This is the first year since I’ve started doing this I seriously contemplated not writing at all. Possibly because my fragile facility with numbers lead me to remember the anniversary as April 11th and not the 14th. On April 8th, thinking I was only days away, I noticed how the usual heaviness had not yet creeped in. I wondered optimistically if I’d reached a new point in my evolution in which my feelings about the crash had eased away from a subconscious emotional realm and into a more purely intellectual one. Of course, that line of thinking was the crash and its anniversary and all that surrounds it seeping back in once more. Each day since then, the slowly building weight has become more and more noticeable, until today (April 12) it is almost inescapable.
What’s strange is how vague the weight appears to me even now, after eight years of experience. It does not carry with it concrete signs of why it’s there or even what it is. It’s not the memory-laden, almost wistful grief that sometime comes on the birthday of a dead relative. It’s not a nihilistic cloud of bitter anger. It’s not depression. It’s not even sadness, really. It’s not specifically about Alex or my injuries or injustice or irresponsibility. It has no form or color. It’s just heavy. It starts in the brain and flows slowly downward. My eyes droop, my skull draws in, my shoulders hunch, my chest begins to cave, my legs feel tired, my feet slap the ground gracelessly when I walk. I am not being held or dragged. I am steadily encased in a transparent but viscous something and it takes effort to move my newly-added membrane. By the time the 14th arrives I am usually pretty drained.
It’s interesting to question where the weight comes from. It’s more than the loss of a friend or the commemoration of a fucked up evening followed by many fucked up months. I know the short answer is, “trauma,” but I lack the clinical knowledge to synthesize the physiological facts into something that squares with my raw and relatively innocent immediate experience. The closest I can come to understanding it has something to do with energy and the enormity of what my and my family’s experience tapped into.
I don’t really believe in ghosts or spend much time pondering psychic phenomena, but I do believe in the idea that people leave energy behind when they die. Whether this energy can be physically measured or is just a residual feeling we carry in our minds and hearts is largely irrelevant. I think we carry with us the impact a person had in life. I also think that energy can be tied to certain locations and dates (or songs, books, movies, etc) because they were shared with that person or played a large part in your relationship. The collective amount of psychic energy expended during the crash and the months and years that followed was like a bomb dropped on all our lives. It was a violent explosion of pain and fear and sadness and empathy and connection and vulnerability and humor and anger and tedium and perspective and heart. It encompassed family and friends across the country, complete strangers on the highway, police officers, EMTs, nurses, surgeons, interns, therapists, new acquaintances, old acquaintances, lawyers, morgues, bands, benefactors and countless others. It opened pathways both terrible and transcendent. It taught me more than I could have remotely fathomed and left me with knowledge I wish I could unlearn. The explosion left behind it a deep, wide crater. The day after the crash I was at the bottom. It probably took a few years just to scale the sides and, once out, there was still a gigantic hole in the ground. And not just a hole, but a cloud above, casting a shadow over what was to come, carrying debris and possible radiation for miles and years. Even if you walk away from the crater, even as you begin to refill the crater, the initial shape and scope is always there. The potential of that cloud is there. I think the heaviness is the physical/mental/spiritual manifestation of the burden of having been in the crater, of knowing what it took to get out and what it still looks like from the outside under the intermittent shadow of the cloud. It’s the burden of knowing what it feels like for the vehicle you’re in to lose control. It’s the burden of having heard my friend’s last breath. It’s the burden of the careening claustrophobia of the ambulance, of the chaos and tedium of the hospital, of the out of body fever dream of intravenous painkillers. It’s the burden of watching my wife and my mom watch me and wishing they could do more. It’s the burden of my roommates in the hospital and rehab facility, each dealing with their own horrible path back. It’s overdue bills and government programs. It’s the burden of coming home scarred and broken, of re-learning how to do things I’d done for decades, of being a burden to my wife and family, of trying to fall asleep and not see all that I had seen. It’s the burden of physical therapy and legal documents and courtrooms. It’s Alex’s memorial and Alex’s parents, Jeannine and Sean. It’s becoming family with Jeannie and Sean knowing the reason why we’re now so close. It’s the burden of knowing that I had not known Alex all that long before we became inextricably linked through this nonsense tragedy. It’s eight years of wondering if I could have done more that night. Eight years of wishing I had said more when Alex was alive. Eight years of wishing we could jam in that disgusting rehearsal space one more time. It’s the burden of boxes and boxes of Jeannie’s and my book, of the poems and art inside, of all the people that made it happen, of what we went through to make it. It’s the burden of being tied to people, all of which I love dearly, I never would have known as closely without Alex’s stupid death. It’s the burden of knowing Jeannie and Sean will never be without their pain. It’s the burden of being tied to the man who killed Alex. It’s understanding what Jeannine and Sean lost after Jack was born. It’s the how close Alex and I became even in a short time. It’s wanting to share things with thim. It’s knowing there is little if anything I can do to prevent something like this from happening to Jack or Nissa or anyone. It’s the burden of everything after being colored by the crash. Driving, drinking, drumming, running, walking, stretching. It’s not being able sleep if there’s a particularly realistic collision on tv, or a particularly nuanced depiction of trauma. It’s not being able to sleep if something during the day triggers thoughts of the crash, driving by an accident on the highway, hearing about a drunk driving crash, hearing a collision on the highway by our house. Sometimes I’ll be reminded of Alex’s memorial or find some relic of our friendship. Sometimes I look at Jack and see all that might happen and it’s enough to make my heart burst. Sometimes I’ll be fine. Sometimes I won’t. It’s much, much better than it’s ever been, but it’s still there right beneath the surface. I walked into a recent therapy appointment riddled with anxiety about non-crash related things. My therapist suggested we try EMDR (https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/). When she asked me to visualize the anxiety, I immediately flashed to Alex’s truck skidding and rolling down the highway, which lead into waking up in the cab, which lead to watching and hearing him buck against the seat and be still. Of course, the rest of the session was taken up by re-living the crash and that night was a hard one to find sleep. That it only lasted one night is a sign of great improvement. I did not come in wanting to talk about that and I hadn’t even been thinking about it, but it was right there at the top, waiting to spiral out. It’s the burden of knowing it will always be there in some form or another. It’s the burden of knowing every April 14th will bring with it a need to check in with myself and, likely, fight through a bit of heaviness.
