(If I Only) Had A Brain

Today is the end of a week of ice-storm and its aftermath, that was supposed to end the day after it began, with a torrent of rain. Instead there were five days of intermitten (and intermittent) snow and sleet that layered the roads and sidewalks with treachery. Because the storm would pass us by, I figured I had enough on hand to make it through. I had one prescription that had to be refilled. I called it in the day before the storm was supposed to start around two PM, figuring I would pick it up around noontime. By noon the sidewalks and streets were covered with ice pellets and snowflakes, and rain was no longer in the forecast, though forecasters struggled to overcome a similar lack of accuracy. The problem? Every twenty-block area had a different mix; forecasters went crazy trying to tell us what and where, and often relapsed into incoherent generalities about what would happen.

By the end of the sixth day, yesterday, I could see that the sidewalks were clear all the way to the grocery store that’s a block away. So today, as I planned it, I would go to the grocery store and stock up once more. And then go to CVS, which is out of sight, but even closer. The hazards are the areas at the street corners; sometimes they are shoveled out, sometimes not. I found mostly clear pathways on the way to and from the market; for CVS, I had to go out into the street to circle around the still icy, unshoveled corners. There was one exception: the street corner for the building where I live. Thanks, Tom or Bob or Eugene, for doing such an exceptional job in shoveling the corner.

Two days ago I had to go out, just as the worst of the weather had cleared, but before real snow removal took place. I had garbage that had collected; usually I would take it out to the balcony leading to the fire stairs, that overlooks the parking lot and area for the dumpsters. A left turn on the balcony and about four steps brings one to a pull-down trash chute. One pull, a quick stuffing of the trash bag through the too-small opening, and the well-tied garbage bag goes tumbling and clanking on its way. With the weather still bad, and the sidewalks not cleared, I figured it would be better not to try to use the trash chute. I would take the garbage down to what is not euphemistically called the “trash room.” So I did.

Today–I’ve been bitten by a cleaning bug as a consequence of being shut in by the storm–once again I had a garbage bag with which to do something. Since I had already been out to the grocery store, a sign that the worst of the storm was over, I blithely went back to the usual practice of taking the garbage to the trash chute.

I opened the door and my feet were on ice, slippery, bumpy ice. In fact the four or five feet to the trash chute consisted of a slippery, uneven surface that belonged in a “fun” house, for those of green and flexible limbs to have fun negotiating. On my feet were my second pair of shoes–I’ll tell you a story of shoes someday– with smooth rubber soles. I thought “Oh, these are the wrong shoes!” But then, I thought, “If I go back to the apartment to get my first pair of shoes, who is to say that those shoes will be that much better on this ice.”

And there, right in front of me, was the goal, the pull-down opening where I could deposit the bundle of garbage I carried. With the goal in sight, rational alternatives didn’t occur to me. It became a challenge to navigate that icy bumpy treacherous surface without falling, to cling to whatever support was available to help me keep my balance as I made my way.

Never mind how I got there, never mind that I could go back and get different shoes, never mind that I could take an alternate route and put the garbage in the trash room, never mind that I could even take the garbage back to the apartment and wait for warmer weather. There was that goal, that silver door with the pull-down handle, that pulled me into action, that drew me toward it. Take a single step in its direction, and there was no rational way back, no turning around without the leverage of reaching the silver door.

Leaving Salt Lake City, where I was part of a community, although rejected by many parts of the community, and coming to West Philadelphia, where I knew no one and had no resources, was the same kind of perilous trip over a slippery flat.

Enrolling in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania was equally hazardous. I knew no one except Martin E. P. Seligman, now known as the founder of Positive Psychology, but then as the researcher who had defined and operationalized the relationship between Learned Helplessness and Depression. I had met him acouple of times in Utah, because my dissertation had shown, in 1981, that one could use psychological testing to assess the extent to which individuals did not feel helpless, but rather felt in charge of their lives, able to accomplish what was needed. I think I called it “Learned Efficacy.” I had given him a copy of my dissertation; who knows whether he read it and later recalled it in developing Positive Psychology. Perhaps you could say I knew him, and because of his theories, at that time working on how people recovered from major problems, perhaps you would say he might have been interested in me and how I came to be at Penn. It might have been; except that the offices for the Department of Psychology were upstairs in a building without elevators, where they have remained to this day. And all descriptions of him did not portray a kindly man who would go out of his way to help me negotiate the icy bumps of the Unversity of Pennsylvania.

