Two Places at the Same Time

Monday, October 26th, 2015

Next week will be one year since I survived a near fatal accident when the car I was a passenger in, slammed into the back of a semi on an interstate freeway. In addition to other  bodily injuries as the result of the impact, a 5 gallon bottle of apple juice flew from the back seat into the front window and shattered, before hitting me in my head slightly above my left eye. I must have had my eyes closed because I didn’t see anything. I remembered thinking upon impact about past descriptions I had read on traumatic brain injuries that occurred when the frontal lobe of the brain hit the inside of the skull and then bounced back to the posterior area of the skull. I assumed that was happening – I wasn’t aware of the flying apple juice bottle at the time.

I retained consciousness, and climbed out of the car in spite of a cracked sternum, a broken ankle and a sprained ankle and a large gash over my eye. I remember not feeling any pain but experiencing a black cloak of fog descending over my head that dropped down to my nose, and I was trying to see underneath. My husband helped me out of the car and told me that the iris of my right eye had turned light blue. Soon after I remember helping the paramedic perform a mental status exam on myself and informing him I had no loss of consciousness. I also remember asking everyone within hearing distance to help me find a rental car so that we could continue to Utah to facilitate the workshop with the Andean medicine people that had been planned for over a year. Then the ambulance came.

After arriving at the hospital, the ER doctor convinced me to spend the night in the hospital after sternly explaining that leaving with a cracked sternum could be fatal. After getting a wheel chair and a cast I forged ahead to Utah the next day. I was going come hell or high water. Close friends expressed concern about my refusal to rest in bed. After completing the workshop, I ended up with bronchitis. Coughing with a cracked sternum was incredibly painful and I finally agreed to spend a couple of days resting.

This accident occurred 6 weeks before a painting show that I had not started preparing for. My husband suggested the theme of self portraits and helped me rig up a way to sit so that I could apply paint to the canvases, ranging between 3 and 6 feet, I began painting. Prior to the accident I had decided to paint on a larger scale, which proved to be a little awkward. The following paintings are from this body of work.

People that I respect continued to suggest that I really hadn’t processed the trauma – I hadn’t. I recognized the fight verses flight trauma response behavior in my insistence to attempt to facilitate the 10 day workshop for 40 people. I found myself wading through layers of psychological grief until I became conscious of the somatic experience in my body. I re-experienced the pain in my nose that felt like it had been broken, and remembered the pain of chipping all of my front teeth, that had since been repaired. Moving into the core of the somatic memory felt grounding and brought a sense of relief.

I remembered being outside of my body and seeing a circle of light beings, perhaps angels, surrounding me. Now  looking back, I found it curious that I did not remember this aspect of the event until I remember the experience in my body. I’d been struggling with writing about nontemporal reality for a couple of years now, and now having two sets of memories of the same event has added fuel to the fire. Is it possible to split and have two sets of memories for the same event?

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