intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. She had just bought some cigarettes and was heading over to a friend’s apartment, which was about two blocks away. The light was still red. That’s when a drunk driver plowed into her from behind and sped away into the darkness, leaving Amber mangled on the pavement—bleeding, alone, and unconscious. She woke up several days later in a hospital bed, heavily sedated. Her mother was at her side. The doctors informed Amber that she had had a T-6 complete spinal cord injury, which meant that she was permanently paralyzed from the mid-sternum down. “And I can’t feel anything either,” Amber explained to me. “From my chest all the way down to my toes.”
Amber was twenty-six when the accident occurred. She is now thirty-two. She is pretty, smart, and exudes a calm demeanor as she sits in her wheelchair. You can see some pale scars scattered across her face—scars that I assume are from the accident, but I didn’t directly ask about them.
Amber was born and raised in Provo, Utah. Both her parents were Mormon, as were her grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. “They go back to the beginning of the church. They came across the plains. They were pioneers.”
By the time Amber was in the fifth grade, she realized that if she wanted to have any social life at all, she had to be religious. Everyone else was, literally—every single kid in her school and in her neighborhood was actively involved in the Mormon faith. So even though her folks actually were no longer very interested, Amber became religious. “I started going to church on my own. Involvement with the Mormon religion is like a daily thing. I went to church every Sunday, but there was also a young women’s club with activities throughout the week. And service projects. And it was something we all did together—all of my friends. And then also camp in the summer.” Amber was also a believer. Her enmeshment in the Mormon religion wasn’t thus strictly a social matter. It was definitely very much about faith. “I believed. I prayed. I definitely did. I read the Book of Mormon. Later, I took two years of seminary classes. I got up every morning at six o’clock in the morning to learn and study and pray. I really did believe.”
But then, when Amber was fifteen, she moved to Montana with her mother for a year. Upon their return to Utah, something had changed. Maybe it was simply getting away from Provo for a spell. Or maybe it was meeting other people and making new friends—friends who weren’t Mormon and didn’t know anything about Mormonism; some of them even smoked cigarettes and drank wine coolers. Or maybe it was just that she went through puberty. But whatever it was, during the year after Montana, when Amber was back in Utah and a junior in high school, her faith melted away. It happened fairly quickly, and absolutely. She no longer believed—at all.
As she explains, “I was sixteen or seventeen. At that point it was just like, ‘This is crazy.’ I just knew. It was like I just knew that I don’t believe there’s a God. I just can’t believe there’s a God. And not even just removing it from Mormon theology—but just in general. All of it—God, religion. How can you die and go somewhere? I mean, you die and there’s something that goes somewhere? What? I just don’t believe that. So the whole thing, yeah, I just couldn’t believe.”
Amber found a few like-minded students and hung out with them for the remainder of her high school days. And she’s been utterly secular ever since. Although she personally doesn’t like or use the label, she’s a convinced atheist. She thinks science is the only possible method for understanding any questions pertaining to the nature of the universe, and she knows that there’s nothing mystical, spiritual, or magical out there. Just the natural world. “I simply cannot know the forces behind existence. I just don’t think that there is any ‘spiritual’ element involved—but I still stand in awe at the physical forces that shape our universe.”
After graduating from high school, Amber moved to Tacoma, Washington, where she lived with her aunt. She learned how to weld at the local community college. She then moved up to Seattle, where, in addition to her welding, she started working at an independent bookstore. Life was really, really good. She was in her twenties. She was making enough money to afford a small but nice apartment in a perfect part of town. She had health insurance through her work at the bookstore. She had great friends, cute boyfriends—a rich social life. She had her favorite coffeehouses, her favorite bands, her favorite nightclubs, and her favorite mode of transportation: a used Vespa moped.
It, too, was mangled that night, along with her spine.
In an instant, everything in Amber’s life changed for the much, much worse. “The firemen who arrived on the scene saved my life. It was actually my friend that I was going to meet—he heard the ambulance sirens and came out to look and see what was going on and so he told me what happened. The firemen, the paramedics, they got there almost right away and they did everything right and they took me to a good hospital. When I eventually woke up, I was heavily drugged. My dad says that the first thing I said was, ‘I can’t fucking feel anything. What’s going on?’”
Although she had health insurance from the bookstore, it wasn’t comprehensive. It didn’t cover the extensive costs of her dire medical situation, such as any outpatient physical therapy. “My mom shelled out so much money. You wouldn’t believe how much. All her life savings. But still—the hospital where I could have gone for the best physical therapy and rehabilitative training, well, it was just too expensive. So I ended up just kind of having to do it on my own. It took a long time. It took a lot of effort. It was really humiliating, all of it. And it’s still humiliating. It’s not just that I can’t walk. I can’t feel anything. I have no feeling—so I can’t tell if my bladder is full, you know? Instead of having a body that you can do things with, I have—it’s like a sort of alien thing that I have to manage, stuck to my brain. It’s just not very … I don’t know … not fun.”
