Month: January 2016

Angels, Hope and Bagels

We were by the bagels. I was pulling out the wheat kind from the bin, the waxy sheet of paper in my hand, and placing them, two at a time, in the paper bag. Damon was a few feet away in his wheelchair, playing on his phone. He was excited this morning when I told him we had no plans for the day, except for a haircut, that it was his day to choose whatever he wanted to do. The world was his oyster today and where did my son choose to go? Wegmans Market. Seriously, I asked him. Wegmans? For their Chinese food buffet, was his answer. We enjoyed our lunch there, and decided to do some grocery shopping, starting with that bagel aisle. And that’s when I heard the voice say, “Are you Damon?”

This isn’t unusual for us. It’s actually quite common. Wherever we go, Damon is spotted by someone who either follows us on Facebook, has read about him in the newspaper or knows someone who knows someone who knows him. I wistfully joke that I only ride his coattails of fame, but I absolutely love when someone stops him because Damon loves nothing more than to meet new people, or meet people in person he’s talked to online.

It usually goes something like this: “Hi Damon, I’m Mary.”

“Hi Mary. What’s your last name?”

“Brown.”

“Mary Brown. What’s your middle name?”

“Ann.”

“Mary Ann Brown. What’s your maiden name?” And then that’s repeated as well. Repeated and locked in the steel vault that is his new mind, to be taken out the next time he sees that same person, whether it be the next day or the next year. I swear his memory is better now than before his accident, as though he has accessed some previously unused part of his brain. Names of people I’ve long forgotten come so easily to him.

Sometimes, after meeting someone for the first time, Damon will immediately log in to his Facebook account to look that person up and send him or her a friend request. Other times he may talk a little more and answer their questions or ask a few of his own.

“How are you, Damon? You look great!”

“I am great! You look pretty good yourself!”

Unless, of course, you’re Luke Bryan, backstage at his own concert. “Hey, Luke,” Damon greeted him first, in the meet and greet line last summer. “How you doin’?”

Damon always has a smile on his face. He always is very pleasant to talk to. And people just love conversing with him. I call him The Mayor.

I was expecting the same type of thing today when I heard that voice say, “Are you Damon?” I turned to see who had approached my son, and the bag of whole wheat bagels almost fell from my hand.

I hadn’t seen her in a little over four years, although I’d thought about her often. I never had a way to contact her. I spoke of her in the speeches and presentations I gave on brain injury, at schools and hospitals. She was my first angel here on earth after Damon’s accident. At my lowest point, she had been a light in my darkness. The only hope in my crashing world.

She worked on the floor in the intensive care unit and she came into our room sometimes two or three times a day, every week day during the five weeks we were there. She is a tiny thing, not weighing much more than 90 pounds and stands no taller than 5 feet high. But she had a strength within her that was immeasurable. A strength in her faith and in her beliefs.

She wasn’t a doctor or a nurse or even any part of the medical staff. She wasn’t anyone who most people would even notice. She was the woman who cleaned the hospital rooms.

I remember her taking such pride in her work and cleaning her assigned rooms until they were spotless. Monday mornings following her two days off, she’d come in and complain about the job the weekend crew had done, because she’d find dust curls or plastic wrappings under the beds. She’d find spots in the sink. Never on her watch. Never. And she’d work harder to get the rooms back to her level of par.

But it wasn’t her cleaning that I looked forward to every day. It was her. It was her attitude. It was the way she came in, and spoke directly to my son. She learned his name right from day one, when he was resting somewhere in the deep corners of his mind, in his coma.

Her name tag said “Joan”.

“Oh, you’re a handsome one,” she’d say to Damon, not caring that there was never a response. “But don’t get any ideas. I’m old enough to be your grandmother.”

“Wake up, Damon. Your mother needs you. Wake up.”

And she’d turn to me and say, “He’ll wake up. Just wait and see. I’ve seen it all. He’ll wake up.”

“But the doctors tell me there is little hope,” I confided in her. “I’m scared of what they’re saying.”

“They don’t know anything,” she’d spit back at me. “Listen to Joan. Listen to me. He’s going to wake up and he’s going to be OK.”

And she’d pat his hand, and I’d see a tear drip down her face, and she’d say, “You’re going to be OK, Damon. It’s time to wake up.” She told me she prayed for him every night.

The medical staff would come in to our room without a greeting and talk above us as though Damon were an object, as though he were not a son or a brother or a grandson or a nephew. They never told him to wake up. They never patted his hand. They pricked him and pinched him and said he’s not responding. There is nothing there. And they’d walk out, their heels clicking coldly on the hard vinyl floor.

Not Joan. When Damon’s one eye finally opened after a few days, she was as excited as a family member, as if she had known him for years. I told you, she’d tell me. He’s going to be OK. I just know it.

“Now you can see this old lady, Damon,” she’d say to that one eye staring into nowhere. “Now you can see me. You’re going to be fine.”

She bitched to me about hospital policy of making employees get a flu shot. She “didn’t need no flu shot,” and she refused to get one. So they made her wear a mask. And she bitched about that, taking it off and on while she cleaned and talked, because it bothered her. She was irritated with it and the hospital staff in general. Her feisty-ness made me laugh when there was so little to laugh at. She was a fighter, no matter what the battle.

She had no medical background, whatsoever. But I chose early on to listen to her instead of the neurosurgeons with their impressive degrees and their cocky attitudes and their prognoses of doom. I chose to listen to Joan because I felt a power in her; I felt her power in her God. Teams of doctors and residents and nurses and therapists passed through that door, but it was Joan I believed in. And I hugged her when she walked into that room every day and I hugged her when she left. I hugged her, probably against hospital policy, because I wanted her faith and I wanted her knowledge, and I needed her beliefs to transcend into me and then through me into my son. I felt I was hugging hope and hope was tangible.

When we left that hospital for the next one after our five week stay, I had the ambulance driver wait until I found Joan. I said goodbye and I handed her the 8×10 framed school picture I had on the shelf of Damon, taken just months before. I had brought it in to the hospital room from home in the beginning days so the doctors and nurses could look at it and see who they were treating and understand that he wasn’t just a patient in a coma; he wasn’t just a head wrapped in bandages; he was Damon. I handed her that picture and I said, please, Joan, please take care of this and continue praying for my boy. And she wiped her tears and took the picture.

