These are some memories I hold.
Aged about 6 or 7, I proudly tell my mum that I don’t look at people in wheelchairs because I know it’s rude to stare at them. She explains that they just want to be treated like other people, and so I should look at them how I would look at anybody else.
Age 14, my first and only experience skiing, with my French family. Actually, I spent the week on a snowboarding course. I was predictably inept, but it was a lot of fun. On the lift one morning, the instructor points to a jump, and warns us always to be careful. The week before, a man had not been. Colonne vertébrale are the words I remember.
15, in the yard at school before registration. A friend tells me the band Travis have cancelled their upcoming tour after the drummer dove into an empty swimming pool and broke his neck. “Must have been on drugs”, I think to myself.
16. Smoking pot with friends in Victoria Park. Here’s a joke I know will make them laugh. Why didn’t superman save the twin towers? Because he’s in a fucking wheelchair. Cue hilarity. Edgy before there were edgelords.
20. Halfway through university. My friend suffers a horrendous leg break playing rugby. It really upends his life for a few months. But one morning I see him on his crutches, and putting a positive spin on it he says, “could be a lot worse, I could be paralysed!”
22, on the London underground with my then girlfriend. She is looking at the Tube map and says to me: “gosh, it must just be so hard to get around London if you’re disabled.” I’ve never really thought about it before. But now that she points it out, it can’t be denied. I mumble back some platitude or other.
33, a friend from the US texts to commiserate me on breaking my leg. “But at least you’ve now had your climbing accident!” she adds. “My climbing accident for the year”, I reply. I’m so funny.
What do these memories mean?
From a dispassionate, sceptical perspective, they obviously don’t mean anything at all. I’ve always had a preternaturally good memory. Friends have often been bemused by my ability to remember the details of events that happened decades ago, which they don’t even remember having happened at all. It’s part of why I haven’t taken notes on anything I’ve read in the past 20 years; I just trust myself to remember where to look if I need to doublecheck.
These memories were always there in the wider mush, along with all the other things that my brain keeps hold of. It is just that since breaking my neck they’ve acquired a particular salience. So of course they get fished out more readily than before.
But I am the narrator of my own life, and so the sceptical, dispassionate perspective feels incomplete. These memories burn like foreshadowings. Moments carefully layered into the plot. So that when the great cataclysm occurred, it arrived not out of the blue, but as a fitting development to the story. And not just foreshadowings, but forewarnings. “If you are not careful, then…” And I wasn’t careful. Or at least, not careful enough.
Read this way, my story acquires a sort of meaning. A false one, of course. But with meaning (however fraudulent), there comes a sort of comfort. “Everything happens for a reason!”, people like to say. It doesn’t. But I understand why they like to believe that; why they need to.
*
A few weeks ago I was completing the slog of getting from my flat to campus. Having been wheeled backwards out of a taxi, I turned around and began pushing towards the entrance. But something wasn’t right. People were stood around staring, all in the same direction. I couldn’t tell what was going on, although it looked as if somebody had collapsed. Various security personnel were clearly agitated, but nobody seemed in charge of a situation that had apparently only just unfolded. I didn’t want to join the crowd of onlookers, and I’m now pretty much the last person who can be of any use. So I opted to get out of the way.
From my office, I heard the sirens. A lot of them. But again, there was nothing I could do, so I went to teach my seminar and didn’t think too much about it. Only later did details emerge.
Somehow a van had made it into the pedestrian area. A van driven by a man intoxicated, apparently under the influence of drugs. He crashed into four people. One escaped largely unscathed, but two were seriously injured, and another was killed. She was a student at the university. Just 22 years old.
Everything happens for a reason?
*
I did not know the student who died, had never met her. Yet more than a few times in the past month I’ve found myself wishing I could trade places.
Partly it is a kind of selfishness. If the van had hit me, then it would all just be over. No gruesome final moment, tipping myself over the edge of a train platform. No morbid bureaucratic shuffle to a clinic in Switzerland. No nagging sense of guilt about the grief that only a suicide can inflict on family and friends. Sure, people who know me would have been sad if the van had hit me. But there would perhaps be some comfort in looking at the evidence piled up on these very pages over the past two years. “The truth is he didn’t really want to be around anymore, so in a weird way, perhaps it is for the best?”
But it is more than just selfishness. I genuinely wish I could trade. 22? That’s so unfair. Me, I’ve already blown it. (And it was ultimately me that blew it, not some stranger in a van.) I now just exist for the sake of existing: for loneliness, boredom, humiliation. But I at least got to have my 20s first. If the universe had to take someone that morning, then it should obviously have been me.
*
Except, of course, we all know that it does not work like that. The cosmos is bluntly indifferent. Stuff just happens. The only meanings to be had are the ones that we bring to bear. The stories we tell; the lives we narrate.
When things are going well, such acts of self-creation can seem like more than enough. But then rocks shatter, vans career out of control. Meaning dies, and comfort goes with it.
*
Age 31, in the pub after trad climbing the grit all day. My partner warns me not to be reckless on the crags. “Don’t worry”, I laugh, “it’s not my fate to die in a climbing accident!”
And I was right. Just not for the reasons I’d hoped.
god damn. i wish I didn't "enjoy" reading your writings, is that the right word? it sounds macarbe. but I don't like hearing the torture you're in. but you write w such clarity. no bullshit. no trying to shine the light on something or to try and trick yourself and others to believe in some positive point somewhere hidden. life is suffering and you are in the thick of it. I guess I just appreciate your honesty and teachings you don't know you're bringing.
Thank you for puncturing, once and for all time, the fatuous faux-spiritual platitude "everything happens for a reason". It gets on my nerves worse than most platitudes. It is always delivered with a wise smile. Aaagh. I am a Buddhist and some people seem to think that it fits in well with the doctrine of karma, but no, it does not. Karma posits that things happen through causes, just as science does. Things happen, not for 'a reason' but depending on countless interwoven 'reasons' in the sense of causes, every result is over-determined in a determinative universe.
All the best to you, Paul, as ever.