A Body, Undone Read online

  Grieving undoes you and casts you off, far from the workaday world uninflected by loss. That’s why you’re told to move through grief, to transform it into a quieter and more tractable sorrow, and get on with life. Loosen your attachments to whatever is gone. Recognize that the influence of what you’ve lost is still with you, and will remain incorporated into your life. Reengage in the present, and orient yourself to the future. These dictates make sense, but trouble me because my grief is multifaceted and its objects incommensurate. The loss of my mother, whom I loved very much, was profound, even though she was ninety-two and had lived a life full of love and backlit with joy. The loss of Jeff was shocking, despite his long decline, because he was himself so oriented to life, so vital and enthusiastic. The loss of the life I was leading with Janet before I broke my neck is of another kind. Its most important element is wholly intact, for we continue to love each other as richly as we did before October 1, 2003. Our sex life is fun and profound, sometimes both at once. All the same, sex is very different, because my body has lost its ability to register its exquisite pleasures. Life no longer feels radiant. The more mundane enjoyments of everyday life—making a peach pie in August, feeling sexy in leather pants and silver jewelry—are also gone, because they depended on a body radically different from mine now. I can no longer feel the satisfaction of cycling forty miles, or hiking up a desert canyon, or kayaking in the ocean, or riding my gorgeous Triumph motorcycle. I don’t want to forget how those pleasures felt in my body, and I fear the erosion of embodied memory.

  I started writing this book to create something from an otherwise confounded life. Only through writing have I arrived at the life I now lead, the body I now am. I’ve done this work in language, because my profession is the study of literature. It’s what I have and what I know. I have found solace in tropes, since figurative language helps us approach what’s otherwise unapproachable or incommunicable. Emily Dickinson writes,

  After great pain, a formal feeling comes–

  The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs–

  . . .

  This is the Hour of Lead–3

  I begin in that leaden place where pain seems on the other side of language, and work toward living on.

  2

  The Event

  as It Was Told Me

  I will never know what happened. The last I remember is climbing a hill, and the next is an exceedingly blurry scene in the ICU, where Janet was with me, and a nurse was . . . somewhere. The light was very bright. I had lost two days of my life and was about to lose many more.

  In the time bracketed by those memories, I had caught a branch in the spokes of my front bicycle wheel, just as I crested a small hill about three miles into my usual seventeen-mile ride. I considered myself a serious cyclist, in that I hoped to ride at least four days out of seven, and challenged myself, sometimes by choosing a route that included steep climbs, and almost always by paying attention to my speed. I did my best to maintain a steady, fast cadence, and to keep a good position on the bicycle—let the legs do the work and keep the torso steady, low, and forward, with your hands over the brake hoods. Pedal through the circle, as though you’re scraping mud off your foot when you get to the bottom, rather than simply pushing down with one and then the other leg. Get up out of the saddle with your body weight forward when charging up a hill.

  I rode alone most of the time. Coming home tired from my office, I knew that changing clothes and getting on the bicycle would be hard to do, so as an incentive I’d promise myself to take it easy and not keep looking at the speedometer. But then, after the first three miles or so, I’d be warmed up and riding hard, easy be damned. On October 1, 2003, my bicycle was in the shop, getting new shifters and brakes. That Wednesday I was worried about a dinner the next day with the trustees and some colleagues, which I had to host as the chair of the faculty. I took that position seriously, perhaps too seriously, because I thought that there was a possibility of creating some kind of pushback to certain of the Wesleyan administration’s policies that undermined faculty governance and were demoralizing many of my colleagues. I knew that, starting Thursday evening, October 2, I’d be in meetings and meals for the next three days, so when the bike shop unexpectedly called and said, “It’s ready to go,” I was delighted. I wasn’t going to be moving my body much for the immediate future. The days were getting shorter and the evenings colder.

