Learn to celebrate the worst day of your life

Sometimes you meet a man who makes you rethink all the worst parts of your life and ask you how many curses can be blessed.

Marcus C. Thomas is one of these guys.

When I met him at an art show in Naples three years ago at the beginning of March, he told me that he had just celebrated the 36th anniversary, “the day that brought me to this chair”.

“Celebrated” seems to be an unusual word to describe the accident that broke his neck, broken the skull and limited it to a wheelchair that had permanently robbed the ability to move part of his body under his neck.

But the more you talk to him, the more you see that this is not a man who only does his best to keep a stiff upper lip in view of the catastrophe. Instead, for Marcus, the moment when everyone who could consider a tragedy at his mind was really a gift – a rebirth into the man he should always be. A man who ironically was restricted by his lack of physical restrictions before the accident.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardinen”. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

As a young man, Marcus was an excellent athlete. Sport came to him so easily that he crashed from game to game without a plan. He tried the college, but without the patience he was missing after two years. Finally he returned to school and acquired a relaxation, and he took on a job in a ski lodge. His future, as he believed, would be full of zipper, kayaks, motorcycles and mountain trails.

But all of this immediately changed in the ski tracks.

Marcus Thomas has been a tetraplegic since March 3, 1986 due to a skiing accident. He woke up from a three -week coma and asked his living friend Anne to marry him. And Anne accepted as brave as Marcus, and knew that she had to do practically everything for him for the rest of her life.

Before the accident, both Marcus and Anne were extraordinary physical specimens, whose life revolved around athletics of all kinds – baseball, kayaking, hiking, skiing and even triathlons.

After the accident, he had to learn actions as simple and automatically as breathing.

“I died at the age of 26,” he says, “was born in a wheelchair. The path was long, painful and discouraging, because frankly” it started again “.

And then, at the end of this year, Anne and his sister came home from a shopping spree with a bizarre gift for Marcus -a crayola watercolor kit with a brush that was modified for him to keep his mouth.

It was a moment that produced a rebirth that today caused Marcus to “celebrate” the tortured path that has taken his life.

Starting with a bizarre Christmas card that looks as if it had been done by a 10-year-old, Marcus learned quickly. His skills, which were fully supported, that he could paint 12 watercolors from birds that he and Anne made in a calendar. He produced another year with the name “Spread Your Wings” and within three years he emphasized watercolors of eagles that look as realistic as a photo with the title “worthwhile trip”.

Over time, when his talent grew, his style also grew around avant -garde, surrealistic or magical realism. But he always returned to pictures of freedom and beauty, especially in his paintings of birds. In the early 2000s, he switched from watercolor to more difficult oils, which he mixed with brushes and tools that he holds in his mouth.

Of course, Anne helps him when he sets and moves canvases, but Marcus does everything else of a specially designed wheelchair that is controlled by movements of his head and plastic tube into which he breathes to turn, navigate or navigate.

While he worked on a 25 -year retrospective of his life since the accident, he painted “How Time Flies”, a surrealistic painting that gave a raven (the “Trickster” God of many American indigenous people) with a snatching pocket watch dangling from a gold chain. The clock falls apart, the inner work flows out and fall through the air. There is a blue eye in the middle of the clock – the eye of Marcus itself.

It is, maybe a metaphor of his life: things are snapped away. Things fall apart. Things fly free. All of them are closely connected.

Today Marcus and Anne Thomas spend their time to travel to art fairs where his works require high prices and extreme respect not only for their masterful beauty, but also for the inspiration that brings his life to others.

For the first time, for four or five years ago, I came across him with an artistic challenge “fast raw” in the Old Naples Beach Hotel, where artists were painted all day long. Her works were then auctioned with the proceeds to the charity.

I wanted to talk to him then, but that was impossible because … now, let's just say that he has the right to say: “I can't talk while I work.”

Therefore, it was such a pleasure to meet him face to face three years ago, speak to him and speak to his side at his side and to tell them how much I not only appreciate his art, but also her remarkable journey. This March I chatted with him again in an art show that looked as happy as always, and now I have three of Marcus' print and a heavy full color book of his works.

And more than that, I now have a new appreciation of my own life trips.

Everything.

Even the tragedies. ®