Chapter 18: The Quiet Math
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I keep my circle small.
That's not a humble brag. That's not one of those things people say on Instagram next to a sunset and a glass of wine. It's a strategy. A deliberate, calculated, fully thought-out strategy for how to live what's left of this life without leaving too big a crater when I go.
Because I am going. Sooner than most. And I've made my peace with that—or at least I've made my peace with the math.
Here's the math nobody wants to talk about:
A spinal cord injury at C6-C7 doesn't just take your legs. It takes years. Quietly. Steadily. Like a landlord who raises the rent a little bit each month until one day you can't afford to live there anymore. The body breaks down faster. The systems that are supposed to run on autopilot—bladder, bowels, blood pressure, temperature regulation—they're all being managed manually now, and manual management has a shelf life.
I don't expect my body to keep functioning for too much longer.
That's not depression talking. That's not me being dramatic over a whiskey. That's a man looking at the data and drawing a reasonable conclusion. My body has been running on override since 2009. Every day is a negotiation between what I want to do and what my nervous system will allow. And the nervous system is winning. Slowly, but it's winning.
The doctors don't say it outright. They talk about "quality of life" and "management" and "long-term care plans." But I can read between the lines. I've been reading between the lines since the day a firefighter told my drunk friends to lift me out of a pool because of protocol.
So I keep my circle small. Not because I don't love people—I love too many people, that's always been my problem. I keep it small because I don't want the people who care about me to be as sensitive to my final departure. They don't deserve that. The fewer people who are close enough to feel the blast, the less damage the blast does.
That's the quiet math. It's not noble. It's not brave. It's just the most logical option I can see.
I naturally get too attached to things. Always have.
Before the injury, that manifested as being the host. The party guy. The one who wanted everyone at his house, everyone having a good time, everyone feeling welcome. I collected people like baseball cards. The more, the better. The louder, the better.
Growing up the way I did — Air Force bases, new schools, new states, new cities — you either learn to connect fast or you spend your childhood eating lunch alone. I learned to connect fast. You walk into a room, you figure out who's who in about ten minutes, you find your footing. It was survival skill first, then personality. By the time I got to high school, I had it down.
After the injury, attachment became something else entirely. It became dangerous. Because every person you let in is a person who's going to have to watch you deteriorate. Every friendship that deepens is a friendship that's going to hurt when the math catches up. Every "I love you" carries a weight that the other person doesn't fully understand until they're standing at the service wondering why you kept them at arm's length for the last few years.
I'm not keeping people away because I don't care. I'm keeping them away because I care too much to put them through it.
The math started sometime around year five post-injury.
Before that, I wasn't doing it. I was still in the phase where you believe, at some level, that recovery is linear. That if you work hard enough and stay positive enough and show up to enough physical therapy sessions, the trajectory eventually points up. Medicine keeps advancing. Breakthroughs happen. You hear about a trial. You read about research. You stay optimistic because the alternative is doing math, and the math is not good.
Around year five, I started doing the math.
Not consciously at first. Just noticing things. The way certain functions that were borderline in the first year had settled into gone. The way complications that used to be occasional were becoming scheduled. The way the doctors' conversations shifted from what might improve to how do we maintain. Small things. The kind of thing you can explain away one at a time but that start to add up when you stop explaining.
By year ten I had a clear picture of the equation. Not a number — nobody gave me a number, and if they had I wouldn't have believed it — but a shape. A direction. The direction the data points.
I started doing what people do when they know something hard. I started being strategic about love.
There's a Sevendust lyric that's lived in my head since 2016: "The only day we live is the day we die."
First time I heard it, I thought it was nihilistic. Dark. The kind of thing you put on a bumper sticker to seem edgy.
Now I understand it differently. The day you die is the only day you're fully alive in hindsight. It's the day everything crystallizes—every choice, every relationship, every moment of pain and joy—into a single, complete picture. You can't see the painting while you're still painting it. You can only see it when you put the brush down.
I think about that a lot. Probably more than a man in his early forties should. But when your body sends you daily reminders that the canvas isn't infinite, you start thinking about what you want the finished painting to look like.
