More than nearly anything else, seeing the image of my happy family from the evening before our 2002 car accident strikes my heart. What it is about this visual clue? How young and naïve our kids were? Less than 24 hours after the photo was taken they would be gently placed in the back of an ambulance near me, to carefully head down icy Timberline Road to Mount Hood Medical Center. Sometime after, I alone would be ambulanced onward to the trauma ward at Emmanuel Hospital where medical providers would submit me, again, to scans somehow lost between the two hospitals.

Yes, we were on a rare nearly spring, two-night vacation with my sister-in-law and niece to ski at Mount Hood’s Timberline Resort. What a treat, we thought! The next morning, a Saturday, we headed down the mountain so I could coach our oldest daughter’s basketball game back home. How is it I remember someone making a phone call to the assistant coach to let him know the team would lack both a coach and player?

Sometimes it feels as if the accident happened to someone other than me. Like my best friend or my brother. Or perhaps, instead, it was simply a bad dream. Is that because it happened decades ago? Or is it a gift generously bestowed by my brain in an effort to minimize the event’s influence on my remaining days? Even though fragments of it seep into my subconscious in ways I don’t always identify or understand. Or, maybe, it simply takes years for us to slowly digest it all. To make peace with it. To reflect on its causes and impacts. And take out what we may. It is now as I look back that some things figure prominently. I know too that details remain in quieter shadows while still others have dissolved in the passage of time.

Our daughters’ elementary school principal gifted me a journal shortly after the incident, noting how it helped her after her own car accident. The journal’s first page still includes her compassionate note. No, she didn’t know I already kept a journal, even if in this part of my life it was mostly rife with funny things my kids said or activities our family participated in. Nor had this long ago retired principal known then how in the future I would share my first written page of that journal when leading workshops on journaling for wellbeing. A journal I haven’t read more than those first two pages in the elapsed thirty years since our car accident on Oregon’s Timberline Road. Until now. Although, without even looking at those pages, I did remember it took me days to be able to begin to write about the trauma of the accident.

I’ve never written in detail outside of that journal about that now, long ago event. Even though I frequently refer to it as an explanation about some aspect of me or my mindset. To explain my chronic back issues. Or how, if I were to go through it again, I’d retain a therapist for my kids. Or how it impacted our next choice of car. Blogging about our new electric car recently resurfaced the topic to the forefront of my brain. I thought about doing more with this piece; might there be a submission somewhere? Some might make it into a book with lots of advice or lessons. Nope. Let’s just do it here, I figure. This blog has become my trusted companion. I no longer worry about what anyone else might think of me. Most will never see it. But I trust, it may bring meaning to a few.

I remember clearly, even though I’d had so much trauma, the EMT who asked me if I could walk to the ambulance. Had I been thinking logically, my brain knew never to move a spinal victim. But I was and still am to some degree, a rule follower and did as I was asked. Months later I was grateful when I entered conversations with AMR, emphasizing that this wasn’t about a lawsuit, it was about being assured that retraining of staff would happen. Which AMR eventually confirmed to me. I had been seated in the backseat with our older daughter, equipped with lap-only seatbelts in our four-wheel-drive. Our youngest daughter was still in a booster due to her size and required the front passenger seat shoulder strap. Yes, we normally drove the kids in our Volvo wagon but expected the Toyota Tercel to be better on the mountain. Yes, we could have equipped the Volvo with snow tires. Those thoughts now in the rear view window of our past.

I can’t make out the face of the ER nurse who chastised me for making a joke during what was, she advised me, “a very serious time,” but I remember being miffed. “Don’t tell me what to do with my pain and fear,” I thought even in my own pain and fear. Grateful later that night on the trauma ward as a nurse with a similar-to-me sense of humor shut the door during some Code, sat next to me briefly, and allowed me to joke about something dark. How is it I still remember that he shared his own witty reply? I remember my friend Maura visiting and advising me it wasn’t the best time for me to ask to have a photo of my face, for memory’s sake. And, above all, as I awaited a neurosurgeon to come in the next day, leaving me on morphine and a backboard through the night, I remember our beloved Unity World Healing Center’s Reverend Victoria’s visit. She blessed me and said a prayer. And then she asked me to ponder what gift I might find to give the world in exchange for living through that day. Or more bluntly; why was I spared?