Today, she told me that she had placed it on her shelf in her house and whenever she passes by she says a prayer for my boy. For four years, she’s been praying for my son.

For four years, I’ve thought of Joan when anyone in the medical profession tells us we are at the end of recovery, there is to be no more progress, what you see is all you’ll get. I wonder, with all their years of schooling why they don’t see what I see, why they give up so easily. And I don’t listen.

So, this afternoon, when she asked, “Damon, is that you,” she wasn’t amazed at how far he’s come from those early days, although she was so incredibly joyful. She had known from day one. She believed in her faith and in her prayers and in a boy she hadn’t even known. She had believed in a mother’s love. She was so gleeful to see him sitting in his chair with both eyes open, hear him say a few words and see him smile, but she wasn’t surprised. There was never a doubt, she said.

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She asked her husband to take a picture of her with Damon to put next to the picture she had at home. She will continue to include us in her prayers, she told me

I will continue to include Joan in my own thoughts and in my speeches and presentations I make on brain injury. Because the medical world needs to know that sometimes healing comes from more than their science and their medicines. It doesn’t always follow the path of their charts or their graphs. Sometimes, even in the bleakest prognoses, it comes from hope and love and faith. Sometimes, it rides on the backs of angels and prayer. And sometimes, miracles happen.

I will be forever grateful for that one lone voice in the ICU, that life line thrown to me in the darkness, that tangible hope. And I will be grateful that today Damon chose to go to Wegmans when he could have chosen to go anywhere else.

Why Not?

He opened his golf umbrella on that sunny, blustery day as he walked toward us, meeting us for the first time. “To keep the wind away from him,” he said.

I looked into his eyes and searched his face, not quite believing he was that concerned. Not after the other school bus driver. Not after the Troll.

The Troll, with his fuzzy reddish hair standing up on the very top of his head, had said nothing to us as he helped as little as possible to secure us in the bus, closing the doors and starting the engine before we were totally buckled. He drove way too fast considering his riders, speeding through the windy country roads. He dropped us off on the cul-de-sac in front of my long, snow covered driveway, with the sleet hitting our faces, the wind whipping around our ears, and he drove away without a word, with me staring at the back of the bus wondering how I was supposed to push the 100-pound wheelchair which held my 170-pound son, the distance through the driveway slosh and up the steep, icy ramp at the back of the house, and carry my huge, purple Nike duffle bag at the same time.

Tears poured down my face at the unfairness of it all that day as I struggled to get my son into the empty house, knowing he was cold and uncomfortable. Knowing I was not strong enough to do this on my own. We had just gotten him back to high school for his senior year after more than a year off, most of it spent in acute care rehabs and ICUs. He was not supposed to even be alive. At the most, he was supposed to just exist as a vegetable, if you believed the doctors, but here he was back in school, and I wouldn’t, couldn’t, leave his side.

I had been so excited for him to return to school, but at that point, at the end of that day, I was exhausted and had little strength to be excited for anything. I had no strength to push the chair. The end of the driveway may as well have been the end of the school parking lot. And the Troll drove away, leaving me there. Leaving us there.

So, that next day, in the windstorm, I was reluctant to even hope it would be different.

“Can he communicate?” this new driver asked me.

I nodded. “He understands everything. He speaks just a little.”

“My name is Tony,” he said to my son, bending down to make sure Damon heard him. My son surprised him by reaching his only working limb up in a handshake, the strength of that handshake never failing to shock most people as they never expect such strength to come from such a compromised body.

“Backwards,” he continued, “Tony is spelled YNOT. My friends call me Ynot.”
Damon smiled slightly, his gorgeous lopsided half smile. And a friendship was born. The best kind of friendship. Beautiful, pure, and totally unexpected.

“Do you mind,” Tony-Ynot asked me. “How did this happen? I just want to know.”

“Car accident,” I answered. “A year ago.”

That day and every school day after that through Damon’s graduation day, he drove us home from school, to the top of the driveway, and insisted on pushing the wheelchair to the back of the house and up the ramp, making sure my son was safe, making sure I was ok. He wouldn’t let me lift a finger. You do too much, he’d tell me.

Some days he drove us to the school, when we had no other appointment before class. Other days he arranged to pick us up at the rehab facility when we were finished with our 8:00 am appointment, so I wouldn’t have to arrange for other transportation to get us from rehab to school. Often he’d stop with the school bus next door to the rehab at the Dollar Store, and run inside to do some shopping or bring Damon a gift. A train whistle, a hand exerciser, a fedora hat or an umbrella hat.

He was always early and we were always on time for Damon’s Chemistry class, his only class that marking period. From the windows of the bus, we watched winter turn to spring and spring turn into summer, the three of us together that year. He purposely drove past horses and fields, dropping any other students he might have that day off first, so that Damon could see the sights, so Damon could be last to get off the bus, and Tony could visit with us a bit on my back deck. And he would talk.

I learned so much about him through his stories, the stories that 80-year-old men tell of their lives, with that far-away look in their eyes reliving the past, the happy, the sad, the memories. I knew he had been walloped with the passing of his wife a few months back. He would never get over that loss that devastated him, that rocked his world off its axis.

I learned about his daughters, of whom he was so proud, his sons-in-law, and his own sons. I learned of his grandchildren, his great grandchildren and his friend from Arkansas. I learned of the lengthy list of jobs he had had through the years to support his family.

He was a New Yorker at heart and no matter how far away he lived from the City, he would always be a New Yorker at heart. He had driven cabs, had an oil company, a printing company, a landscaping business. He took care of the love of his life through her very last breath. He had a story a day, and better yet a great sense of humor. Self-depreciating humor. “I only use nickel words,” he’d say. But he had million dollar stories. He had million dollar advice.

He had bad hearing back then before his hearing aids, and I would have to scream from the back of the bus to tell him something. We laughed then and still do at the day about one week after we met, after four bus rides home, when he looked at me in the mirror of the bus and told me about the house sale he was having. “Where do you live?” he asked me.

What? I thought, He’s driven me home for a week and today is asking me where I live?

“Um…..” I answered, yelling from the back, “……with Damon?”

“I know,” he yelled back, not quite hearing and definitely not understanding. “But where do you live?”

This went on for a minute or two. “I’m his mom,” I said, praying that dementia or senility hadn’t set in so quickly. “I’m Damon’s mom.”

