All the King’s Men

We are pleased to share Paul Hetzler’s personal essay, “All the King’s Men,” which was longlisted for the CBC literary prize for non-fiction.

According to the Mayo Clinic, the four leading causes of spinal injuries are vehicle crashes, falls, violent assaults, and contact sports. At age five, my backbone got crunched by an assault, a fall, and a sports injury that happened at the same time. I bet hardly anyone’s nailed three of the top four simultaneously. Not to brag or anything.

Compulsory flying isn’t on the Mayo Clinic’s list of things that compress and deform spinal columns. Strictly speaking, the flight itself wasn’t injurious. And the fall was merely a side-effect of forgetting to use an airplane to fly.

The propulsion scheme was the issue. The kick-off.

Beginning in the second grade, two things came to school with me each morning. One was a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, which in those days wasn’t lethal to kids. Not that I noticed, at least. The other thing was back pain.

I rarely forgot my lunch. The pain always remembered me.

***

After 22 months on a “6-month” waiting list, it looks like I’ll have spinal surgery at General Hospital in Montréal this spring, which is awesome, as I’ll probably be able to stand and walk normally afterward. The surgeons told me that once they’ve scraped the bone spurs away from where they pinch my spinal column and foraminal nerve-root bundles, they’ll screw four titanium rods to my spine.

This last part was a disappointment. Because I specifically asked for plutonium. I mean, radioactive implants did wonders for Robert Downy, Jr. But I guess one Iron Man is enough.

Two rods will flank my lumbar and thoracic regions, and two will be anchored into my pelvis and run diagonally to support the vertical rods. They’re building a tower inside my back. In a way, it’s similar to a joint replacement, except they leave the defective part in.

For a while, I avoided surgery. Sure, it would keep my spine from deteriorating at an ever-faster clip, reduce the severity of pain, and restore some, if not most, motor function in my legs. But certain details were off-putting.

The lead surgeon informed me that with titanium-stiff posture, I’ll bend only at the neck, and a little at the waist. I figure I’ll be like a Ken doll, except not as handsome or eternal, and without all the plastic cars and real estate. I won’t be able to touch my knees, and will always need gadgets to help me get socks, shoes, and pants on. That means no playing “Simon Says” anymore. I’ve heard old Simon gets testy when he commands “Simon says touch your toes” or whatever, and you don’t do it.

My surgeon also said that because my torsional range of motion will be roughly zero, I won’t be able to wipe my own butt. Oh, shit. So to speak. Yeah, that’s a drag. I mean, how many public toilets have a bidet, right? But you gotta do what you gotta do.

He also said I’ll have the option to donate bone tissue, explaining, “We’ll remove a number of bones you’ll no longer be needing.” I should’ve asked what number, exactly.

At this first appointment with the surgeons, I balked. But escalating pain and further loss of mobility made me reconsider, and I jumped in the surgery queue.

***

Twenty-some years ago, following my first-ever MRI, the doctor assigned to me, who happened to be the head of Burlington, Vermont’s Fletcher Allen Hospital Spine Institute, remarked that I’d obviously been in a brutal auto wreck as a child. When I told him I’d never been in an accident, his eyebrows rose. He said the type of damage he saw in my scan could only stem from massive, sudden compression trauma. He then asked if I’d fallen off a ladder.

I said no.

“Well, something must have happened,” he insisted.

This encounter really shook me, because all the pieces fell into place in an instant. I remembered very well that incident, but somehow disconnected it from my back trouble. I knew I had scoliosis, but I didn’t know back then that it can result from severe trauma.

All through my adolescence and young adulthood, Dad would apologize from time to time, for my back pain when it was obvious I was suffering. I would typically mumble that it wasn’t his fault, and he would immediately assert, “Oh, yes it is. Yes it is.” Sometimes he’d say words to the effect that it started with him. Given our relationship back then, I never took the conversation further.

