The snow has been falling in Flagstaff since we left home four hours South ago. Humphrey’s Peak is blackened by the night sky but glows white where the round ball of moon stubbornly shines.
My favorite local diner’s lights defy the blizzard, too. My brother pulls the van into the lot but doesn’t cut the engine yet. My daughter scrambles to locate the blankets, proceeds to tuck them around my body in my wheelchair.
It’s operated by applying taps to a head rest, with my head. We use what we’ve got.
Life hasn’t slowed with the storm, local college coeds accustomed to the ice and acquainted with their breath on a visual level most mornings year round. Tonight is no exception, a handful of handsome, half-drunken frat boys eager to open the door to the diner for us and let us take the next available table.
“We’re in town for the metal show,” my brother volunteers.
We look the part too; I’ve got on my leather and spikes, fresh pink in my hair.
I pull my power chair up alongside a table because I can’t get my legs under it.
Outside the window Route 66 streams by us in a steady river of red, orange and white light, distorted and fuzzy from the fog and flakes.
I’d hated driving in this community, I recall suddenly. I relate this to my teenage daughter who was just a small child then.
“Always too many cars and not enough space.”
“Or buildings,” she adds, too quickly for the response to be a premeditated dig at my prior construction career; her innocent and ancient connection to Earth always reminded me to get in tune with mine.
I miss the jobsites though; I miss the grind. I miss driving the forklift down the highway in the snow, gloved fingers gripping the wheel.
I built a fire station here a lifetime ago; and North Country Medical Center over on Fourth Street. I had worked on the new gym for the high school on the nearby Navajo reservation and worked at the local steel fabrication shop, watching the snow fall outside the big garage doors and keeping warm by the exhaust of my welding machine.
My career was ripped from me with my spinal cord injury a year ago, as rudely as the motor and sensory function below my shoulders had been removed in an instant with the crush of my C4 vertebrae.
I’m determined to let the disability deter me from my adventures exactly as much as I let my gender and a little bit of snow scare me back in my day.
Facing the challenges of complete quadriplegia make walking the steel welding a torch feel like child’s play though.
I’d be lost without my precious family.
My daughter orders breakfast for dinner. She doesn’t care that she’s not old enough to attend the show, at just 15. She’s ecstatic because I let her boyfriend tag along, and they’ll be unsupervised while we’re at the concert with my friends.
It’s probably not the smartest decision I’ve made as a mother, even lately, but the dynamic between my daughter and I is forever altered with my disability. The caregiving roles are reversed. I lack the finances and resources to afford me the opportunity to lean on her less. I give her so much responsibility with my care, it’s hard not extending her adult autonomy in other areas of her life where she probably needs me to do the opposite.
“Are you excited Mom?” Haley stabs a waffle drenched in syrup and waves it at me to get my attention.
I open my mouth to answer, and my brother, distracted by his conversation with our friend Ian who has arrived, sticks a French fry in it. My daughter and I laugh but he’s still oblivious.
I am self conscious about eating with assistance in public. But I’m determined to normalize this life. I refuse to hate my life. I have too much pride.
“I am SO fucking excited,” I assure her, and my excitement is no fabrication.
Otep is my favorite artist. Her words descended to the Hell my mental illness dragged me to so frequently and they resonated with my crushed soul, soothed it somehow, lifted it back to the light, alchemized my heart from cold hard stone to steel refined in fire.
She found me again, supine and terrified, self worth shriveled, spine crushed. She reminded me again, of the hidden spring of inner strength: yes, that same one my brother’s old Greco-Roman Stoics spoke of; that burning light within that Christ touched on in the Gnostic scriptures; that ancient energy of Gaia- Mother Earth and my ancestors.
Even now, I call on it.
We use what we’ve got. I’ve still got my connection to this universe, even if I can’t wrap my arms around it or grab it by the balls anymore.
Despite my eager excitement, I’m exhausted from breathing in the mountain air. The cold exacerbates my neuropathy. My arms and legs scream and stream with fire. My muscles spasm involuntarily. A foot taps obnoxiously on its footrest, threatening to spill off it completely until my daughter discreetly presses her hand to my knee to calm the tremor.
“Should we go?” My brother asks.
My blood pressure has risen. In a flash the heats crawls up my face, which begins to drip sweat.
Any minute now and my heart will begin to pound hard as if I have just ran a marathon.
Yes, there it is.
With the adrenaline comes indignation, with the suffering, self pity.