I also sort of knew Bob Kraft, Dr. Robert A. Kraft, a professor of Religious Studies. He had not seen me, and I think seeing me, picking me up at the airport, was a complete shock. I think I looked to him like a little old lady with tennis shoes; I had to wear oxford shoes or sneakers, with a “riser” inserted between the sole of the right shoe and the upper part of the shoe. The dress I wore was one I had chosen for the layover in Chicago, where my daughter, then living in St. Louis, introduced me to her soon-to-be fiance/. The colorful print on the dress attracted babies at synagogue, so I wore it frequently on Shabbat, and got to hold many babies as a result. The dress also seemed appropriate for meeting a potential son-in-law. For meeting a Harvard-educated Penn professor, not so much. He took me out for a meal, and tried to learn something about me; soon, though, he fairly obviously lost interest in making conversation. That was a slippery bump.

We did work together in the next few days on the task of finding me housing; he took me for a guided tour by car of the University City/West Philadelphia neighborhood that was within the Handivan-defined area around Penn. We checked out whether I could manage to live in one of the row houses he then owned, in the area. What I would need in housing depended on whether it was, first of all, wheelchair accessible. I already knew from talking on the phone to Alice Nagle that there were only two buildings, outside of the Penn graduate student housing that was much too expensive, that had wheelchair access, the Fairfax and the Garden Court Plaza. The Fairfax sat much closer to Penn, and a one-bedroom apartment there cost less than at Garden Court Plaza. No real contest there, I’d say. So Dr. Kraft and I investigated the three or four apartments at the Fairfax, and used the wheelchair to work out angles negotiating doorways and hallways and the various jogs into bathrooms. Also a factor–I don’t quite know how he knew, to this day–mentioned by Bob Kraft was distance from the central elevators. The apartment I settled on was very close to the center of the building, looking out over some trees at a lovely hundred-year-old church on a hill, with a spire that was later to come tumbling down.

At this point I needed a one-bedroom apartment because I had come from a one-bedroom apartment. Well, that’s not the only consideration: I also was not sure whether I would still be called upon to make a home for my daughter, who was then trying out her wings in St. Louis, where she had gone to “follow her man.” The first year had been very difficult. Both finding a job and finding an apartment had not been easy for her, and during one 48-hour stretch she was nearly homeless. She found shelter with a woman who fostered twenty-something women in about the same predicament as Alyssa; otherwise she was pretty much a stranger, except that Alyssa and boyfriend belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism, the SCA, as did this woman. (Otherwise one might suspect her of strangeness–except this was St. Louis, the honest and level-headed center of the country.)

I had brought Linus, my cat. My cat was not really my cat; I was affectionately fond of Lucy, not Linus. But Lucy was a proven mouser, while Linus tended to run in the opposite direction from mice. When it came time to find one of them a home, the only candidate home for cat adoption wanted a mouser. So Lucy went, and Linus stayed.

The next icy hollow in the irregular surface of graduate school at Penn came with the first “Colloquium,” a once-weekly meeting of the academic elements of Religious Studies at Penn, faculty and graduate students and the occasional fellow-traveler. This first Colloquium of the fall is for Introductions; the faculty and graduate students already there get to meet the new crop. The person who at that time was the Chair of Graduate Studies–there is also an Undergraduate Chair–led us in introductions.Then he laid down the law. We had to take four courses each semester; we could not take incompletes; we could only take a reduced load if we also taught. Sometime in the first or second year we had to present a paper to the Colloquium; we would have to pass a hurdle known as “??” before we could be admitted to Ph.D. status. This hurdle included our Colloquium paper, plus four other papers. Three papers had to be about methodology. One paper had to be in either South Asian or Far Eastern Religion, if we focused on Judaism-Christianity-Islam, or the opposite. One paper could be in the historical or textual area in which we hoped to concentrate.

In the same week, the same Graduate Chair spoke to me alone, and said “Don’t talk about your disability” though as far as I know he had no idea how, and in how many areas, I was disabled. That meant that contrary to the Americans with Disabilities Act, I could not ask for reasonable accommodations, which might have involved taking fewer courses, or having more time to complete them, or other measures which might have reduced the stress from sky-high limits. Later, when under the stress of a dying mother, unfinished papers, and the question of whether my funding would be renewed for a second year, I fell and fractured my tibia and fibia, he was the brave faculty member who came to me in the hospital to tell me that I had a full tuition scholarship for the semester that was about to start. “Fine! Tell me how I’m supposed to do this!” I might have said. I just politely thanked him. In that semester to come, I traveled by handivan, and lost my mother to cancer. Worse than newly crippling injury, as bad in its own way as losing my mother, about as horrifying as waiting for renewal of funding, came the news that the School of Arts and Sciences expected to close the Department of Religious Studies and several other departments.

