Scars.

Scars

By Stout Cortez

We hit the mountain at the same time, skidding face to face. I don’t know exactly how our skis got tangled up to lead to our trajectory; I came out of my break and was late to see her, having just come out of one of her usual tight and flat turns across the mountain, now on a straight line towards me. I know that the tip of my ski ran over top of hers and got itself to the inside of her right boot, and when our bodies collided the torque on her left leg — anchored as it was in a freshly secured binding, breaking in its first run of the season — twisted through her knee and cleanly severed her left anterior cruciate ligament. Then, somehow, we turned and slid together face to face, allowing her shocked, pained, tortured expression through orange-tilted goggles to sear itself into my memory where it will probably reside until I die.

“How could you do this to me,” is what it said.

“It’s gone — it’s gone,” is what my wife actually said, through pained short breaths as she managed her way out of a shock response.

I stayed in mine for a while.

The ski patrol came very quickly — at least that’s what I’ve been told. I was sitting catatonic on the eastern face of Mount Mansfield, home of Vermont’s Stowe Ski Resort, and was not truly experiencing time. I was stuck in the moment that had just passed, 15 seconds or 15 minutes prior. I’d seen her winding her way down the mountain in front of me, at what I had judged to be a safe distance away. I’d pushed hard into the mountain with my left leg for the first time that season but wasn’t feeling secure in my cut, leading me farther down-mountain than I had intended to go. On my pass back, I had pushed hard with my recently injured right leg, but my ankle twinged with pain from where it had recently been injured, drawing that turn once again much farther down the slope than I wanted to travel. By the time I had come out of my break, she was right there, looking over her left shoulder down the slope. I screamed her name and tried to move but it was too late.

She never saw me, never expected me to be there. Maybe she could have picked me up in her periphery and moved, and maybe she brought her line too far laterally across the run (as she would later say), but I knew it immediately: This was my fault. 

I did this. My beautiful wife, who moves with such grace and power, who was just out on the first run of the season, on a trip she organized, would be out of commission for a year — if we were lucky.

I don’t remember what I said, if anything. I hope I said “I’m sorry.” I was — as sorry as I’ve ever been for anything. I was aware when ski patrol arrived, and they seemed to be relieved when they learned we were married. She clocked why immediately (if we’d been strangers, the resort would have had to mediate a potential liability suit, but since our strife was domestic the resort could breathe easy), but I was barely there.

They asked me if I could walk, and I said I could. They asked me to hike around the area to collect our skis and poles, and I did. She started saying she was feeling better as they strapped her into the sled, that maybe she’d overreacted and her knee was fine (it wasn’t), and the ski patrol relaxed into a professional courtesy. Two of the responders asked if I was ok to ski down the mountain. I said yes, and physically I was; mentally, I’d lost all trust in myself, but I could at least wind down slowly and save them a burden to supervise. I’d been standing for I didn’t know how long, numb to feeling, and the first sensation I registered when my brain started receiving messages from my body again was a wet coldness in my left hand.

“I think I might be bleeding,” I said.

My wife and the three ski patrolmen all looked at me the way you might look at a child who told you there was a monster under his bed. “Are you sure? You’ve got a lot of layers on.”

My forearm started to report a dull discomfort. “I don’t know, I think I landed on the edge of a ski…” I took off my left glove and saw a liquid red curtain draw a veil from my hand to the cuff of my glove as I removed it. I tipped the glove upside down, pouring a healthy splash of crimson onto the New England snow.

Some glances were exchanged. A radio crackled. The sled with my wife was gone. A radio crackled again. The remaining member of ski patrol turned to face me.

“Can you take your jacket off?”

The discomfort in my arm had fully turned to pain now, and a welcome bodily anger punishing me for my carelessness was spreading through the extremity. I flexed the fingers of my red, wet hand, wincing. “I think so.”

“Ok, the other option is I cut it off.”

Urgency. Suddenly, I was aware, I had become the priority.

“I can take it off.”

I dislayered, starting to become aware of the elevation and cold as I stood in a performance t-shirt in the snow while the patrolman inspected my arm. “Yeah, it’s an oozer.” A new feature had just been installed on my body: a deep gash, about an inch long and a half-inch wide, was efficiently bringing my insides out exactly as the patrolman described — not gushing or spurting or pouring, just calmly oozing deep red blood. He bandaged me so tightly that my entire arm started to numb, using a tourniquet I remember him calling “an Israeli,” then helped me get my outer jacket back on. 

He sized me up and instructed me with professional curtness. “Ok, it’s time to go down. I’ll be right in front of you. You don’t have to go fast, but… don’t go slow.”

I was somewhat grateful for the emergency to focus on, to get me out of my head. I was even grateful for the pain that I saw as a small penance. When we reached to the bottom, I was grateful to see my wife in good spirits in the medical hut, and I was grateful when they took the tourniquet off and inspected my arm — with the hand on the end of it bulging to the size of a Mickey Mouse glove from pressure — and told me I’d avoided long-term damage. But with that news, and that emergency gone, I settled back into the context of the day: My wife had just been hurt worse than she’d ever been hurt in her entire life. And I was the one who did it. This was my fault.

Since I was the only one who could drive the manual transmission car we came in, I drove our group back to the AirBnB. I cried the whole way.

