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>> 175 6 Wrestling with an Angel Most of the women discussed spiritual or religious commitments, beliefs, and/or communities as important to their identity and their recovery. Tracy was regular churchgoer and believer but didn’t see a connection between that and her injuries; the car accident was “just one of those things.” Beth is the only participant who disavowed any spiritual or religious beliefs. She describes herself as a Hobbesian materialist, sometimes as a pantheist. To remind the reader, Beth was injured when she was caught in gun crossfire while driving to a conference, about six years prior to this interview. Here, I was asking for her thoughts about post-injury meaning or sensibility: ES: I’m wondering, and you might have already answered this in telling me about being a “stoic midwesterner,” but I was wondering about the experience of it, you know, the day-to-day of it, what got you through it? The way you make sense of it? Beth: Oh, well there’s no meaning. ES: Yeah? There’s no meaning? Beth: No. no meaning. ES: Yeah? Beth: You know, life is random. 176 > 177 and her relationship with her family have become more intimate (“or whatever”). She attributes those changes to the tools she’s been given to work with and the insight she’s gotten from working with professionals. Echoing other statements of Beth’s presented in previous chapters, she also sees the time she now has, to reflect and think about things people have said, as having been a major contributor to those positive changes in her personal relationships. So while she declines to ascribe meaning to the injuries or the event, she can identify the ways that relationships are better and ascribe value to those changes. That Beth describes this as “an unconscious process,” not a project of intentional meaning construction or extraction, is interesting because some of the women draw an intentional distinction between the meanings they have purposefully constructed post-injury versus those that were in some sense inherent or ordained in them. Beth may be a “little obsessive-compulsive” but not in any cosmic way: “Just so people will clean up after themselves around here, that’s enough order for me.” In a relatively short passage she introduces concerns or motifs recurrent in many of the other women’s accounts. One is the question of a purpose or meaning to the injury, including how it happened and, to an extent, the placing of blame. A second and related question is about the question of justice or order—worldly or cosmic— that is raised by having been injured, and what appears to be the accessory problem of what to do with the anger about being injured or impaired—the loss, if that is how it comes to be construed. Third, Beth asserts here (and elsewhere) the importance of interpersonal relationships and how they and her perspectives on them have been changed following the injury. Fourth, she points to the work of reconstructing life and meaning post-injury, and finding the “tools” necessary to that endeavor. And, fifth, she mentions the time needed for that reconstruction work. Beth is unique in her dispensation of questions of meaning and in her resistance to metaphysical framings, as well as in the way she discusses an “unconscious process.” But the centrality of relationships is a common and generally central aspect of all of the women’s accounts, of the ascription of a meaning to their injuries, and of the process of reauthoring identity. Some of the women ascribe a crucial or even primary spiritual relevance to their interpersonal or community relationships; 178 > 179 The rest of the women, in one way or another, wrestled with the question of a purpose to their injuries—why they happened and what the ultimate meaning of them might be—and of responsibility, God’s, their own, or people’s. Susan was injured when she was drove her car into a tree, thirteen years prior to this interview. She was twenty at the time and “smoked grass all the time, popped pills” and did all “sorts of stupid things.” Susan never clearly stated to what degree she was impaired behind the wheel, but she has done public speaking in schools (“pouring my heart out to little kids”) on drinking and driving since she left rehab. She recounts the night in this way: Susan: I was driving. And my friend that was in the car. I woke him up...

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