before/after
I’ve witnessed quite a few road accidents in my life. Some benign, some catastrophic, some happening in front of my eyes, some behind my back, my ears picking up on the unfamiliar sounds immediately. One where I was involved, one where I almost was.
The former is quickly told. My ex-husband and I were the subjects of a rear-end collision one evening, resulting in the radio falling out and two cases of whiplash. Despite the unexpected and violent force, we recovered rather quickly and haven’t developed a fear of driving. In fact, I don’t think about this accident all too often.
Other cases are different. About fifteen years ago, I waited for my tram to take me home from uni as I heard an impact and a following slithering sound I will never forget. Before I turned around, I instinctively knew what it would be. Heidelberg Bismarckplatz is set up in such a way that several busses can stop behind each other in one bay. The pedestrian area being on the right side of the bus stop, the trams on the left, it’s easy to see how someone hurrying to catch their tram might run across the bus bay, not seeing a second bus already accelerating behind the first. That’s how it happened. The woman lay on the floor, there was blood coming out of her head, the bits of the front light she broke on her impact scattered around her. I was one of the first people with her, someone called the ambulance, the woman remained whimpering but otherwise unresponsive as they brought her to the hospital. I had her blood on my hands as I got home and I never knew what became of her.
The other accident that left a lasting impression on me was similar in some ways - I heard it happen. We were on vacation in the Netherlands and had just set out to take a walk. It was windy but otherwise very quiet in the countryside, when, behind the dam, a loud, attention-beckoning crash cut the silence. We stopped. It was quiet once more, but we knew something had changed. Before we could make it to the site, a helicopter already landed close-by. We later learned that two passengers were injured and a cyclist had died on the spot.
What stayed with me in both cases were the sounds. Not their unique quality per se - there are many unfamiliar sounds you only hear once in your life, and many of them are actually neutral and don’t always indicate disaster. It was rather the fact that through auditory memory, there was a clear distinction between the before and the after of these events. I remembered what the before sounded like. Almost as if I could keep this expired reality alive where those people didn’t get hurt.
Despite the fact that everything changes, everywhere, at all times, when big things change suddenly, violently, we often struggle to see things in a continuum. An accident becomes an isolated event with a prae and a post era, and very often, we already realize that in the moment. This overpowering, creeping feeling of dread that rises in us when we hear a car crash or learn that someone has died. To me, it signifies the intuitive understanding that whatever is happening will be life-altering for someone involved.
One form of structure that most of us seem to immediately implement in these cases is what I just described - the distinction of a before and after. It makes sense; whether you’ve been in a bad car crash or dealing with severe illness, losing someone you love or having to relocate to a different country, almost every part of your life will be affected by this seemingly singular event, and one thing trauma, in a broader sense, does, is uproot you. Routines that gave stability might no longer work or be unavailable, people you counted on might be gone and you might struggle with impaired health. Nothing is as it was.
Except nothing ever is as it was either way - and then, it is. The most recent accident I came across happend on a curvy road up the mountain in my valley. It had just been a few minutes ago, warning triangles were out but no one had come. The car in front of me stopped and asked if they needed help, but apparently, no one was hurt and police were on their way. We drove on, flashing our country beam at the oncoming traffic to indicate the danger. As I went back the same way about twenty minutes later, one car was already gone and a single police man stood in the half-shade, directing traffic in a laid-back manner. Soon, there would be no trace.
Constant (not as in: linear, but as in: perpetual) change is the essence of existence in this universe. From a human perspective, some things that happen are categorized as events because they happen on a scale that we understand, and those events sometimes feel bigger than the rest of life because of how much impact we later attribute to them. And yet, everything is part of the same continuum.
When dealing with the aftermath of things as big as road accidents, whether it is severe illness or divorce or the loss of someone, I have found that the before-and-after perspective, while intuitive, keeps us from integrating these events into the grander scheme of life. As long as you consider anything big to be this isolated event that ripped your life apart, making you unable to reconnect, this is exactly what will happen.
It takes time, though. There is a reason why, when I started to recover from ME/CFS, I felt like my life before the illness was over. It is. In the form that it had, anyway. But at the same time, it is not. I have the chance to regain things that I felt were lost in this big break. During the worst months of my illness, I couldn’t listen to music because it caused my symptoms to worsen. And yet, I was able to reclaim music as an important part of my life once I got better. I’ve found that a lot of my prior taste has changed and that I don’t really care about certain songs anymore. So it took time to find new music that I loved and that ultimately started to feel familiar. But I got there.
Some things that happen to us or to the ones closest to us seem too big to ever get over. The before and after seems to be set in stone, and we often carry immense frustration about the unfairness of life. Many of the laws we’ve lived by before seem to no longer be in place. This insult is something we have a hard time getting over. We can’t be casual about the death of a partner, a family member’s TBI or the loss of a job we’ve held for twenty years. But I’ve found that by acknowledging that and yet not resisting the inevitable continuation of life, we can slowly integrate all of it, opening ourselves up to the realization that the same laws do, in fact, still exist. We’ve just witnessed their exceptions more closely.
Because my recovery is less than a year old, I still experience this life as after. But from previous experience, for instance after my hysterectomy in 2022, I know that eventually, it will serve me more to switch to thinking in phases. As implausible as it sounds right now, but in my future, not everything will come back to my recovery. My illness might remain the biggest life-changing event (…) for the rest of my days, who knows, but I know I will eventually move on from it. As I should. In 2022, leading up to the surgery, the intense pain I was in due to endometriosis was a major part of my life. And as much as I wish I could be grateful for its absense every day still, I honestly hardly ever think about it anymore.
Change is sometimes violent, and sometimes it even involves you getting hit by a car (my almost-accident was exactly this, except with a motorcycle, a few years back). Losing physical abilites you took for granted before. And no, sometimes you don’t get them back, so you resent the event and cling to the before, kept alive by the label. But despite the crash sounds, which break your seemingly linear life up into a before and after you can access ad libitum, it ultimately serves us best to re-enter the natural progression of life, where only this moment right now really exists. As long as we try to keep a reality alive in which what happened didn’t happen, we don’t really accept the reality we’re given. We can’t go back. Even if - no, especially since - we are forever changed by what we have experienced. Instead, we eventually shift our focus away from trauma and onto the rest of life - and trust me, there is plenty.