“What?” he yelled back. “What?”

“I live with Damon. I’m his mom,” I was screaming at this point.

“Oh my,” he laughed when it finally hit him. “I thought all this time you were his aide. I never thought you were his mom.”

“And I thought you were losing your mind,” I laughed.

From that day on, even though he was younger than my dad, I adopted him as my Grandpa and Damon’s great Grandpa. Because he had thought I was too young to be Damon’s mom. Because he felt like family.

When he told me he ate Dollar Store cans of soup for dinner I made sure I made a little extra food when I was able to cook dinner, taking him some the next morning. Greek salad was his favorite in those days when I had more time to make something.

I laughed at most of the stories and told him I’d write a book someday. A book on his life and his stories.

When the lady at the front desk of the high school told him she’d like to introduce him to her dog, because he loved dogs, I teased him that that pick-up line was better than “Would you like to come to my apartment to see my fish tank?”

Two years later, wanting to give Damon the fish tank he had for years in his house, he wrote to me, via text, “I can’t stop laughing,” he said. “I really need you to come over and see my fish tank to see what you think of it for Damon’s room, and I keep thinking of your comment when the lady wanted to introduce me to her dog, and I can’t bring myself to ask you if you want to come see my fish tank.”

So many stories, but the story he couldn’t get enough of was Damon’s story…..the story of the miracle boy he drove home from school every day.

When both newspapers ran articles that winter on Damon and his recovery, Tony was first to ask for his autograph, his glee obvious as Damon wrote “To Grampa Ynot; Love, Damon.” I gave him a 120 page printout of every update I had ever posted to Facebook on Damon’s accident and recovery. He wasn’t a reader, but he couldn’t put it down. “What an inspiring story. You can help people. You have helped me,” he told me. “You don’t know the people you’re helping.”

He named Damon “Rocky” and me, Mrs. Stallone. And he says he will be the one when the time comes to drive Damon to the Court House stairs so Damon can run up those stairs with the music of Rocky blasting in the background. It will happen, he keeps saying. Write a book he always tells me…except the last chapter isn’t ready yet…the last chapter when he runs up those stairs.

When I told him that first spring with tears in my eyes that Damon had a beautiful date and would be attending the senior prom, a miracle in itself, he insisted that he would be in the driveway with the school bus and drive him and his friends to the event. I laughed. They won’t allow that, I said. You watch me, he said. And the bus was delivered the morning of the prom so we could decorate it with streamers and balloons and he showed up later in his dapper suit, playing the role not of bus driver but chauffeur.

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Prom night 2013

I had planned a pre-prom party to get some pictures of my boy who was not expected to be alive let alone go to his senior prom. I nervously fretted about the weather for two weeks prior to that day.

“I’ll get you sun,” Tony told me. “I have an in with the guy upstairs. He owes me.”

And it rained all day. “Where’s my sun?” I texted Tony in the morning.

“Believe,” he texted back.

It rained as the beautiful girls in their stunning gowns and handsome boys in matching tuxedos piled into my house. “Tony? It’s raining,” I panicked.

“Believe,” he replied.

And it rained until, on cue, after everyone arrived, it stopped, and the sun broke through the clouds and heated everything up while it gave us chills. Immediately the ground dried, and it somehow was magical, unworldly, and pictures were gorgeous and the day was perfect.

We joked after that: Can you get me sun for graduation, as well, Tony? What about for Damon’s grad party? For the weekend? I told him he reminded me of George Burns in the movie, “Oh, God”.

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Prom night, 2013

He also managed to secure the bus for graduation that year and my entire family rode in style to the huge event, not having to worry about parking or anything for that matter. Television crews came to film Damon take a few steps across the stage. And we felt like celebrities and that school bus was our limousine.

Damon’s graduation ended our bus rides but not our friendship. Armed with donuts for Damon’s sweet tooth each time he visits, he never turns down a cup of coffee. We trade my Greek salad for his Easter pie. He stops by also to visit, unannounced, at therapy, noting Damon’s progress, cheering him on. Everyone knows his name. Tony-Ynot.

He plays the lottery for Damon. “Wait for that 11 pm call,” he always tells us. “When we win, I’m calling immediately.”

“Yo, Tony!” is Damon’s greeting, every time he sees him. “Antonio Josepe” Damon always says, using Tony’s Italian name and then reciting some of the Italian words and jokes Tony has taught him.

He’s 82, now, and celebrates his birthday each year by wearing a T-shirt that sports his age, and he increases the number on the shirt by hand with each birthday. I’ll wear this shirt on my birthdays ’til I’m 100, he jokes each year. He has a Facebook account and a smart phone and just a few times has needed instructions, but otherwise manages this new technology quite impressively.

We text instead of call, because I know his hearing won’t have any impact with texting, and besides he likes to use smiley face emoticons with mustaches.

He was there for me when my dad died, but I never told him about my husband leaving. He figured it out eventually, but with his Italian temper, I didn’t want to be the cause of him getting him riled up and upset when the leaving was fresh. He was the only one I thought of when I needed help with my daughter’s recent graduation, having to push my mom’s wheelchair, maneuver Damon in his power chair, take pictures and watch the event. “What time should I be at your house?” he texted back the minute I asked him his availability. He drove us in our wheelchair van like in the old days. He pushed my mom into the stadium even though he’s just a few years her junior. He made it all doable.

He just recently traded in his house for an RV, which has added a spring to his step and shaved years off his features. “I feel terrific…years younger,” he said. “I’m getting into the driver’s seat and just going he told me. No real destinations, no set plans. I’m taking off in the fall and I’ll return in the spring. Unless of course Rocky is ready to run up those stairs. Then, I’ll return immediately.”

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Riding high, 2015. Courtesy of Jen Rae Monte

So many people have come into my life, especially since Damon’s accident, and even more people have gone out of my life. But the special ones don’t come often enough. The special ones with their smiles and their stories, their huge hearts and their golf umbrellas are a rare find and a true blessing, especially for a 20-year-old disabled boy with a middle aged mom who pretends she’s young enough to have an 80-year-old grandpa.

This friendship is a true two-way street, two people helping each other, each thinking they have gained more than the other. This friendship, like Damon’s story, thankfully doesn’t have a last chapter yet, either. Somehow I am sure it will tie into the other last chapter of the other story I’m writing, on the Court House steps.