I recall that in second grade – and beyond – I kept getting admonished for slouching. Only much later did I discover that “rounding out” your spine relieves the pain somewhat. Students in the row with the best posture when the teacher called “star time!” all got gold stars. My row never got stars, although I tried mightily to sit straight.

But none of that seemed the least bit interesting until the day that doctor, a preeminent expert on spinal injuries, assured me that I received a massive blow in childhood that damaged my spine so much, he could pick it out when I was 38 years old. Perhaps there is some kind of protective process that kept me from connecting these dots, something I’m quite good at in other contexts.

***

To persuade objects to leave the ground takes energy. The heavier an item, the more oomph is needed to defy gravity. As a kid of five, I was about forty pounds, and it took substantial power to launch me. But Dad was built for the job. Six-foot-six, and 250 pounds. It’s unlikely anyone could drop-kick a kid my size very far, but I was on a dead run at the time, which undoubtedly gave him a leg up.

I’m sure someone could do the math. Not that it matters how many foot-pounds of force it took. I know the result anyway.

About sports and flying. My father often played a game with me; like tag, but you never got to be “it.” And you had to figure out when it started, because he didn’t say. That’s what we were doing. At first, I kept ahead. But then he won, tagging me with an athletic boot to the base of my spine while I was high-tailing it out of the room.

The voyage was brief and covered about four feet of distance, but I remember being airborne, and amazed that in that one partial-second, I was flying. I sailed past the hall closet and landed on the staircase, three and four steps up, sprawled on the threadbare burgundy runner.

The strange thing about lying there was that normally in this game, I’d scramble to my feet and run unless he already had a grip on me. But I lay there, eyes open, kind of blank. I didn’t feel pain right then. Not until a few minutes later when Mom came and screamed at Dad and took me to my room.

On the heels of my ill-fated flight, there was no visit to a doctor or hospital. Mom brought chicken-noodle soup, baby aspirins, glasses of water to my bed. She helped me get to the bathroom, which I needed on that first day, I remember.

The next day, or maybe it was two days later, she sat on the edge of the mattress and pushed my hair to one side. “Your father wants to say he’s sorry,” she announced. “You know, his father was mean to him when he was little. It’s all he knows. Remember, it takes a big man to say he’s sorry.” I didn’t follow her logic, as he was already a big man. Then Dad came in and apologized.

He never kicked me again. Other things, yes. This was 1968, and plenty of stuff that wouldn’t fly today got swept under the rug if you were church-going, white, and employed.

During the most intense violence, roughly my fifth and sixth years of life, I wished my dad would die. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t hate him. Or it could be I just don’t want to admit it. I don’t know.

I feared him, oh yeah. I was always on edge. A behavior that was well-received on Monday could trigger a fit of rage on Tuesday. There was no pattern to his outbursts.

***

It may seem odd that a guy who says his back hurts nonetheless took a job tree climbing. To clarify, it’s no problem to lift heavy things. What hurts is sitting up straight or standing.

For much of my life, my identity was tied to work output. But my expectations were always a notch above what was physically possible. If at the end of a day I went home exhausted, hurting badly, it proved I at least tried. If you’d caught me in an unguarded moment in my 20s or 30s and asked directly, there’s a chance I might’ve been honest enough to admit it was self-punishment. No doubt “pushing through the pain” and working too hard aggravated my spinal injury.

***

In 2003, a worrisome behavior emerged. For the previous 20-some years, I had meditated daily, exercised plenty, ate and slept well, and shunned drugs and alcohol. Prayer was as integral to my life as breathing. But soon it became clear my shit was not together.

Since forever, I’ve been a mumbler; dictating random thoughts aloud. Now and then it caused embarrassment, but otherwise seemed a benign quirk. Then out of the blue, it went rogue. As if I’d contracted an evil variant of Tourette’s Syndrome, I suddenly began to hurl vile epithets at myself any time I was alone; the same invectives my dad used when I was a kid.