Five years have passed. My wife’s knee is strong, our marriage is strong, and we’re both skiing again. In quiet moments I will find her leg and bring my hands to her surgical scar. These wounds will always require some attention if the limb is to stay healthy. Scar tissue grows like ice crystals, spreading out in all directions from the source of the trauma; consistent use and forceful massage is required to break down the tendrils that impede instead of support. The surface-level scar needs its care, too. But scars are not only indelible changes to our bodies and our lives, they are also reminders of the things that could not kill us and the lessons we had to learn in order to adapt, to, grow, to strengthen.

For my wife and I, if we’re honest, the scars I gave us that day are reminders of a trauma that was altogether very manageable. For me, the muscles beneath my stitched-up gash suffered no lasting physical consequences. For my wife, the miracle of modern medicine has meant she could walk a path towards an essentially complete recovery. Her top-end strength and speed may be gone, but the consequences downstream of that day have intermingled with the stream of time and been all but swept up in the superseding flow of natural aging. We have our lives and our limbs. Many others suffer similar ordeals that leave them not so lucky. 

Thumbing the inch-long pink-white line that parallels my ulna, I think of the lessons this scar certifies that I’ve learned. I list them here, should I, or you, need them for recoveries that aren’t as manageable — I hope we do not need them.

The physical recovery my wife underwent was not passive. Rehabilitation after a challenging surgery requires patience, perseverance, and humility. Thankfully, recovering from a torn ACL is a somewhat solved problem; millions of people have done it before, and I watched my wife humble herself enough to walk the trail others had blazed without ever pitying herself or allowing the pain and unfairness of the injury to provide an excuse not to work to get better. I watched her ice and wince and stretch and bend and eventually run — her graceful effortless stride now labored and asymmetrical — taking steps and steps and steps to recuperation. 

Lesson one: Humble yourself enough to face the work, then steel yourself enough to do it.

In order to keep our relationship strong, the bulk of the work again unfairly fell to her — which required a different kind of strength. It would have been easy to allow spite and resentment towards me to seep its way into our relationship. What happened to her wasn’t fair, and if she wanted to stay in her anger she had an easy target at which to direct it. Anger and spite can be soothing poisons, and it can feel empowering to wield your hurt as a weapon. Kindness, conversely, requires real strength — the strength to resist picking up the weapons of blame. I was spared by her quick forgiveness, but so was our relationship — though it was never really in jeopardy. My wife is an unfailingly kind person, and being kind requires an inner strength many people are never able to see.

Lesson two: Anger is easy, but kindness is rewarding.

Forgiving myself was a little bit trickier. Accepting your own failings, it turns out, is completely separate from another person’s forgiveness. No person has the power to absolve you of a guilty conscience. On the other side of that coin, no amount of punishment — from the outside or from self to self — can change the past. You have to find the ability to accept what you’ve done in order to move on, and to truly forgive yourself.

Lesson three: No one can bring you forward; only you have the power to move on.

An essential component to self-forgiveness is accountability. It was never a question that I would do anything and everything I could to help my wife recover; for as long as she had a burden that could be shared, we would share it. Filling the ice-water bucket, changing the dressings, making the meals and cleaning the dishes, walking the dog, picking up whatever slack could be picked up… that was the only right thing to do. Just as important, though, is looking at the individual decisions I made that I could have made differently. I should have cut harder into the mountain and trusted my ankle would hold. I’m experienced enough to know the difference between pain and injury, and I should have known what kind of load my body could carry. More importantly, I should have been more cautious — since my ankle wasn’t feeling right, I should have just given the people in front of me a wider berth. Accepting my actions then means changing them for the future. And, hopefully, it means communicating them to others to prevent future traumas that don’t need to be suffered.

Lesson four: You can’t change the past, but you can change the future.

I want to end not by aggrandizing my own response to what was and will remain a grievous error, but instead aggrandize the very nature of scars themselves — through a much shorter story told to me by a Ukrainian friend in college. It goes like this:

One day, a young man stood in the middle of the village and proclaimed that he had the perfect heart. He opened his chest and showed it to the townspeople: It was strong and pink and bright, pumping blood firmly with a smooth and muscular strength. Everyone who looked upon him could see that yes, truly, his was the most perfect heart.

“Your heart is not more beautiful than mine,” protested a voice from the crowd. An old man came forward and opened up his chest, showing his heart. It was patched, stitched, and beaten. The heart had holes that were barely covered by thin tissue; parts seemed to be missing, and other parts seemed to be taken from other hearts entirely. 

The young man was baffled. “Are you joking? My heart is perfect — yours is full of scars and holes and patches,” said the young man.

“Yes,” replied the old man, “but each of those scars is evidence of something I survived. Those holes are pieces of my heart that I gave to others. And those patches are pieces of others’ hearts that they gave to me. My heart shows a life full of pain and of love; it is truly the perfect heart.”

The young man began to cry, understanding that this old man’s heart was far more perfect than his. He reached into his chest, ripped out a piece of his heart, and gave it to the old man; in return, the man ripped out a piece of his own and placed it into the young man’s chest. As blood flowed from the traded pieces into their bodies, both their hearts became a little more perfect.

Stout Cortez is the pen name of a man in his thirties who writes occasional Sunday essays. He has no tattoos but has plenty of scars.