Believe. Because…. Ynot?

***update March 6, 2016*****

I thought my heart couldn’t break any more. I was wrong.
This is not how I had written the final chapter in my mind. But I am happy I wrote the rest while he was alive to read it.
“Get better,” I told him a couple weeks ago.
“Make sure you get Rocky to those court house steps,” he answered.
“I can’t do it without you.” I replied. “We need you to get better.”
“You will and you have to,” he wrote. “Don’t you dare let me down.”

Yo, Tony. Rest in peace. We love you.

Truth Be Told, or Written

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My best writing came out of an online class I took last summer.  It wasn’t so much due to the instructor because the instructor didn’t really instruct,  and all her critiques on everyone’s pages seemed to be nothing but positive.  It was moreso because the prompts were fantastic and could be tailored to my story and because I was forced to write at least 300 words a day for about four or five weeks.  And it was because I was honest in what I wrote.  Truly honest.

I amazed myself that I wrote as well as I did considering most of the time I do not reside in a physically or mentally quiet place.

Sometimes I wrote in hotel rooms two hours from home, totally exhausted after tucking Damon in for the night after a long day of physical rehab.  Sometimes I wrote at home, after a twelve hour day which included driving to and from rehab,  again after Damon was in bed for the night.  Sometimes I wrote during the rehab session itself, in the waiting room, in a panic that I was coming up on the class deadline and I wasn’t even near finished.

And sometimes I just wrote during the day at home amid the noise of Damon’s online games, his loud music and YouTube videos, and in between fetching this or that, doing laundry, cleaning, bathing, dressing, or feeding this 21- year-old, brain-injured son of mine.

 I don’t ever have the luxury of a bulk of free time to dedicate solely to my writing.  I do have a quiet room, a beautiful writing room, but never much opportunity to sneak into it to use it.  Such is the life of a parent caregiving to her disabled child.

Damon has little patience and can’t seem to comprehend that if I am holding his urinal bottle in place for him chances are pretty high that I can’t get him his phone, get him a drink or stand on my head at the same time.    I only have two hands, I say, and I wince, because that is double of what he has functioning, right now.

So he certainly doesn’t have the patience for me saying: One second.  I’m in the middle of a thought. Or: How badly do you have to go? Can you hold it until I finish this sentence?

Even right now, during this short spurt of writing, I have been summoned to his bedside three different times to adjust his pillows, to fix his sleep mask, to rub his ankles.  I write a sentence, I get up, I write two more sentences, I get up, and I come back to finally finish a paragraph.

During the online summer course, however, somehow, regardless of my ups and downs and ins and outs, despite the urinal bottle and the showers and the pillow adjustments and wheelchair transfers, I did find time to write every day for those four or five weeks. I felt so inspired by those online prompts and so hungry to get my words into sentences and paragraphs and essays that I wrote any and every few minutes I could find throughout my crazy day. Of course, I also didn’t want to be  embarrassed that I failed to produce something on any required day even though grading for this course was not a factor.

And, even more amazing than all that, I was happy when I read what I had written.  Seriously happy.  Confident.  Wowed by my own essays.  I thought some of them were so good, I sent them on to friends, just waiting to bask in their adoration of my words. And bask I did.  For those four or five weeks.

During the course, I was also required to read the other students’ writings and critique them. And they mine.   I felt like a buffoon at first, critiquing English majors and “real” writers, because honestly, I had no clue as to how. I do not know about juxtaposition, split infinitives or allegories (Yes, I googled those.  I’m an accountant for heaven’s sake).  But as we got going through the weeks I realized, that like an average reader, I either like what I read, love what I read, or I don’t. Not because of juxtaposition, split infinitives or allegories; for no other reason than it’s a damn-good, well-written, truly honest story.

It was scary as hell to write for and be critiqued by those who knew so much more about everything literary. Even though I knew I had a damn good subject.  And I knew I could write.

What I didn’t know was if I could be honest and raw and real….everything required to tell a story like mine.

I didn’t know if I could truly write from my soul, from seething pain to sheer joy.

Brain injury is a journey of emotional turmoil for the loved ones of the injured.  We are thankful beyond measure our loved ones are still with us. We grieve beyond measure at the daily reminder of whom we lost. Neither emotion can be hidden; both need to be acknowledged for the story to be true.

I found it easy, after a few attempts, to be more honest in front of faceless strangers.  Much easier than being honest in front of friends, Facebook or real. They didn’t know me.  They had no expectations.  And I felt they were not there to judge my topic, only my presentation.  And therein lay the difference, the step-up in my writing.  My honesty, transcribed into words.

Looking back today, however, I’m actually frightened of what I wrote last summer. I’m frightened not only in sharing what I wrote; I have little confidence now that I can continue at that honesty level, which is the level of writing I need in order to take the next step in actually writing the book.

Honesty requires bravery and I’m scared to be so vulnerable.

It’s no longer  just about me staying honest about myself, as I was last summer.   I need to step it up now and go even  further than that to tell the whole story.  I now also have to be honest about others, regardless how they come across on the page. Honest about their reactions. Honest about their emotions and the way they impacted me and the situation.

Honest about the hell that comes with brain-injury and caregiving. 

Honest about what happens when life shatters and then just keeps on shattering.

During the early days, actually the first few years after Damon’s accident, I wrote on Facebook every day. It was a cathartic healing for me, a way to deal with what was going on around me, to make sense of it, and to send out hope, to update friends. But I wasn’t always real.  I was seldom totally honest. I couldn’t look over the edge into the darkness, so I wrote of light.

I stayed cautiously positive and hopeful, instead of writing what the doctors told us about vegetables and nursing homes and pulling the plug, because really, I thought, who wants to read the negative shit?

Responses and comments came flooding in, gushing about how inspirational we all were.  How much love our family had.  Our strength. How we exemplified  the meaning of family.  And I read them all as I sat in the rubble, the charred remains of my life, the crumbling of my family unit.

They wrote of my strength as a mother.  They asked how I kept it all together.  They didn’t see me go 4 or 5 days without a shower, sometimes unable to put one foot in front of the other.  My total exhaustion.  My heartache.  The pains in my shoulder and back so bad that I couldn’t get up to walk.  They didn’t see me throw things or cry myself to sleep.  They didn’t see me wiping up vomit or shit or screaming at the top of my voice.  They didn’t see it because I never wrote about all that.