The journey alone had been overwhelming. The cold is cruel and vicious to strike so certainly upon my arrival. And now, my parasympathetic nervous system works against me too. My body, missing all memos from the brain, has given the mind a certain message:
Nope. No amount of will can power a body so broken.
Tears sting my eyes.
I see the look exchanged between my family and it pulls more pain from my chest. How I hate letting them down. How I hate listening to a body that makes no effort to listen to me.
But if my blood pressure keeps rising, I’ll be in the hospital.
We will head back to the hotel for a bit. The opening acts will take forever anyway. Maybe my symptoms will subside.
My brother starts the van and runs around to throw open the big double doors on the passenger side. He pushes the button to lower the wheelchair ramp.
Nothing happens.
“Grab it here, bro, shake it!”
My brother and Ian struggle to fight the ramp.
My teeth chatter uncontrollably. The sweat on my face feels frozen. At least my blood pressure has dropped.
The teenagers huddle close to me like bodyguards, holding my thick Apache blanket tight around me so the wind can’t whisk it away. Our breath hovers in front of us, a collective cloud.
At last the frozen lift gives, and with a cheer of relief we pile in, the heater running so long it’s warm inside already, and I’m thinking, I’ve got this.
At the hotel our golden retriever, Lovely, bounds out of the room and into the blizzard to greet us the moment the door to the room my brother rented before dinner is opened.
Inside we smoke a joint.
The cannabis calms my nerve pain and anxiety. I’m ready to do this.
“You don’t have to push yourself if it’s too much.”
Yes I do.
But no, it isn’t.
In the parking lot at the club where I met frat boys a decade ago, Ian bangs on a back door.
In seconds bouncers rush out, equipped with a tarp. Sheltered all the way, I’m ushered into the venue, the bouncers parting the crowd like the Red Sea, one yelling into my ear:
“How close you wanna be?”
“How close can I get?” My voice is lost in the noise but he reads my eyes.
“Let’s get her front and center!”
The crowd greets us like old friends, loving on my hair, fist bumping my supine hands.
The accepting, loving atmosphere that is prevalent in the heavy metal community isn’t understood by outsiders but I’m at home among the misfits, perhaps even more so now.
I feel Nicole’s arms around my neck before I see her face. Our delighted shouts at each other are immediately swallowed by the room: Quirky, crazy Nicole in her unicorn leggings, and sweet Levi with his long curls and bohemian scarf- my dearest friends.
My heart soars. My spirit flies. My body is just along for the ride.
Being mindful of gratitude is new for me. It’s ironic; I appreciate life more now than I ever did when I was able and agile. Perhaps it is the perspective that the near death experience had lent.
I’d been wide awake in the aftermath of the car crash. For too many long moments I lay with my face in my lap and a mouthful of hair, the driver screaming that I was dead, as I doubled over motionless.
I’d wanted to scream out to the whole world that I most certainly wasn’t. It sounds impossible but I felt real gratitude as I waited on paramedics to cut the car apart to get me out.
I knew I’d broken my neck. But I hadn’t stopped breathing.
And I hadn’t hit my head.
I hadn’t hit my head!
I could still be a mother. I could still communicate. I could still learn. I could still write. I’d figure it all out.
In the months that followed as I had fought to regain the autonomy just to breathe on my own though, there were many dark moments in which I struggled so significantly to find the light I managed to see somehow from my initial position in that flipped SUV.
I considered myself a corpse, called myself a ghost in a shell.
I’ve come so far because of the people who convinced me I was more than that. I convinced myself of my worth, put myself to work. I write with my teeth.
We use what we’ve got.
I’ve got my mind, and my mouth. I’ve got my ears, lean into the lyrics, resonate with the beat, release with the screams.
“Alright mother fuckers! I want every last one of you to jump the fuck up!”
Suddenly my heart plummets. Certain verbs still slap my face with harsh reality.
Run, walk, climb, swim, dance, hug, jump.
I can’t jump. Not even when my favorite artist in the world says how high.
But then she looks right at me. She grins and extends her arm straight out to point at me so no mistake is made.
“And you. I want you to bang your head!”
The crowd of metal heads around me roars in approval. My brother raises my arm above my head and Nicole manipulates my fingers into devil horns.
We use what we’ve got.
I bang my head.
I’m no ghost tonight, no corpse. I’m seen. I’m loved. There’s still adventure in this world within my reach. There’s still the sun on my face and the snow in my hair. Dopamine for my brain and music for my taste.