Most of us, readers of this book, will only know what it is to have a disabled mind from the outside looking in. As a counseling/clinical psychologist, I knew disabled minds from interviewing their possessors, and from a neurology textbook, and from the observations that informed Abraham Maslow, especially in his Motivation and Personality. I had memorized favorite lines: about the brain-injured people he observed, he wrote “Capacities clamor to be used,” and he developed his ideas about self-actualization from observing the small and large gains of people with disabled minds.

How can a disabled mind earn first a Master of Science degree in Semitic languages from the demanding courses at the Middle East Center of the University of Utah, and then a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the world-class University of Pennsylvania and its Department of Religious Studies?

I didn’t forget any of this after the accident; I could still have taken the national exam for certifying psychologists, that tests knowledge of the field, and passed on the first try. I still knew the stuff from books. “Capacities clamor to be used” became my mantra. But how to use them? Nine months after the accident I went back to school at the University of Utah. I audited classes. One class was Assessment Interviewing; it concentrated on the first, or intake, interview–that’s from the point of view of the mental health professional. We were to master some theory, and then try our hand at being televised interviewing each other. Now you need to know that graduate students in psychology and educational psychology would do their damndest to present extreme levels of pathology and craziness. The interview I did, and taped, involves a graduate student playing patient. She was one of the best at playing crazy, either presenting clients she had observed or interviewed, or digging deep into the craziness we all have, but don’t usually get to live out.

I know that the ordeal of this interview for me, playing the therapist, was that I still, ten months after the accident, could not remember any part of the interview that had taken place more than 20 minutes ago. Fortunately, my classmate played crazy in such a way that she simply shifted her self-presentation every three minutes or so. All I had to do was to follow her shifts, not remember anything she had said at the beginning. I still have the tape.

Watching the tape, I knew what I had lost. I had never known, never been told, how good a listener/therapist I actually was. Now I could see, now I knew, now I could no longer do.

Somewhere in the rehabilitation experience I went, was encouraged to go, to a support group for people with head injuries. One young woman, there with her mother, was trying to explain, with the help of the group, her current sense of self. She tried out the idea of having two personalities, and then said, “That’s not it.” From my own experience, I suggested, “It’s more like having double vision, or a photograph that has double exposure. The person you were before the accident can still be seen, but there’s another sort of person over that, and you’re aware of both.”

So this chapter, on “A Disabled Mind,” is about a double vision–the mind that was, and the disabled mind. Counseling and clinical psychologists learn to observe themselves as much as their clients: I can write this chapter from memory of that continued, insistent, self-observation. At the same time, I had profound short-term memory loss.

Just now, in real time, as I write this, I got up to microwave a snack. The task required using the kitchen scissors, which are usually right near the microwave. Then I remembered: last night I had used them to disassemble to heavy cardboard box that had contained the multifunction printer I just installed. The instant I remembered when I had used them last, I could see in my mind where the scissors would be found. I went and found them and used them to prepare my snack. Nothing unusual, is it?

For the disabled mind, such a feat is outside possibility. The trace of remembered location has disappeared. Everything has to be put back in the same place, the same place, the same place. That’s the first self-training. Put it back where it belongs. Simple. And terrifying: put it back where it belongs, or you will never find it.

Over and over, as I put things back, I also visualized where I was putting them. After all, I also had to remember the “where it belongs” part. I lived alone; there was no one to tell me where to find something, where its place actually was.

After ten or twelve years, in the middle of my graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, I suddenly had a day when I just knew–just “remembered”–where something was, without having to search for the visual picture of where I might have put it. I began to be free to risk putting something down in the wrong place, as long as I visualized it there. I began to remember the last time I had used something, what I had done with it, and where I would find it. One triumph.

If such a simple thing as remembering where I put things was so difficult, how to account for earning a Master of Science degree in Semitic languages from the rigorous program at the Middle East Center of the University of Utah, and then a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the world-class University of Pennsylvania?

In the beginning, it was the work of “Jewish fathers.” If Jewish mothers are proverbial in their own way, it is probably because it was their sons who did so much writing about them. In my case, there were so many Jewish fathers who fostered my continued education. And one woman psychologist, connected to Holy Cross Hospital.

To backstep for a moment, in the fall trimester before the accident, I had taken the introductory course in modern Hebrew–my escape from AIDS Prevention work. In the third trimester of that academic year (1988-1989) I tried to complete the work in Hebrew. In that summer, or the next, I took second year Hebrew with the Consortium of Western Colleges that sponsored a rotating summer intensive language series. In the fall trimester of 1989, just nine months after the accident, I audited Biblical Hebrew Narrative with Harris Lenowitz. I told him it would be a mitzvah for me to be his student. I guess that convinced him to take me on, despite the lack of a third year of modern Hebrew.

