recollections

I was raking up leaves in the garden at my parents’ place. It was hard work but I liked it. I could take a deep breath of nature. Needless to say, it was a real pleasure for my lungs, which were so accustomed to the pollution, the dioxide, the motorcars and their fumes – the stink of the whole city. Their garden, or should I say our garden – even if I no longer lived there and only occasionally went there during vacations or days off – was like a wood. As I picked up those leaves, a strange and absolutely absurd thought came to mind: I imagined those leaves were pages in a book – billions of pages written by a single person, to be renewed every year. Wow, what a fantastic yet mammoth task. Then I realized the insanity of the idea and it made me smile. The sky was quite light for the season – mid-November and almost winter. The kind of weather that somehow resembled an Indian summer. It reminded me of Canada – even if I had never really seen such weather over there – the country I belonged to.

When you’re doing a task (I was raking leaves but it could be anything like cleaning up or folding clothes), doing something on your own, things wander through your brain. You think about your preoccupations, about things you didn’t do, things you should have done… I happened to think about a book I had just started to read: Object Lessons by Eavan Boland. Although I hadn’t read much, it had aroused my curiosity and a certain fascination. Even if I did not necessarily agree with her feminist views, I found some similarity between her life and mine. Alright, I’m not Irish and I have not returned to my country, at least not yet – and even if as I write ‘not yet’ I know that this will not happen anytime soon – but I was caught up in the intrigue she cast the reader into right from the start. 

The search for an identity, for her identity both as a poet and as a woman, led me to draw parallels with my own life. What exactly was my identity? I’d never stayed anywhere long enough to get a true identity. In my heart I felt Canadian, but physically and mentally I was brought up as a European. Linguistically it was an advantage, which is why I had decided to study English, and the more I got used to it, the more I liked it. To me, English had always been the most enchanting, melodic language ever. When I found myself on my own – sweeping leaves, going back home, or just walking – sentences sprang to mind and some remained there. I would develop the essence of a phrase or an idea either in a poem or a short story. It seemed that I really had to write. 

I still don’t know why I must write. Perhaps it would be more cautious to say I “should” write. After all, I am only human. I’m not the only one to have experienced a loss of identity; others have had a more tragic fate. But something deep within me tells me that a tragic fate was very nearly mine. Now that I think of it, I remember something I have tried hard to forget – cerebral shock. When I got out of it they all said I had been lucky. They told me that so often that I grew suspicious of it until I heard it on TV. (Strange how everything turns around that little box nowadays – we seem to give it a power that it does not really deserve). I heard that only one out of ten people recover from such a trauma. And I had survived! Isn’t that amazing? It was then that I realized my chance. And I use the word “chance” instead of “luck” on purpose, because the recollection reminds me I had come damned close to death but had been strong enough to fight the demons and come back to life. So the phrase comes to mind, which goes “You live to tell.” 

I wonder if I do. What should I say? What should I do? How to describe the events I had been through: a little boy run over by a car, lying unconscious on a blood-stained pavement; the same little boy a few years later, slightly more mature but cast in an unfamiliar setting, who went to sleep for a weekend. The dream metamorphosed into a nightmare – a lasting nightmare that resembled reality. However major the operations had been - and I must admit I was unlucky for both my hospital stays had been decisive – I always had a strong enough will to get through them. I simply refused to leave the hospital dead. Why should a medical intervention affect me? In my opinion, hospitals were made to help people recover, not to kill them. But these medical interventions affected my self-pride, and pride you can’t fool with. I simply tried to keep my pride and by doing so I made my parents a little more proud of me. 

So these experiences gave me another view on everything that surrounded me. There’s a book by Philippe Labro, entitled La Traversée, which still outrages me, in which he writes about being unconscious in hospital and basically describes this as a dream made up of flashbacks. How could he? I’ve been there too (in another hospital room), unconscious for more than a week, and I have no memory of it whatsoever. I was even slightly amnesic when I recovered. Sure, he is a writer, and there are wonderful stylistic sketches in his novel, but I think it’s a shame that somebody who writes such enjoyable novels should be so inclined to recount an experience with so little credibility. 

When I was at high-school, my French teacher told us there was no such thing as being between life and death. “Either you’re alive or you’re dead,” she said. As for a coma, she thought that somebody in a coma was still living. I said nothing at the time but I felt she didn’t know what she was talking about. Had she ever been there? To me, it felt like something you could hardly describe, as if you were flying above life, like you were born a second time. The only difference was that I was then ten years old. Age is an important factor. Either you have previous experience, or you might be traumatized for the rest of your life. As far as I was concerned, I had neither. I was an innocent child with neither past experience nor future trauma. I simply got the message: watch out before you cross the street!

It was like a great shock that was meant to awaken the child sleeping within me. I started to watch out all around me, full of admiration and wonder, excitement and fear. Through the years I recognized that the true meaning of a life is to learn all the time, learn a little more every day, for as long as you can. And when I see people pretending they know everything because science can explain it all, I know they’re wrong. Not everything can be explained scientifically. As long as there is life, there is mystery. 

Reconsidering it all – and it is, after all, nothing but a life – human beings are like seeds to be planted in a garden, as Ghandi once said. It really captures the magic of life, and this kind of magic is up to everyone to make. It is an opportunity to be seized, to be fought for, even if ultimately it defies explanation.

© 2016 Matt Oehler