The Promise: A Tragic Accident, a Paralyzed Bride, and the Power of Love, Loyalty, and Friendship (14 page)

CHAPTER 29

Let It Be

Three words summed up my life before the accident: Let It
Be. My dad used to sing to me when I was little. He didn’t sing lullabies; he sang songs by the Beatles. I knew “Hey Jude” and “Imagine” by the time I was five years old. One of the songs I loved most as a kid was “Let It Be.” The song had an early impact on my life, and the lyrics were words to live by for all of us—my family, friends, and me. When my friend Carly and I sang in the hospital, we sang that song often. Of course, when I was out of rehab, “Let It Be” lingered in my mind, well beyond the whiteboard it was written on that had made it our group mantra. It grew to be my mantra and our way of coping. It was a term that defined how we came to realize our bond without actually saying much about what had happened, and it was critically important to me and to the group. It gave us all strength.

I was being interviewed on the news about the accident, and I mentioned that I wanted to get a tattoo on my neck. Shortly after, I received a phone call from this really cool guy at the Blue Flame Tattoo shop. He’d seen the story and he said he wanted to give me a tattoo for free. I was excited but also a little bit afraid. But with such a nice offer, I couldn’t say no. I had to go through with it. I made the appointment.

I called my brother to share the news. He already had so many tattoos and he’d done so much to help me out that I wanted him there to share the experience with me. The day of, we grabbed my mother and headed out to the shop. I decided to have it done on the back of my neck. I’d thought about that area for a tattoo before the accident, but not for any reason as meaningful as this one.

Breaking your neck at the C6 level affects movement and feeling from the chest down, as well as triceps and finger function. The neck doesn’t actually experience paralysis until you reach the C1 or C2 level, which are the very first bones at the top of your spine. Many people think, “Oh, you broke your neck, so you are paralyzed from the neck down,” but that’s not the case.
Quadriplegic
just means impairment in four limbs, not necessarily full paralysis. So I felt pain in my neck, which I guess made the tattoo more significant and ironic at the same time.

Just saying
pain
doesn’t really describe it. It hurt. The tattoo was applied right where the bone was on the neck, so I think that was why it hurt as badly as it did. Still, hair pulled back, leaning forward with my neck exposed, we got down to business. It was excruciating. I don’t know how many words in, I yelled, “Stop! I can’t take the pain anymore.”

My brother said, “You’re barely halfway finished; you can’t stop now.”

I thought about it for a while, then took a deep breath and said, “Okay, let’s keep going.” In case I might forget just how horrifically painful it was, my brother snapped a ton of pictures of my miserable face wincing from the needling.

Another problem also slowed things down. Whenever my body experienced pain or infection, it often responded with muscle contractions or spasms. This was the case during the tattooing. We had to take a lot of little breaks to deal with my body’s reaction.

But at the end of it all, I was set to remember, for life, those three special words that have been my guiding light. I had
Let It Be
and a peace sign inked onto the back of my neck in the exact spot of my injury. Chris and I have talked a lot about getting a couple’s tattoo to ink our bond, but I wanted this one first. I wanted a permanent reminder that I had made peace with my situation, that it was what it was, and that, simply, the only way to get through life is to just let it all be. Having it in ink on my neck gave me secret strength. Knowing it was there powered me, and those words both literally and figuratively became a part of me.

CHAPTER 30

Buckets of Love

Chris and I had agreed we would spend the rest of our lives
celebrating our love and never letting an opportunity to make a memory together pass us by. We had gone to visit his family in Ohio over Christmas break, and while we were lying in bed, we starting talking about how we enjoyed celebrating love and doing things for one another. We of course already made a big deal of Hanukkah, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and our anniversary, but between it all, we had a five-month gap with nothing to celebrate. We decided as we were lying there to make our own day, for only us to enjoy. Later that day, we hopped on the computer and started searching holidays for that time period in the gap, looking for something random and funny that we could celebrate. There’s a day for everything, but when we saw My Bucket Got a Hole in It Day, we knew it was ours, and it was timed perfectly in May. It was random and goofy, but we marked our calendars, both excited to celebrate.

When the first one came around that next year, I bought Chris a subscription to
Bassmaster Magazine.
His dream was always to have a bass-fishing boat. So I opened a savings account and put $100 into it because, hey, you can dream and you have to start somewhere. He had waited until the last minute to buy me something and got a little panicked by his decision. He had to call my mother on his way home for suggestions about the perfect gift. He settled on a pretty engraved key chain that said “Chris & Rachelle Driven by Love” on the front and “My Bucket Got a Hole in It Day” on the back. He wanted me to have a special key chain as I perfected my driving skills. Ironically, Chris’s dad had a bucket with an actual hole in it. We created a tradition in which we’d put our gifts in it for the exchange. We take a picture with that bucket every year.

Maybe I did take for granted the simple, obvious things before the accident. I hated going for runs, for example. I hated going to the gym and preferred to relax after work. I know those are normal feelings for many people, but if I had my old life back right now and the ability to walk, there are so many things that I would do. . . . I’d go for runs, rock climb, travel more, hike, and see some of the big mountains. I’d do all these things and make sure that I didn’t let a week go by where I didn’t do something new or awesome with my legs, something that required physical ability.