  “Hey, Jake,” I said into the phone, “they just called from Pedal Power to tell me that the bike’s fixed, so I get to ride today—thank God—because the trustees are in town tomorrow through Saturday dinner. At least I’ll get out today, which is great, since they told me it wouldn’t be ready before Friday.” So when I got home, I tossed my work clothes on the bed, got into cycling gear—including a reflective vest and a helmet—and went out. I imagine I started shifting up as I got to the top of the hill, moving into a higher gear ratio to keep my cadence regular as the climb leveled out. The shifters were new to me that day and shaped differently from my old ones. I was worried about the trustees and my responsibility to my colleagues, as I understood it. Whatever was going on in my head and the rest of my body, I didn’t see a branch lying in my way.

  The physics of the event are beyond me, but apparently I came to a dead stop when the branch got wedged in the spokes of my front wheel, which pitched the bicycle instantly over to the right. The force of my full body weight, coupled with the force of violently arrested forward movement, slammed my chin into the pavement. Despite my fast reflexes, my hands were untouched, because it happened too quickly for me to throw them out to break my fall, nor were my shoulders hurt, because I didn’t have time to twist my body. The impact of my chin hyperextended my neck so violently that I fractured the fifth and sixth cervical vertebra, which scraped the spinal cord those bones are made to protect. Serious neurological damage started instantly—blood engorged the affected site, and the tissue around the lesion began to swell, causing more and more damage as the cord pressed against the broken vertebrae.

  I also smashed my chin into tiny pieces, tore open my lips, slashed open my nose, breaking the cartilage, and multiply fractured the orbital bones underneath my right eye. Since I hit my chin just slightly to the right of center—I must’ve been reflexively trying to turn my head—the damage runs from that side, through my lips, and across my nose in a diagonal cut. The wire-rim glasses I was wearing were deeply enough embedded in the bridge of my nose to leave a dark half-moon scar that I see in the mirror arching between my eyebrows. Everything bled fiercely, as facial wounds always do, and loss of blood was the most immediate danger. My front teeth were left dangling and one in the lower front was half broken. I didn’t lose consciousness—how is that possible?—and was able to tell my name when asked, but nothing else. No, I didn’t know what year it was. No, I didn’t know who the president was. No, I didn’t know where I lived or whom to call. And I had with me no identifying papers of any sort. “I don’t feel well. I . . . Don’t feel . . . Well,” I said, a statement of fact that yielded no useful information.

  On one count I was very fortunate. A car was behind, preparing to pass me, when my bicycle pitched sideways so fast that even though the driver had his eye on me, he said he couldn’t see what had happened—I just disappeared. The branch caught in a mass of broken spokes told the story. Thankfully, he stopped to help and dialed 911 on his cell phone. When the EMTs arrived, they immediately called the rapid-response helicopter from Hartford Hospital. It landed on the grounds of a graveyard directly across the road from where I lay shattered, bleeding, and unmoving. I imagine a dramatic scene, just at dusk, with lots of flashing lights and whirring helicopter blades. I had left the house wearing my reflective vest just after 6:00, so darkness was coming on fast.

  The state trooper who arrived at the scene, Officer Milardo, was left with the task of trying to figure out where I lived. He knew my name, got my address in Middletown, Connecticut, and drove over to the house to see if anyone was there who
should know that I was gravely injured and in the emergency room of Hartford Hospital. Friends happen to live directly across the street—when I was in my study I could look over to Anthony’s, and he could likewise see mine. He had watched me head off for a ride some time before, so when the cruiser pulled up, he went out to check if something was wrong.

  “They’re partners,” Anthony said, gesturing emphatically. “Partners.” He was trying to tell the officer whom to call. “She’s in New York City, and they’re partners,” he said, striking the back of his open right hand in the palm of his left for emphasis. So Officer Milardo called Janet in New York City, and reached her in her office at Barnard College. When he identified himself as a state trooper and said, “Are you a friend of Christina Crosby . . . ,” she instantly broke in, “How bad? How bad? How bad?” The officer told her that I was in no danger of dying, although I was very seriously hurt. “How are you going to get to Hartford?” “Rent a car,” Janet said distractedly, to which he replied, “Take the train. This is no time to drive.”

