Scene 02 - Larry's Introduction

***************************Larry’s Introduction**************************************

Now, like I said, this is a verbal collage of stories,
and while researching this story, I became involved with The Crumley House,
a brain injury rehabilitation and living center, located in Limestone, Tennessee.

And while there, I got to hear the stories of the residents at the Crumley House,
Tony, Sarah, and Larry

And when Larry’s story begins,
he was just your average 12 year old boy,

Well, I was a military brat, so I moved around a lot,
Base to base
to base,
and I remember, at that age, I was always climbing on things -
Rocks, you got the one story barracks - I was on top - and trees -
I remember the last base I was on, we were stationed in Germany, and they had this one tree that just went on forever.
You could climb
to Infinity and Beyond.
And that’s what I was trying to do, so everyday I would climb just a little bit higher,
and higher,
and one day I climbed just a little bit too high, and the branches up there,
they’er not that strong and I…

And that was that.

***********************************************************************************
This story segment  begins by referencing The Crumley House in Limestone, Tennessee.

I became involved with the Crumley House through a serendipity of events - I was studying Storytelling at East Tennessee State University, when I was introduced to Storyteller Mrs. Judith Black - and in this meeting I mentioned the story of my accident.  I mentioned it, she was interested, we talked about it, and the conversation moved on.

The next day I received a call -

Apparently, Mrs. Black had been talking to the person in front of her in line at the grocery store and learned he managed a regional brain injury rehabilitation center.  She volunteered her services as a storyteller, remembered our conversation, and asked if I would like to join her in a performance.

My answer was “Most certainly”, and the next day I went with Mrs. Black to meet the residents of the Crumley House Brain Injury Rehabilitation and Living Center.  I only performed with Judith once, but my relationship with the center continued - performing regularly throughout my graduate studies.  Through this, I came to know the residents - hearing their stories and recognizing the similarities between their stories of recovery and my story - stepping away from this project being My story about what happened to Me, and seeing common events and themes that exist in the story of recovery from brain injury.  Through this process, the piece Who Am I, Again? was formed.

With stories collected from 20+ residents at the Crumley House, I chose moments that highlight common themes from the experience of recovery and arranged these moments to depict three experiences of recovery.  The story of my recovery provides a general outline for the piece, as it is the story I know best, but simultaneously three alternate recovery storylines are shared by the characters of Tony, Sarah, and Larry.  Each character is modeled after a specific resident at the Crumley House, but their plots come from an amalgamation of moments discussed in interviews.  I say this because it is important to recognize that there is a clear distinction between the characters in the piece (Tony, Sarah, and Larry) and the residents used as models.


The character of Larry is based on a young man - about my age - who was involved in an accident as a young adult that left him with brain injury.  I will call him “Peter”.  “Peter” and I were also involved with similar social groups in high school, enjoyed similar music, had similar philosophies on life - he is someone I would naturally befriend.

When I became involved with the Crumley House, “Peter” was already at a moderately high stage of recovery - relatively mobil, despite requiring a wheelchair or crutches, we shared amateur internet hacking techniques, we had extended conversations about a variety of subjects and he spoke of his accident with a competent understanding and almost humorous dismissiveness.  This man could have made a living outside of the Crumley House, but it would have been hard - his recovery hadn’t progressed to my level, and his physical impairments, combined with a slightly slower cognitive process, would have made retaining most jobs difficult.  For these reasons he chose to stay at the Crumley House and I could understand why.

With these realities in mind, I created the character of Larry.  Larry carries the idea of youthful hope, tempered by the recognition of a reality imposed by his situation.  Of the three characters portrayed in my story, Larry is the person most similar to my situation - yet due to fatalistic forces, at the time of the story he had not regained the ability to return to society with as much fluidity.  For this reason, my portrayal of the character of Larry is slightly jealous of me (as the Narrator) - not a spiteful jealousy, but confused: “Why has Lethan been given the chance to return but I’m still here - Why is my recovery different?”

I recognize that my recovery was a miracle, and while there were many factors that likely contributed to this recovery (discussed in later posts), there is no set of comprehensible events that can be marked as “The Reason” for this success.  I even hesitate to use the word “success”, as that implies other recoveries are a failure - this is not true.  A survivor’s path of recovery is largely not determined by the medical techniques used in the process and/or the commitment of the recovering individual, but by an ineffable set of factors still not fully understood by medical science.  Steps and attitudes can be taken that are believed to assist the process - some simple, some complicated - but these may also lead to further frustration, as the methods employed by one may offer few tangible results and a seemingly near complete rehabilitation in another.

Recognizing the differences in recovery can create difficult questions for a survivor - “Why is my recovery different from his?  Why is she able to heal so much faster than I?”  Questions such as these can quickly devolve into, “What am I doing wrong?”


That last question in particular is an unanswerable question, not because the answer cannot be known, but because the question is built on a false premise - that false premise being that there is a “correct” way to recover. The healing journey after brain injury (as with many traumatic incidents), is so dense with unanticipated difficulties and joys that to claim any possibility of a uniform recovery process is pretentious and/or obtuse.  In truth, a recovery is only what it can be - nothing more, nothing less. 

Yet even with a cognitive understanding of this randomness of healing processes, the inherent “unfairness” of it can’t help but standout like a blinking, neon hotel light on an empty highway -  for examples: why does “Steve” seem okay after being in a coma for a week with his drunk driving accident, while “Charlie” was hit just a little too hard in a football game and now he acts like a completely different person? - “June” was drowning and now she’s alright but “Susan” was bumped on the head by a falling book - in the library no less - and now she can’t remember anything!

To compare the damage dealt by any set of incidents or speed between two recoveries is a futile task - every person’s accident and rehabilitation process after TBI will be different.  Furthermore, different aspects of recovery will occur at different times and some steps, while they may be more observable by the general public, are no more or less important than less immediately apparent, internal healing.  To anticipate the timeline of one’s recovery on the events of another can be debilitatingly frustrating.

This calls into the question the value of listening to stories that I lauded in the previous posting - if one cannot form a treatment plan and schedule based on another’s experience, what is the purpose?  How can a survivor gain hope from a story if, in all likely hood, his or her recovery process will be drastically different?

At first glance, this seems to be a paradox - a survivor should listen to stories of recovery so he or she can better understand the emotions and events, but this information cannot be used to formulate or accurately anticipate a personal recovery process - yet I hold that the purpose of listening to stories is not about trying to find out how to heal, but to better understand the emotions and events as they happen, regardless of the time or order in which these events occur.

Returning to the trope used in the storytelling community - “We all have the same story, just the details are different.”  In recovery after TBI the details of each process will change, but everyone heals.  By hearing and sharing stories from a variety of speakers at various stages of recovery, a survivor can be inspired and find hope, but also become aware of the multitude of paths that a recovery can take.  Each path has the same destination in mind - to heal - but how this path is traveled and where this final destination lies is as varied as the patterns on a snowflake.

In the story, Larry might have a bit of jealousy about the Narrator’s healing, but I did not sense this from “Peter”.  In fact, this is one of the things I admired about “Peter”, a recognition of where he was - not necessarily where he would stay, but an almost monastic patience about letting his recovery occur at its own pace.  He knew it would be a long road ahead, so he might as well settle back and enjoy the scenery - speeding on the highway of recovery might cause an accident, and there’s no need for that.