CHAPTER 33

Marriage

Britney got married on March 22, 2013, and I was really excited to go to her wedding. When I got engaged, I’d known Britney for maybe eight months. We were more “going out friends” than anything else at the time, but I knew I liked her a lot. I was glad she’d come into my life. This whole new level of our friendship grew in such an unexpected way.

She’d go for a run and just swing by my house and sit on the couch for a talk. It was easy for us to spend time together, and we would go downtown and have lots of laughs. And more than the other girls, we had face-to-face time, for talking about everything, and that was really nice. It still is.

I was with Britney before her wedding. We were getting ready together.

“Are you having fun?” I asked.

“Yeah, for sure. It’s so cool to have all of these people here for us,” she said.

I agreed.

“Do you remember the night before your bachelorette party?” she asked.

I didn’t really. I remember a lot of stuff, but of course the night itself had been more memorable.

“Not really,” I said.

“We stayed up really late. You don’t remember?”

“No,” I said.

“We talked about ghosts and spirits. We were up all night.”

I loved that she had this crazy memory of that time. I loved that she remembered some really fun stuff that had nothing to do with the accident. Ghosts and spirits had been the topic of conversation, not anything else about my party.

With Britney wed, that meant she joined Lauren and me in commiserating about the ups and downs of being married. Despite the hugeness of our love story, Chris and I have had some tense moments, like any other couple.

Lauren had gotten married four weeks before my accident. Our birthdays were so close together, and then we were almost married around the same time, too. We also had similar relationships. Their relationship was easy, like ours. I connected with her on that level. I was supposed to be born on her birthday, she on mine. I was glad I was paralyzed after her wedding because it would have ruined her day. She was the person who had always been in my life, like family, since I was two. I don’t even remember meeting her; she was just always there.

One night, Chris and I made the three-hour drive up to visit Lauren and her husband; we all went to hang out at a sports bar near their house in Charlotte. Lauren told me that night that she’d cried at work, in front of her boss, the Monday after the accident. We also talked about how the accident had really tested my strength.

I remember sitting there during our dinner and thinking that I was actually glad the injury hadn’t happened to anyone else. I handled it. I’m a patient person. I don’t mean this offensively, but Chris is a stresser. I’m not sure he would have been as easy about having someone take care of him as I have been. He overanalyzes things, too. I thought about that as we sat there, how his traits, or anyone else’s, might have impacted their ability to deal with this situation. I’m calmer, I think.

Chris and I never really argued. Neither of us were fighters. But he misdirected his frustration sometimes, and I knew that. We had disagreements, of course, every couple does, but we weren’t the type of people to raise our voices. We never yelled at each other. Some people wondered if he controlled himself because of the injury. It was not that. He didn’t cut me any slack. There was a time when we butted heads over what I was actually doing for myself and not doing for myself. He wanted me to be as independent as possible. It was the kind of head-butting that only came out if he’d had a stressful day at work. In year two of my injury, when I was better able to handle the nerve pain but had also figured out how to do a lot for myself, I’d get lazy. He’d come home and we’d be watching TV, and I’d say, “Can you get me a glass of water?” And some days he’d get it, but on some days, he would say, “You are able to get it yourself.” He was pushing me. He’d say, “You want to be independent. I want you to live as full a life as you can.” He was right. It took me longer to get a glass of water, but I could get my own water. Absolutely.

When my body was on fire and I was in pain, it was hard. It was hard to be motivated when I felt that way. There were days when I was struggling and he’d come at me wrong. But it was a good period in time to learn, about each other and about myself. Sometimes I actually was so drained and felt so guilty about the situation that I cried. At the end of each day during this little rough patch, we’d sort it out. We never went to bed angry.

Communication helped us survive all of this. Neither of us ever held back on sharing our feelings with each other. We understood that both of our feelings were valid and that everything we felt was always okay. I believed nothing got fixed if you avoided talking about it. We resolved a lot, and I felt stronger for it. You don’t know a lot about yourself until you are tested.