Resilience

Pneumonia was something that killed people. It killed the brother I would have had. The third child who was alive in our family by force of memory, by force of repeating over and over the details of his short life until he was nearly as real as the older sister who tormented me.

And by repeating over and over the details of his death, the horror of seeing your child snatched away by an invisible virus and the inability of science to intervene.

By the relentless, furious determination of a mother to make sure death never had another opportunity to steal a child. “Bundle up. Cover your chest. Don’t forget your jacket.”

When the doctor came back with the x-rays and said I had pneumonia, all my five-year-old consciousness could manage was to start screaming “Am I going to die? Am I going to die?”

Face down on the exam table, writhing and screaming. Each parent holding a leg, the nurse trying to immobilize the rest of me. The doctor trying to explain that I must hold still so he could administer the million units of penicillin that were going to save my life.

I lived. At five, I had survived what killed my brother, survived the worst of what the world could throw at you.

Later that year, I survived a misjudged, face-first dive onto the corner of the coffee table, and the surgery to remove the tumor that resulted from the impact.

And the next year, in the gray, wet cold of Northern France, I survived bout after bout of bronchitis.

Mumps, measles, chickenpox the year after.

Broken bones, dog bites, falls from trees.

All the things that slowed but never stopped me.


The Hatfield Power Plant sat at the edge of the Monongahela so the coal barges could tie up and deliver fuel. The plant used its own power to light every inch of the structure, its own massive ornament in the rainy December night. My aunt, my mom, and I crossed the bridge past the lights, on our way to Uniontown to start our Christmas shopping.

My next few memories are moments of consciousness days later in the ICU, and dreams of food brought on by being nourished from an IV drip the whole time.

My aunt was driving. My mom was sitting up front with her. I was sitting behind my mom. My mom and aunt remembered everything. The lights of the other car suddenly glaring into the windshield, blinding them both. The impact. Pleading with the police and the EMTs to get their boy of the back of the car. No one being able to see me at first beneath the overturned rear seat. “There’s nobody there, lady.” But the implausibility of two women having the same hallucination finally prevailed and they looked again.

My dad told me later that the doctor encouraged him to say goodbye to me because I wouldn’t live through the night. They opened me up sternum to navel to repair what they could, but the spinal injuries were out of scope. If I lived, the concussion would take care of itself, but my legs might wither while my back healed.

I lay mostly unconscious for a week in the ICU.

Then I spent a week downstairs in a regular ward clamoring for pain medication.

They released me on Christmas Eve. The candy striper put her knee in my back trying to get the wheelchair over the threshold of the elevator. I screamed. I wasn’t going to survive all that only to be felled by a teenage volunteer on the way out.


I was a 15-year-old boy who had been invincible. Bent in half by the seat belt that saved my life. Stitches holding together the gash in my side, the incision down the front. Tension stitches spanning my abdomen so I wouldn’t split apart.

They fitted me for a chair brace, two metal strips alongside the new shape of my spine. Each week they bent them a little more and cinched me into the brace in an effort to regain something of the original shape of my spine.

I was a 15-year-old boy who wondered if I would ever stand up straight again, if I would ever have anything like a normal body again, a normal life.


Being a little hyperkinetic helped: as soon as I could, I’d strap on the brace and walk outside.

And I grew that year. Nearly eight inches.

When I was 17, I performed on the trampoline for the May Day celebration at my high school.

When I was a junior in college, I was offered a scholarship at a ballet school, and the following year was performing at The Kennedy Center with The Washington Ballet.

I was a 22-year-old man who was invincible.