Passage to Nirvana

On a beautiful spring day in , Lee Carlson's life was transformed forever when he was hit by a careless, speeding driver. Father, husband, writer, son—all .
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It was surreal to have a total stranger in a suit sitting by my bedside pretending to care about my well-being, when he was really there for the money.

The last thing I needed at the moment was to worry about lawsuits, money, etc. I needed to concentrate on my health. So when I was discharged from Stony Brook after five days in the intensive care unit, my sister helped me into a wheelchair, then into a waiting hired black car with driver, then wheeled me onto a plane and flew with me to Ft. Myers, Florida, where she handed me off to my father, who could care for me and drive me to various doctors, specialists and therapists every day: On Friday evening, September 28, , eight months before my accident, my mother had fallen down a flight of basement stairs while looking for the bathroom at a dinner party in an unfamiliar house.

She had opened a door, stepped into the darkened space and tumbled down the steps, landing on her head on the concrete floor. She was rushed unconscious by ambulance to the hospital, where surgeons were forced to remove the part of her brain that had been critically damaged. She was in a deep coma — the dramatic television kind — for weeks. When my mother regained consciousness after a month she was severely disabled, confined to a wheelchair, unable to walk, talk, feed herself, go to the bathroom by herself, bathe herself or perform the thousands of other small daily domestic tasks we all take for granted.

After several months of therapy in a nursing home, my mother was mobile enough to travel, and I helped my father wheel my mother onto a commercial jetliner for the flight down to their winter home in Naples, Florida. My father slept alone in the master bedroom while the second bedroom became a hospice room for my mother, where round-the-clock caregivers bathed her, dressed her and watched over her while she slept. The house also had a small porch where my mother could sit outside in her wheelchair, looking at the water in the small canal behind the house, watching birds flit from orange tree to avocado tree to palm tree while caregivers spoon fed her and wiped spittle from her mouth.

Just when our family was recovering from the shock of what had happened to this vibrant matriarch, my accident occurred, and my father suddenly had the burden of being the caregiver not only for his wife of forty-six years but also for his forty-four-year-old son — both with traumatic brain injuries.

Passage to Nirvana by Lee Carlson

My mother continued to deteriorate until her body finally gave out and she mercifully died in her sleep, leaving my father and me both grieving and grateful for her death. In the midst of trying to regain some sense of normalcy, my brother-in-law Kevin, who was married to my other sister, Kristan, and who was also a good friend, was diagnosed with throat cancer at age forty-seven. He was a vibrant, intelligent person, a lawyer who had forgone entering private practice to instead help the poor and underprivileged.


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While many lawyers become public defenders for a few years after law school and move on, he had stayed with the public defender career path, choosing public service over private financial gain. He took a personal interest in helping his clients, acting like a social worker as much as a lawyer. Why had cancer targeted him? I returned to Buffalo to help Kristan, who had two young children, while she went to the hospital every day.

His dying was prolonged and painful, leaving all of us emotionally drained and leaving my sister a widow with two young children. She had been a successful chef in New York City, the first woman ever hired at the Waldorf Astoria, a personal favorite of James Beard and a well-known innovator and food personality who had been featured on television and had written several successful cookbooks. How could cancer have taken her too? All the dying and illness and loss in our family left me physically, emotionally, psychologically and financially drained.

It was a difficult time. When I returned to Southold one of the most severe lingering problems was memory loss.


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    4. But the biggest problem was work. I tried to get back to work as a writer, but I would write a marketing brochure for a client and by the time the client had reviewed the copy days later and given comments for revisions, I would have totally forgotten what I had written. I would sit and stare at the words, wondering where they had come from. Had I written them?

    I had no idea, no recollection at all. The accident had changed my ability to be who I once was. One of my best friends who owned a design firm and who had given me freelance copywriting work before the accident was looking to grow his business and hired me full time. He fired me after a few weeks when it became apparent I could not do the work. I had never been fired from a job in my life. It was devastating to me and not an easy thing for him. TBI is a huge and little-understood problem in the U.

    Passage to Nirvana: A Survivor's Zen Voyage

    According to the Brain Injury Association of America, 1. The number of people who sustain a brain injury but receive no care is unknown. To help put that number in perspective, the American Cancer Society estimates that in there will be 1. Cancer kills many more people — approximately half a million a year — than TBI, which has annual death rates similar to motor vehicle crashes although some TBI deaths are also motor vehicle deaths. Usually that is not the case with TBI, where the resulting disabilities can cause lifelong impairments.

    Blasts are a leading cause of TBI for military personnel in war zones. TBI has been more in the news due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the many athletes who are suffering head injuries.

    See a Problem?

    Males are about 1. The two age groups at highest risk for TBI are children aged zero to four and teenagers aged fifteen to nineteen. African Americans have the highest death rate from TBI. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at least 5. According to one study, about forty percent of those hospitalized with TBI had at least one unmet need for services one year after their injury. As might be expected Traumatic Brain Injury is not the sole source of sudden-onset brain damage and brain-damage-related disabilities.

    That, and we were both sailors with a common love of the sea. The long classic wooden bar, with its brass cash register, high ceiling, old mirrors and slowly turning ceiling fans was the perfect place to drink a beer or a ginger ale, eat some chicken wings and watch a football game. There is even a trap door behind the bar where bootleggers hoisted cases of booze up from boats underneath the wharf during Prohibition.

