A Body, Undone

by Christina Crosby

  Photographs confirm that memory. We used to take pictures all the time, and recalled our pleasures as we put them into photo albums, where we have six years of happiness on page after page. One day a couple of years ago, wondering whether my memory had somehow burnished past happiness, I dared to search for the birthday photographs. Was I inflating in my memory the daily pleasures of my life with Janet and the moments of sheer joy that illuminated those days and years? I found the pictures seemingly untouched in their Mystic Photo Labs envelope. Flipping through them, I realized that I had not exaggerated my happiness, and that the photos fairly hum with merriment and desire.

  I don’t know if Janet’s ever looked them over. I’ve never talked about it with her. We’ve certainly never gone through those photos together, as we used to do with each new envelope of negatives and prints, and I’ve looked at them only that once. They are still out in the living room. That envelope is somewhere. At this moment, eleven years after my accident, they still feel like green kryptonite to me. Dangerous, dangerous. Love, passion, giddiness, joy, pleasure, desire fairly burn through those photos and the ones arrayed in the albums that record six years of birthdays, holidays, and everyday adventures. There’s no way to rewrite what happens, my lost body is forever lost, and I am forever reliving the events of the past that take on a dangerous golden glow. It’s the glow of illuminated amber in which my remembered body is transfixed. Dr. Kernberg would have it that “the painful, yet creative act of mourning” will allow me to fully appreciate in retrospect what I’ve lost. This “internal learning process” is a concept so innocent of complexity that I really can’t stand it. I knew what I had. I know what I’ve lost.

  Besides, the analytic talk about grief is always focused on the relationship between the dead and the living. No one’s dead in this case, although I often wished in the early months and years that the accident had killed me and sometimes still do. Janet got angry at me one evening after I’d been home a couple of months, as she was pushing the wheelchair toward the dining room that was serving as our bedroom. I had been worrying with my tongue what felt like a new tooth protruding from my gums just below my lower front teeth, and I wondered aloud what it could be. “It’s probably a bone chip,” Janet said, and I cried out, “I am so fucking fucked, I can’t believe how fucked I am,” thinking of my broken face pinned together by the surgeons and wondering what else would emerge. “What does that say about me?” Janet said, her voice rising, clearly pissed. “When you talk like that you’re just erasing me and all the work I do, as if it were for nothing.” Immediately scared, certainly because of my dependence on her, and perhaps contrite, I said I was sorry. But she went on, indignantly, “All my work, all my care . . . and me—it’s as though I don’t matter to you at all.” I protested the contrary, and again apologized, saying that I’d think about her position. It’s very true that I loved her dearly and was sorry to have hurt her.

  “It’s not just the labor—although that’s part of it, for sure. There’s something else, though, and it’s this—You also overlooked—no, refused to see—negated—my love for you. You may not love your body, but I do—you should know by now that I want to be your physical lover. I’m working on understanding and accepting the fact that you do not love your body and, from the way you talk about it, it doesn’t seem likely you ever will. But saying you’re completely fucked is saying that my desire for you and my love is of no consequence.” We were drinking our morning tea in bed, and Janet was describing how she’d felt the night before. As we talked, I came to understand the logic of her complaint, and from that moment forward I vowed not to break out in imprecations against my life, a life that is sustained by her considerable and absolutely necessary labor and even more by her loving regard. Yet on a bad day of pain and discomfort that abstracts and alienates me from my life, I feel my attachment to the world attenuate, and cannot contemplate aging, with its attendant physical and mental decline, with anything but horror. At such a moment, death turns a benignant aspect to me.

  What is it about my injured life that militates against mourning and keeps grief fresh? What makes it feel like a horror story? In a horror story, you begin by being afraid, and all its devices are dedicated to stoking the fear of fear, making it clear that there’s worse to come, that, if you’re afraid now, you’ll be terrified in a moment. When? Wait. Just you wait. You’ll see. You’ll see . . .

  I’m afraid I’ll stop grieving and equally afraid that I’ll never stop grieving. If I do stop grieving, I will necessarily have come to terms with my profoundly changed body and my profoundly changed life, for I can leave off mourning only by no longer cherishing and burnishing my memories of the past.

  I may be perverse, but I’m terrified of what I’ll lose in making my peace with what I’ve lost. I fear I’m forgetting how it felt to be comfortable in my body as time does its wearing work. I fear I’m losing how my embodied passions felt through my whole body, and I’m afraid that I’ll forget the feeling of joy.

  If I don’t stop grieving, and refuse to move on, I fear that I’ll be always missing the body and the life I had at the moment I broke my neck. I’ll be caught in the sticky resin of amber. New pleasures will be foreclosed. I fear being impossible to live with—and I fear not wanting to live.