I think there’s a tendency to wonder if maybe spending so much time thinking about the crash and its aftermath makes it more difficult to get past it, but I really don’t think that’s true. It’s not about getting past it. There is no other side. There is living through it, of adapting and evolving inside it. I cannot undo anything that happened and I cannot remove its residue from my mind and heart. I can learn how to live with it as a part of me, along with Alex and Jeannine and Sean and every dumbass hot shot on the highway and Joshua Blackburn who killed my friend and everyone who opened themselves up to me and how open I became in response and the terror of Jack’s stupid fragile body and the stupid fragile bodies of all my family and friends and all of it all the time forever. I can and have reduced the impact. I have moved from a place of near incapacitation to a place where maybe two or three times a year I have trouble sleeping on top of the raw, vulnerable nerve endings of the second week of April.
The crash opened me up to extreme pain, extreme confusion, and extreme empathy. That deep, wide crater appears in the distance and I walk toward it every April. The cloud that is always there turns a deeper shade of gray and my open self remembers it all. Where I’ve been, who I have been with, how far I have gone, how long we have all been connected and how many more will join as we move forward. April 14th I lie open, just as I was on the operating table, open to what must be done, to what may enter. Love and darkness and asphalt and bass strings and babies and whiskey and cavernous, shrieking metal and reaching out and holding on and letting go and knowing even though his hands were so quiet that night, he sometimes still pushes me into what comes next. We live and we continue and we do what we can to help others understand that there is no one way to feel. We must learn how to honor it all, the pain, the love, the fear, the hate, the silly, the wonder, the horror, the beauty. We must allow it all in so that we may learn how to live inside what happens and not be buried by the weight. The crater is wide and deep, but I am outside it looking down. And I am free to look up and walk away.
I don’t mean to sound self-pitying or over dramatic. Today is the day I allow myself to vent without filter, and this is how it came out this year. As always, I can’t say enough to thank you all for being who you are and being with me while I do this. I know it’s not fun to be there sometimes. Please take care, drive safe, and have fun.
Sincerely,
David
Here are two poems I wrote about openness and empathy:
HAKOMI WALK
He is at fault, of course,
but he does not become fault -
a skinless, rootless mass.
He walks and warms the bones
of other, luckier souls.
The heart hardens, constricts,
and stumbles to insist he is nothing
but a mistake.
Lost.
I remember the face of the one he doomed.
The patient eyes and the wet, horrible noise.
The piercing fire in my gut and knees.
The dawning I was not the one who died.
Alone.
In bed I tried to rid him of his life,
remove his weight and clear him
from our soil,
but his steps are burdened
and his bones are cold.
Open.
He is mine and I am his and we share roots
in drought and flood.
we know eyes and long to rid
ourselves of noises in our skin.
We walk and warm the bones
of those without.
Unclosed.
THE BARGAIN
I met a woman who lost her son.
Her son had been my friend.
We bonded our grief together,
knowing it was not the same.
Separate, but parallel,
we push, not knowing where.
Simply forward, hard and through
as forceful as we dare.
My son was born and now I know
something of what she lost,
swaying in the back seat
singing that he knows the names of cars.
She loves my son in near the same
way that she loves her own.
She knows what we accepted
on the day we brought him home.
“I can’t imagine.” They all say.
She says, “I think you can.”
The floor beneath your feet
is not as sturdy as it seems.
She knows what a phone call can do.
She knows how thin the tether.
She knows what color the box turns
as it rolls slowly into the fire.
And she knows how fragile fingers are,
how warm tired shoulders.
She knows the wrenching pull through black
of love’s undying smolder.
And I know too the risk involved,
the dam built just to breach.
What one allows inside
when one allows one’s soul to reach.
The darkness guaranteed is all a part
of our grand bargain.
The day you feel those fingers curl,
your heart is broken
open.st year since I’ve started doing this I seriously contemplated not writing at all. Possibly b
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