Our Bucket Day grew to become really important to me. I needed to cherish all the little things in life, because some of them were fleeting. Looking back, maybe I would have simply done more when I could walk. I worked at the senior center and as a lifeguard, and that was my life. I am not saying it wasn’t a good life. I had a fun job—I loved working with seniors and I loved lifeguarding. I just didn’t do enough. I didn’t appreciate the ability to dance then, for example. It’s unlikely we would have come up with another celebratory day for our love if I hadn’t learned how important the appreciation of these things was. People need to appreciate every day. I even looked back and appreciated the ability I once had to go to the bathroom on my own. I started speaking to groups, and that was always my message: Take advantage of running or dancing or even the simplest things while you can.

CHAPTER 31

What If

For a long time, the accident and the what-ifs were always
part of the conversation with the girls. Not overtly, but they were the elephant in the room. One night, as we approached the two-year anniversary of the accident, we were all hanging out at Samantha’s house in the living room and something shifted. It was a mini-reunion almost, not planned as such, but we just happened to be together. We were gossiping and catching up, which was our favorite thing to do.

This particular night, with all of us hanging out, the accident didn’t loom. The sadness wasn’t masked with laughter. It felt gone. I don’t know how else to explain that. It’s as though it didn’t matter to us, as a group. Individually, sure, I am certain we were all dealing with it, but as a group we’d been liberated from it somehow, and this casual, uneventful night was only about fun and laughs and friendship.

One of the girls was really nervous because she had to have her wisdom teeth removed.

“I’m freaking out about it,” she said as we all sat around chatting.

“You’ll be fine. It’s just the dentist,” someone else said.

“I’m scared,” she kept saying.

I said, “Geez, I broke my neck. You can get to the dentist.”

We all erupted in laughter. It was different laughter. It was like something significant had changed in a good way, especially for the friend who had so playfully and innocently pushed me. She laughed, too. Finally. We all did. It wasn’t somber anymore. The accident had become fair game. It didn’t own any of us. It was one of those markers, you know, those moments where it’s all different, and although the pain still existed, it didn’t fill up a room anymore. We could genuinely laugh. I don’t think I would have made that joke a year earlier. She was just too sensitive about it then. Everyone was. It was raw, and the guilt and pain consumed them all. But I remember the shift so vividly. We could all feel it and see it and hear it. We were girlfriends again. We’d all come out of this okay.

That night, it became clear as we talked that we all felt guilt to a certain degree. It had come up over time, little by little, but it took us nearly two years to really address and solidify our feelings. We all felt it in different ways. My friend who helped me get out of the pool that night told me late in my stay at the hospital that she felt badly about the fact that maybe she injured me more on the scene by listening to me and pulling me out of the pool, instead of stabilizing me. I assured her that I really felt like the damage had been done when I hit the bottom. Another friend felt that maybe she should have caught me or done something—that she could have prevented the fall if she could have reached out and grabbed me. To me, that was so illogical and her guilt so unnecessary.

One friend told me she watched it all happen in slow motion and, looking back, believed that she could have prevented it. Instead, she called 911. I felt guilt, too, about my split decision to dive instead of allowing myself to fall feet first. I even felt guilty that I was afraid to go into the water.
What if I had just walked into the pool at the steps, instead of hesitating or talking about it being too cold to jump in?
My friend who pushed me watched that scene in her head like a movie, frame by frame, and every time, she played the “what if” game and was then overwhelmed by anxiety. We felt guilt for all the times before as kids and adults that we had played around by a pool. I’d done it. They’d done it. Thinking of all the times before made us cringe, and nothing even happened then.

If only one little thing had been different or we’d been standing in different places. They all wondered if it could have been one of them who got pushed instead of me. I wondered what would have happened if
I
had pushed someone that night, which of course could have been the case. I am sure they all would have rather not been there given what happened, but no one ever actually said that to me.

For all of us, it was a loop in our heads, and we were finally at a point where we could share our feelings on the matter, which to me meant the healing perhaps had really begun.

What if I didn’t push her?

What if I didn’t complain about the cold and had just gone in on my own?

What if I hadn’t made it downstairs because I was still inside?

What if I had been able to catch her?

What if I had not made us go swimming in the first place?

What if we’d stayed out longer?

What if we’d gotten drunk and were too drunk to go swimming?

What if it had been the next night instead?

Airing our feelings like that opened a door for us all. A month or so later, a bunch of us got together for Samantha’s birthday and we had the most amazing time, in part because it was fun and we were all together, but in part because no one said a word about the accident again, something that had been slowly happening with increasing frequency. It was becoming a pattern. There wasn’t really any kind of deep conversation at all, just pure fun like we used to have back in the day.

The night began at Samantha’s house. Before we left Chris stood behind me and helped me look like I was standing up with my girls, and we took an old-fashioned group picture like the night of my bachelorette party. Chris was the designated driver, so it was his job to chauffeur us to the club. My van has a nice amount of space, and along the top it has an outline of blue light. We blasted the music, and for one night it was more like a pimped-out party van instead of a wheelchair van. We were all dressed up, too, and we went to a rooftop club.

I felt a real change that night: It didn’t feel unique or special or out of the ordinary. It just felt completely normal. Can you imagine striving for normal? Not spectacular or anything insane. I was just so relieved we were back to 100 percent regular, raw fun. We’d had so many nights together where the sadness filled the space. They made the rest of the talking feel forced. But not this night. This night, it was just plain real and normal. And I cherish that night when nothing else was with us but friendship and love. It took a long time to reach that moment, but I think once we did, a lot changed forever. We couldn’t roll backward in any way because the healing had begun.