when the thing that you thought would never happen to you happens to you

You have long said you wanted to be a writer. But through a pandemic that left the world homebound for months and months, two personal quarantines due to your own bouts of COVID, and ten weeks without walking, you’ve spent a lot of time sitting. And you haven’t written much.

Because you had the most to say when you knew the least. You always think you’d know what to do.

But then, life flattens you. You are hit by a car, breaking a bone in your knee. Your beloved grandmother dies three weeks later. You missed your last Christmas with her because you were still dazed and drugged from surgery. You are…bereft. And wordless. Because there is no way to make sense of it.

You have already lacked the words for what has been taken from you and from the world over the past few years. And then this. You try to fight with God each day. You are too far to hear His response.

You hate when people act like they’re uniquely experiencing hard things. You know the world is heavy and we all bear its weight a little differently. But you also hate to have to put an asterisk on what you want to be a long, raging, scream into the void. 

But because the worst possible thing would be to accept that this meant nothing–that the red scar carved into your skin only served to make you more ugly, more butchered, not wiser—because that is too scary, too earth-shattering, too godless to believe, you try to learn something from it. You cling to your belief that orders your world: that everything means something. And you know that the little meaning that you’ve found in all of this is the hope that you can become a person who has learned something, a person with more empathy, a person more in touch with senselessness to help the next person it decides to meet. 

Here is what you learn when the thing that you thought would never happen to you happens to you (plus the other things right behind it):
You don’t want to talk about it. Unless you do, in which case, you want an empathetic listener, perhaps a few well-timed head nods, maybe a few emphatic “mmmms,” but not the too-sad eyes. Never the suggestion that your tragedy is their biggest fear, never the implication that you have somehow crossed over into the pitiable, into the damaged, into the irredeemably sad. You still elicit the details of the latest workplace scandal or their new relationship or their dramatic family Christmas dinner. You need something, anything else to think about!

There is the grief, and then there is the grief after the grief. The worst is the middle. In the beginning, you get texts and packages and calls because you ARE the drama. There are surgeries to be scheduled and doctors appointments to attend that keep you hurtling in a forward motion. But the worst is a random Tuesday when you have already hobbled around for six weeks and exhausted everyone’s goodwill because you can’t even carry your microwaved lunch to the table at work without asking for help. When your armpits are sore and everything is hard. The worst is the first holiday without her, the way you see death everywhere now. The worst is the in-between.

You begin to see that there is value in sitting with someone in their sadness. But you don’t always want or need your sadness to take up a seat at the table. Fixers get a bad rap in today’s day and age, but there is value in the emotional and the practical. In sending gift cards or boxes of books. In sharing lawyer recommendations and helping parse through medical and insurance jargon. There is value in sending a text message but more value in pushing the wheelchair. You are not good at asking for help. When people guess something practical they can do and offer it, you are grateful. Because our world is not built to make space for grieving, for pausing. There are decisions to be made and bills to be paid, even more than before. And there is the rest of life, boldly continuing to happen. The boy you like will still tell you no. The job will tell you to take the time you need but you’ll still get texts for deliverables. Students will still email you to change their grade. And you will be alternately pissed and comforted by the world continuing to turn. Alternately offended by the utter disrespect of it not grinding to a halt, but charmed by the hope of being one of the distracted passersby again tomorrow, who in the absence of a tragedy, are consumed by joyful mundanity. 

There is something about these events that forces you to crack the door open to your life a little wider. When you crack it open, some people wedge their foot in the door. You hope they remember you have probably already had to tell this story one million times. You hope they ask enough questions. You hope they don’t ask too many questions. You can see when they’re asking questions for you, and when they’re asking questions just to seem like the kind of person that they want to seem like they are. 

You know that you can only speak for yourself and what you wanted. 

It’s okay if they do something wrong, if they say something wrong. You know because you have been on the other side, too.You are difficult when you are grieving. They are trying their best. Being a member of a lovingly invasive community is hard. But it is the most important thing anyone will do. 

When writing about it later, you use the pronoun “you.” Because before, there was an ineffable sense that these sorts of things just didn’t happen to you. Some apartness from those who had these things happen to them. Some invincibility. The glass between you and them, now shattered. 

—

I will remember that this time was hard. That I lost and I gained. That there was so much warmth and laughter in the room, sitting around and telling stories about my grandmother. That there were giggles and gooey sheet masks and wrong notes as we practiced our harmonies to sing at our grandma’s grave site. I think she would’ve liked that. That there were calls to doctor friends and chicken tenders and honey mustard in the emergency room. I said it was the best date we’d had and I meant it, a small island of normalcy amongst mountainous uncertainty punctuated by the handcuffed, yelling patients being led by. That coworkers fought over holding the door for me and carried my water bottle. That there was breakfast in bed daily from a loving and worried mother. That I felt more connected to the world when I had to lean on it. That concerned friends organized an email chain to my sister. That some relationships grew deeper and wider in my dependence, and some quietly faded into mist. That every day was closer to healing, and that my body proved the strength and resilience that had been previously intangible. That there is some sweetness in the rawness, being so broken open to life. And some coming home to myself again. These moments are devastating and surprising and cleansing and clarifying. And most of us won’t make it out of here without one or five or a hundred.

I don’t know how to end this because this didn’t end. There are still bills to pay and physical therapy and court appearances and no running and all the permanence of titanium plates and screws. 

At some point after the initial rush of packages, after that flurry of activity had faded, I got another package. It was a decorative plate of Frida Kahlo and it arrived from Canada, surviving the journey but bearing one clean crack down the middle. Accompanied by a sweet letter about how Frida Kahlo used her accident as artistic inspiration, my friend pondered our desire to make meaning out of everything because “Frida would probably have preferred— given the choice—to have not needed to get hit by a bus in order to have her artistic awakening. Her work rejects easy lessons.” I super glued the plate back together and stuck it on my dresser anyways, where it holds whatever I place in it. Maybe that’s how this ends or doesn’t. Cracked, but refusing to be disposable. Marked, scarred, still here, still expectant of what will next be placed in my hands.