In the trimester before the accident, I could look at a page of vocabulary for ten minutes and answer a quiz on the material with 90 to 100 percent accuracy. In the Spring trimester, that easy acquisition of vocabulary and grammar had gone missing from my mind. How to learn what I needed to know? I read, I went to synagogue (I think), I tried to absorb language as a child does. What I could master and remember, often, were distinctions about grammar and syntax. The advantage, if you will, of brain-damaged minds is being able to approach a learning task without preconceptions. So what if Classical Hebrew is Verb-Subject-Object in sentence arrangement? So what if adding a single letter reverses a verb from past to future? That was easy.

I couldn’t remember conjugations–but locating roots was generally not hard. I couldn’t remember suffixes and prefixes according to their particular use–but recognizing the particular intent of a specific conjugation was generally not hard.

The Jewish fathers–where do they come in? I had just transferred from Latter Day Saints Hospital to Holy Cross Hospital at the end of January when Rabbi Wenger, of Congregation Kol Ami, came to visit me for the second time. I was still not remembering anything more than the most recent five minutes of a conversation, at that time. Rabbi Wenger, with perfect faith, brought me his first Hebrew grammar, and gave it to me to have, to read, in the hospital. I thought it the height of foolishness; no more excursions in learning. I would do well if I could manage to get one foot in front of another while supported by parallel bars, and make it to the end of the apparatus. That would be an excursion. I had no mind to learn with; I had a disabled mind.

The second Jewish father was Bert ? , who was in charge of the synagogue’s Mitzvah Committee. He helped my mother pack up our apartment and put things in storage; he visited fairly often, and gently told me that my recurring anger at everything was a hopeful sign toward recovery. He found foster homes for our cats, Lucy and Linus. He took me to the storage barn, after I had found a more accessible place to live, and helped me look over the stuff that was there.

Larry Loeb was my third Jewish father, a bit later. As Laury Loeb, he was the Cantor of Congregation Kol Ami. As Larry Loeb, he was a well-published scholar of sociology. In 1991, the year before I applied to, and was accepted by, the University of Pennsylvania, he gave me the “scholar’s aliyah.” I was called up to the Torah during Sukkot for a specific Aliyah that recognizes scholars in the congregation. There were many others there he might have called, and I always wondered why he called me, brain-damaged me.

By then I was in the second year of Master’s study, with generally execrable grades compared to those I had gotten in graduate school in Counseling/Clinical Psychology. A course in languages was hardly anything that made sense at this point in developing my fried brain.

Also, I suppose, Ben Barr was my Jewish brother. He and his partner were faithful in visiting me in the hospital; he would manage to see me a couple of times a month after I had moved out of the hospital. Ben smoked; I had had my addiction broken by the accident. I loved and hated the smoke from his cigarettes. Is my memory reliable in telling me that I never actually begged a cigarette from him? Our conversations about smoking are on the edge of my mind even now. We agreed that, smoking or not smoking, if either of us had terminal cancer we would definitely smoke!

This word, “thrown,” seems to me right now to express something I want to use in/as the title.

Most of all, thrown as in “radical thrownness,” from existential philosophy. The idea that we exist in a state of radical thrownness, not having chosen our specific time or circumstances of existence, and that we make our own existence by our choices–or in my case by further elements of “thrownness.” That is, the Accident ultimately threw me into a completely new existence, where, in a sense, I had to achieve just to justify being there/here at Penn. Thrown, very simply, by a car colliding with me.
Radical, also, as in an unusual life path, radical as in “root,” radical as in “netroot,” even radical as (somewhat) politically/religiously radical. Radical as in radical insight(s), though I may miss what those are, because they are so familiar to me.

Less than a month before the date of my premature graduation, I had filed an answer to a complaint by the University of Pennsylvania that I owed them $15,000, in part for University housing. I have never lived in University housing. Instead I have lived in one of two wheelchair-accessible apartment buildings near the University, but more affordable than University Housing.

I also did not know how the bill had climbed to nearly $15,000. Despite my repeated requests (unfortunately by phone), the University had not sent me any itemization of charges for almost ten years. In some of those phone calls I made, I’m sure I gave them my current Philadelphia address. Still no bills. Once I had cleared the lawsuit, I found out that their computer system persisted in listing the address I had in 1996-1997, when I had a fellowship at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Their address is 15600 Mulholland Drive. The resident students and standing faculty are so few that there is a mailroom that handles mail for , 15600 Mulholland Drive.

