Going Back

Not too long ago we had a terrible trauma. A teenage driver lost control and wrecked his car, and in the process killed his best friend who was riding in the passenger seat. I wish this sort of thing didn’t happen very often, but sadly it does. The boy’s recovery was a long one. He had to have multiple surgeries to repair his many fractures, and he needed intense therapy to re-learn how to walk.

He also had difficulty with his brain. Diffuse axonal injury – or DAI – is a condition that happens in many trauma patients. In short, it is tiny foci of injury that happens to lots of areas of the brain all at the same time. It occurs most commonly in car accidents, when the rapid deceleration causes the brain to strike the inside of the skull and rattle around like a tennis ball inside a shoebox. It causes people to be incredibly slow to wake up, and to profoundly affect their behavior when they do wake. In our patient, it altered his memory. It altered it in such a way that he would forget the accident and his role in it and his dead friend – he would “remember” it, as if for the first time, every morning for months. It was like some perverted, new brand of torture.

Or was it? Maybe it was just his way of going back to that moment as often as it was necessary for him to come to peace with it. CS Lewis writes of sin in this way by making the analogy to a lengthy math problem, with several steps, each building upon the last. If you happen to make a simple error in step number two, obviously the final answer – even if you performed the next twenty steps correctly – will be wrong. Pushing onward, despite doing so perfectly, will never get you to the right answer. In fact, the only way to ever find the correct solution is to go back, all the way back to step two, and make the correction, and then complete the rest of the problem.

The boy is doing well now, I’m told. He’s been able to move on. And in a certain sense I think it’s because he had to go back to that moment of the accident and figure out a way to confront it head on. He didn’t just push forward with this tragedy in his past – he went back, found peace, and then moved on. It doesn’t mean he forget the accident or in anyway feels less pain – it just means he found a way to live with it, and not blindly go forward.

It is Lent now – a time of self-examination. I am daily trying to go back, find my errors, correct them, and find peace so that I too may move forward.