  18

  Living On

  Yet here I am. I’m sitting at my desk, outlined by and suffused with neuropathic pain, that tingling, vibrating, burning sensation that I’ve been describing from the very beginning. The pain is uncomfortable—today, that’s all. When I’m concentrating, my bodymind turns to the task at hand and this sensation becomes background, only to reassert itself as I lose focus and return, as it were, to my resting state. How am I to represent this complex embodied fugue? My skin is an organ of sense that runs imperceptibly from inside my body to the outside, or from outside to inside, which defeats the idea that I’m living in my body. There are 108 single-word prepositions in the English language, and none is adequate to representing the relation of mind to body. Body and mind are simultaneously one and the same and clearly distinct. Thinking my body, I am thinking in my body, as my body, through my body, of my body, about my body, and I’m oriented around my body. I’m beside myself. Perhaps the most powerful effect of the realist consensus is what Ermarth calls the “concordance of difference,” the summing up at the end of a novel that’s sometimes explicitly offered to the readers by an author, as Eliot apprises us of where and how her characters live on after the end of her story in Middlemarch. The more detail, the more exhilarating and exhaustive is the effort to orient it all toward a single vanishing point, and the more perspectives from which we see a character like Dorothea, the more she acts differently, but always like “herself.” Differences multiply, but in the end they add up with no remainder. The account balances. My account doesn’t. I can’t make sense of this body, which continues to surprise and baffle me.

  When I was first hurt, I began to feel a dense and obdurate need to put into words a body that seemed beyond the reach of language. I searched for words to describe to Doctor Seetherama phenomenological realities that made no sense to me, and tried to explain what I felt to the aides who were turning me in bed. I live on in a neurological storm—it’s electric, even now sometimes violent enough to be overwhelming, and certainly endless enough to be horrifying. Yet my life is not in truth a horror story, and I have no wish to claim that it is, however powerfully that genre has helped me conceptualize my fear of the future.

  I have lived on eleven years beyond the accident, through the suspension of life occasioned by terrible loss that Emily Dickinson represents with such fierce precision in her poem “After Great Pain.” The experience may be so intense that it freezes rather than burns. Then death beckons.

  This is the Hour of Lead–

  Remembered, if outlived,

  As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow–

  First–Chill–then Stupor–then the letting go–1

  Sportswriter
Brian Phillips describes this state, which he experienced once when stranded for several hours on an icepack in the Bering Strait. “It was the first time I ever understood why freezing to death is sometimes described as . . . just like falling asleep . . . . It was like certain parts of [my] body just accrued this strange hush.”2 I recognize the temptation to lay down the burden of living, because I felt it when my body metabolized crushed OxyContin. I left my body and went elsewhere as my bodymind knew the strange rushing hush of nonbeing. Nodding off, I experienced the relief from my suffering as complete . . . myself gathered into a blissful absence of pain, below zero on the pain scale. Lovely, easeful, unsustainable, unlivable life.

  Janet’s told me how deeply relieved she was when I greeted her with “Hi, Jake” the second day she came to visit me in the ICU, where I had emerged from deep sedation. She further reports that the second thing I said was, “How was your conference?” In so doing, I immediately recognized her and her projects. She was reassured. I had a spinal cord injury, she had no idea what that would bring, but I knew her for herself and wanted to hear about her work. In other words, I was myself, which, in turn, helped her to recover a sense of who she was that had been terribly shaken over the preceding forty-eight hours. Our lives are intertwined, and my life is not mine alone, but shared with her. My living makes her life better, and she tells me so—it’s that simple and that profound. I think it’s accurate to call my injuries “catastrophic,” and it’s a testament to the sheer durability of our feelings for each other that the love that was so vital and alive before the accident survived without a scratch. This fact, more than any other, makes my inexpressibly difficult life livable, and I know that Janet and I enjoy a reciprocity of feeling that’s very precious to us both.

  Writing, no matter about what subject, has its way with the writer. Writing helps to teach us what we can’t know otherwise, which makes it a demanding and invaluable discipline. Writing offers, not a way out, but a way into the impossible dilemmas of not-knowing. Each sentence begun can wander off, sometimes irretrievably into confusion and mistake, sometimes to greater clarity. Tropes transport memories and transform them, as resin is transformed under pressure into amber, sometimes with a small, ancient bit of life suspended inside. Amber can be remarkably clear, but the piece that conserves a suspended life is often more valuable. Writing works on memory, compressing and doubtless distorting the past, and offers bodies for the inspection of reader and writer alike.

  Writing has turned me in ways I didn’t know I was going to go—outward as well as inward. Attending to my family led toward a particular intimacy with my brother, Jeff, with whom I shared so much. Searching to represent unfathomable experience—both his and mine—has sent me repeatedly to the dictionary and to the concentrated language of lyric poetry, to ways of knowing like phenomenology and psychoanalysis that seek to understand human subjectivity, and to feminist and queer thinking about embodied and relational life. I’ve reached backward in memory to my childhood and young adulthood, but the process of writing has taken me forward, and continues to do so. Sentences unfold before me, always into the future, even as I return and work over what’s already there.

  I understand that every day I’m faced with an impossible choice—remembrance of things past or living on into a future that is troubling, even terrifying, but nonetheless underdetermined. I don’t know what is going to happen, and I can’t forget the past. I won’t. I need it, I want and I need to remember the body that I once was. That body has suffered grievous injury, and to believe in myself as a strong, competent, and desirable woman I built on my memories of the many moments when I felt all that. Forgetting is impossible.