Depression hit her hard. In the bleak year after the accident, Amber found adjusting to her new situation almost impossible. She didn’t want to live. Suicide seemed like a viable option.
But it was the love she had for her mother, and her mother’s love for her, that kept Amber going. “My mother forced me to live. That was what started out my recovery. I was thinking, ‘I can’t kill myself because my mom will be so sad. I can’t do that to her.’ My mother didn’t leave my side for six months. She took a leave from her job and was just there. She did everything. She found me a wheelchair-accessible apartment and she lived there with me for months. She went and bought furniture—just everything. She’s the saint in all of this. So I guess I was living for someone else at first—for her. But soon you think, ‘Okay, it can be done. It’s manageable. It could be so much worse.’”
From the first sedated hours in the hospital, through that first difficult year and beyond, Amber never once turned to God. “I didn’t even think about God. I never did. I never really even thought about it. My nonbelief is so complete that, well, there you go.” But wouldn’t having had some faith in God have been advantageous during that time after the accident, at least psychologically?
Amber doesn’t think so. “If you believe that ‘God is in control’—I don’t think that’s helpful. And I don’t think you learn from that. I don’t think you can learn anything from that—just giving up or giving away your responsibility to God. There’s potential to learn from these kinds of things, and you give it away when you give responsibility to something that you don’t see and then believe in… . I prefer to affirm belief in life. You have the potential to change, to change it yourself, and you don’t have to give it away to some ‘higher power.’ You have to be able to take responsibility for your own—for the next steps that you need to take after something traumatic. If I was a believer, I don’t know … I can see that it is comforting to think that there is a ‘reason,’ that there is a ‘plan,’ and that there’s somebody watching out for you, somebody that will p
rovide the answer—like, someday you’ll know why. ‘When you die, you’ll find out. So you should look forward to that, and just rest assured that it’s for a good reason.’ But it’s like, I know there is no good reason for this to have happened. So what you do is you pick up and move on.”
So how did she cope, if not with all that comes with religion?
Her mother was central, no doubt. And in addition to her mother, Amber benefited from having solid friends. “I had a lot of support from friends. Everyone was really great. People visited me in the hospital. Everyone was really helpful. I had a very small group of really supportive friends.” In addition to her mother and her friends, Amber cites good old self-reliance as another key ingredient to her coping. “You focus on what you can control. I had completely lost control of everything that I had known before. Even—just—my body.
“So you have to really think about what you can control. What can I actually do, literally? It takes thought. It’s not just something that you can ‘give over to God.’ Or give over to someone else or something else, something higher, you know? You can’t just be like, ‘Oh, everything will work out.’ Because you physically have to make it work out. You do. I had to actively decide to—to want to live. I had to make that choice. And then I had to do what needed to be done. When I fall out of my wheelchair and am lying on the ground, alone, God isn’t going to lift me up. I have to lift up myself. I have to figure out how to crawl to the corner of the room, find some leverage between the wall and the bed, and get back up again. It wasn’t easy. It took me half a year to be able to figure out how to do that.”
Although she can still weld, Amber can no longer work in the bookstore. Life is certainly much better today in many respects than it was five years ago, but it still isn’t easy. “I am living on disability. It is very little money. It is barely enough to pay rent and food.” To help make ends meet, a friend of Amber’s is letting her live rent-free in the Airstream trailer in her backyard. It seems to be a good situation, for the time being. And Amber recently decided to go back to college, to pursue a bachelor’s degree in history. She’d like to become an archivist.
Amber maintains a serenely fatalistic take on things now, and she feels perfectly at peace in her godless universe. “I take comfort in the fact that we’re on a planet, spinning through space, with no reason. That’s comforting to me. None of this matters. I think about that often. Nothing—the meaninglessness of everything is actually the biggest comfort of all. It doesn’t matter that all of this has happened. So the only thing you can do is move on and not abdicate your responsibility to—to yourself. And although I embrace a certain existential meaninglessness, there is of course tremendous meaning to be found everywhere, if one wants to find it. There is meaning in not only being personally responsible, but in responding to others, in responding to the people in your life, to their needs and feelings, and their experiences.”
Reading philosophy has become a hobby of Amber’s this past year, and she carries around two quotes with her at all times, which she finds both comforting and instructional. The first comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, written in 1873, from an essay titled “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense.” It is a quote that provides Amber with a great deal of existential solace:
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.
The second quote comes from an essay titled “Transcendence Without God,” written by contemporary philosopher Anthony Simon Laden. It kindles Amber’s sense of meaning amid life in this remote, fleeting corner of the universe:
In the absence of God, all there is left to human life is human action and interaction with ourselves and each other and other aspects of the natural world, and the only meaning any of it has is the meaning we manage to give it.
