After the Storm, the Dishes Still Need Doing

You never think to ask what comes after survival, and why would you? It was the job, the destination, and the goal.

It’s the first thing and the last thing you think about when things go sideways. You grip it with both hands, teeth clenched, holding on like you’re riding a greased pig through a thunderstorm, and if you’re lucky, you come out the other side a little wetter, a little bruised, but still on your feet.

What nobody tells you is that once you survive—once the storm passes, the threat moves on, or the doctor says you’re clear—you still have to figure out what to do next.

Nobody claps, and there are no parades. It’s just another quiet Wednesday and a pile of laundry.

I remember when I broke my back for a second time. I thought it was just a backache, the same one I had for the previous 20 years. So, I drank a shot of whiskey and lay on the couch watching reruns of “The Rockford Files.”

By the next morning, I couldn’t stand upright, and I was speaking in tongues—mostly curse words and prayers. My wife rushed me to the hospital.

They couldn’t do much for me unless I wanted to go under the knife and get metal rods inserted.

That was a nope, so they gave me pain meds and a muscle relaxant. I felt like I’d been hit by a semi when I woke up, but I was alive.

My family came to visit. I got cards with flowers on ‘em, and one from my Aunt Barbara that had a cartoon kidney saying, “I’m glad you didn’t croak!”—which, anatomically, didn’t make sense, but it’s the thought that counts.

Then the visitors stopped coming, the flowers wilted, and they sent me home with a paper bag full of pills and a warning not to lift anything heavier than a tennis shoe. And that’s it.

I sat in my recliner, marveling at how survival doesn’t come with instructions for what’s next. No one tells you that brushing your teeth becomes a philosophical exercise.

There’s a strange stillness to surviving. A silence that creeps with all the questions you didn’t have time to ask before, like now what?

It turns out, after your survival, you still need to take out the trash, feed the dogs, and return library books. Then people start expecting you to act normal again, like the whole “nearly being paralyzed” thing was just a hiccup, not a life-altering thunderclap that left you rearranging your thoughts.

But slowly—real slowly—you do begin to act normal again. You laugh at old jokes, crave pancakes at midnight, and go for walks and realize the trees are still out there doing their tree things, indifferent to your brush with mortality.

And that, I suppose, is the secret. Survival ain’t the end.

It’s the door you crawl through on your knees into a messy, wonderful, ordinary life. The kind where your neighbor still complains about your lawn, and the cat vomits on the rug, and someone leaves a pie on your porch just because.

After survival comes living, and if you’re lucky, you get to do the dishes standing at the kitchen sink while the coffee brews and the world goes on turning like it always has, and with you still in it.