by Lynne Greenberg
for The Survivors Club

At 19, I fell off a cliff—literally, that is, not metaphorically. I survived a broken neck in this near fatal car accident. Miraculously, I recovered fully, and until the age of 41 my life was pain-free. I got married, had two children, got a Ph.D. and became a professor. Three years ago, this carefully constructed, much cherished life imploded.

In one day, seemingly out of nowhere, I found myself in excruciating pain that started at my neck and shot through the center of my skull. Months of visits to doctors finally revealed that my neck was still fractured and that I had experienced nerve damage. I spent the next year and a half as an invalid, in bed with the shades drawn. I tried seemingly everything I could to get better: fusion surgery, 41 nerve injections, medications, pain-killers, acupuncture and physical therapy. Nothing helped.

After nearly two years of seeking a cure, I finally accepted that I wouldn’t get better-- but that I had to somehow figure out how to resume my life. I got out of bed. I began taking my daughter to school again. Slowly, I began regaining my life. Now, I have a fuller, richer, more Technicolor existence than I could have ever before imagined, primarily because after descending into the underworld, or going straight to hell, I somehow managed to return. I combat the new difficulties and restrictions in my life by tasting every sweetness, embracing and fully appreciating every joy and finding that my love for, and even humor in, life is more expansive than ever before.

My greatest fear was that I would never again have the same relationship with my fourteen year old son, Benjamin, and ten year old daughter, Lilly. Now, somehow, while my relationship with my children is radically different than it was before I got so injured, it has a richness and intimacy that I could never have been able to imagine was possible.

Like many mothers, I found that my prior role was mostly that of audience member, cheerleader, encourager, chauffeur. I would shuttle my kids to their next activity and then applaud their efforts (or scold their lack thereof). My condition has taught me that life is too short to watch from the sidelines, and indeed, that my life, not just my children’s, must be an adventure. I have therefore fully embraced their activities, making them my own, and, as a family, across generational and gender lines, we share in passions that we never shared before.

I used to drop my children off at the beach for their surfing lessons in the summers. I would use the time off to do things for myself. Now, my children and I surf together. We all don wetsuits, rub zinc oxide on our faces (pink for Lilly and me; blue for Benjamin), grab surfboards and race into the water. Sitting in the line-up of surfers, waiting for a wave, is sacred time-- we laugh, joke, sometimes just smile huge grins of contentment at each other. When I catch a wave, I hear the hollers of support from my son and the giggles of my daughter. When one of them catches a wave, I watch transfixed, awed by their lithe bodies, their grace on the water. Mostly, I feel grateful for the immediacy of this bond with my children.

My son also dances in a program that requires several hours of training a week. I used to send him there on his own. Now, when he takes class, I take class. He is practicing double tours, I am performing lady-like plies at the bar. While my body is ostensibly broken, it seeks and is daily healed by the art and act of grace. While I will often still play the familiar role of encourager, when he bounds into my room breathless and rosy-cheeked to show me some twirl or leap that he has mastered, more often, I am dancing too-- for the crazy sheer joy of it.

My daughter and I are also writing a book together about fairies. Here, my passion—for writing and reading—is prioritized, and I have figured out how to pass on and make alive this passion to her. We lie in bed together, she furiously scribbling sentences, as we debate what magical adventure will our fairy, Annabelle, have that day.

Perhaps surfing, dancing and the fairies are metaphors for my life at this point – a life that resembles a kind of magical flight, or alchemical transformation, from pain into joy, joys that keep me connected, most critically, to my children. And, while my prior life and relationships with my children temporarily flew apart, it magically, somehow, got replaced with a new and more joyous, even more connected, relationship with my children-- a little bit of everyday fairy dust.

Lynne Greenberg is the author ofThe Body Broken: A Memoir, published this week by Random House.

>> Visit Lynne's website. 

>> Click here to buy the book.

>> Click here to see Lynne's interview on ABC's Good Morning America.