Over the past five years, as I have moved into the solidity of middle age, I have become aware of a surprising need for symmetry. I am possessed by a peculiar passion: I want to believe that my life will balance out. And because I once had to learn to fall in order to keep this life mine, I now seem to have convinced myself that I must also learn to fall into death.
Falling into life wasn’t easy, and I suspect that is why I hunger for such symmetry today. Having lost the use of my legs during the polio epidemic that swept across the eastern United States during the summer of 1944, I was soon immersed in a process of rehabilitation that was, at least in retrospect, as much spiritual as physical.
That was a full decade before the Salk vaccine ended polio’s reign as the disease most dreaded by America’s parents and their children. Treatment of the disease had been standardized by 1944: Following the initial onslaught of the virus, patients were kept in isolation for a period of ten days to two weeks. After that, orthodox medical procedure was to subject patients to as much heat as they could stand. Stiff, paralyzed limbs were swathed in heated, coarse woolen towels known as “hot packs.” (The towels were the same greenish brown as the blankets issued to American GIs, and they reinforced a boy’s sense of being at war.) As soon as the hot packs had baked enough pain and stiffness out of a patient’s body that he could be moved on and off a stretcher, the treatment was ended, and the patient faced a series of daily immersions in a heated pool.
I was ultimately to spend two full years at the appropriately named New York State Reconstruction Home in West Haverstraw. But what I remember most vividly about my stay there was, in the first three months, being submerged in a hot pool six times a day for periods of between fifteen and twenty minutes. I would lie on a stainless-steel slab, only my face out of the water, while the wet heat rolled against my dead legs and the physical therapist at my side performed a series of manipulations intended to bring my useless muscles back to health.
Each immersion was a baptism by fire in the water. While my mind pitched and reeled with memories of the “normal” boy I had been a few weeks earlier, I would close my eyes and focus not, as my therapist urged, on bringing dead legs back to life but on my strange fall from the physical grace of childhood. Like all eleven-year-old boys, I had spent a good deal of time thinking about my body. Before the attack of the virus, however, I thought about it only in connection with my lunge toward adolescence. Never before had my body seemed an object in itself. Now it was. And like the twenty-one other boys in the ward — all of us between the ages of nine and twelve — I sensed I would never move beyond that fall from grace, even as I played with memories of the way I once had been.
Each time I was removed from the hot water and placed on a stretcher by the side of the pool, there to await the next immersion, I was fed salt tablets. They were simply intended to make up for the sweat we lost, but those salt tablets seemed to me the cruelest confirmation of my new status in life. Even today, more than four decades later, I still shiver at the mere thought of salt tablets. Sometimes the hospital orderly would literally have to pry my mouth open and force me to swallow them. To be an eater of salt was far more humiliating than to endure pain. I was not alone in feeling this way. After lights-out had quieted the ward, we boys would furtively whisper from cubicle to cubicle of how we dreaded being forced to swallow salt tablets. It was that, rather than the pain we endured, that anchored our sense of loss and dread.
Any recovery of muscle use in a polio patient usually took place within three months of the disease’s onset. We all knew that. But as time passed, every boy in the ward learned to recite stories of those who, like Lazarus, had witnessed their own bodily resurrection. Having fallen from physical grace, we also chose to fall away from the reality in front of us. Our therapists were skilled and dedicated, but they weren’t miracle-working saints. Paralyzed legs and arms rarely responded to their manipulations. We could not admit to ourselves, or to them, that we were permanently crippled. But each of us knew without knowing that his future was tied to the body that floated on the stainless-steel slab.
