The checklist I made for surviving my darkest days
Severely injured in a road accident, Tarini Mohan, the author of Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity, spent three months in coma. Here, she writes of how she got through the toughest times
After an accident in 2010, who knew I would need to relearn how to walk, talk, be again? No one knew anything – not for another three months, they wouldn’t. I had descended into another realm. Regaining consciousness after a three-month-long coma isn’t quite as rejuvenating as it sounds. The fog in my head. My immobile limbs. The sterile hospital room. The unreality of it all. It felt like just yesterday when I had woken up in my bed in New York City, wandered through the East Village streets, hands linked with my partner’s, living quite the dynamic early twenties Wall Street analyst life. And now this.
The chasm between the person I was and the person I had become felt infinite. The reflection I saw in the hospital mirror wasn’t mine but belonged to someone else – a stranger. My family and the doctors all spoke to me in measured tones about patience, healing, and the long road ahead. It hadn’t yet occurred to me I would have to rebuild my identity from fragments, resurrect a life buried below hospital charts and therapy schedules.
In those early weeks and months, I thought any day would bring the end of this nonsensical nightmare, and I would wake up in my comfortable bed in Manhattan. Despair settled into my bones, like winter, when that day never came. But it was during this period that I intimately learned that we humans are wired for survival. With my dominant right hand out of commission, my speech slurred, my body balance thrown off, my short-term memory out of whack, and my body practically chained to the hospital bed, while I couldn’t reach for a piece of paper to scrawl a checklist on, my bones, though buried under frost, seemed to know how to keep on keeping on. And so, from necessity, a metaphorical checklist was born.
Morning ritual: Acknowledge the body that remains. Before the avalanche of physical and occupational therapy, before the speech exercises that made my tongue feel foreign in my mouth, I would catalogue what still belonged to me. From my hospital window, I glimpsed the majestic Qutub Minar towering in the background, adorning the city with its regal identity. The warmth of sunlight streaming through the hospital blinds. The steady, defiant rhythm of my beating heart. The taste of the small cup of vanilla ice cream, in contrast to the bland hospital food. Then, I’d be transferred out of my bed to sit upright in an armchair to remind me I still had a body that could potentially still participate. This sort of inventory became my rebellion against the voice that whispered I was broken beyond repair.
Embrace the support that arrives: I didn’t have to reach out to my tier-one support – they were right there beside me, even though I had left Delhi in my mid-teens and had unintentionally drifted apart from my school friends. Yet, they showed up at the hospital day after day with tubs of Nirula’s hot chocolate fudge. My partner, far away in San Francisco, never allowed loneliness to creep over me. My brother, sixteen hours away in college in the US, hopped on a flight the minute my parents gave him the go-ahead, and seeing my condition, took charge of my recovery, motivating me not to give up. My mother sat beside me through the night, clutching her spiritual beaded necklace in her left hand, stroking my arm with her right, and assured me I was surrounded by love. My father forced himself to work during the day, yet would turn up each evening without fail, and would pull up a chair within striking distance of my bed.
Find victories in the microscopic: My accomplishments became laughably small but fiercely celebrated. Successfully guiding a spoon to my mouth with my left hand. Remembering my physical therapist’s name two days in a row. Making my speech understood to a stranger – heck, to my parents, too. Walking one more step inside the parallel bars than I did yesterday. These tiny conquests weren’t about progress but about proving to myself that I could still affect change, however minuscule, in my small corner of existence.
Create anchors of familiarity: I discovered that my traumatized brain craved the predictable. The same playlist that a thoughtful friend had created for me with my favourite songs from my pre-accident days. Chatting daily with my favourite hospital nurse. The ritual of being wheeled out to the corridor at sunset to the window with a frontal view of the Qutub Minar. The majesty of the monument made my world, along with its troubles, seem minute.
This checklist wasn’t about healing — that word felt too grand, too distant. It was about endurance, about creating scaffolding strong enough to hold me upright while everything else remained uncertain. What surprised me most was how these tiny acts of intentionality began to accumulate, slowly forming something solid beneath my feet. The person who eventually left the hospital wasn’t the same one who had strolled through the East Village. But perhaps that was never the point. As I explore more deeply in my memoir, Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity, perhaps the real work was learning to love whoever emerged from the wreckage — changed and changing, beautifully, stubbornly alive.
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Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity by Tarini Mohan has just been published by Juggernaut Books. She is @taranimohan_writes on Instagram