  She got onto Metro-North, having called Lori, who lived in New Haven pretty close to the train station. They drove in haste up I-91 to Hartford. Janet had my power of attorney in hand, because she was prepared to do anything to get into the intensive care unit, where only family members are allowed. Imagining me lying there alone . . . she could think only of being by my side. Doug and Midge Bennet, the president of Wesleyan and his wife, were in the waiting room, keeping vigil.

  “We’ve been able to see her. They asked, ‘Are you her parents?’ and I just lied,” Midge said, and Janet was suddenly overcome. Sobbing the first of so many tears, she cried, “I was so afraid, so afraid, no one was here, she was alone.” “No, no, we’ve been by her bed—but you know she’s not conscious because she’s heavily sedated . . .” At the last, Janet had no need to flourish the power of attorney to come to where I lay motionless, clean, intubated to protect against further swelling that could obstruct my breathing, and quite unconscious.

  I was unable to recognize or speak to her until the end of the following day.

  3

  Bewilderment

  How can I give an account of myself after “catastrophic injury”? That’s a technical term used by physicians and insurance companies for a severe, radically life-changing event like a spinal cord injury. A chasm—impassable, unbridgeable—opened the instant my chin hit the pavement, injuring my central nervous system and stranding me in a violent and unceasing neurological storm. I have no memory of the minutes leading up to the accident, and the accident itself is utterly obliterated. I lost days of my life in the ICU—it’s only a blur of fluorescent light. The month that I underwent major surgeries is lost forever, and the long months in the rehab hospital only gradually came into focus. Janet reported to friends that I was severely injured but had suffered no loss of my “personhood.” I can’t say how happy that makes me—my face acted as a crumple zone and protected my brain from injury—but I feel alienated, sometimes profoundly alienated, from “myself.” My skepticism about my “self” is not only that of the intellectual taught to be suspicious of such a clearly bounded rationality, but also an inability to recognize who I have become.

  Because of my condition, I’ve been pondering the reality that everybody has/is a body. Your body emerges through the perception of others as different from yourself, at a touchable distance, and selfhood is not self-contained. What you want, who you are, how you feel are all brought into being over time and in relation to others, and those thoughts and feelings are repeatedly inscribed, creating powerful circuits that organize a sense of embodied self. Such is human interdependency that my self-regard depends on your regard for me. I need and want a more fully livable life, which turns importantly, if not exclusively, on this play of recognition.1 Spinal cord injury has cast me into a surreal neurological wasteland that I traverse day and night. This account is an effort to describe the terrain. I want you to know, and I, myself, want better to understand, a daily venture of living that requires considerable fortitude on my part and a great dependency on others, without whose help my life would be quite literally unlivable.

  Whenever you offer an account of yourself to others, you labor to present yourself as coherent and worthy of recognition and attention, as I am doing right now. Yet because my sense of a coherent self has been so deeply affronted, I’ve also been thinking about stories that are devoted more to affect than to reason, and because the accident and its aftermath were so horrific, horror stories suddenly make sense to me in a way they didn’t before. Such stories gather affective intensity as their narratives develop, and often create eerie, uncanny effects by presenting doubles—two where only one should be. Hitchcock uses this device in some of his most famous films. In Vertigo, for instance, the story revolves around the emotions of a detective who sees a woman he desires fall to her death while he is paralyzed by vertigo and unable to save her. Then some months later he catches sight of her again, or someone so alike that the resemblance to the dead woman is uncanny. The one he loved seems returned to him, and they begin to date. The uncanny doubling of one woman into two urges doubts that gather into a malevolent uncertainty that haunts their interactions. If she is the woman he loved, she’s one of the undead dead and must be threatening. If she’s not the woman he loved, she’s playing an elaborate confidence game with him and must be dangerous. But she is so beautiful, and resembles his beloved so strongly, that he finds himself drawn on despite his doubts. A sense of dread increasingly suffuses their interactions.