On sheer intuition, I called Dad. I knew he’d been in counseling for years, and although he lived five hours away, I asked if he could arrange a meeting at his psychologist’s office. He agreed.

***

I wanted Dad to acknowledge the violence, and to hear some of its impacts on my life, both as a kid and later on. My intention was not to excoriate him, but I did recount some vicious episodes, including the spinal injury, which he remembered well.

To his credit, Dad was attentive and respectful. When I finished, he buried his face in his hands and sobbed at length. I cried too. Looking me square-on, he apologized, with no excuses. It was a world away from his hollow mea culpa after kicking me like a football years ago. I felt his sincerity. After a pause, he said something that made me shiver.

“I used to stay in bed in the mornings until I heard you leave for school, because I was afraid that if I saw you, I’d kill you.”

This jarring admission confirmed a sense I had as a kid. Whenever he was thrashing me with the closest suitable object, often his belt or a shoe, I was sure that I was going to die before he got tired enough to quit.

***

Our grace-infused session in 2003 was a watershed for Dad and me. No longer did knots form in my stomach upon seeing him. I visited more, though to call it frequent would be a stretch. Dad phoned about once a week, and our talks were amiable if short.

It would be nice to claim we formed an intimate bond, became fast friends, and made up for lost time. In truth, we were strangers with a dodgy shared past. He’d grown a lot thanks to therapy and the passage of time. All the same, emotional intimacy stayed at arm’s length. When I missed a call, often I didn’t phone him back, and my visits were generally limited to one overnight. Dad continued to reach out until his death in 2014.

Maybe it’s as hard to mend a fractured relationship as repair a crumpled spine. Nothing can be made entirely right, but many things can improve.

Ten days before I was born, my parents lost a fourteen-month-old daughter, their first-born child, to an accidental choking. From what I know, both parents made dubious choices on that morning, but Mom pinned the blame squarely on Dad, where it stayed. Given such a weight piled on top of his abusive past, it was probably all he could do to stay in bed until I’d left the house.

***

Humpty Dumpty is more than a children’s nursery rhyme. I have to assume the King must have really cared about Humpty Dumpty, because he mustered the most powerful resources his kingdom had to offer in a bid to fix the fragile egg-man. Though I question the wisdom of using horses to repair eggs, but whatever. What the story says to me is that returning to a pre-wounded state is impossible. Once you’re shattered, you’ll never be the same. And yet, any amount of healing is good, whether a spine or a psyche.

It’s curious that my father loved jigsaw puzzles. He was especially keen to glue together the odd bowl or cup that fell, even though it would never again be used for its intended purpose. I remember him at the kitchen table, hunched for hours over a pile of busted ceramic until he’d placed the very last shard. Sometimes he did a nice job. Mostly, stuff ended up like Humpty Dumpty. I think about Leonard Cohen’s advice to forget perfection, as it’s our broken places through which Divine light shines.

My father handed me a life, along with positive traits like the inability to drive past a car with a flat tire without stopping to see if they want help, and the desire to fix stuff instead of throwing it away. For sure, the abuse really sucked, to say the least. Healing has been a long road. Yet I don’t blame him for the challenges I’ve worked to overcome, or those that remain works in progress. Resentment is too tight of a space to live in.

When life presents us with a loaf of bread, it’s unfair to get mad because it’s not buttered toast. Seasoning life’s “bread” in a way that works for us is our job.

I’m told it’s a process that takes backbone.

 

Epilogue: My long-awaited surgery took place on April 22, 2024, just shy of a year ago. It lasted twelve hours. I owe Dr. Peter Jarzem and his team at Montreal General a huge debt of gratitude, as my quality of life today is better than I could’ve imagined. My wife and I went on vacation this March, and we walked on the beach for hours. It used to be that just standing was agony. These days, I’m entirely pain-free. Leg function improved, allowing me to drive again. Writing this, my dad’s penchant for fixing impossibly shattered china came to mind. They did a great job on my new metallic spine. Sure, I have a few limitations. Don’t we all.