Now if you have been to Los Angeles, or seen the movie Mulholland Drive, you may know that it runs along the ridge between West LA and the Valley. It requires wealth to live on Mulholland Drive. If I were wealthy, I would rather live in San Francisco, but Mulholland Drive is certainly nice.

That mailroom, for the offices, and faculty, and academic residents such as students, told me that they would forward stuff for one year after I left, and then would just throw out anything that came after that. So the University of Pennsylvania detailed accounting was toast, or smoke, or ash, after 1998.

The same day I filed the answer to the collection lawyer’s complaint, I found in the mail I collected when I got home, finally, what I should have received six or eight years earlier. My more persistent calls had located someone in Student Financial Services who took down my actual address and sent me a copy of the University’s “archive.” The archive is in tiny print; it is a record of every financial transaction with the University, from kosher meals to grants and fellowships, from a xeroxed course pack to tuition. And of course late penalty fees.

Those late penalty fees amounted to about $7,500. The tuition and fees and the odd meal here and there amounted to $7,500 or so, that had no “offset.” An offset would be the tuition rebate granted for teaching a course, or a reduction in tuition for taking fewer than four courses.

I had talked to a lawyer. For a free half hour of his time he coached me in how to file the Answer to Penn’s Complaint. I was to deny those aspects of the Complaint that “on information and belief” were incorrect. There was no accounting attached to the Complaint, only an affidavit that I owed the amount, and they had been unable to collect it. I said that I did not owe that amount, and that they had not made any effort to collect until they (somehow) located me and started legal proceedings. That’s very odd. As I write this I find it very odd that the UPenn collections department could find me when they wanted to sue me, but they couldn’t send me any information about the account to the same address.

After I was (actually) cleared for graduation in October 2006, after successfully overturning the lawsuit, I was able to log in to the University’s computerized system for student accounts, for the first time. I saw that my address was listed as 15600 Mulholland Drive; I was at that point unable to change the address, because the bill hadn’t yet been cleared after the court appearance of September 16th. Later, in November, I used the system to pay the $80 fee for filing my dissertation, and also changed my address to where I really live.

Because I have an apartment, not a house, when I get a fellowship or travel for any length of time, I give up my apartment. That’s what I did for the one-year fellowship at the University of Judaism on Mulholland Drive. I listed the UJ address as my permanent address; what other address did I have? My parents are dead, my daughter lived in an apartment herself.

Perhaps I can begin to outline the story:

A. There is the non-graduation Graduation;

B. Then the horrific accident and recovery;

C. Then a section on “All the Other Stories” which should be brief vignettes, not necessarily chronological, of things like AIDS work, including lobbying, quilt; “favorite things;” surviving Philly, its downers; travel tales; the talented Kraft, and others;

D. The Lawsuit-Penn sues me to collect a bill I did not owe. The best and the worst of it. Winning the lawsuit without a lawyer.

E. Finishing up, tuition-free.

Each section has its own message. Is there overall triumph? Yes, in achieving the “worthy goal” I set on an application a year and a half after the accident.

Is there piety? Despite my religious studies degree, there’s little piety. About other times in my life I can say “God must have been there;” not this. Dr. Kristen Ries did say “I’m awfully glad you hit your head where you did, and not somewhere else.” There were people praying for my recovery in Salt Lake City who were Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, and Protestant, and gay and straight. That’s fairly diverse; it could have been even more diverse. I do believe in things unseen, like love; I do believe that believing makes things happen.

And I lost that bright and shining goal, the Ph.D., when the University sued me.

And the logical fallacies! Get a lawyer, they said. We don’t want to talk to you, that implied. What would you know? Pay a lawyer $1,000 (to start) in order reduce the bill to some amount I could not pay and didn’t owe?

So at one point I offered $1,000. They told me That’s not enough! We need a substantial payment! We won’t take your money if all you are offering is $1,000!

The point is, the feeling I had, after the fact, and after the oral exam. How DARE they, after all they’ve put me through, demand that I go through this hour of examination of how much I’ve kept up with my field, when they did everything they could, through the lawsuit, to take away my ability to keep up with the field.

Yesterday, October 24, 2006 I had an oral examination to satisfy a new requirement for Ph.D. candidates, to recertify that they were still on top of their game in their field. In that sense, for that purpose, it went okay. On the other hand, I wasn’t very satisfied with where I came out in my own estimation.

