Those two weeks of processing that Cory was not given CPR because it could not work caused the sort of bizarre thought patterns that made me fear I was going crazy.
Somehow I had gotten it into my head that it only made sense that she couldn't be revived if her head was physically separate from her body. How weird is that?
I knew Cory had not been decapitated during the accident, but every time I tried to think about the logistics of vertebrae, spinal cords, spinal shock, electrical activity, and the like, my brain got tired, overwhelmed, and just generalized the whole thing into this: Cory couldn't have survived with her head in one place and her body in another, so that must have been what happened.
Where in world did this come from?
I have a few thoughts.
First, the brain experiencing trauma doesn't line up its sensory experiences in straight little lines. I saw some horrible things on that road. I did not see Cory's head unattached from her body, of course, but I saw plenty of other unnatural and disturbing images. They made absolutely no sense to me at the time.
Secondly, my brain following that traumatic experience was as literal as it wanted to be. When the funeral director cautioned my family and I that there could be no "jostling of the body"...that Cory was "extremely fragile" and "could not be handled roughly"...I took him at his word...and then some. I'm not sure what kind-hearted Mark had in mind when he gave us this cautious speech before I saw my daughter for the first time since the road. I'm not sure what he thought I had in mind. I had no intention of handling her roughly, whatever that might mean. God knows what funeral home directors may see from grief stricken loved ones, as logic clearly departs. I know for my part, I immediately pictured Cory's head being held onto her shoulders by about three loopy stitches, and silently gave up my most fervent desire of just climbing right into her casket beside her, as if it were a hospital bed.
To this day, I deeply regret not asking to spend the night sleeping on the floor of the funeral home beside her, and wonder if I had begged hard enough or offered to pay extra, if I would have been granted the opportunity to spend a little more time with my girl before she was taken away from me forever. Would that have made me feel better, you ask? Yes, yes, it would've. I am absolutely certain.
The whole necklace business at the end of her service sealed my madness. When I gave the kind woman my dragonfly pendant to be put on Cory's neck, it was a put up job of all put up jobs. My beautiful, real, and recently living and breathing child and friend was reduced to mannequin status as the necklace was set on her collarbones and the ends tucked gingerly behind her shoulders, without being latched. What in the hell was that about? My survival state brain pumping adrenaline and high alert chemicals through my body twenty four hours a day went absolutely ballistic with this proof of Cory's new fragility: OH MY GOD! They are afraid to lift her head LEST IT FALL RIGHT OFF!
Obviously, I have reasoned with myself on this matter some in the past year or so, but as I worked through the details of her injuries this last couple of months, all those crazy thoughts came back with a vengeance.
I try not to think of Cory at night before I go to sleep. The road is always too close. One look out my window, or a few steps into my darkened living room, and I am literally right there. Once asleep, it's out of my control. This whole decapitated thing ran rampant in my dreams, and I woke up sweaty and confused night after night after night.
I've tried to find a way to resolve this for myself, and all I've been able to come up with is this:
my brain couldn't process an injury it couldn't see, and didn't take in as a viable image. I couldn't see the particular severed vertebrae that meant my girl couldn't be given CPR, couldn't have her blood circulated to her organs until professional help arrived. There weren't, in my memory, shards of bone or strands of fibrous tissue trailing out of her neck to remind me. I would always see her in my memories of that day as broken, bloody, wrong...but in pieces that were generally still attached, in one place. So if she looked somewhat still together, why couldn't she be saved?
My subconscious stepped right in, agreeing that was absolute hogwash. If Cory's brain could no longer send messages to her body, they must be ex-communicated. Just like that, my bizarre thought patterns and grisly nightmares were born.
How do I stop them?
Hell, if I know.
What I do know is that I've started looking at people and their bodies differently. Part of it may be obsession with drawing people, and faces in particular. Having a good idea of the bone structure that lies underneath helps your drawings and paintings to be more dimensional. But more than that, when I see Jake sleeping with his head on the pillow, and a small hand on one cheek, I'm looking at his face, his bones underneath, and marveling at the fragileness and beauty of human beings. These days, I have a conversation with Tim about paying a bill, and catch myself looking at his neck and wondering just where that magical vertebrae resides, that holds so much responsibility and so much power over human life.
We are so fragile.
I had a series of nightmares directly following the accident: Tim stabbed at the C-store, Tim and Jake run over by a Fed-Ex truck in our driveway, my parents dying within days of each other. This is common after a traumatic event. Once your safe circle has been put on hit, you realize those horrible things really can happen to people like you, and you start to see danger lurking everywhere.
Right after I lost Cory, I spent nights and nights sitting up in the glow of a nightlight, absolutely terrified. It took weeks before I stopped feeling like I was being chased by someone who wanted me dead.
We are so fragile.
How do I process the fact that Cory, who to me was a supernatural being of sorts -someone so big, so important, so central to my identity that she blocked out the sun- she became my sun- was really only made of flesh and bones, after all?
Cory's stunted development, interrupted with schizoaffective disorder, held her fast to me, postponing the natural break of a teenager her age from her mother. We were enmeshed in so many ways. She had become the biggest focus of my waking hours and more important to me than food or sleep. How do you make someone like that mortal in your mind? How can you be at peace with the end of that sort of influence on your life? She made me a better person. Her very existence and the struggles we faced together defined me, and certainly the loss of her would define me, as well. How could it not? We are the sum of our influences, and our experiences.
I guess I'll tackle it in my art journal, like everything else. If you follow me on facebook, and patiently endure my daily doodles, you might start to notice a lot of bones...some skeletal work under my people. That's me, trying to find peace in the fact that the love of my life was a girl...the best girl I've ever known...but a girl made of flesh and bones, like the rest of us. She was fragile. Someone wasn't watching where they were going, and they broke her.
And she just couldn't be put back together again.
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