Memoir reflection 1

For my first memoir reading, I have chosen Waking by Matthew Sanford. For those of you who are also reading it, forgive me as I give a quick summary. When Matthew was 13, he was in a car accident that killed both his father and his sister, and left him paralyzed from the chest down. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which chronicled his recovery in the hospital during the months following the accident. While reading, I made many connections, personally and to the philosophy we have been discussing in class. Along with how the book is written, I want to talk about those connections. 

First, I want to say a quick word about Sanford’s writing style. For a grown man describing events from his pre-teen years, he does so with surprising accuracy. Now, I am not saying that I do not trust his recollections. Instead, it proves that traumatic events and the days that follow them are forever imprinted in our minds. The words that Sanford uses to describe his feelings and thoughts throughout those times are beautiful. One of my favorite sentences was when he was talking about getting put into a second body cast, a moment he dreaded because of the burning pain that came with the last procedure. On page 55, he describes the pain, the second time around: “my back smolders but never completely catches fire.” Beautiful.

Second, I wanted to mention a personal connection that I had with a story in Sanford’s journey to recovery. In one chapter, he talks about visions that his mother would have about death and other weird instances that in the face of tragedy, seem like strange coincidences. One in particular that stood out to me was a story about his Aunt Kathy who miraculously had a baby when she was forty-one years old. She named this child Laura Kathleen, after Sanford’s older sister. The baby was born seven months before the crash when Sanford’s sister died. The second Laura Kathleen also died at a young age--twenty-three. I know of a very similar story. When I was a junior in high school, a friend from church named Rebecca died in a car accident at the age of 17. She was named after her Mom’s sister Rebecca, who had also died at the age of 17 in a car accident. I’m honestly still working through how I feel about things like that. By no means do I fear naming a child after a dead relative, but it is an eerie thing to hear of twice. 

Lastly, for this reflection, I want to discuss the yoga philosophy Sanford briefly referenced in this section. On several occasions, he recounts different experiences that left an “imprint” on him for later life. This idea of imprints reminded me of the “seeds” that Friday and the Captain discuss in How Yoga Works. Sanford tells of his time in the confinement of the body cast and how “years later, a calming compression is what [he] experience[s] when [he] practice[s] yoga” (50). The closeness of the body cast left an imprint on him for later in life.