How to Survive a Tree Falling on You - Step 11: Prepare for What Happens When You're Alone

Your step-by-step guide for getting through one of the most rare, random, fucked up, and cartoon-adjacent things that could happen to you.

The month after I came home from rehab, I had people constantly staying with me. My mom, Sylvie and Zack, Nicole, Adriana, Becky, Jules, and Michelle. The parade of love and care was incredible. There was always someone with me to help with anything I needed help with - which was pretty much everything.

The week of Thanksgiving was the first time I was alone. Angie and her family were in town from Europe and were taking me to her brother’s for the holiday but Monday through Wednesday, I was on my own. My friends in Portland had plans to stop in and check on me and I had in-home PT and OT appointments so I knew I’d have help when I needed but I was looking forward to discovering what level of autonomy I had after seven weeks of recovery.

Navigating my house in a wheelchair without help stretched the time it took to do every task and the space between them. My first moment alone without anything to do was quiet. Very quiet. No conversations with friends, no instructions from doctors, no questions from nurses, no shouting from hospital room neighbors, no sounds from ICU machines. The silence let my mind wander - and it wandered back to that moment on Wildwood Trail.

The experience of hearing the sound of cracking wood and turning around to see a Douglas fir slowly and not-so-slowly fill my visual frame flashed back into my mind. My recognition of what was happening and the calculation of my very limited outcomes ran through my brain for another time. I re-heard the “Oh fuck…” I said in my head. But now, without the need to switch into survival mode, I heard the rest of that sentence. I didn’t even know there was more to that sentence. Each time I had told that story before, I said “Oh fuck” as if it had one period following it, but apparently there were three. Sitting in the safety of my kitchen counter, I could hear the entire thought that went through my head: “Oh fuck…I’m going to die.”

For the first time, I felt that entire sentence. I didn’t even experience it the moment the tree came towards me. But sitting alone in an empty quiet house I felt a level of fear and finality that brought me to tears…and made me realize my life was never going to be the same.

I don’t think flashbacks need soundtracks - there’s enough going on in our brains.

But if you find yourself alone in a quiet space after going through something difficult, play some tracks that can take a backseat while preventing whatever's going on in your mind from going completely off the rails. Only you know what tracks do that for you. But here are some that do that for me.

Thanks for reading.

Now go listen to some music.

🫀+🎧