In those first few days of recovery at home, I remember not being able to breath well through my nostrils due to significant facial damage sustained after my head hit the back of the front seat. It is amazing, I think only now, that I sustained no concussion. Yet I had my first ever bouts of near panic attacks, probably heightened by pain medication. I can find humor today, given how much I adore flowers in our home, at how that first evening at home, I demanded Russ put all the bouquets –so kindly shared by friends and family– outside. I was convinced their fragrance and pollen were impacting my breathing.

From my journal:

Sunday, March 10, 2022

“…This tremendous upset of our lives. The gratefulness that I feel; is really beyond words. And I feel there’s a lesson – or perhaps many lessons. Certainly, the easy lesson is to make each moment (and each relationship) count. That’s a no brainer. Not to take any of the wonderful things (and the challenges, perhaps) for granted. But is there something else – something bigger, or perhaps more precise. Someplace to spend my energy? My passion? Hmmm.”

Tuesday, April 9, 2002

“Maybe a lot of my problems stem from a lack of accomplishing things. The first 6 weeks – I could handle. I expected. But perhaps part of my depression lies in the vision of the next six weeks and still not being able to accomplish things. Okay. Maybe life should’t rest with needing to accomplish? How many times will I need to revisit that!!!”

And with these glimpses of my past, I am reminded of the treasures. The Cedaroak School Community that brought us meals until I finally had to admit we really could do it ourselves. The dear work colleagues who donated their sick leave to me because I was, at that point, un-benefitted. And it helped me learn by accepting these offerings, how important it is to allow others to care for you when you need it.

These decades later, I ask myself Victoria’s question. What is the gift that I offer in exchange for living through that day? Or being able to live on without extreme debilitating physical or mental impacts from the accident? Is this why my most recent book characters so ponder their own relevance? The age old, “why am I here” question? Or did my experience just mimic something that comes up in unique ways for each of us in our life, all on our own schedule?

As the recesses of my brain gently prodded the question, a sentence from my current read (Country People by Daniel Mason) struck me.

“Kate remarked on this capacity: to play ball with just about anybody, to elevate the sorriest soul in the ranks of the folkloric, even the heroic. To fall in with anyone, anywhere.”

And that, I think, is what I find meaning in. I can’t say it’s a result of the accident, or more simply how I came into this world, my personality, or my response to my life journey. But it is how I feel myself today. Even my time with a hospice patient, as hard as it might be, is joyous in connection. So, I guess, if I’m remembered for only that? I’m good with it. To see a being as they are, stripped of the evil. Stripped of the pain. And no, I’m not there yet. But if I’m allowed, I have more time to get there.

What is my gift? Today, after visiting with my current hospice patient, who I’ve only visited three times, I still knew. Yes, my eyes were heavy with tears, some I had to wipe away, as we talked today. A mixture of connection and sadness. I told my new friend how frequently I cry these days with tears often an inseparable mixture of joy and sadness. So much that sometimes I can’t discern between the two emotions. My friend said, “At least you can cry.” I knew what she meant. As I helped support her head for our hour-long visit, I was fully in the moment. Nothing else in the world mattered. But later, as I walked to my car, I knew. Connection is a gift that means more to me than nearly anything. I don’t know if that accident all those years ago, pushed me in this direction or if it is simply all those little bits of who I’ve been and who I am now. Into this kaleidoscope of life’s moments. But no. I’m not going to try to figure it out. I’m just going to be grateful.

HERE I AM! In these moments. Grateful. Whole. Here.

And, About Those Books…