Living the Secular Life : New Answers to Old Questions by Zuckerman Phil

Author:Zuckerman, Phil [Zuckerman, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2014-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

Overcoming Injury

On a rainless night in Seattle, at around 2:30 in the morning, Amber Olson was sitting on her idling moped at an intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. She had just bought some cigarettes and was heading over to a friend’s apartment, which was about two blocks away. The light was still red. That’s when a drunk driver plowed into her from behind and sped away into the darkness, leaving Amber mangled on the pavement—bleeding, alone, and unconscious. She woke up several days later in a hospital bed, heavily sedated. Her mother was at her side. The doctors informed Amber that she had had a T-6 complete spinal cord injury, which meant that she was permanently paralyzed from the mid-sternum down. “And I can’t feel anything either,” Amber explained to me. “From my chest all the way down to my toes.”

Amber was twenty-six when the accident occurred. She is now thirty-two. She is pretty, smart, and exudes a calm demeanor as she sits in her wheelchair. You can see some pale scars scattered across her face—scars that I assume are from the accident, but I didn’t directly ask about them.

Amber was born and raised in Provo, Utah. Both her parents were Mormon, as were her grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. “They go back to the beginning of the church. They came across the plains. They were pioneers.”

By the time Amber was in the fifth grade, she realized that if she wanted to have any social life at all, she had to be religious. Everyone else was, literally—every single kid in her school and in her neighborhood was actively involved in the Mormon faith. So even though her folks actually were no longer very interested, Amber became religious. “I started going to church on my own. Involvement with the Mormon religion is like a daily thing. I went to church every Sunday, but there was also a young women’s club with activities throughout the week. And service projects. And it was something we all did together—all of my friends. And then also camp in the summer.” Amber was also a believer. Her enmeshment in the Mormon religion wasn’t thus strictly a social matter. It was definitely very much about faith. “I believed. I prayed. I definitely did. I read the Book of Mormon. Later, I took two years of seminary classes. I got up every morning at six o’clock in the morning to learn and study and pray. I really did believe.”

But then, when Amber was fifteen, she moved to Montana with her mother for a year. Upon their return to Utah, something had changed. Maybe it was simply getting away from Provo for a spell. Or maybe it was meeting other people and making new friends—friends who weren’t Mormon and didn’t know anything about Mormonism; some of them even smoked cigarettes and drank wine coolers. Or maybe it was just that she went through puberty. But whatever it was, during the year after Montana, when Amber was back in Utah and a junior in high school, her faith melted away.

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