I’ve had vertigo this week, whenever I lie down. Reassuring for once, Dr. Google tells me that I probably don’t have rapidly metastasizing cancer of the left hair follicles, but benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. Little crystals in my ears are out of place, and the treatment is to move my head slowly in specific directions, like calibrating your phone’s internal mapping function by tilting it.
Doesn’t sound fatal.
Before I looked it up, Jack asked whether vertigo can be emotional. He didn’t mean to imply it’s all in my head, though it turns out it literally is. Our world is spinning again. Choices made eons ago — friendships forged and nurtured — now foreground fear and suffering. Nothing will ever be the same, but we don’t know how yet. This new path offers no visibility.
Life is full of choices, but it’s even fuller of adjustments.
Choices are the exception: where to live; whether to date; what major to pick. When we’re lucky we can picture the path forward, but that’s only imagination. Just out of sight there could be a bridge out, dropping us into a foetid swamp, infested with rodents of unusual size.
Probably not, though. Life is more mundane than that. More of us wake up one morning realizing we left twisty unknown paths to drone down the freeway, rushing endlessly to some forgotten destination.
Not me, though. When I saw shapes shifting in the fog, past the curves ahead, I pinned the throttle. Friends described me as “aggressively risk tolerant,” so I rode alone.
Until I met Jack.
If I was a good rider, Jack was great. At stoplights his big, black bike bounced between his knees like the ball clinging to a Globetrotter’s palm. Long after I shared his bed, I climbed onto the back of his bike. That’s when I found out just how much better he was. Once he trusted me on pillion, we rode a remote curvy stretch in Oregon at 120mph, two up, camera gear in hand. It felt like a roller-coaster: safely thrilling. That’s when I knew I’d never seen him push his limits.
It’s when I understood that my speed-demon husband would die alone, someday, brushed from the path by shadows. I’d lost other friends that way.
I renewed my vows that day. Demons are just angels who missed a turn, and who doesn’t want to stand next to that?
After the first accident, I wondered if that slanting dappled sun would blind me in some descending-camber corner. Could I withstand his leather wings, shredded across the asphalt?
After the third accident, I preemptively forgave him for abandoning me. I had to. There are worse things than death.
When it finally happened, he wasn’t alone, and he didn’t die. I witnessed the rooster tail sparks of pipe grinding on pavement through my camera lens, hanging off another bike’s pillion. I’d almost jumped on his, but golden light is precious, even after a long day of shooting.
Peering through a camera viewfinder places you outside the scene, and I react to crisis by not noticing it. Crisis happens yesterday, or tomorrow, or over there. Never here. Never now. This corner — the one I’m rounding — is clear and dry. Only later will I remember the click of the deer’s hooves as it cleared the pavement moments ahead.
After we all came to a flying stop, an EMS-trained friend took over. I walked away, snapping pictures of the bike, its mangled engine pinging quiet distress. Whatever this day became in Jack’s retelling, I’d have art.
He couldn’t die. Not with me there. I knew that.
The idea didn’t even occur to me until 2am, alone with strangers who stayed so long they became friends. Picking up a dead phone in an eerie waiting room, a voice from another place assured me that five hours after I squeezed his hand goodbye, they’d finally staunched the bleeding. They could begin the spleenectomy now.
That’s when I searched my memory for the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, but the past and future were stroboscopic flashes of gibberish. It’s when my new Southern-speaking, pork BBQ-eating friend started telling me stories about his synagogue.
Jack wouldn’t have crashed if I’d climbed on his bike. We had rules.
He lowsided, hit a mailbox, then highsided. His bike flew thirty feet before hitting with impact sufficient to cleave free the front wheel. Jack flew further, before landing on his left shoulder hard enough to break his clavicle, scapula and nine ribs. His spleen exploded. His shredded wings evaporated.
He looked okay.
I remember thinking “get the hell up, Jack — don’t make a big deal out of this.” On my camera viewfinder, though, the detached wheel didn’t look like a roadside repair.
Damn.
Jack survived three surgeries, then everything-resistant pneumonia. After a week unconscious, and two days of agonizing conscious intubation (“He’s tough. He can handle it. He’ll breathe for me.”), he couldn’t speak or swallow. He keeps water handy at dinner now and his singing voice is as tattered as his wings. If he lives to eighty, we’ll face down that same gravel-strewn stretch, again.