I never wrote about it because writing of the negative wouldn’t serve my purpose.  I couldn’t mention my shattered surroundings.  Because, again, who wants a daily dose of negative?

I wanted my readers to come back. I wanted them to be happy and hopeful.  I wanted them to follow the story.  I needed to keep Damon in their minds, because by being in their minds, perhaps he remained in their prayers and perhaps the universe would shift and miracles would happen.  Perhaps sending out the positive would cause the positive to be returned to us, to him, tenfold or more.

And we know that miracles did happen.  Miracles the medical profession just could not believe. Miracles they never saw as remotely possible. Of course we have so far to go.  But Damon is with us.  He is alive.  Damon can communicate.  He can laugh and make us laugh. And most importantly, he can love and be loved so much right back.

But he’s not the son I had. And this isn’t the life I wanted.

 I feel the time has come to tell the full story, complete with the darkness.

I need to share my fear, my panic, my broken heart, my broken home, my broken dreams.  I need to write of the depression. My need to be in control.  My losing control. My selfishness and my selflessness.  The loss of marriage, of friends, of a life that looked so picture perfect from the outside. The shattered happiness and loss of such a bright future. 

I need to entwine those truths with the miracles, the inspiration and the faith with the horror and the hell. And I need to tell it from my viewpoint.  It’s my story.  It’s my life. And it may upset  a few people.

Why don’t they understand what I’m going through?  I, exasperated, recently asked a friend about a close family member of mine.

Because you have made it look too easy on the outside, he responded. You’ve sugarcoated it.

It’s been anything but easy.  It’s been anything but that.  And I need to write it all down. Because the truth may help others.  Others on this journey.

My ultimate wish is just that, to help others following in these footsteps.  I can’t do that by glossing over the darkness. It will be no help to them if they read words of inspiration only without the words of despair pushing out from behind the inspiration.

I want to write an honest memoir and I want to try to fully open up.  It is time.  But, for me to write anything on a serious level, honest or not, I need to stop procrastinating.  I need that kick in the ass. That pressure.  Those deadlines.

So, I signed up, once again, for another online course.  This time it’s ten weeks long.  Ten weeks of writing every day. Of reading others’ writings every day.  I can massage every prompt, like I did during the first session, to fit my story however I want.  In this setting I hope to flourish.  I plan to be as truthful as I can.  I will piss people off.  And I will try to write a damn-good, well-written and honest story.

I hope to include the essays I write over the next ten weeks in my blog, well, as many as I can without compromising my book.  And I promise to…..

Hold on to that thought….I need to get Damon his breakfast.

 

 

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Driving in Reverse

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For a split second, in my mind, he was not quite seventeen yet. For a split second, as the wind whipped through our hair and the music blasted and the sun beat down through the open roof, I was sent back to that summer before it happened, that summer of happy, when he was just a beginning driver and the Jeep was only six months old, and dreams were alive and opportunities were endless and his future was wide open and we were all free and everything was perfectly fine.

For a split second I forgot that it had just taken three people to physically lift him inside his Jeep and place him gently onto the passenger seat, adjusting his legs and his arms because he couldn’t do it himself. I forgot that I wasn’t sitting next to him because I was teaching him how to drive. I forgot that I was driving because he couldn’t, and I forgot that he probably wouldn’t ever sit behind his steering wheel, again.

I forgot that all our lives were now shattered.

As we drove, that entire three-and-a-half-year-heart-wrenching-span-of-time since the accident just seemingly blew out the windows and swirled with the dust particles that had been sitting inside the Jeep for the same amount of time, and then disappeared.

The heartbreak, the grief, the dread, the denial, the refusal to believe what the doctors told us, the twenty-four-hour-a-day care, and the total exhaustion. None of it existed in that split second.  Time rewound in sync with our distance and speed, and we drove faster and further away from the present.

As I navigated the roads, he adjusted the volume on the country music stations I had taught him to listen to and love so many years ago. He turned it louder and louder with his one good hand, and as he sat back and listened to his favorite songs he watched the old familiar roads and the scenery, the scenery he can’t usually see from his perch high up in the wheelchair van.  I knew how happy he was to be in his Jeep with the top off and the hot wind in his face, and my heart became lighter than air but full of something so much heavier.

I turned slightly toward him, and as I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye I pretended he was no longer disabled.  In my mind, then, he was fully abled. He was strong and tanned. He was sitting tall without slumping, without any form of assistance. He was all that a carefree teenage boy with a new Jeep and a new license should be.

I fully turned and looked into those beautiful blue eyes and I saw him smile. From my vantage point I could only see one side of his smile, so to me that smile seemed perfectly symmetrical and the muscles on both sides of his face gave the illusion of working together.   And as he smiled, I laughed. I laughed as untroubled and easily as I always used to laugh when I was with him in his Jeep going anywhere.  And I laughed until I began to cry.

How often had I begged to no one in particular in the dark hours of the night when my heart screamed with the pain of losing the boy I knew….how often had I begged and offered my soul to whomever might want it, for one more chance to be with him as he was before his accident?

“Please let me go back, just one more time.” 

On that day, in that moment, as the dirt roads passed under his Jeep, we drove forward but time somehow reversed.  I knew I had been granted that wish of reliving a memory with the boy I once had. Not just in my mind or in pictures or dreams.  This memory was real enough that I could feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my shoulders.  I could smell the fresh cut grass and the wild flowers as we drove through the fields.  I could reach out and squeeze the hand of the boy sitting next to me in the passenger seat, and he could squeeze back.   I could taste the joy and wild freedom from so long ago, now so lost.

For a split second, I went back to the time before time stopped.

Dead Christmas Trees and Brain Injuries

 

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Image Source: DSNY

When I lived in New York City after college, too many years ago, I’d be so saddened the weeks following Christmas walking by apartment buildings seeing the discarded, used up Christmas trees piled in front, waiting to be picked up by the garbage collectors.  I was in no way a tree-hugging, save-the-earth activist back then, but for some reason, these trees, some still with tinsel on the branches, made me view the city as a morgue and a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness and despair would replace the holiday happy from a few days before.  The trees of all shapes and sizes, some tall and skinny, others short and more full, ugly Charlie Brown trees, and beautiful prize worthy ones, whatever fit into the lives of the former owners’ apartment spaces, had now served their purpose and lay, most of them without bags, on the cold New York City sidewalks, atop their own fallen needles.  They were once connected to and nurtured by the earth, then worshipped and adorned with beautiful decorations… a proud centerpiece in the apartments, the holiday, and now tossed out like garbage.  Actually, that’s exactly what they had become.  Garbage.

