Stage 5

Four years ago, I should have died. I probably did die. Was I lucky? Spared? Saved? I’m still unsure.

Those who know me, or have followed my journey, know that I was involved in a motorcycle accident that few walk away from, on September 12, 2021.

I still have far more questions than answers about that day, but one thing I do know is that while many loved ones were responsible for my recovery, only one was with me at that moment. So, on the four-year anniversary of the accident that would forever change my life, I want to acknowledge that one.

To the Woman Who Saved My Life –

I never saw her, but I could hear her voice:

“Chris, just hang on! You’re going to be okay! I love you so much.”

Those were the last real words I remember hearing four years ago, just before fading into my week-long lucid nightmare.

She went home that first night, rejected by medical staff because she wasn’t my wife or my family, and she screamed. She screamed about the warzone she had just borne witness to, and the PTSD she would inevitably experience; at the helplessness she felt.

But she showed up to the hospital each day during visiting hours, handcuffed by COVID precautions. She sat by my bedside. She cried for me. She prayed for me, despite her disdain for religion.

She made arrangements to have her children cared for, sacrificing precious time with them just to comfort a man who had seemingly lost his mind.

She watched in horror as I cried out for help in a futile attempt to ward off an imaginary demon. She so badly wanted to sing me the hymnal that had always comforted me as a boy—the hymnal that my broken mind told me would save me from my demon. But she didn’t know the words; she didn’t know the tune.

She would have done anything to take away the pain I was going through.

When I awoke from my lucid coma on September 16, she was one of the first voices and faces I remembered. She was the one who sat by me as I learned about the death of my grandfather; she cried with me as the reality set in that I would never see the man who had always been like a second father to me.

As I wailed in painful agony, from the latest of my multiple surgeries, it was she who wiped away my tears. She comforted me.

When we were establishing an aftercare plan for my release from the hospital that had been my home for three months, it was she who first raised her hand to execute that plan.

All she ever asked from me in return for her sacrifices was to see her for who she was, and love her for her imperfections; it's all she ever asked of me. To love her for being the best mother she could be to her children. To love her children for who they were, and not who I wanted them to be

But I hated her. I hated her for seeing me for who I was: a broken, hopeless, self-conscious opioid addict.

I’d become both ashamed and riddled with guilt over the fact that I had convinced myself she was secretly happy about my accident because she just wanted me to move in with her—something I had regretfully fought her on, blind to what it truly meant.

I hated her for being so beautiful as she showered me, carefully scrubbing dying skin from my body and applying ointment and bandages to my various, disgusting wounds.

I hated her because she had to wipe my ass because my hands and arms were useless.

Each meal she brought to me tasted worse than the last, despite the amount of effort she put into preparing it.

I hated her for wasting her time with me; there was nothing good left of me to give her.

I’d find reasons to stay on the couch all night, pretending to be asleep while she folded the laundry she could barely keep up with.

When she would finally pass out, I’d use my walker to somehow move my broken body into our bedroom, watch her sleep, and bemoan the incomprehensible idea that this woman loved me like she did.

It made no sense to me—how could she still love who I had become, and who I’d never be again?

Of course, none of this hate belonged to her. Every ounce of it was a reflection of my own self-loathing, a mirror held up by circumstance. I despised the life I had built, the choices that had gutted me, the shell I had become—and she was simply the closest target for the storm inside me. It wasn’t her beauty I hated, nor her devotion, nor her quiet grace. It was the way her love exposed what I could no longer deny: that I was broken, bitter, and drowning, and that she still chose me anyway. My fury wasn’t about her at all—it was about me, and the unbearable truth that, in her eyes, I was still worth saving.

She came into my life five years prior to the accident. We grew up together, though thirteen years separated us. And yet, there was something about the way she loved me that seemed to erase time, to collapse the years between us. With her, I was not the man thinned by addiction, grief, or regret. With her, I felt young again, as if the calendar had been turned back and life still held the wonder of possibility. She had a way of looking at me that stripped away the armor I had built, the calluses life had carved into me. In her presence, I felt the kind of reckless, idealistic love I thought was reserved only for the young—the kind that made me believe, if only for a moment, that I could begin again. But I was too lost in my own self-pity to accept the love she so freely offered—too angry at the loss of who I believed myself to be, and too afraid of the unknown of what I might become if, and when, I recovered.

Still, the memories I have of her, of us…ooof…no head trauma, no broken bone, no cruel trick of fate will ever be able to steal those from me.

I hope she knows what she meant to me. What she did for me. That she somehow knows how often I smile when I think about our crazy adventures. I hope she knows that I know she saved my life.

And now? Well, now I’m out of hope, and I’m way out of time; I have been for far too long.

So, as I think back on all of it, I have only one wish remaining—that she will one day look back on all of our chaos and see, through the fog of our demise that I brought upon us, and somehow think to herself, “He was once special to me.”

Four years ago she saved my life, and now she’s gone. After all this time, I’ve finally reached the fifth stage of grief: acceptance. It is a particularly jagged pill to swallow now that I have finally realized what she ever needed from me.

I let her go now. I don’t know where that takes me, and I’m scared to think of it. But she’s happy now, and I’m happy for her. She deserves happiness. She deserves peace. She has both, and it is in no small part because of my absence in her life.

As for me, I’m in the eighth month of a journey to find myself—to rebuild and reset. I’m in Ireland today. Will I find what I’m looking for here? I don’t really know the answer to that semi-rhetorical question. But as her favorite quote goes: “The best way out is through.” So I fight on, and I do so with love and gratitude for the woman who saved my life