I suppose we might have been told that our fall from grace was permanent. But I am still grateful that no one — neither doctors nor nurses nor therapists, not even that sadistic orderly, himself a former polio patient, who limped through our lives and through our pain like some vengeful presence — told me that my chances of regaining the use of my legs were nonexistent. Like every other boy in the ward, I organized my hopes for the future around whatever illusions were available. And the illusion I needed above any other was that one morning I would simply wake up and rediscover the “normal” boy of memory, once again playing baseball in French Charley’s Field in Bronx Park rather than roaming the fields of his own imagination. At the age of eleven, I needed to weather reality, not face it. And to this very day I silently thank those who were concerned enough about me, or indifferent enough to my fate, not to tell me what they knew.
Like most boys, sick or well, I was an adaptable creature — and rehabilitation demanded adaptability. The fall from bodily grace transformed each of us into a novitiate of the possible, a pragmatic American for whom survival was method and strategy. We would learn, during our days in the New York State Reconstruction Home, to confront the world that was. We would learn to survive the way we were, with whatever the virus had left intact.
When I think back to those two years in the ward, the boy who made his rehabilitation most memorable was Joey Tomashevski. Joey was the son of an upstate dairy farmer, a Polish immigrant who had come to America before the Depression and whose English was even poorer than the English of my own shtetl-bred father. The virus had left both of Joey’s arms so lifeless and atrophied that with pinky and thumb I could circle where his biceps should have been and still stick the forefinger of my other hand through. And yet Joey assumed that he would make do with whatever had been left him. He accepted without question the task of making his toes and feet into fingers and hands. With lifeless arms encased in a canvas sling that looked like the breadbasket a European peasant might carry to market, Joey would sit up in bed and demonstrate how he could maneuver fork and spoon with his toes.
I would never have dreamed of placing such confidence in my fingers, let alone my toes. Like most of the other boys in the ward, I found Joey’s unabashed pride in the flexibility and control with which he could maneuver a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth a continuous indictment of my sense of the world’s natural order. We boys with dead legs would gather round his bed in our wheelchairs and silently watch Joey display his dexterity with a vanity so open and naked that it seemed an invitation to being struck down yet again. But Joey’s was a vanity already tested by experience, for he was more than willing to accept whatever challenges the virus threw his way. For the sake of demonstrating his skill to us, he kicked a basketball from the auditorium stage through a hoop attached to a balcony some fifty feet away. When one of our number derisively called him “lucky,” he proceeded to kick five of seven more balls through that same hoop.
I suspect that Joey’s pride in his ability to compensate for what had been taken away from him irritated me because I knew that, before I could pursue my own rehabilitation with such singular passion, I had to surrender to what was being demanded of me. And that meant I had to learn to fall. It meant that I had to learn, as Joey Tomashevski had already learned, how to transform absence into opportunity. Even though I still lacked Joey’s instinctive willingness to live with the legacy of the virus, I found myself being overhauled, re-created in much the same way a car engine is rebuilt. Nine months after I arrived in the ward, a few weeks before my twelfth birthday, I was fitted for double full-leg braces bound together by a steel pelvic band circling my waist. Lifeless or not, my legs were precisely measured, the steel carefully molded to their form, screws and locks and leather joined to one another for my customized benefit. It was technology that would hold me up — another offering on the altar of compensation. “You get what you give,” said Jackie Lyons, my closest friend in the ward. For he, too, was now a novitiate of the possible. He, too, now had to learn how to travel the road back.
Falling into life was not a metaphor; it was real, a process learned only through doing, the way a baby learns to crawl, to stand, and then to walk. After the steel bands around calves and thighs and pelvis had been covered over by the rich-smelling leather, after the braces had been precisely fitted to allow my fear-ridden imagination the surety of their holding presence, I was pulled to my feet. For the first time in ten months, I stood. Two middle-aged craftsmen, the hospital bracemakers who worked in a machine shop deep in the basement, held me in place as my therapist wedged the wooden crutches beneath my arms.
They stepped back, first making certain that my grip on the crutches was firm. Filled with pride in their technological prowess, the three of them stood in front of me, admiring their skill. Had I been created in the laboratory of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, I could not have felt myself any more the creature of scientific hubris. I stood on the braces, crutches slanting outward like twin towers of Pisa. I flushed, swallowed hard, struggled to keep from crying, struggled not to be overwhelmed by my fear of falling.
