Recovery Room
Sooner or later every person experiences some kind of unforeseeable event that reveals the vulnerability of humanity. What a surprise it is to us when we discover, firsthand, that our packaging, the body, is not impervious to harm or damage. We move through life half believing that we have some magical immunity against unfortunate events; that they only happen to others. Illness and accident both hold the capacity to bring this fallacy front and center.
I created “Recovery Room” a number of years after my daughter was involved in a dramatic car accident on a snowy New Years Eve. In a flash, the lives of all involved were changed. She was a vivacious high school sophomore at the time, full of sparkle and ambition. The head injury she sustained was moderate, though she developed seizures as a result. In the months and years to follow, she wrestled with the physical and emotional challenges so common to traumatic brain injury, all the while determined to proceed with her plans, which included college. The medical “experts” enlisted my help in lowering expectations for her future. She emphatically resisted, rebelled, and clung doggedly to her dream.
Six years later she graduated from college, proving the experts wrong, including her very own mother. I had tremendous admiration for this young woman, who proceeded bravely when everyone about her was not only skeptical, but half expecting failure. Along with my admiration, I experienced great guilt. After all, I had subscribed to, and endorsed, the opinions of the experts. It must’ve been quite lonely for her, to proceed without my full encouragement and support. To forever remember this humbling lesson about the power of belief, I felt that I needed to pay penance as well as salute her achievement and determination. The question was - how?
I began the process by working on an unusual quilt. The activity of quilting was appropriate, because it speaks the process of making something whole - out of fragments. Through the piecing together of broken parts, a new wholeness emerges. The pieces of the quilt were made of Kodalith film, bound in plastic and whipped stitched to each other like sewing cards with strips of surgical scrub gowns. The process took nearly an entire summer, each whip stitch a payment for my lack of belief, my easily misplaced trust in the experts, my lack of understanding about the tenacity of the human spirit. Images taken at the site of the accident, my daughter’s X-rays, brain scans, and journal excerpts were used, as well as those of her boyfriend and myself. These 750 squares were then joined together with safety pins.
On the walls of the room I hung a number of light boxes, the kind used in hospitals to examine X-rays. The quilt was then strung much like a canopy tent, backlit by the light boxes. A hospital gurney was placed in the center of the room, upon which lay hospital sheets and the clothing my daughter wore on the night of the accident – all compressed under the weight of a large shattered windshield, fallen pieces crunching underfoot. A loop tape played the flat voice of a technician reading her EEG report. The distinct smell of an emergency room filled the air. The floor of the emergency room was painted like a section of highway, the place where many so many lives and the lesson of human vulnerability intersect. I was surprised by the response to the installation. I learned that a group of patients from Craig Rehabilitation Center, in Denver, came to see the work. When I de-installed the piece, I found several scraps of paper tucked under the sheet on the gurney. “Thank you,” said one. Another spoke of a young man’s struggle to regain wellness from his own injury. Yet another spoke to the work’s ability to work against the stigma surrounding epilepsy. My daughter never saw this installation, but that was not the point. Art has many uses, among them the process of introspection that brings its maker clarity. Some discount aspects of art that are “merely” therapeutic. I will never again make that mistake.
-Monika Lidman
