Waking Pt. 1

Part One Trauma and Separation 

“Death and trauma reach through one’s life with stunning swiftness”

In 1978 thirteen year old Matthew Sanford began his healing journey. In a car accident that took the lives of his sister and father Matthew breaks his back and goes into a coma. His mother and brother survive with small injuries. After three and half days Matt wakes up and his journey begins. At the age of thirteen he is confronted with the fact that he will never walk again shortly after waking. He describes this as more than just bodily injury; his sense of living was under attack. How does anyone deal with something like this, let alone a thirteen year old? “I could not control what was going to happen, but I could control how I perceived my situation” (12) At this point he began on a path to healing; he began telling himself healing stories. His remaining family needed him to live and so despite the suffering he had and would continue to endure he had to press forward.

                Matt had lost the connection he had with his body. The injuries he had sustained could not be fixed but only dealt with. The hospital he had been taken to in Iowa could not properly deal with his injuries and upon recommendation of one of Matt’s nurses his mother demanded he be moved to a hospital more equipped with dealing with these injuries. The move itself would be risky and could prove fatal in his current state but they moved him anyways so he could find better care. Death looms over his family and over himself and although he acknowledges it he avoids it. As Matt describes it this accident did not happen to just him and not just to his family but to a connected group of people, a community. People come together to support his recovery; his mother, brother, aunt, his father’s friend, and his sister’s boyfriend.

During this time Matt has a great deal of time to contemplate his life up until this point and then his life as it stands. In a particularly poignant chapter Matt asks “Which family were we?” referring to a deeper eternal question. “…which family were we? An average one from small cities who happened into some bad luck; or were we never average and always headed down that embankment?”   And then on a more personal level “… has my life been a preparation for itself?” He starts to unravel this basic human desire to connect the randomness that defines our condition. He sees these events from the past several years of his life as a form a foreshadowing to this event. A friend of his brother’s had a dream their family would be in an accident, Matt commented ironically on being paraplegic that he’d rather be dead less than a month before the accident, and his sister became wrapped up in this stanza from a poem:

Remember me,

As I do you,

With all tenderness

Which it is possible for one

These seemingly random events added up to something. But conversely had the accident not occurred they would mean nothing. The pattern of thinking that he brought up at this point affected me. I’ve often thought of the events in my own life and have really wanted to make sense of them by believing they point towards something greater. It makes dealing with the situations life presents easier but at the same time could it be true? Could the events of today be preparing us for later events in our lives? For Matt decisions that he made growing up and while dealing with his new life in a wheelchair molded his path. His actions even as a young kid set him apart. He tells a story of how his mother would rub his back as a child and he would reach back and rub hers back. A traditional path to healing would not be in the cards for Matt because he did not fit that mold and could not journey down that path.

                The details of Matt’s suffering as they apply more aggressive forms of treatment are haunting. As he describes the feeling of receiving his first full body plaster cast my mind goes blank. I cannot begin to imagine the pain that he might be feeling in that moment. I cannot fathom his suffering. Through this experience Matt learns how to disconnect from his body and bring his mind to another place. Learning how to dissociate himself from the pain becomes key as he continues through his healing story. Each day he has to be introduced again to his broken body, one he does not know and cannot get used to. At the end of this section he gets introduced to his first wheelchair and can barely sit in it. His “giant leap forward” out of the bed and into the chair feels anticlimactic and discomforting. This isn’t his body he feels.