My future had arrived. The leather had been fitted, the screws had been turned to the precise millimeter, the locks at the knees and the bushings at the ankles had been properly tested and retested. That very afternoon I was taken for the first time to a cavernous room filled with barbells and Indian clubs and crutches and walkers. I would spend an hour there each day for the next six months. In the rehab room I would learn how to mount two large wooden steps made to the exact measure of a New York City bus’s. I would swing on parallel bars from one side to the other, my arms learning how they would have to hurl me through the world. I would balance Indian clubs like a circus juggler because my therapist insisted it would help my coordination. And I was expected to learn to fall.
I was a dutiful patient. I did as I was told, because I could see no advantage in doing anything else. I hungered for the approval of those in authority — doctors, nurses, therapists, the two bracemakers. Again and again, my therapist demonstrated how I was to throw my legs from the hip. Again and again, I did as I was told. Grabbing the banister with my left hand, I threw my leg from the hip while pushing off with my right crutch. Like some baby elephant (despite the sweat lost in the heated pool, the months of inactivity in bed had fattened me up considerably), I dangled from side to side on the parallel bars. Grunting with effort, I did everything demanded of me. I did it with an unabashed eagerness to please those who had power over my life. I wanted to put myself at risk. I wanted to do whatever was supposed to be “good” for me. I believed as absolutely as I have ever believed in anything that rehabilitation would finally placate the hunger of the virus.
But when my therapist commanded me to fall, I froze. The prospect of falling terrified me. Every afternoon, as I worked through my prescribed activities, I prayed that I would be able to fall when the session ended. Falling was the most essential good of all the goods held out for my consideration. I believed that. I believed it so intensely that the belief itself was painful. Everything else asked of me was given, and given gladly. I mounted the bus stairs, pushed across the parallel bars until my arms ached with the effort, allowed the medicine ball to pummel me, flailed away at the empty air with my fists because my therapist wanted me to rid myself of the tension within. The slightest sign of approval from those in authority was enough to make me puff with pleasure. Other boys in the ward might not have taken rehabilitation seriously, but I was an eager servant cringing before the promise of approval.
Only I couldn’t fall. As each session ended, I would be led to the mats that took up a full third of the huge room. “It’s time,” the therapist would say. Dutifully, I would follow her, step after step. Just as dutifully, I would stand on the edge of those two-inch-thick mats, staring down at them until I could feel my body quiver. “All you have to do is let go,” my therapist assured me. “The other boys do it. Just let go and fall.”
But the prospect of letting go was precisely what terrified me. That the other boys in the ward had no trouble falling only added to my shame and terror. I didn’t need my therapist to tell me the two-inch-thick mats would keep me from hurting myself. I knew there was virtually no chance of injury when I fell, but that knowledge simply made me more ashamed of a cowardice that was as monumental as it was unexplainable. Had bodily harm been able to rid me of my sense of my own cowardice, I would happily have settled for it. But I was being asked to surrender myself to the emptiness of space, to let go and crash to the mats below, to feel myself suspended in air with nothing between me and the vacuum of the world. That was the prospect that overwhelmed me. That was what left me sweating with rage and humiliation. The contempt I felt was for my own weakness.
Shame plagued me — and shame is the older brother to disease. Flushing with shame, I would stare down at the mats. I would feel myself wanting to cry out, but I’d shrivel at the thought of calling more attention to my cowardice. Finally, I would hear myself whimper, “I’m sorry. But I can’t. I can’t let go.”
I remembered a time when the prospect of falling evoked not terror but joy: football games, on the rain-softened autumn turf of Mosholu Parkway; belly-flopping on an American Flyer down its snow-covered slopes in winter; rolling with a pack of friends down one of the steep hills in Bronx Park — free falls from the past, testifying not to a loss of self but to an absence of barriers.
