At Mile 11
“And I will try to fix you.”
-Coldplay, “Fix You”
Mile 11. That phrase will be forever inscribed in my mind. So too, will everything that happened that night in the Provo Canyon at the Mile 11 marker. I was driving back to camp with a co-worker, where we both worked and lived up at Aspen Grove. He worked in the dining hall while I worked at the pool as a lifeguard. Perhaps it was not chance that we left the movie early that night. It was dark and late but as I drove up the canyon, I noticed a car on the other side of the freeway; it wasn’t right. Mile 11. I found myself pulling over and telling my friend to stay with my car. I walked across the freeway, but began to run as I drew nearer the accident. Mile 11.
There were two victims, but the one I saw was the woman on the blanket surrounded by four or five people. They began CPR. When they were unsure of the breath to compression ratios I told them. It’s thirty chest thrusts to two breaths on an adult. We found a flashlight and I held it, pointing toward her, as we counted “One, two, three, four…” Did you know that the tempo for CPR can be kept to two songs: “Staying Alive” or “Another One Bites the Dust.” With each thrust I heard the air forced from her mouth. It wasn’t her breath; we were making her breathe. We were making her heart beat at Mile 11.
I remember her face. It was pale and white. Her mouth was slack in a frighteningly crooked way. Her eyes were open but they did not see. She was not there, but she wasn’t gone either. I did not feel the finality. Not yet. Not with us, but not gone. I wonder where she was during that time. Her chest was rigid, but we thrust it down, an external heartbeat, and we counted.
“What is her name?” we asked. Perhaps calling it would help her come back to us. “Karilyn”, we were told. So we spoke her name. We whispered her name, yelled her name, we talked to her, called to her, pleaded with her, we even commanded her. “Karilyn, Karilyn, come back.”
One boy decided to give her a blessing while we did CPR. He blessed her to come back to us. When he finished, I asked him if that was really what he had felt. “It’s really what I want,” he answered honestly. I stared at him for a moment then looked back at her face and body and wondered what would happen.
The paramedics came and took her away. The machine they hooked her up to showed an irregular heartbeat. V-tach or V-fib perhaps. These are the shock-able heartbeats. The defibrillator stops the heart for a moment; sometimes it starts again with a regular heartbeat. Like a reset button. I watched the lines on the machine and listened to the beeping and I wondered if it was her heart I heard, or only the remnants of our thrusts.
They took her away into the ambulance. And we stood there, at Mile 11 and watched them put sand on the oil spilled from the car. We watched them poke and prod the car. We watched them tend to the other girl. We watched them, busy paramedics and policemen.
I learned later that she didn’t make it. Karilyn died. Some reports said she died at the scene. One said they proclaimed her dead later at the hospital. No one seemed to care exactly where she died, but I did.
We filled out reports and I went back to the car looking for my friend. Our friendship would become much more because of what happened at Mile 11.
We spent the summer together; we worked, ate, and lived, all in the same place. We laughed and we fought. We hiked, we watched movies. I came to love him and forgot, for the most part, Mile 11.
About a month ago he ended our dating relationship. He said that he just couldn’t do it anymore, and I had the tragic feeling that he had just given up. With this loss came the memory of another, of the night that brought us together at Mile 11. Only this time I couldn’t run to find him in the aftermath. Instead I was alone with my loss.
Months later I had forgotten Mile 11 again and thought only of love. This was when I went to the swings. I needed to be held, to be rocked, even if it was only by plastic and a metal chain. I needed peace. Swings have always done that for me. I sat gently in a swing at a Provo park. I set my phone so that it would play music, rocked back and forth, and I remembered. I remembered every boy that I had loved and lost, saw their faces, and felt a strange peace.
A song came on my phone: Coldplay’s “Fix You.” And then I remembered another person I had lost. A woman named Karilyn; I lost her at mile 11. I heard the words from my phone, “tears stream down your face…” I saw the mangled car. “…When you lose something you cannot replace…” I saw the blanket with her on it. “…tears stream down your face and I will try to fix you…” I saw us doing CPR, trying to fix her. But we could not.
But then I heard these words, “Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones and I will try to fix you.” I still saw the scene that night. And I remembered looking up from the meager light of my flashlight into the bright headlights of the cars that had piled behind us. But this time, from the beams of these dozens of cars, I looked even further up. This time I looked straight up, into the heavens. There I found so much light. And I thought, perhaps there was more to it than I had seen before. Perhaps, at Mile 11, Karilyn went home.
