In Matthew Sanford’s book, “Waking” he writes in the chapter called “Body Memories”.
“I am in the hospital, but what am I healing? Is it my back or is it my past? Whatever it is, I am on fire. What should be only a three- or –four-day stay turns into seven. I cannot sleep. Time won’t let me; ghosts won’t let me; past trauma won’t let me. Each time I drift off toward sleep, there is a fury. Startled, twitching, jumping, screaming – not mind, but body. I can’t see it coming. Blindsided, hammered, bouncing, thudding, breaking. Then I wake to quiet, to stillness, only for it to repeat when I doze again. I am exhausted, but it won’t let me sleep; whatever has me in its clutches won’t let me sleep. I am overwhelmed.”
“I am besieged by a past that I can no longer see. I try drugs. All these years later, they now give a patient control of the IV morphine drip. I press a button and bingo. I am trying to eliminate the transition into sleep; my aim is to move straight into passed out. It doesn’t work; nothing works. Something deep within me has uncorked. I am coming apart. That thirteen-year-old boy is calling me back. I am being pulled back into what I left behind.”
“Over time, it dawns on me- I am having flashbacks. Almost all of my physical trauma has occurred between the states of wakefulness and sleep. I was dozing in the car when we slid down the embankment. I was in a coma during those first few gruesome days. I was on Valium when the screws went into my head, when they broke my wrist, and on and on. So often my trauma had come when my guard was down, when I was trusting the world, when I was taking a nap. Whether it is being in the hospital again or having my spine manipulated, my body is making me relive my past. It is gaining voice because I am finally strong enough to let it. My body has been terrified, and I am grief-stricken that it has suffered silently for so long. I can’t stop crying.”
“This goes on for nearly three days. Barfing body memories is what I am doing. It feels completely out of my control. But the memories are helping me regain a semblance of continuity. For example, I have mentioned before that I have no memory of the day of the accident. That’s not exactly true. I have no mental memory. But I am learning that my body has retained the memory; it has been holding pieces of my history until I was ready.”
“The experience of my body memory is hard to describe. I now know the feeling in my body when our car shot hard left as our tires hit dry pavement. I can feel the car tumble from left front corner to end over end. More than anything, I can feel the terror of traumatic time, the pause, the hanging, just before impact. (This feeling is still triggered when I am landing in an airplane and the brakes engage.) I now know that the blow to my upper thorax came from the right side at a downward angle, sweeping through my torso, from right-side ribs to left hip. I also know- from the ‘inside’ – my shallowness of breath, my struggle for air, and my drift into shock at the accident scene. Still, twenty-five years later, if my spine moves too much or too quickly during yoga, I go into a mild version of past shock. My spine is still letting go of echoes of trauma.”
“These memories are not visual. They are not thoughts. They are experienced, something like the inward feeling of falling into a dream, only to wake up just before rolling off the bed. They are pauses of fright and held in the silence before breath. They are my body bearing witness to what my mind could not.”
“As I lie in that hospital bed, I am temporarily living in more than one dimension at a time. I did not expect this level of healing. I thought I that losing the metal in my back would be enough, that this would neatly end a twelve-year chapter of disintegration. Healing, however, is not instantaneous. It is earned. There is no way to step around my body’s past experience. I am terrified. My body has much to say, and it needs acknowledgement. More importantly, I need to feel grateful.”
“As I wake up to the horror of traumatically induced body memories, I am forced to feel death – not the end of my life, but the death of my life as a walking person. I absorb death as I watched that young boy having screws twisted into his skull. The silence within which I found refuge was a level of dying.”
“In principal, my experience is not that uncommon, only more extreme. We all experience levels of dying throughout our lives - the process of living guarantees it. As each day passes especially in our later years, we become increasingly aware of our own mortality. If we can see death as more than black and white, as more than on and off, there are many versions of realized death short of physically dying. The death of a loved one sets so much in motion: grief, a sense of loss, tears, anger, transcendent sense of love, an appreciation of the present moment, a desire to die, and on and on...”
“What happened to me was simply more dramatic. I absorbed an unusual dose of death at an age when I still had much living to do. Then I made it worse by working to overcome my paralyzed body. I used my will to step over it, to step over the perceived death of two-thirds of my body. My actions unknowingly injured me. Now, I can’t stop crying because in this hospital I am experiencing the convulsing body of a suffering, but I am doing so as an adult…”
“During the previous twelve years, I have borrowed against my body. I have unwittingly relied upon the resounding beauty of its discipline against death. When I “left” my body during my traumatic experiences, it was my body that kept tracking toward living. It was my body that kept moving blood both to and from my heart. Often, as we age and can no longer do what we once could, we say that our bodies are failing us. That is misguided. In fact our bodies continue to carry out the processes of life and unwavering devotion. They will always move toward living for as long as they possibly can. My body did not as for the rupture that it experienced, but it somehow survived it.”
“I am still returning to my body and will do so for the rest of my life. I will leave this hospital with the crushing realization of my body’s commitment to my living. I did not mean to take it for granted.”
Matthew Sanford