My therapist pleaded, ridiculed, cajoled, threatened, bullied. I was sighed over and railed at. But I couldn’t let go and fall. I couldn’t sell my terror off so cheaply. Ashamed as I was, I wouldn’t allow myself to be bullied out of my fear.
A month passed — a month of struggle between me and my therapist. Daily excursions to the rehab room, daily practice runs through the future that was awaiting me. The daily humiliation of discovering that my fear had been transformed into a public issue, a subject of discussion among the other boys in the ward, seemed unending.
And then the terror simply evaporated. It was as if I had served enough time in that prison. I was ready to move on. One Tuesday afternoon, as my session ended, the therapist walked resignedly alongside me toward the mats. “All right, Leonard. It’s time again. All you have to do is let go and fall.” Again I stood above the mats. Only this time it was as if something beyond my control or understanding had decided to let my body’s fall from grace take me down for real. I was not seized by the usual paroxysm of fear. I didn’t break out in a terrified sweat. It was over.
I don’t mean that I suddenly felt myself spring into courage. That wasn’t what happened at all. The truth was I had simply been worn down into letting go, like a boxer in whose eyes one recognizes not the flicker of defeat — that issue never having been in doubt — but the acceptance of defeat. Letting go no longer held my imagination captive. I found myself quite suddenly faced with a necessary fall — a fall into life.
So it was that I stood above the mat and heard myself sigh and then felt myself let go, dropping through the quiet air, crutches slipping off to the sides. What I didn’t feel this time was the threat of my body slipping into emptiness. I dropped. I did not crash. I dropped. I did not collapse. I dropped. I did not plummet. I felt myself enveloped by a curiously gentle moment in my life. In that sliver of time before I hit the mat, I was kissed by space.
My body absorbed the slight shock and I rolled onto my back, braced legs swinging like unguided missiles into the air, crutches dropping away to the sides. Even as I fell I could sense the shame and fear draining from my soul, and I knew that my sense of my own cowardice would soon follow. In falling, I had given myself a new start, a new life.
“That’s it!” my therapist shouted triumphantly. “You let go! And there it is!”
From that moment, I gloried in my ability to fall. Falling became an end in itself. I lost sight of what my therapist was desperately trying to demonstrate to me — that there was a purpose in learning how to fall. She wanted to teach me through the fall what I would have to face in the future. She wanted to give me a wholeness I could not give myself. For she knew that mine would be a future so different from that which confronts the “normal” boy that I had to learn to fall into life in order not to be overwhelmed.
“You were afraid of hurting yourself,” she explained to me. “But that’s the beauty of it. When you let go, you can’t hurt yourself.”
An echo of the streets and playgrounds I called home until I met the virus. American slogans: go with the flow, roll with the punches, slide with the threat until it is no longer a threat. They were simple slogans, and they were all about creating strength from weakness, a veritable world’s fair of compensation.
I returned to the city a year later. By that time I was a willing convert, someone who secretly enjoyed demonstrating his ability to fall. I enjoyed the surprise that would greet me as I got to my feet, unscathed. However perverse it may seem, I felt a certain pleasure when, as I walked with a friend, I felt a crutch slip out of my grasp. Watching concern darken his features, I felt in control of my own capacity. For falling had become the way my body sought out its proper home. It was an earthbound body, and mine would be an earthbound life. My quest would be for the solid ground beneath me. Falling with confidence, I fell away from fear.
Of course, some falls took me unawares, and I found myself letting go too late or too early. Bruised in ego and sometimes in body, I would pull myself to my feet to consider what had gone wrong. Yet I was essentially untroubled. Such defeats were part of the game, even when they confined me to bed for a day or two afterward. I was an accountant of pain, and sometimes heavier payment was demanded. In my midthirties, walking my two-year-old son’s baby sitter home, I tripped on the curbstone and broke my wrist. When I was forty-eight, an awkward fall triggered by a carelessly unlocked brace sent me smashing against the bathtub and into surgery for a broken femur. It took four months for me to learn to walk with the crutches all over again. But I learned. I already knew how to fall.