And here's what scares me: I'm not sure I know.
I don't have a clear purpose. There. I said it.
That's a hard sentence to write in a book that's supposed to be about overcoming adversity. You'd think by now—seventeen years post-injury, after the foundation, after the speaking tours, after the skydive, after the dog, after the pills, after the mirror work—I'd have figured it out. Purpose. The big one. The reason I'm still here.
I used to think my natural urge to help people was my calling. It felt right. It felt like the thing I was built for. Show up. Listen. Be present. Share what I've learned. Help someone else find their next step.
But here's what I've discovered: my help is either never enough for people, or it's taken for granted, or it's misunderstood, or it's used up and discarded. And I don't say that with resentment—I say it with clarity. There's a responsibility to having a giving personality, and that responsibility is to surround yourself with people you can trust rather than wonder about. It's the only way to find fulfillment with your purpose.
And I haven't always done that. I've given to the wrong people. I've poured from my cup into containers with holes in the bottom. I've burned energy trying to help people who didn't want to be helped—they wanted to be validated in their misery, and when I offered something different, they resented me for it.
So where does that leave a man who was built to help but keeps getting burned by the helping?
Every April I sit in a room at Delgado for five hours.
It's a nursing program. Part of their curriculum. They bring me in to talk to students who are about to start caring for patients with spinal cord injuries — patients like me. I talk about what it's actually like. Not the clinical version. The real version. What it feels like when a nurse talks about you like you're not in the room. What it means when someone's tone shifts from engaged to efficient. What it does to a person to be handled with competence but without presence.
I go every year because I've seen what happens when it works. I've had students come up to me afterward with wet eyes saying they understand something now they didn't before. One woman told me she was going to quit nursing before that session. She said what I said changed her mind. I think about that on bad days. One student. One session. She's somewhere right now taking care of someone, and maybe she does it differently.
That might be enough. It might have to be.
The problem with purpose is that we expect it to feel large. We expect it to come with fanfare, with a clear before and after, with measurable impact you can post about. The real thing is usually quieter. Five hours in a classroom. A student who doesn't quit. A ripple you'll never fully trace.
I understand pain as fear, and fear as a dilemma.
That's something I wrote down years ago, and it's become a kind of compass for me. Pain isn't the enemy. Pain is information. It's a signal. It's your body—or your mind—telling you that something requires attention. The problem isn't the pain itself. The problem is what the pain makes you afraid of.
And what I'm afraid of, if I'm being honest—really, gut-level, three-in-the-morning honest—is that I'll leave without having mattered. That the math will catch up and the final picture will be a nice guy in a wheelchair who cracked some good jokes and loved some wrong women and helped some people who forgot about him by the following Tuesday.
That's the fear. Not death. Death I can handle. I've been flirting with it since 2009. We're on a first-name basis. Death doesn't scare me because I already know what the edge looks like—I've been living on it for seventeen years.
What scares me is irrelevance. The possibility that all of this—the pain, the fighting, the refusing to quit—was just noise. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Shakespeare said that. I'm quoting Shakespeare now. That's how serious this is.
But here's where I have to catch myself. Because I've been down this road before—the spiral, the dark math, the inventory of everything that hasn't worked—and I know where it leads. It leads to the couch. It leads to the 92% homebound days. It leads to the place where the only company is the man in the mirror, and he's not great conversation when he's in this mood.
So let me do what I always do when the math gets too heavy: let me look at what's actually true.
It's true that my body is on borrowed time. It's true that I don't have a grand, capital-P Purpose that I can point to and say, "That. That's why I'm here." It's true that I've been hurt by people I tried to help, and it's true that my circle has gotten smaller and smaller as the years have gone on.
But it's also true that I'm still here.
It's true that the woman I love is in the other room. It's true that my parents—who've carried more weight than any two people should ever have to carry—still pick up the phone every time I call. It's true that every April, I sit in a room at Delgado for five hours, and at least one student walks out seeing their future patients differently. It's true that I wrote this chapter, which means I'm still painting. The brush is still in my hand.