 Although I never, ever, bought a real tree after my first Christmas in New York, I certainly don’t make any judgment on those that chose the natural over the unnatural; that’s not what this is about.  I know that for every tree cut down, others are planted and farms grow trees just for Christmas pleasure.  It is not a moral choice for me; it’s an emotion. I know real trees look much more beautiful, fully decorated, than the artificial ones, and I do love the smell of pine, but the memories of those discarded trees piled many feet high like dead bodies awaiting their disposal left too much of an impact on me, too much of a sadness, not because of the waste, but because of the abandoned love.  From the pedestal to the street.  Beauty completely stripped to nothingness.  Life to death.  

I’ve been feeling similar emotions recently, but not due to Christmas trees. I feel so much pain and sadness, all around me and not all mine.   Being so easily connected through social media and website magazines, Damon’s story has reached out past the community in which we live to a much larger audience. Because of this, I’ve been connected to many new friends and reconnected to many old friends, so many of whom are affected either themselves or through family members by traumatic brain injury, death, or just horrible diseases.  In our pre-accident life I never would have crossed paths with most of these people. In our pre-accident life I would never have been able to so deeply feel their pain.  So many have reached out to us to share their own stories, looking both for inspiration from our journey and hoping to add support to theirs.

With a new awareness due to my own experience, their pain and sadness, their suffering, has added to my suffering, piling up like those forgotten trees, and I find myself crying almost daily over someone’s sister, son, or daughter, a friend’s injury or the horrors of living with cancer.  The same thoughts of beauty stripped to nothingness, abandoned love, and life to death fog up my head.  Not a day goes by where I don’t receive a message starting out with, “You don’t know me, but I read your son’s story, and I too have a story….”  Some people I do know outside of Facebook and it makes it even worse, it just eats away at me.  Hearing or reading all their stories, I shoulder their pain and sometimes I can’t rid myself of their sadness, now my sadness, as I ask: why her, why him, why, just why?  I become every sister and every mother and every daughter.   I feel like I’m looking back at those Christmas trees piled up, hopeless, helpless, in despair, just watching the decay.   Like the trees, these people never had a say in being chosen by some circumstance, by fate, by God, for some reason we will never understand, to be killed by a drunk driver, stricken with cancer, or changed through injury or disease.  

I want everyone’s outcomes to be miraculous, like Damon’s.  I want Damon’s to continue to be miraculous.  I want to help them all.  To point them toward the resources no one ever helped me to find.  I want to fight for them. To scream at their professional caregivers who tell them to relinquish hope.  To call their nursing companies and demand better care.  I want to give them hope and inspiration and make them all believe.  But of course, I can’t.  I have my own battles that take up almost all my waking hours and I can’t ever take on the magnitude of so many others. So I feel helpless.  I can only offer our story and pray that it helps to inspire others to believe, to hope and to challenge the medical profession.  But their pain layers itself on top of my pain, and sometimes the sadness of the world overwhelms me and I completely lose sight of the happy.  

I know I need to stop concentrating solely on the dead trees and start looking at the flowers growing miraculously in the cracks of the sidewalks.

I know somehow I need to learn how to take the pain of others, acknowledge it, feel it, but rather than co-mingle it with my own, keep it separate, and then let it flow through, flow away.  I want to help everyone, but in doing so not lose myself or my ability to help my son.   I just need to figure out how.

“Why do people buy flowers for other people?” my daughter pessimistically once asked me.  “So they can just sit and watch them die?”

“Of course not,” I answered her then.  “To enjoy their beauty.  To care for them while they live.”  

I need to get back to that.  I need to enjoy the beauty. I need to care for them while they live.

Broken Hearts and Orange Popsicles

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You never expect it although nothing in life comes with more certainty.

I joked with my dad that night as I drove him to urgent care, asking him why he picked the coldest night of the year to not feel so great. A closed sign on the door made me turn to him and say, “How bad are you? Should we go to the ER?”

“Nah. Let’s find another urgent care place.”

“What exactly are your symptoms?” I asked him.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m just not right.”

He didn’t look just not right; he looked just wrong. I drove him to the emergency room.

Chest pains I told the lady behind the desk. I said it to rush their response time. I said it because he looked weak. I said it because deep down perhaps I knew.

He joked with the nurses. He joked with the doctor. Stop joking, I thought, or they won’t be thorough. They’ll think you’re fine.

But the tests weren’t a joke. The results didn’t make anyone laugh.

Can’t be my heart he kept saying. No one in my family had heart issues. They all died of cancer. Maybe they didn’t live long enough because of the cancer for anyone to know they had heart issues.

This came from out of nowhere he said. It’s been building for a while they told him.

Blindsided. All of us. Even him. Especially him. I’ve always taken care of everyone he said. Who’s going to take care of everyone? You’re not going anywhere I told him. Not now. Not yet.

And my brother and I talked to the doctor and my brother remained calm and something inside me just broke and something inside me twisted and something inside me that for three years since my son’s accident held the floodwaters at bay became unplugged and every emotion rushed out, poured out, and I was reliving three years ago with my son but it was three years later now with my daddy and I couldn’t keep anything in check. I couldn’t keep anything under control.

And I rubbed his forehead and I held his hand and I held up his head so he could sip some water. And I stared at the monitors that I knew so well and I watched his vitals make a slight comeback. And I screamed at a nurse for her incompetence and I took turns with my brother trying to make him laugh, trying to make him smile.

And I washed his hair and I helped him walk down the hall when he was given the ok to stand. And I reassured my mom that everything was alright and my brother reassured me.

There is no option I said later when the doctors gave us options. There is no option. He needs the surgery. Because he acted like he was 60, and looked no older than 70, everyone forgot that he was 86. Even us. Have the surgery, Dad, we told him because they told us there was over a ninety-five percent chance of success. They told us without it that there would be a ten percent chance he’d make it past the next six months. My father was a gambler – he always loved to go to the nearby casino and play craps. He read books on craps and studied the odds. “Ninety-five percent success rate? You bet those odds all day long, Dad,” said my brother.