I knew such accidents could be handled. After all, pain was not synonymous with mortality. In fact, pain was insurance against an excessive consciousness of mortality. Pain might validate the specific moment in time, but it didn’t have much to do with the future. I did not yet believe that falling had anything to do with death. It was simply a way for me to exercise control over my own existence.
It seems to me today that when I first let my body fall to those mats, I was somehow giving myself the endurance I would need to survive in this world. In a curious way, falling became a way of celebrating what I had lost. My legs were lifeless, useless, but their loss had created a dancing image in whose shadowy gyrations I recognized a strange but potentially interesting new self. I would survive. I knew that now. I could let go, I could fall, and, best of all, I could get up.
To create an independent self, a man has to rid himself both of the myths that nurture him and the myths that hold him back. Learning to fall was the first lesson in how I yet might live successfully as a cripple. Even disease has its inviolate principles. I understood that the most dangerous threat to the sense of self I needed was an inflated belief in my own capacity. Falling rids a man of excess baggage; it teaches him how each of us is dependent on balance.
But what really gave falling legitimacy for me was the knowledge that I could get to my feet again. That was what made it a fall into life. That was what taught me the rules of survival. As long as I could pick myself up and stand on my own two feet, brace-bound and crutch-propped as I was, the fall testified to my ability to live in the here and now, to stake my claim as an American who had turned incapacity into capacity. For such a man, falling might well be considered the language of everyday achievement.
But the day came, as I knew it must come, when I could no longer pick myself up. It was then that my passion for symmetry in endings began. On that day, spurred on by another fall, I found myself spinning into the inevitable future.
The day was actually a rainy night in November of 1983. I had just finished teaching at the City College Center for Worker Education, an off-campus degree program for working adults, and had joined some friends for dinner. All of us, I remember, were in a jovial, celebratory mood, although I no longer remember what it was we were celebrating. Perhaps it was simply the satisfaction of being good friends and colleagues at dinner together.
We ate in a Spanish restaurant on 14th Street in Manhattan. It was a dinner that took on, for me at least, the intensity of a point in time that would assume greater and greater significance as I grew older, one of those watershed moments of which writers are so fond. In the dark, rainswept New York night, change and possibility seemed to drift like a thick fog all around us.
Our mood was still convivial when we left the restaurant around eleven o’clock. The rain had slackened off to a soft drizzle, and the street lights glistened on the wet asphalt. The five of us stood around on the slicked-down sidewalk, none of us willing to be the first to break the richness of the mood by leaving.
Suddenly the crutch in my left hand began to slip out from under me, slowly, almost deliberately, as if the crutch had a mind of its own and had not yet made the commitment that would send me down. I had apparently hit a slick patch of city sidewalk, some nub of concrete worn smooth as medieval stone by the thousands of shoppers and panhandlers and tourists and students who daily pounded 14th Street.
Instinctively, I at first tried to fight the fall, to seek balance by pushing off from the crutch in my right hand. But as I recognized that the fall was inevitable, I simply went slack — and for the thousandth time my body sought vindication in its ability to let go and drop. These good friends had seen me fall before. They knew my childish vanities, understood that I still thought of falling as a way to demonstrate my control of the traps and uncertainties that lay in wait for us all.
Thirty-eight years earlier, I had discovered that I could fall into life simply by letting go. Now I made a different discovery — that I could no longer get to my feet by myself. I hit the wet ground and quickly turned over and pushed up, trying to use one of the crutches as a prop to boost myself to my feet, as I had been taught to do as a boy of twelve.