And it's true that every Thursday night, my dad and I sit across from each other with chicken tenders and a cocktail that has a name neither of us could say in church, and we talk, and we laugh, and for a few hours the math gets quiet. A retired colonel who flew F-117 Nighthawks and F-16 Fighting Falcons, and the guy who hasn't walked since 2009, ordering "Lick Her 43" from a straight-faced bartender who's heard everything. That's a painting worth finishing.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe purpose isn't a destination. Maybe it's just the act of continuing. Of showing up for one more day when the math says you probably shouldn't. Of keeping the circle small but keeping it warm. Of loving fiercely within the boundaries you've drawn, even if those boundaries look different than what you imagined at twenty-four.
I wrote something once that I keep coming back to:
"I'm as limited as I plan on being."
I wrote that on a good day. The kind of day where the pain is manageable and the sun is out and you feel, for just a few hours, like you might actually have this thing figured out. I'm not always that guy. Some days I'm the other guy—the one doing the quiet math, counting the years, measuring the circle, wondering if any of it adds up.
But I keep that line around for the bad days. Because it's a choice. Limitation is a choice. Not the physical kind—I didn't choose the chair, and I don't choose the spasms, and I damn sure don't choose the pain. But the mental kind? The I'm done, I've peaked, there's nothing left to find kind? That's a choice. And I haven't made it yet.
I choose not to feel a pain—both physically and mentally—so that I have more time to focus on my priorities. My pain is respected, noted, and used in my daily happenings. Since understanding this, I've seen a drastic change in my well-being. I feel less complicated but more advanced. I've mulled over countless insecurities only to realize that I was living in a symphony of chaos, not recognizing the simplicity of pain.
Temptation seems less prominent. Desire seems less apparent. And the quiet math—the one that counts down instead of up—gets a little quieter when I'm focused on what's in front of me instead of what's behind.
There are days when the math is manageable. The stimulator is doing its job. The pain is background noise instead of the whole score. Beka is there. The work is interesting. Delta's gone, but Winnie's here, and Winnie has her own version of the job. Thursday is two days away and the cocktail name competition is unresolved. On those days, the quiet math is actually quiet. It recedes to a corner of the room and doesn't make any demands.
And then there are the other days.
I've learned not to fight the other days. Fighting makes them last longer. What works — and it took me a long time to figure this out — is meeting them where they are. Okay, the math is loud today. Okay, the body is running the show. Okay, the circle feels smaller than usual. I acknowledge it. I don't argue with it. I just note it, the way my therapist at Shepherd Center used to note things in her chart without reacting. She'd write something down and move on. She wasn't ignoring it. She was filing it in the appropriate place.
That's the skill. Appropriate filing. Not minimizing. Not catastrophizing. Just: yes, this is happening. And it's not the whole story.
The whole story is seventeen years in. The whole story includes the stimulator, the Thursday nights, the business, the book. The whole story includes the people who stayed and the people who taught me things by leaving. The whole story includes a red fox lab named Delta who slammed a door at eleven o'clock every night for thirteen years and then went out during an eclipse.
When the math gets quiet, I can hear the whole story. Not just the ledger.
I don't know how many chapters I have left. The real ones, I mean. Not the ones in this book.
But I know this: I'm not going to spend them doing the math. I've done enough math. The numbers don't change no matter how many times you run them. What changes is what you do with the time between now and the answer.
So I keep my circle small. I love the people in it hard. I show up at Delgado every April. I write these chapters. I tell the truth, even when the truth is that I don't have a purpose and I don't know how long I've got and I'm scared.
Because maybe that's the purpose. Maybe it was always this—the telling. The refusing to pretend it's fine when it's not. The willingness to sit in a room, or in a book, and say: I'm a man in a wheelchair and I don't know what I'm doing here, but I'm not leaving yet.
Wisdom is the accomplishment of stress. Your gray hairs prove just that.
I don't have gray hair yet. But I've earned every strand that's coming.
I love you. But damn, the math is heavy sometimes.