Die Don't Die: A Journey into Paralysis: Love, Hate and Redemption of a Caregiver’s Soul

By C. Lindsay Newell Young

When a freak accident renders an avid surfer quadriplegic and paralyzed from the neck down, his sister is forced to confront her conflicted feelings of anger, fear, resentment and guilt about her little brother. Against the backdrop of a melodic connection to surfing and the sea, Die Don't Die is a haunting and bittersweet novella about the search for meaning amid paralysis and chaos—an extraordinary expedition into the eccentricities of a godless, quirky and privileged family fueled by hubris and zucchini. Inspired by true events, Die Don't Die takes the reader on an unflinching journey through the deepest layers of the human heart, leading to the triumph of compassion and love over suffering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626754188

Book preview

Surfing

1. Wipeout

Was it love?

I’ll probably never know for sure.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway, what you call it.

The drama of our relationship, the one between me and my little brother, began very late in our lives. He was fifty and I was fifty-one when, out of the clear blue sky, tragedy sent him flying and struck him down on March 14, 1999.

Everything that came after unfolded like a deep marine fog slowly receding from shore. Little by little the beach came into view—a pile of seaweed, an empty sand crab shell, a line of foam marking the high tide. But there were days when the sun wasn’t hot enough to burn it all off, and a thick band of low-slung clouds hovered on the horizon forever. On a good day, glimpses of blue sky appeared through chance portals that randomly opened and closed inside wispy, ethereal veils of sea-mist. Which was good because even the tiniest glimpse of blue sky was better than nothing. A sliver of blue was enough to give a heartbeat of hope for the sun. If not today, well, maybe tomorrow. Or the day after.

To ocean people like me and my brother, blue sky was the mustard seed that contained all our faith that a perfect summer day was possible, any minute now.

Which was all we had to hold on to. The possibility of better days.

When I was a young girl, I used to sit underwater on the bottom of the swimming pool for over two minutes at a time before I needed to take a breath. When my lungs felt like they were about to explode, I’d pop my head out of the surface, suck in a giant ball of air, and quickly slip back down into my blurry, watery sanctuary. Once in a while people would worry about me, wonder where I was. Not very often, though. When I popped up for air I could hear Mom’s voice yelling Chrissie! Chrissie! and I liked it so much—that someone missed me—it made me want to hide underwater for hours, until my toes and fingertips shriveled up like tiny raisins. No one ever guessed I was in the swimming pool, waiting to be missed, or discovered.

Underwater.

Holding my breath.

Sometimes Willy would join me. We’d stare at each other through a chlorine prism and have contests to see who could hold their breath the longest.

I think he sat on the bottom of the pool waiting to be missed, too. And I don’t blame him because I certainly never missed him. And I doubt anyone else in the family did either. I honestly never gave him much thought, especially after I became a teenager.

The sand at Venice Beach is white hot. It burns the feet of people who rarely come to the seashore. The soles of my feet are calloused, tough, and rock hard. I can jump on broken pieces of Coca Cola bottles or step on lighted cigarette butts and not even know it. Why Willy is here is beyond me. I want to be left alone to trounce over the sand and splash into the ocean without feeling responsible for anyone else. I run fast, like an Olympic champion. Over the small sand dunes and around a huge pile of seaweed washed up on shore after last night’s high tide. I race like a Thoroughbred colt in a lush, spring pasture. Round and round, faster and faster, up and down the beach. I glance behind. Willy is chasing me. He’s getting close and panting as if his life depended on catching up with me. But I’m a little bigger and can run a little faster.

Wait up, Chrissie! he yells. Wait for me!

I stop. When he gets close I turn around and kick sand in his face.

Leave me alone! I say. Leave me alone!

He slumps onto the white hot beach and rubs his eyes.

He doesn’t cry.

He stares at me. Stares hard.

But he doesn’t cry.

When we were children, my little brother was merely an appendage–a constant presence, like a benign tumor, or an invisible heart beat. I rarely noticed him, even when he was right next to me. Even when I was holding his hand.

He was there, that’s all. That’s how it was. I don’t remember loving him. I don’t remember not loving him. He was like my skin. And skin has nothing to do with love or not love. It just exists.

Like he did.

I can look at old photographs of him and feel nothing. Well, most of the time. There’s one of him holding a surfboard that causes my gut to feel like it’s falling out. He looks so happy on the beach. So regular.

He said the only time he felt whole, like he belonged on the planet, like he was normal, was when he was surfing. Out there with other surfers he was okay. On land it was a different story.

He never felt comfortable in his own skin.

Willy was born thirteen months after me. In those early days he was small and warm, and a comfort. For years people thought we were twins with our big brown eyes and flaxen hair.

It’s funny how someone can be so close to you and yet seem so other. Perhaps it was the simple fact that he was a boy with his boy-parts that made him strange and unknowable. Whatever it was, those mysterious facets of him remained constant throughout the years. I suspect no one ever really knew him.

He thought I did.

But I didn’t.

Not really.

Our early childhood was tumultuous, made memorable by the mayhem of our parent’s marriage and subsequent divorce; a battle so nasty and volatile that it garnered gossipy headlines in local newspapers.

Pasadena socialite scandalized by illicit love affair.

Custody battle wages into second year.

Kidnapped children returned to mother.

Father’s accusations: home-wrecker is a homosexual.

The whole sordid mess etched similar, twisted imprints on our tender psyches. I was about four, Willy three, when Dad caught Mom and her very wealthy paramour in flagrante delicto! At first, the courts awarded our father custody of me, Willy, and our older brother David. Neither Willy nor I remember much about living with our father, just bits and pieces of incomplete images—all of them obscured in a childish haze. But after the dust settled, and Mom married her lover, the courts granted custody back to Mom. We were whisked away from Dad to live permanently with Mom and our exciting new stepfather, Papa Jim (who also had custody of his own three kids: Mai, Mark, and Larry).

A year or so later, our bio dad remarried a woman who also had custody of her three children: Jennifer, Jack, and Peter. By now, Willy and I had so many instant siblings that we virtually disappeared in the bowels of this reconstituted, chaotic, familial menagerie and became part of the general background noise of a yours, mine, and ours horde of bewildered and needy kids. In years to come, Mom and Papa Jim would have two children of their own (Katy and Joey—our biological half-brother and half-sister) making a grand total of eleven children between the two families. Willy and I became lost in the shuffle because we were smack dab in the middle, united only by an unspoken bond of understanding what it feels like to suddenly become invisible in a family.

No matter what people say about divorce sometimes being necessary, all divorces are damaging to children in one way or another. Even if the dad is a raving alcoholic or the mother is a crazy wacko, the kids still hurt. They still lose a mother or a father. They still feel like orphans.

Not that our parents were anything like that. Quite the opposite. They were gorgeous, intelligent, wealthy, and well-meaning. For all intents and purposes, we had it all. And then some. We were born with a silver spoon in our mouth and pieces of our heart cut out.

It’s hard to say which was worse.

Our happiest days were those typical Southern California ones when the sun is hot and the waves are perfect for surfing. Willy and I learned to swim at our grandparents’ beach house in Corona Del Mar. Every morning the Red Cross would offer swimming lessons to all the rich little old ladies who had vacation homes at the beach. Dressed in oversized bathing suits that