I have spent the last year and a half defending myself against a $15,000 collections lawsuit filed against me by the University of Pennsylvania. I was ultimately successful, after pouring unlimited time and energy into understanding the legal proceedings against me, and after also pouring unlimited time and energy into first, getting the complete record of the University’s charges, and then understanding the accounting conventions used in the archive thus produced, and then matching that archive against other records, and emails, concerning my bill with the University. Half that amount of $15,000 was late penalty charges, at 1.5% per month. Of the other $7,500, I had paid, after locating UPenn errors in billing, $9,500. That is, I had already paid $2,000 in late fees, over and above paying all the tuition due for the corrected billings. Others agreed, and prevailed upon Collections at UPenn to drop the law suit.

For the final Arbitration Court Hearing, therefore, the University’s (nasty) lawyer did not show up. I went into the three-person panel and showed that in the original pleadings I had asked for lawyer’s fees, and since I had not been able to find a lawyer, had served as my own lawyer. I asked the panel to award me the fees I would have had to pay a lawyer. They demurred, explaining that courts often do not award lawyer’s fees in any case. They did ask me what costs I had incurred, especially as I had filed and been awarded a Petition to proceed in Forma Pauperis. I replied that I had paid the cost of filing the Answer with the Prothonotary. I misremembered the amount as $90, although it was $129, and the panel decided in my favor and ordered UPenn to pay me $90.

Should I take that award to the people who finally agree that my dissertation satisfies the necessary paper and microfilming requirements to be filed? That is when I will pay $80 for the Copyright and filing with Proquest for a microfilm copy to be deposited as a permanent record of the work?

Two months after that Arbitration Hearing, I am preparing a major paper for delivery at the Annual Convention of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. I am preparing the bibliography for my dissertation; I am revising a paper on Aramaic for publication. “I don’t have time for this!” But I rationalized that since I entered before the requirement for an oral exam, I can do this for an hour.

That was yesterday.

Today, very suddenly, I am first sad, in a post-traumatic stress disorder funk, about all that has been lost in that protracted period of the lawsuit. I am sad, too, because the bright shiny goal of the Ph.D. in Religious Studies, doing original work on an ancient text, and significantly shifting the context for its reading — that bright and shining goal has been tarnished by the behavior of the University that will be granting the degree. That degree will never regain its luster, I fear.

I am hoping I will be able to write my way out of the pain that I feal now.

A bright spot, for a few moments today, came when I saw this cartoon in Slate. The cartoon refers to the sentencing decision in the Enron case; Jeff Skilling will spend more than 24 years in prison, and pay some restitution. The cartoon reminded me of the day of victory, when the Arbitration Panel declared in my favor and awarded me costs of $90. Sometimes there is justice. And sometimes (maybe later?) justice is enough.

I sat in my wheelchair in the front row of the audience at the very rainy 250^th Commencement of the University of Pennsylvania. Occasionally my eyes met those of Jodie Foster, who bravely endured the rain, and talked of her acting as “telling stories.” I fantasized about writing a story that would turn into a movie with Jodie Foster playing me.

Certainly I am no Clarice. That May morning under my umbrella, I did not know how my journey from brain-damaged accident victim to completion of my Ph.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania would finally end. I had put myself on the list for graduation and then marched in the graduation processional and sat in my wheelchair, all without the final okay on my dissertation. I marched in order to honor the students I had just finished teaching; half of them, I was sure, would be well-known in their fields within ten years of graduation.

I marched, or rolled, too, because the University of Pennsylvania has almost no standing faculty with visible impairments, such as using a wheelchair for mobility, or living with a damaged eye. Yet I was not, and never will be, standing faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, or anywhere else.

There was quite a contrast: the honored guests on the podium represented extraordinary diversity. Amy Gutmann, Penn’s President, was the third woman president of an Ivy League University. Judith Rodin had become, in 1995, the first woman president of an Ivy League School, here at the University of Pennsylvania.

I saw great contrast between the diversity of the assembled honored guests, including people with visible disabilities, and the old men and younger women who were introduced to confer degrees on the graduates, from the Graduate School of Education to the School of Nursing to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to Wharton School.

Among the watchers, I know now, were two friends from the Student Disabilities Office, Alice Nagle and Troy Odom, who had endured the downpour that preceded the ceremony to arrange chairs so there would be spaces for those people in wheelchairs who come to watch someone graduate. When my wheelchair wasn’t in the expected place—I had marched part of the way, and rested in a different chair during the procession of graduates, and needed a chair again to sit through the ceremonies—a marshal had known to go and find Alice or Troy.

And there was Jodie Foster, slightly smiling through what had turned from downpour to drizzle and mist. Although there was a canopy that covered part of the stage, she was not under it, and got wet with the rest of us.

