One afternoon a few weeks after I celebrated my 50th birthday, I came home from campus, threw my work clothes on the bed, pulled on my cycling shorts, jersey, and helmet, and set off on a 17-mile route I’d ridden hundreds of times before.
The next day I was lying in the intensive-care unit of Hartford Hospital, while my lover, Janet, hoped against hope that I was not paralyzed. Three miles into my ride, I had caught a fallen tree branch in the spokes of my front wheel, pitched instantly sideways off my bike, and landed on my chin, smashing my face, snapping my neck, and fracturing vertebrae so that they scraped my spinal cord.
“There will be deficits,” the neurosurgeon said, “possibly — probably — quadriplegia.” A few hours later, a friend driving Janet home from the hospital searched for words of comfort. She observed that, for a literature professor, an avid reader and writer, there would always be “the life of the mind.” She was right.
So was the surgeon. I am in fact quadriplegic, which means that my legs are paralyzed, as are the trunk muscles and some crucial arm and hand muscles. I therefore need support to sit up, and am at this moment held in a sitting posture by a neoprene vest strapped to my wheelchair. My feet are buckled onto the foot plates against spasticity. My arms have recovered considerable range of motion, though pitiful strength, and my equally pitiful hands are of limited functional use.
Within, my bladder drains into a catheter and my bowels are disciplined by a “bowel program.” The neurological pain that devastated me for months is now dulled by drugs, and what had been solar flares have subsided to a constant current of bioelectricity that buzzes below my skin and suffuses my tissues.
Yet from the first, my mind was active and engaged. Forty-eight hours into my new life, after I had been “extubated” and was able to talk, Janet asked me what she could bring to the hospital. “Middlemarch,” I said. “Please bring Middlemarch.”
The following day she came in with the novel. “Should I read the preface?” she asked. “Of course, you have to read the preface!” I replied. My insistence on the full text assured Janet that the accident had in no way diminished my “personhood,” and it allowed her to recognize me for myself.
I don’t remember her reading to me — my memories of those first weeks after the accident are broken like the reflections of turbulent water — but I do know that when I was moved a month later to the rehabilitation hospital, Janet borrowed the 23-cassette edition of Middlemarch from our local library. Day after day, I listened without skipping, all the way to the end.
Between sessions of physical therapy, during the long, empty hours lived in the vividly painful and incomprehensible body I had become, I could enter into George Eliot’s imagined provincial world. I was far better off in the Vincys’ hospitable house, or the oppressively evangelical Mr. Bulstrode’s office at the bank, or with young, vibrant Dorothea in the Lowick house of the Rev. Mr. Casaubon, where she was slowly coming to understand that her husband was far from the great divine she had imagined him to be.
I found solace in the ethical coherence of the novel, its apparent infinity of realist detail that somehow never exceeds the explanatory powers of the narrator. Let me be clear: I didn’t accept the narrator’s insistent, universalizing moralism. Nonetheless, that ordered world was such a welcome contrast to the unimaginable life I was suddenly living. Thank the stars above for the life of the mind!
Slowly, Janet and I rebuilt a livable life, with help in the early years from a host of friends and colleagues. I have returned to work half-time. Working is hard, but not working is harder. I forget myself when reading, preparing for class, and teaching.
Profound neurological damage, however, makes it impossible to forget my body, which is forever paralyzed, always uncomfortable, often in pain. Grief and loss run turbulent through my mind even now, a current I must not struggle against, lest it exhaust me. If I am to continue living, I must be open to being swept away, living on as a perpetually undone body.
Yet I also want to hold onto my life of active physical engagement — athletic, abundant, and deeply satisfying. I must fight not to forget what that life felt like. So despite the sustaining pleasures of literature, I discovered that losing myself in books was not enough.
I needed to enter language and engage my learning in an active, creative way. To my surprise, I began writing in the first person. I wrote to refine my memories of the body I had been and the life I had lived, all of which made up the bodymind I was that day I set off on my last bike ride. And I also wrote to articulate the life that has come to me since, linking my irrevocably sundered past to the present so that I might face the future. I rejoiced in the way sentences pushed forward from subject to predicate, and tropes turned my thinking in creative directions I had no notion I’d go. Finally, writing brought me in the end to the beginning: the moment in the rehab hospital when I was able to imagine a future of independent activity directed to ends I desired.
Paralysis had so weakened my hands that I couldn’t turn a page of the Penguin paperbacks that line the bookshelves in my study. I was unable even to grasp a Kleenex and move it from right to left on my tray table. When my occupational therapist instructed me to do so, I cried tears of despair and rage, bitter tears. Day after day in therapy, I very slowly strengthened my grip as I followed her instructions.
Several months after she had tried the tissue, she returned with a pencil and a book. She opened the book flat before me and, holding the pencil with the eraser facing outward, used it to grab the edge of a page. She turned it over. Then she handed the pencil to me. I grasped it with all my strength, and as she, Janet, and my nurse watched, I turned a page. I knew then that I could in time retire the cassette player and excuse Janet from reading to me. I could once again read on my own. “I have my life back,” I said with tears overflowing. I said again, “I have my life back,” and we all four cried together.
Christina Crosby is a professor of English and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University. Her memoir, A Body, Undone (NYU Press), comes out this month.