Surviving the Holocaust
Nazis. Roll call. Line up. Schnell! Growling German shepherds on taut leashes. Bleak courtyard. Zenon feels frail, weak. He’s scared. But he tries to stand as stiff and as strong as he can. The Nazis are shouting orders, beating people at random. Suddenly, one of the Nazis points at Zenon. “You!” Zenon freezes in fear. The Nazi strides directly toward him. He yells again, “You!”—but it is actually the redheaded young man directly to Zenon’s left that he is glaring at, not Zenon. The redheaded young man steps forward. Five other Jews in the assembly are also called out in a similar fashion. They form a small line at the front. Six men. The yelling Nazi takes out his pistol and shoots each one in the back of the head. Their thin bodies crumple to the ground, right in front of Zenon. Everyone is ordered back to work.
Just another day in the Tomaszów ghetto in Poland, April 1943.
Zenon Neumark was fifteen years old when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. By the war’s end, thirty members of his family would be dead, including his parents, grandparents, and nearly all of his aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as almost all of his childhood friends and neighbors. Zenon’s life as a teenager during the Holocaust was a constant nightmare of fear, persecution, and uncertainty. For years, daily life was fraught with peril and grief. From the time he was fifteen to the time he was twenty, his very existence was precarious.
Zenon’s childhood was spent in Lódz, Poland. His was a middle-class, nonreligious Jewish family. Neither his father nor his mother believed in God. They did go to synagogue once a year, for Yom Kippur, but this was largely just to go along with the community tradition, not for any religious or spiritual reasons. “I think my father spent more time outside the synagogue, talking to friends, discussing politics or something. And we kids were running around with other kids, playing and whatnot. We never really participated much in the service.” Although Jewish in heritage and ethnicity, Zenon’s family was decidedly secular. Zenon himself never believed in God—not as a kid, and not at any time during his long life. He is now eighty-seven, and as he explains, “I would say that I am an agnostic. I graduated in physics—science. I have to have proof before I can accept something.”
When the Germans came to Poland, Zenon’s parents thought things might be easier by moving out of the large city of Lódz to the smaller, more rural town of Tomaszów, where some of Zenon’s relatives lived. So three months after turning fifteen, Zenon headed to Tomaszów, with his parents and sister to follow shortly. But they never came. They kept postponing their departure, until it was suddenly too late and they were trapped in the Lódz ghetto.
Tomaszów, of course, turned out to be no safe haven after all; the Jews were quickly rounded up there as well, and Zenon, along with several other family members, was soon imprisoned in the Tomaszów ghetto. Conditions were cramped, cold, and hungry. There were typhus outbreaks, one of which killed his grandfather. There were gunshots. Bloodied bodies in the streets. Rumors soon seeped into the ghetto about mass exterminations of Jews in gas chambers. Most people rebuffed such harrowing rumors. Who could believe such insanity? Zenon could. “I knew. To some people it was just rumors. To me it was fact. They didn’t believe it. I did. I knew that we are being exterminated.” And sure enough, one day in October 1942, half of the Tomaszów ghetto was “liquidated.” Over six thousand men, women, and children were forced at gunpoint onto cattle cars and sent to the Treblinka death camp, where they were summarily gassed to death. Zenon luckily missed that deportation—he and a few hundred other Jews had been assigned work duty in a labor camp just outside the ghetto walls that day. But his three aunts, Rena, Rachela, and Celina, as well as his eleven-year old cousin Olek and several other
distant relatives and friends were not so lucky.
Now Zenon was completely alone. And he had no idea if his parents and sister, back in the Lódz ghetto, were alive or dead.
He continued to work in the labor camp adjacent to the Tomaszów ghetto, where he received rudimentary training as an electrician. He was fed a piece of black bread and watery soup twice a day. And that was considered a lot. Then one day he heard from his German supervisor that the entire ghetto was to be liquidated. All the remaining Jewish inhabitants would be shipped off to the Treblinka death camp. The “action” would take place the next day. “Tomorrow will be too late,” he was warned. So at three in the morning that night, Zenon hid, crouching in a remote corner of the ghetto, behind a stack of lumber. He watched and waited. As soon as the armed Ukrainian guard turned his back to walk in the opposite direction, Zenon scurried over the six-foot wall of the ghetto.
Now he was a lone Jew in occupied Poland, and if anyone identified him as such, he would be arrested and most likely killed. His first place of refuge was the home of a distant friend of a relative who lived on the outskirts of Tomaszów. She reluctantly allowed him sleep in her toolshed for the night—an extremely dangerous thing for her to do. “There was a proclamation put out by the Germans. It said, number one: any Jew found outside the camp or ghetto will be shot. And number two: any Pole providing lodging, food, or any help to a Jew will be shot.” Zenon knew that he couldn’t stay in that shed for more than two nights. It was simply too risky. He decided to make his way to Warsaw, Poland’s biggest city, figuring that it would be easier to survive there, with a possible degree of urban anonymity attainable. He also had some contacts there—Poles who were friends of friends, who might give him shelter, despite the risk.
Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions Page 15