“What choice do I have?” he asked. “I’ll have the surgery. And I want to have it done here in Wilkes-Barre.”

And we all gathered together that morning of, and we all joked around as families do. My brain-injured son sat in his wheelchair; my daughters sat on the foot of the hospital bed, one being calm and one being funny, coming in scrubs and donning surgical gloves, just to make us all laugh. We stripped him of his jewelry. My mother, one hand on her cane, the other shaking as she held his wedding band, terror in her voice as she asked, almost pleading, “You’ll wear this again, won’t you?”

I took his cross and put it around my neck, the gold mixing with my silver, a combination I’d never do, and now won’t do without.

We waited in the waiting room for the three long hours, but my mom waited at home because, at 88, she was too weak and her health was too poor to wait in that hospital. We nervously joked and we nervously laughed and we waited and we waited. My oldest did some yoga poses and my youngest played on her phone. My son had long gone by then, being given a reprieve from the wait, needing his own care. When the doctor told us all was well and my dad was in recovery, my brother left to pick my mom up from her nearby house and when we were able, we all rushed to see him in the recovery area. I held his hand and I shushed the others. I was so experienced in this role, the only one who knew hospitals and recoveries and the searing pain of seeing your loved one attached to breathing tubes and wires and monitors and bells and whistles. I took charge and after a while I kicked them all out, with the promise that I, too, would go right home and rest. But I didn’t. I stayed until after midnight. Until his blood pressure stabilized. Until I made sure that those on duty knew the worth of this man to his family, to me, and would take the very best care of him. I held his hand until 1:00 AM.

“He wants me to turn on CNBC,” my brother told me on the phone the next morning, around 7:00. “He’s in a lot of pain, but he wants to watch the stock market.”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I smiled. That was Dad. He’ll be just fine. We all suffered through years of having to be quiet and listen to the news and the stock market reports. In the car, in the family room. My son, when he relearned how to speak after his accident, always brought a smile to my dad’s face when he’d greet my dad with “Hi, Pappou. How’re your stocks doing?” The market and my dad were one; when I heard stock market, even after I moved out of the house, I smelled my dad’s aftershave. I pictured the man who had shaped my life, who told me from a very young age that I could be whatever I wanted to be and I could accomplish whatever I decided to accomplish. The man who was my safety net even in this fifth decade of my life. The man who always said everything will be fine…don’t you worry about that. The man who gave me confidence and wisdom and a smile and story after story and unconditional love, the special love only given to daddy’s little girl.

I pictured this very successful businessman at his desk, in the office in his house, with the yellow sheets of lined paper and the green accounting tablets, long before computers were introduced into his world and long after. Writing down the numbers. Adding the profits or subtracting the loss. He always had a smile on his face, either way. This was his game. This was his talent. We of course all complained when forced to listen to the business news, but on that morning I was thrilled at this normalcy. I told my brother I’d be in in in a while after I had arranged care for my son. I got to the hospital around lunchtime to relieve him and my daughter and mother. “His smile was biggest when he saw you,” my daughter told me later. “He knew you’d know what to do. He was so happy to see you.”

But he was in such pain. So much pain that he told my brother that if he had known the pain would have been so bad, he’d never have had the surgery. Did you tell him a few days of pain is worth living at least 10 years more, I snapped. Did you tell him that?

“Do you want a popsicle, Daddy?” I asked him that day after what minutes before the doctors had told us was a very successful open heart surgery, and that the pain was to be expected. I had just sent my brother home with my mother, right after the doctors had left, telling him that Mom didn’t need to sit there any longer, that I’d stay through the afternoon and he could relieve me later that evening. “The nurse said you could have a popsicle.” He nodded yes and I ran out to the nurses’ station to ask for one. The nurse behind the desk unwrapped an orange ice pop on a single stick and handed it to me to give to him.

“Here, Daddy,” I said as I put it toward his mouth. “Take some of this and your mouth won’t be so dry.”

Instead of licking it, he bit into it from the top, making me wince at the thought of the cold hitting his teeth. A piece fell down and landed on my hand. I licked it off my finger, tasting long-ago summers, the covered back porch on the beach house; kids running up the steps shrieking, kicking up sand. It was sugary sweet, but not my favorite flavor. More the flavor of baby aspirin, not citrus as orange suggests, and I wondered briefly as the cold ice hit my tongue, why they called it orange-flavored; oranges never tasted that flavor. Maybe orange was named for the color, but then why not purple flavored, instead of grape; why not red and not cherry?

I gave him another bite, but this time he had trouble getting a piece off because he was too close to the stick. “Maybe you should hold it, Daddy. Maybe it would be easier if you fed yourself.” But at that instance something happened, something that the doctors told me later I didn’t see, but I knew I saw because I was there and they were not. I was there, holding his hand and holding the orange popsicle. I watched as his eyes shut and then flew open, almost in terror; I watched as his hand couldn’t find his mouth, and I listened as his words slurred all together. I glanced over at the monitors he was plugged into, the monitors that I knew so well, the monitors that turned you from a living person to just a machine with numbers, and I watched as the numbers fell. I watched as his blood pressure rapidly dropped from 110 to 80 to 40 and I screamed to the nurse whose back was to us, who was too involved in whatever it was she was doing, I screamed something is wrong, something is very wrong, and she turned and she kicked me out so I wouldn’t be in the way, so I wouldn’t see, and someone else led me outside the unit into the empty waiting room, but not until after I heard the call. Not until after I heard Code Blue.

And waiting in that waiting room, for a while all by myself, shaking with fear and with pain and wondering what do I do now, what do I do without my daddy, I bit my nail, the nail of the finger that had caught the orange popsicle, and it no longer tasted of summer and beaches. It no longer tasted of baby aspirin. It tasted of death.

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Nicholas J. Pyros

July 14, 1928 – February 24, 2015

Scrolling through life

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As I scroll down my news feed during my ‘in between this and that’ hours, I realize that Facebook is doing to me what the women’s magazines have done to me for years.

That feeling of inadequacy.