  Forgetting is also imperiously necessary. In order to live on I must actively forget the person I once was, and be committed to forgetting more mindfully than you probably are as you go about your daily life. I am no longer what I once was—yet come to think of it, neither are you. All of us who live on are not what we were, but are becoming, always becoming. I have chosen, and for the immediately foreseeable future, will choose, to live as fully and passionately as I can. Every time I make that choice, I move further from the past, and am increasingly detached from what once was. It’s a taxing process.

  When I was rehabilitating at the Hospital for Special Care, paralysis had so weakened my hands that I couldn’t turn a page of the Penguin paperbacks that line the bookshelves in my study. As you know, I was unable even to grasp a Kleenex and move it from right to left on my tray table, when Patty instructed me to do so. I cried tears of despair and rage, bitter tears. Day after day in therapy, I very slowly strengthened my grip as I followed her instructions. Several months after she had tried the tissue, Patty returned with a pencil and a book. She opened the book flat before me, and holding the pencil with the eraser facing outward, used it to grab the edge of a page. She turned it over. Then she handed the pencil to me. I grasped it with all my strength, and as Janet and my nurse, Winnie, watched, I turned a page. “I have my life back,” I said with tears overflowing. I said again, “I have my life back,” and we all four cried together.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Paralysis and pain have impressed on me something that I knew before breaking my neck, but understand now with vivid clarity—the simple and profound fact of human interdependence. I have been since my accident so long dependent on so many that a listing of proper names cannot possibly represent all those who aided in my recovery and ongoing life. Nor can I single out all who rendered me extraordinary aid, again because the list would grow beyond measure, but I remember, and I am forever grateful. I remain indebted to every person who helped me and Janet in the sustained crisis and to the many who continue to ease my way. This debt is not one that I can discharge, because it is beyond calculation, nor is it a burden from which I wish to be relieved. I owe my life to a veritable host of people.

  At the Hospital for Special Care:

  Doctor Subramani Seetharama, my physiatrist, who said to Janet, “We are looking for positives here”;

  Danielle O’Connell, my life-affirming physical therapist;

  Patty D’Arena, my empathetic and athletically accomplished occupational therapist;

  Winnie Benjamin, my skilled and compassionate nurse;

  Robyn Cop, a force of nature and integral part of the spinal cord injury team;

  Jeff Dion, then head of the Connecticut Chapter of the National Spinal Cord Association, who came twice to the hospital when asked by Danielle, and convincingly demonstrated to me that it was possible to build a livable life after a cervical spinal cord injury; and

  Donna Collier, who as a CNA carefully tended me in the hospital. She has continued lovingly to aid me, Monday through Friday, at home, and says every day in parting, “Call me if you need me.” I do.

  And at home on the weekends:

  Shannon Upshur, handsome and charismatic, who lifts my spirits and pleases Moxie no end.

  Early readers of the manuscript, each of whom helped me see more clearly what the book was and what it might be, and thereby encouraged me to keep writing:

  Judy Butler

  Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson

  Lisa Cohen

  Leigh Gilmore

  Laura Grappo

  Laura Levitt

  Maggie Nelson

  Tavia Nyong’o

  Ann Pellegrini

  Gayle Pemberton

  Jord/ana Rosenberg

  Gayle Salamon (thanks to Joan Scott for the introduction)

  Matt Sharpe

  Elizabeth Weed

  Eric Zinner

  Cecelia Cancellaro of Idea Architects, acting as my agent, persuasively represented the book to publishers and put me in the best possible position as an author with choices to make.

  Friends and colleagues who helped both Janet and me in a myriad of ways large and small as we slowly built a livable life—many are also part of the Wesleyan community that continues to support my working life:

  Henry Abelove
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  Rachel Adams

  Susan Adler

  Karen Anderson

  Sally Bachner

  Douglas Bennet

  Midge Bennet

  Elizabeth Bernstein

  Laura Berry

  Elizabeth Bobrick

  Elizabeth Budnitz

  Carole Bufithis

  Elizabeth Castelli

  Carolyn Coates

  Robert Conn

  Hope Dector

  Ann DuCille

  Lisa Duggan

  David Eng

  Allen Funk

  E. Grace Glenny

  Ray Gorneault

  Lori Gruen

  Kim F. Hall

  David Hopson

  Sybil Houlding

  Gertrude Hughes

  Allan Punzalan Isaac

  Craig Jakobsen

  Emily Jakobsen

  Jane and James Jakobsen

  Tom Jakobsen

  Rebecca Jordan-Young

  Kerwin Kaye

  Natasha Korda

  Juliana Kubala

  Gale Lackey

  Linda March

  Elizabeth McAlister

  Sean McCann

  Lily Milroy

  Margaret Neale

  Ellen Nerenberg

  Laurie Nussdorfer

  Richard Ohmann

  Migdalia Pinkney

  Teresa Rankin

  Mary-Jane Rubenstein

  Teemu Ruskola

  Anu (Aradhana) Sharma

  Ann-Lou Shapiro

  Bill Stowe

  Andy Szegedy-Masak

  Neferti Tadiar

  Karin Trainer

  Anthony Valerio

  David Harrington Watt