But try as hard as I could, I couldn’t get to my feet. It wasn’t that I lacked physical strength. I knew that my arms were as powerful as ever as I pushed down on the wet concrete. It had nothing to do with the fact that the street was wet, as my friends insisted later. No, it had to do with a subtle, mysterious change in my own sense of rhythm and balance. My body had decided — and decided on its own, autonomously — that the moment had come for me to face the question of endings. It was the body that chose the time of this recognition.
It was, it seems to me now, a distinctly American moment. It would leave me pondering limitations and endings and summations. It would leave me with the curiously buoyant sense that mortality had quite suddenly made itself a felt presence rather than the rhetorical device used by the poets and novelists I taught to my students. This was what writers had in mind when they spoke of the truly common fate, this sense of ending coming to one unbidden. It brought with it my impassioned quest for symmetry. As I lay on the wet ground — no more than a minute or two — all I could think of was how much I wanted my life to balance out.
Here was a clear, simple perception, and there was nothing mystical about it. There are limitations we recognize and those that recognize us. My friends, who had been standing around nervously while I tried to get to my feet, finally asked if they could help me up. “You’ll have to,” I said. “I can’t get up any other way.”
Two of them pulled me to my feet while another jammed the crutches beneath my arms, as the therapist and the two bracemakers had done almost four decades earlier. When I was standing, they proceeded to joke about my sudden incapacity in that age-old way men have, as if words might mollify loss and change and time’s betrayal. I joined in the joking. But what I really wanted was to go home and contemplate this latest fall in the privacy of my apartment. The implication was clear: I would never again get to my feet on my own. A part of my life had ended. But that didn’t depress me. In fact, I felt almost as exhilarated as I had thirty-eight years earlier, when my body surrendered to the need to let go and I fell into life.
Almost four years have passed since I fell on the wet sidewalk of 14th Street. I suppose it wasn’t a particularly memorable fall. It wasn’t even particularly significant to anyone who had not once fallen into life. But it was inevitable; I had fallen into a time when it would no longer even be necessary to let go.
It was a fall that left me with the knowledge that I could no longer pick myself up. I now needed the help of others as I had not needed their help before. It was also a fall that left me burning with this strange passion for symmetry, this desire to balance out my existence. When the day comes, I want to be able to fall into my death as nakedly as I once had to fall into my life.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not seeking a way out of mortality, for I believe in nothing more strongly than I believe in the permanency of endings. I am not looking for a way out of this life, a life I continue to find immensely enjoyable — even if I can no longer pull myself to my own two feet. Of course, a good deal in my life has changed. For one thing, I am increasingly impatient with those who claim to have no use for endings of any sort. I am also increasingly embarrassed by the thought of the harshly critical adolescent I was, self-righteously convinced that the only way for a man to go to his end was kicking and screaming.
But these are, I suppose, the kinds of changes any man or woman of forty or fifty would feel. Middle-aged skepticism is as natural as adolescent acne. In my clearer, less passionate moments I can even laugh at my need for symmetry in beginnings and endings, as well as my desire to see my own eventual death as a line running parallel to my life. Even in mathematics, let alone life, symmetry is sometimes too neat, too closed off from the way things actually work. After all, it took me a full month before I could bring myself to let go and fall into life.
I no longer talk about how to seize a doctrine of compensation from disease. I don’t talk about it, but it still haunts me. In my heart, I believe there is only one philosophy by which anyone can actually live; only one philosophy that strips away both spiritual mumbo jumbo and the herculean weight of existential anxiety. In the final analysis, a man really is what he does.
Believing as I do, I wonder why I so often find myself trying to frame a perspective that will provide a proper sense of ending. Perhaps that is why I find myself sitting in a bar with a friend, trying to explain to him all I have learned from falling. “There must be a time,” I hear myself tell him, “when a man has the right to stop thinking about falling.”
“Sure,” my friend laughs. “A second before he dies.”
“Falling into Life” is excerpted from Falling into Life, by Leonard Kriegel. © 1991 by Leonard Kriegel. It appears here by permission of the author.
