•  Caregiving (Eldercare)

Tumbling After: Pedaling Like Crazy After Life Goes Downhill. A Memoir
By Susan Parker
Crown Publishers
283 pp $24

For more than a decade, Susan Parker and her husband, Ralph Hager, enjoyed a life of sports and adventure. They went skiing and hiking together. They loved to backpack, snowshoe, and rock-climb. Then, in 1994, Hager sustained terrible injuries in a bicycling accident and woke up a quadriplegic. Tumbling After: Pedaling Like Crazy After Life Goes Downhill is Parker's highly readable account of what happened next.

The first thing to be said about Tumbling After is that it's remarkably engaging and entertaining. And that's due entirely to its greatest asset -- the narrative voice of Susan Parker. She tells her story with a spare, dry wit and a keen appreciation of life's absurdities. She doesn't flinch from discussing, in a matter-of-fact way, details about such sensitive matters as catheters and soiled bed sheets. She reveals her thoughts and feelings, however brooding and unattractive, without embarrassment or apology.

Parker is heartbreakingly funny about many aspects of her new life, not least the varied, utterly tactless reactions the tragedy elicited in others: "An old friend told me she hadn't called in a while because she was too busy buying a car," she writes. "A coworker compared taking care of Ralph to raising children; another likened Ralph's accident to his own orthopedic knee surgery. A friend of a friend told us of his strained back. A member of the gym said if he were in a wheelchair, he'd want his wife to kill him. An old friend took me to breakfast and accused me of being bitter and unpleasant to be around. He demanded that I straighten up."

When the couple's middle-class friends, at a loss as to how to respond to the situation, desert them, Parker and Hager find themselves surrounded by a remarkable collection of characters, many of them poor black residents of their neighborhood in Oakland, California. And with equal doses of humor and affection, Parker portrays the members of this new extended family in all their flawed, chaotic humanity.

The most memorable of them, and the book's second heroine, is Gerstine Scott, an elderly, 300-pound, gospel-singing, gold lame'-wearing neighbor who descends upon the Parker-Hager household and injects herself into their lives with her fried chicken, no-nonsense advice, and smothering warmth. From the moment she knocks on their door, barges in, demands Vaseline and starts rubbing down Hager's hands and arms, Tumbling After takes off.

Here, for example, is how Parker describes an expedition to the supermarket: "Mrs. Scott liked to move real slow around the store, selecting the most expensive brands," she writes. "It made her feel wealthy. My job was to follow her and put back the items we didn't need, like giant jars of pickles, cans of white and red kidney beans, apple sauce, crushed pineapple, bags of white rice, and multiple boxes of butter ... Maybe because of the new diet she had me on, fat, cholesterol, pig parts, and pound cake, I didn't seem to have the energy to tell her no."

What's particularly impressive about this memoir is that Parker avoids all hints of self-pity and sentimentality. There is no grand lesson gleaned from the tragedy, no great meaning to be divined and pondered. She suffers. She struggles. She yells and cries and thinks she's losing her mind. She refashions her life and her community to fit her new circumstances. And that's all. But her courage and her ability to view her life clearly allow you to experience what a victory that is.

This is a book in which Parker discusses caring for her husband on one page and having great sex with Jerry, one of his attendants, on the next. That juxtaposition could be jarring in less skilled hands. But because you sense Parker is leveling with you, because she doesn't try to disguise her emotions or gussy up her story with pretty trimmings, she makes you feel how much she loves, and needs, them both.

Tumbling After is not a perfect book. Its most significant shortcoming is that Hager, although a constant presence, remains something of a blank slate. That may have to do with the work's origins as a series of newspaper columns focusing on Parker's experiences as the wife of a quadriplegic. But I would have liked to understand more about what he feels, how he copes, what dreams he's given up and what new ones he's discovered. As just one example, Hager eventually becomes president of the board of a local disability rights group. But Parker tells us next to nothing about what that involves, why he does it, or what it means to him.

In Parker's telling, her husband is more of an object that people react to than a fully realized character. We learn how she and others move him about, bathe him, wheel him around, transfer him from bed to chair and back again, carry him up flights of stairs, catheterize him, kiss his forehead. A man who would inspire such devotion in those around him must be a remarkable person himself. Unfortunately, it's something we can only assume, since we learn so little about what's going on inside his head.

But the abundant virtues of Tumbling After win out. What stays with you, in the end, is the grace and guts with which Parker comes to embrace a life she would never have chosen.

"It is not the life Ralph and I planned to have together," she writes. "It is not the family I had once hoped for. But it is a family of sorts, with all the idiosyncrasies that every family, however traditional or makeshift, might have. We are not without joy or laughter or love. Ralph and I remain optimists. Somehow we'll get by."

-- David Tuller, a former staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Salon.com. He is also the author of "Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia" (Faber &Faber 1996).

First published April 16, 2003
Last updated November 21, 2007
Copyright © 2003 Consumer Health Interactive

Back to top of page