He’s turned sixty since I first drafted this, and I’ve updated “seventy” to “eighty”. Until you have to look inside the box, gentle uncertainty reassures.
I tell myself that someday, I’ll have defined each puzzle piece of this life; put form to all the impending deaths I face. My parents, my spouse, myself. That’s if I’m lucky. I’ll push them into place, and someday I’ll découpage the whole thing, a finished picture that was always there on the box, if I’d only known how to look.
I won’t. We never see the whole picture until it’s too late.
My mother, who spent a career evaluating brain damage and dementia, extracted my sworn promise never to put her in a nursing home. “What if you fall down that gully behind your house, alone, and die impaled on blackberries?,” I asked.
She says there are worse things than death.
I was called recklessly fearless, but that’s not me now. Not after Alabama. If I were fearless, I’d admit how many things I just don’t want to do any more. I haven’t ridden in seven years. Some days I don’t even leave the house.
I have a friend who adores his wife the way Jack looks at me. He wrote about her motorcycle racing history recently and I learned this: she lost her first husband, a motorcycle racer. There she was, living her one fearless life, and her partner’s path exploded abruptly into bolts and bones.
She raced again, after that.
I want to drop in on them, a thousand miles away, to ask impolite, uninvited questions. Did she somehow close the box again? When did she remember herself? How did she keep riding her own twisting path, when all I want to do is sit on a dappled bench?
Maybe someday we’ll visit those friends and I’ll ask all my rude questions, but on the day I drafted this, Jack dragged his skeleton, which hurts from more breaks than either of us can track, out of bed to run an errand in our safety-rated, heated-seat Subaru Outback. He loves that car the way I love staying home.
He headed south for the impossible task of sitting with a cherished friend facing her own impossible choice. She thought she might make it that day, but I’m writing this months later, so I know she didn’t. Her world went on spinning for another week before crunching to a stop.
Schrödinger got this part right: there are worse things than dead cats.
Jack and I discussed these things before Alabama. Motorcyclists and parents, it was the responsible thing to do. We drew diagrams for each other across the outside of the box using strong black lines and bright primary colors. I knew exactly what his wishes were, as I signed surgical consent forms and listened in on morning rounds.
We discussed them again after Alabama. Crises ding up the paint. The lines never look as clear in the aftermath. If it doesn’t change your idea of what’s in the box, was it really a crisis?
Jack’s needed machines to breathe and tubes to eat and he doesn’t want to do that again. I have his permission to drag him through that hell again only if the odds are in his favor. He’s not a twenty-to-one better any more. No Vegas trips for us. He’s an organ donor, too. I know now that means not sitting beside him when his lungs fill for the last time. It doesn’t bother him. Brain death is a prerequisite. Saving one life is akin to saving the world. He points out he’ll never know.
I’ll know though. There are worse things.
I’ve seen the cracks in that pavement, but I haven’t had to ride that road. Not yet, anyway. I scan for breaking markers now, before I blow a turn. I’ve glimpsed inside the box. I’ve felt my traction slip.
Jack’s friend would choose a week later, but it wasn’t really a choice, after all. When the world is spinning the image flickers. You might convince yourself that if you stop the spinning at the precise, perfect moment, you can control what you’ll see. You can’t. Once the crisis happens, you’re left with the adjustments.
The events of my life conspire to tell me this: life happens, and on the vanishingly rare occasions we get to choose, we do so blindly. The prettiest Italian country road may hide washed out bridges, lying in wait for a thrumming Ducati and its speed-blissed rider. A dank forest path, covered in shuffling slimy duff, may open into a sun-kissed dirtbike heaven.
We can try to choose a path that suits who we are, or perhaps who we want to be, but we have only now, and here, to do it.
So why can’t I get back on my bike?
Sweet friend, I'm so glad you've released this piece for us.
"When did she remember herself? How did she keep riding her own twisting path, when all I want to do is sit on a dappled bench?"
Vigilance seems to snake it's way into our lives at times. In the twists of dictionary linkage, looking up Vigilance brings me to Circumspect, which ties to Prudent, which attends parties with Judicious and Sensible. I too am questioning if this is the party I want to be at. Therapy has me asking how to exert control of the music playlist at this gathering! And therapy is likely going to ask me if I can see incorporating not just one, but several instances of self into my being. This mortal coil is sticky stuff. There are worse things than death indeed. ❤️