Damien Grant
There is a moment of serenity between the instant you lose control and the moment of impact. Most have felt this glimpse of temporal grace in the seconds before a car or bicycle crash and last month I experienced this sensation out running.
I’d built up a small head of steam hauling my decaying carcass around the rural Waitoki hills and was pelting downhill at a clip a little faster than prudent. Malcolm Gladwell was in my ear, explaining why the turmoil in Elvis’ personal life caused him to stumble over the lyrics to the song Are You Lonesome Tonight, when I too stumbled, found myself mid-air, arm outstretched like Elvis himself if he was playing Superman. Only the later, bloated Elvis, rather than the svelte militaryuniformed version.
I became one with the road. It wasn’t great. I glided across the asphalt for a short distance before sliding to a shambling stop in the gutter. There was enough missing skin at this point to make a new wallet and it would have made for a pitiful sight.
Thankfully I was rescued by the kindness of strangers when a young mother pulled over, agreeing to drive this sweaty, bloodstained wreck back up the hill. ‘‘Did you cry?’’ enquired Jack, the 5-year-old in the back seat, after dispassionately inspecting my injuries.
‘‘Big boys don’t cry,’’ I explained. ‘‘Yes they do,’’ he corrected. He’s a wise boy, Jack, because big boys do cry. Not always when they trip over their own feet, but at other moments when our emotions unexpectedly catch us.
I stumbled over mine on Monday when, on radio, I was obliged to give some analysis on the previous Friday’s events.
It was a foreshadowed topic so I’d given it some thought and had prepared a mental script about how, since becoming a parent, I’d become aware of how much work, love and emotional investment goes into making a child.
On how, if illness or some calamity, a tyranny of circumstance, robbed me of that loved one, the grief would be what it would be. But if that loss was caused by a deliberate action designed to cause grief and loss, that I doubted my own ability to find a path back to sanity.
I never got to the end of the sentence, not as I’d prepared it anyway, because having to articulate my own words became too hard. I shambled on before I was rescued and we moved back to easier ground.
Most weeks I relish having a column. This isn’t one of them. All around me I see writers expressing certainty, clear in their own minds who is at fault and what we should do about it.
I’m jealous of their clarity for I am not among them. I have no answers, no insight, no solutions. Perhaps my critics are right and I am unworthy but all I have is my own reaction to what occurred and, like Elvis, struggling with the loss of what we had and the uncertainty that now lies before us.
I’m jealous of other writers’ clarity for I am not among them. I have no answers, no insight, no solutions.