    My mother would have felt right at home smuggling her guns here. We clinked glasses, and drank a toast to being somewhere we could just eat, drink, watch football and not be judged. The doctors and therapists understood. My doctors kept encouraging me to write a memoir of my experiences.

    Writing would be therapeutic, it would help me heal.

    A Thousand Steps

    I would be writing to heal a battered brain, a wounded psyche, a mind and soul laid low by physical infirmity and psychic loss. Writing as a healing art. But writing about my journey would also be something I could give back to the community, helping raise awareness of this illness in our society, as well as helping patients, family and caregivers to deal with the aftereffects and challenges of TBI.

    And since I was a professional writer and journalist, I would be able to put it all together in a way that could truly communicate the magnitude of the problem. I was one of the lucky ones: I had not only survived, but through hard work and luck I had regained most of my faculties and would be able to write intelligibly on the subject of TBI. My doctors believed in me, and that in itself was incredibly healing.

    There were several problems, however. First, the memory issues that were preventing me from writing simple short marketing brochures made it impossible to write a full-length book, no matter how good my note taking and file keeping. Second, the subject was so emotional that just sitting down to write about it would exacerbate my post-traumatic-brain-injury disorder, setting my heart racing, my palms sweating, my head pounding. The stress would intensify my memory problems, and I would sit at my desk, staring at the computer screen, stuck as I tried to remember a simple word.

    Sometimes I would burst into tears at this inability to perform so simple a task. I had been a student of Zen Buddhism prior to the accident. Reading that book led to taking a comparative religion course, where my professor, Dr. The book centers around Carlson's Traumatic Brain Injury and subsequent recovery, as well as his mother's death from a Traumatic Brain Injury.

    However the book is much more far-ranging, delving into such subjects as Zen Buddhism , sailing , divorce , children , family and even poetry. Ultimately it is a book about finding peace and happiness after a traumatic life event, a book about finding the joy in living. Passage to Nirvana begins with Carlson's accident, when he was hit by a car standing outside a car wash, striking his head violently on the pavement, fracturing his skull, lapsing into a light coma and sustaining a Traumatic Brain Injury, with bleeding on the brain and other damage.

    The story follows him through his brief hospitalization, then a year-long rehab in Florida, then his return to the North Fork of Long Island where he tries to rebuild his shattered life. His wife has left him and moved away with their children, his business has evaporated, he has no home and has to begin with noting to renew his life. During his year in Florida he also helps care for his mother, who is severely disabled from her own traumatic brain injury sustained when she fell down a flight of basement stairs.

    She is in a wheelchair, unable to walk, talk or feed herself. While he is in Florida, his mother eventually dies. Upon returning to Long Island, more misfortunes seem to continue: While this may sound morbid and depressing, the bulk of the book is uplifting, a positive affirmation of life. Carlson concentrates on his Zen Buddhist studies and meditation as a way of helping him heal, working with the noted writer and Zen teacher Peter Matthiessen. Sections of the book take place in the Ocean Zendo, a Zen center run by Matthiessen, and much of the book is a meditation on the spiritual aspects of healing, acceptance and rebuilding a life.

    Eventually Carlson meets a beautiful, understanding woman who has been through difficulties of her own: They fall in love, and decide to buy a sailboat named "Nirvana" that they discover rotting in a boatyard in St. They renovate the boat, sail her back to the eastern end of Long Island, where they are joined by their four children and two dogs, working at creating a new family and a new life. Eventually they sail "Nirvana" to the Bahamas for a winter writing sabbatical, where most of the book was written. Trying to describe the "plot" is difficult, however, as the book is really a collection of short essays, some about events happening in real time, some about Traumatic Brain Injury, some reflections on various aspects of philosophy and Eastern thought, and some stories recalling the author's childhood.

    Creating the proper files for the ebook version is proving to be more difficult than expected, and then there is the marketing push that needs to happen now that the book is actually for sale. No rest for the weary. Backer's books will be going out as soon as the books arrive, although it will take a bit of time to unpack, repack and ship individual books, so please be patient. When you get your book, and after you've read it, feel free to post comments on Amazon: Although it doesn't specifically say so in their guidelines, Amazon discourages customer reviews from family members, business partners, or anyone else who might be a biased reviewer, but honest, thoughtful reviews are always welcome.

    You can read Amazon's guidelines here: After several sets of proofs to get the cover color right all part of the process of printing a new book and dealing with a new printer , I approved the final proofs yesterday, and we should have printed books late next week or the week after, with copies going out to backers and reviewers immediately after we receive the books.

    Then the book should be up on Amazon. A long process, and a lot of work, especially when you are publishing a book yourself, without the help of a big staff at a big publishing house, but in the end it is all worth it. Check out the photos on the Kickstarter update page. The first version of the "book" has just been released. It is the PDF e-book version that can be read on personal computers and most smartphones. If you know anyone who likes reading books on their cell phones or computers, send them to the web site! Producing e-book files for the Kindle, Nook, Sony e-reader and other dedicated e-readers is a bit more complex, and will therefor take a bit longer, but we're working hard at it.