That feeling of I’ll never be good enough, I’ll never make the cut, I’ll never get a passing grade. Judging myself for years (and falling so short I couldn’t even pick myself up off the ground) against airbrushed faces and bodies on magazine covers and advertisements has left that stamp of imperfection on my mind and soul that will probably never be overcome.

Who cares that I graduated from a prestigious university? That I had a great job in my twenties and amazing kids in my thirties? I never could fit into a size 2 bathing suit; I still have no idea how to properly apply contouring blush; and my hair, no matter what, frizzes in a rainstorm.

I have to work hard to keep in shape and when I gain weight, I gain it in all the wrong places and when I lose it, I lose it in all the wrong places, as well.

My news feed at times brings about the same levels of inadequacy onto me. The picture perfect meals on a plate. The Pinterest house decorations. The knitting accomplishments, the fancy hors d’oeuvres. The workouts. The spotless homes. The vacations. And the glamorous lives!

I want to post pictures of the dead flowers in the vase next to my kitchen sink that I haven’t gotten around to throwing out; the dog hair clumps on my bedroom floor; the piles of laundry needing to be put away and the bills and paperwork I just threw into a cardboard box and hid because company was coming. The weight I’ve gained.

But I don’t. I succumb to the social, nonexistent-except-in-my-mind pressures and post happy smiling pictures of people who honestly don’t smile all the time. The dogs at their cutest, not after they’ve been sick all over the rug or they’ve rolled in something that takes hours to wash out. I push the clutter out of the way before I shoot pictures of Damon’s recovery, while he’s in the middle of doing something incredible. With almost a professional photographer’s eye, I survey the background to make sure the setting is Facebook acceptable. Wait, hold on, keep that stand, Damon, while I move everything that will show people that my house may not be in perfect order. Or any order.

Am I being judged? Held to Martha Stewart standards? Especially now in this new role in my life?

Probably not, but it only takes one slight negative to pull down all the positives. It takes one comment regarding my recovering-brain-injured son such as “Damon, you need better oral care” to reverse the 30 other comments about how handsome he looked in his selfie with his new hair cut. That day I scrutinized that picture that the not-so-sweet woman commented on, and then also his mouth afterward, and even though I knew she was wrong, I knew he had beautiful and clean teeth, I allowed her to put a damper on my pride.

I allowed it.

I allow others’ holiday pictures to put a low on my own holiday; I allow vacation shots to send me back to the days before the accident when vacations were plentiful and exotic and, if I’d had Facebook back then, would have been plastered all over my wall. I allow happy smiling faces of my past friends living it up at bars or concerts or parties to bother me, because, one: they are no longer in my physical life, two: they obviously did not need me in theirs to have a good time; and three: well, I just don’t have that freedom any more to be much fun.

I wonder if my posts and pictures of Damon’s recovery bother others in that same wistful way….others whose loved ones haven’t made as much or any progress after their own brain injury. Or others who have lost a child. …do they feel I’m gloating because mine is still alive? Do they judge themselves against me more than against their friends whose kids are in perfect health? Do the people who have progressed much further gloat to themselves? Do they feel more blessed?

I don’t want to nor do I try to be a measuring stick for anyone, in or out of my shoes. Not so long ago my posts regarding Damon’s attendance backstage at a concert bothered a fully able bodied young person, to the point she told me I was rubbing it in her face by posting that Damon had Luke Bryan’s autograph. I was shocked that we were on that side of the measuring stick. That others would compare themselves to our not-so-glamorous life.

Do I need to word things about my compromised, dependent, brain-injured child as he and I are going through the slow process of his recovery, a journey I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, so as not to instill any jealousy in anyone else?

It sounds crazy, but others (as I do in my times of insecurity), may interpret something totally different than the writer’s intent. Like me, the reader needs to understand as she peruses her newsfeed and compares herself to what she reads that it’s not always, if ever, about her, about me. I also need to understand, like my picture perfect backgrounds in pictures of Damon, it’s not always real. It’s just what I allow myself to show, to see, what I allow it to be.

The poem ‘Desiderata‘ by Max Erhmann, that I had hanging in my college dorm and then years afterward in my apartments and my house says, ‘If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.’

I loved that line forever, but I never took its advice fully. Or at least I never felt worthy of being vain, only bitter.

Don’t get me wrong, I count my blessings every day. My three biggest blessings of my children are super huge, and of course my blessing of watching my son recover, albeit slowly, rather than the alternative as bleakly misdiagnosed by the doctors almost four years ago, takes me to my knees daily. But those glamorous Facebook pictures of those glamorous lives! Why can’t I have that as well?

The smart thing to do would be to post my updates and then close up shop for the day. But I can’t. I’m an addict. I need to know who adopted what dog, how cute the newest baby is, who broke up with whom, recipes and helpful hints I’ll never use, and funny memes. I don’t have time to read an entire book, or even a chapter at one sitting, so a quick article on what’s trending at the moment fills the perfect amount of time I have.

But mostly, the real reason I don’t close up Facebook and continue to allow myself these crazy feelings of inadequacy as I fall short in life’s comparisons, is because I’ve connected to the most wonderful people from all over the world. Some people I knew a different life time ago but lost years and years of being in touch. Other people I’d never have met if not for Damon’s accident or Facebook. Beautiful people who offer support and ideas and advice as far away as California, Australia and the UK. The virtual hugs and love and light sent to me from these total strangers, now Facebook friends, help counter my wistfulness at the exotic lives of others, making my jealousy dissipate and then sometimes almost disappear.

My closest friends today were mere Facebook friends right after Damon’s accident and total strangers before. Others are people who have reached out to me, or me to them, because we share life’s journeys and only we know what’s behind each other’s Facebook smiles and pictures of recovery.

“Are you awake?” The message rang close to midnight not too long ago.

“Yes” I answered my long ago friend whom I haven’t seen in almost 30 years. Another night of no sleep. “What’s up?”

“My dad passed today” was the answer.

I was never so grateful for the opportunity to be an ear. To be a shoulder. To virtually hug. I would never have had that opportunity outside of Facebook.

That’s my reason for constant scrolling, despite any feelings of inadequacy I allow my news feed to give me. I want those connections. I want those words of understanding. I want to help. I want to pay it forward. That and the fact I don’t have time for a more exotic life right now. But I just need to keep in mind that someday I will. And I’ll post all about it.

After I clean up the mess from the background.