Contrast 1

It is a bright bright sunshiny day, but cold; Thursday January the 12^th before a Friday the 13^th. We had been having snowfalls every other day; this was a day free of snow, but there was fresh snow covering the mounds of plowed snow. I am meeting at what my shaky memory says is an outdoor café, where with a group of friends, a havurah, we enjoy the camaraderie, and anticipating the successful execution of an event we are jointly planning.

The meeting breaks up; I board a bus for home. I remember that on the bus I had the chance to get off and deliver a job application, and decided to skip it. That is the last thing I remember–the rest is reconstruction: I got home and discovered that we (my college-student daughter Alyssa and I) were out of cat food. I went out again, on my way to a convenience store some four blocks away. I never got there.

As I approached the larger street halfway to the store, as the bright sunshine turned to dusk, a woman named Carla Martinez was leaving work, three blocks away from the school zone where I planned to cross. She was in a hurry; her windshield was covered with frost, but she thought she didn’t have to clear away the frost—it would soon be gone as the car warmed up. I begin to cross the road as she got up to speed. She hit me going 30 or 40 miles an hour. And stopped. As I reconstruct what happened next, she dissolved in hysterics. A passing motorist stopped, tried to calm her, determined I needed an ambulance, and left to find a phone to call 911. I very very dimly think I remember the flashing lights and people asking me questions. What’s your name? Where do you live? What country? What year is this? Who is the President? I knew my first name. I said I lived in Philadelphia, in Canada (I think). The year was 1989—but odds are I could not answer the question. I didn’t know who was the President. Throughout the confusion that followed, and that I don’t remember, I kept hearing “Sigrid” and being confused; were they calling me? what was I supposed to do? Did they mean me, or somebody else named Sigrid? Where was this, anyway? Was that pain that I felt mine? Was somebody still hurting me? Why was everything so dark?

They had asked me how old I was; I had no idea. That puzzled me as much as anything. If I was I, I should know how old I was, shouldn’t I?

There are two moments of clarity from that very very long night. I came too, more or less, and remember thinking “My body is broken. I will never be the same again. AND I WILL RECOVER! What I’ll do is write a book, lose weight, and go on TV to publicize it.” That was one moment of clarity. My daughter Alyssa tells me that when she arrived at the ER and was able to see me, I told her “The cats need to be fed.” I thought I was in Philadelphia, where I had never been, didn’t know the year, thought the name Sigrid might belong to someone else, and yet I knew our two cats had not been fed. Though Alyssa remembers it, not I, that was the second moment of clarity.

Alyssa had just turned 19; throughout that night she had the presence of mind to contact my mother in Rhode Island, and to run after the doctors who were going to do a CAT scan to tell them I am fatally allergic to the contrast dye they used for the scans. That was the first time she saved my life.

The book I was going to write was one of those victorious over adversity sorts of tales, like conquering Everest though only having one foot, or winning the Tour de France eight times after nearly dying from cancer. It would have been about conquering the fear of HIV/AIDS in a city and state that religiously feared and abhorred homosexuality, associated the HIV/AIDS virus with homosexuals, and ostrich-like, refused to deal with the need to prevent the disease.

Just before the accident that had put me on my back in the hospital, we had learned that we (the Salt Lake Aids Coalition) had won the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson grant for AIDS/HIV Prevention; I hoped that once funds were disbursed, I would join the Salt Lake Aids Foundation as their Coordinator of Development. That would be the book I would write: I would write about David, and David’s Year. It was the year that he founded the People With Aids Chapter in Salt Lake City, the year we gave him a roast for all he had done, and the year that his mind faded from AIDS dementia. The book would also be about Ben Barr, who put together the Coalition, dealt with the conflicts of personalities, represented the problems that AIDS/HIV posed to the community, tried to life his own life and be involved in the lives of his children, and would just put his head down at the end of the day and say, “My brain is fried.” Once, one of the people he had to talk down from personality conflicts was me, self-involved as well as intellectually involved in writing the grant proposal.

Now it was my brain that was fried, truly fried. I had a Ph.D. in Counseling/Clinical Psychology from the University of Utah, and knew the effects of brain injuries. My brain was now injured; I was in a light coma for four days. I couldn’t remember the accident, I didn’t know who was President, until I “surfaced” as my daughter and I call it, on the day of the Inauguration of the first President Bush. Later that day, when asked who was President, I could answer that it was George Bush. My name seemed to belong to me again; I recognized my daughter, Alyssa, who was home on break from her first year at Grinnell College in Iowa. I knew I was in Salt Lake City, but could not answer the curious question of the doctor about Philadelphia. Why had I said I lived in Philadelphia? I had no idea.