  The childhood in which I was so close to my brother, when we were fiercely competitive and evenly matched, ended in seventh grade, in the junior high where femininity engulfed me. We grew up and grew apart, lovingly enough. He married and went to law school, while I discovered the passions of lesbian feminist practice and politics and went to graduate school. Just as he graduated and was beginning to clerk for a judge, he was diagnosed with MS, and by his late forties was quadriplegic. The contrast in our lives could hardly have been more complete—he was seriously disabled and I was not. In an instant, at the symbolic age of fifty, that contrast collapsed and my childhood fantasy of being his twin seemed malevolently realized, for there we were, each with seriously incapacitating damage to the central nervous system, each in a wheelchair, each requiring intensive assistance just to make it through each day. My brother/myself. Is quadriplegia doubled a fantastic coincidence or foreboding sign? If I am myself, what the hell/who the hell is this body!? My life feels split in two. The horror, the horror.

  Spinal cord injury has undone my body, bewildering me and thwarting my understanding. Yet I am certain about one thing—whatever chance I have at a good life, in all senses of that phrase, depends on my openness to the undoing wrought by spinal cord injury, because there is no return to an earlier life. I know that the life I live now depends on my day-by-day relations with others, as it did before, but to an incalculably greater extent. Now I need you to know from the inside, as it were, how it feels to be so radically changed. If I can show you, perhaps I’ll be able to see, too. The intricacies of bodymind interactions defy certainties and confound representation, but I see no other way to go on—how else will I understand? How will you?

  4

  Falling

  into Hell

  Because I was so powerfully and thankfully drugged, the three weeks that I spent in Hartford Hospital are a jumble of disconnected impressions. The neurosurgeons and the plastic surgeons debated who should go first. My face would remain workable only so long before starting to set, yet my neck was unstable, and needed to be shored up with bone taken from my hip and installed on either side of the fractured vertebrae, or I stood the risk of further damage to the spinal cord. I was in no way conscious of these discussions. Janet was, although the conversation was really among the physicians. The plastic surgeons operated first, and then sent me back to the intensive care unit from which I’d come.

  Coming to consciousness, I fe
lt an obstruction in my throat, the tube that prevented me from choking on my tongue. Although its purpose is to allow you to breathe, it felt as though I couldn’t, and I remember struggling against it in my mind. When the neurosurgeons put me under, I was once again intubated, only this time when I returned to consciousness my mouth and throat were filled with mucus. I drew each breath through that thick fluid, which seemed to be drowning me. Janet watched over me, using a kind of vacuum tube to suction out some of the goop gurgling in my throat.

  These were experiences of powerful discomfort and fear more than of pain, since I was so out of it. Because I had to recover after each surgery, I was in Hartford Hospital for a bit more than three weeks, able to talk, more or less, when I was awake, only a few hours a day. I have a jumbled recollection of being told I had broken my neck and might be paralyzed, or perhaps not—the MRI showed the damage to the spinal cord clearly enough, but there was no knowing what kind of damage it actually had sustained until the swelling began to abate, and that takes a long time. Because Janet was by my side every day, I had the security of her love, which mitigated my fears for the future. I didn’t really understand much of what I was being told.

  I recall as a kind of dream seeing the stunningly white brightness of an operating room one time as I was being wheeled in. I know that dear friends came to visit me. I know that one day my bowels let loose and I fouled the sheets with liquid waste. I know that I went from the ICU, to the operating room, to the ICU, and then to a “step down” unit, only to return to the operating room and repeat the sequence. My mouth was full of metal, arch bars that ran from side to side to keep the roof of my mouth from caving in—somehow the bits of bone that had been my chin were pinned together, as were other bones in my face—and I wore a very high, tight, and rigid cervical collar around my neck. I could not turn my body or sit up. I could not move my legs or feet. I could not lift my arms or use my hands, which were uselessly curled up into loose fists by atrophying muscles and tightening ligaments.