As I went through that process of coming to consciousness in the Hospital’s Intensive Care Ward, I began to learn the extent of my injuries. I had damaged the Third Cranial Nerve, which supplies the nerves used by the muscles that control the eye. I had double vision as a result, one side of my face drooped, and swallowing was somewhat affected. They said it would heal—the doctors said. In the meantime, I wore an eye patch.

I had had laparoscopic surgery the night of the accident to repair my bladder, which had burst. Now that I was conscious, though my short-term memory did not work, a wonderful orthopedic surgeon, who put the skiers of Utah back together after falls, told me that of my two knees, the left one, on a scale of 1 to 3 measuring the extent to which it didn’t hold together any more, was at 3+, and they would have to operate the next opening he had in his schedule, which was later that week. He said that the other knee was at 2+, which normally indicated an operation, but that they would treat that knee conservatively for the time being, in order to focus on the left knee.

My pelvis was fractured symmetrically in eight places (or was it four—I’m not really sure, now). My right hip blade separated from my spine—the ligament holding hip blade to spine shredded. One of my feet was very painful from a road burn; as that began to heal, I had problems with the nerves in the other foot.

And I could not breathe. I think I inhaled some Nicorette gum I had been chewing. I had pneumonia from atelactasis. (That’s the technical word for inhaling something that gums up the lungs.)

That was the second time my daughter saved my life. She sat by my bedside and told me to breathe, to remember how good it felt to breathe, the good moments of life, the time I had told her about “seeing fire in the sky.” After some marvelous moments of psychological intimacy with a man I loved, we had parted and I drove through the University toward the mountains, and saw the sun setting in the west light on fire the crystallized snow on the mountains in the east. As Alyssa told me to remember, and live, I got a bit annoyed with her because she didn’t describe the events exactly right. She hadn’t been there, after all. I had to live, so she would know how to tell the story.
It seems odd that I would recall that little bit of annoyance with my daughter, who pushed me to decide to live, when I know that a great deal of the time I was simply furious with everything in that hospital.

That fury is one of the ways in which brain-injured people react to their injury; somehow it is a good sign, though families find it hard to take. It is the passive reaction to brain injury that is less likely to lead to a good recovery.

Somehow in that fury I managed to choose a doctor to manage my care—the marvelous Kristen Ries, an specialist in infectious diseases who treated people with HIV/AIDS and older women. As an internist, at least at that time and that place, she did have the capacity to manage my care—but to have her as my doctor, I would have to transfer to Holy Cross Hospital, which had the first HIV/AIDS treatment ward in the city. By a lucky coincidence, that ward was adjacent to the Neurological Rehabilitation Wing, so she was able to check on me before or after visiting people hospitalized with HIV/AIDS. Also, I learned as I was about to shift from Intensive Care at the first hospital, that my colleagues and friends from AIDS Project Utah had practically been camped in the waiting room for intensive care, but had not been able to see me, because they were not relatives. I spent a few days in a less intensive treatment area of the hospital, getting angrier and angrier over little things; but my friends and colleagues could now visit.

That was very important, because my daughter’s winter break from college was now over. She had been a critical part of my survival, and now that I had survived, I needed to be able to let her go back to school, and she needed to be a college student once more. I think. By then my mother had arrived, and was involved in “doing things,” in order to do something with her feelings of loss and despair over the condition I was in. Looking at me, and talking to the doctors, she did not think I would be able to return to our apartment, which was up one flight of stairs in a house dating back to polygamy days, that had been converted to apartments.

Both Alyssa and I loved it, though; we loved the beautiful view of the mountains out of the octagonal bay window, and the 1940s retro feel to the huge kitchen. What we have saved of that place is pieces of cloth; I have a prayer shawl made from one panel of window hangings that were not quite drapes and not quite curtains. She has the unusual print that she had chosen to be her bedspread. The synagogue found temporary places for the cats. And helped my mother clear out the apartment and put everything in storage.

Notes for further stuff:

Holy Cross hospital, first up on my feet, parallel bars. Intensive therapy, being psychic.

Had a Brain (as in “if I only had a brain” from The Wizard of OZ) is material for an “achievement despite obstacles” memoir, with a twist. In short, I earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania despite head trauma and assorted other physical injuries sustained when I was hit by a car. That should be enough for one lifetime. But as I approached the goal of graduating with the Ph.D., the University of Pennsylvania sued me for an outstanding bill that I had already paid!

Caution: This is a blog of long and infrequent posts, not daily brief entries. What posts there are will be found, more or less, in reverse chronological order.