Chapter 9

That first awakening and brief flurry of activity exhausted Dave, and he went right back to sleep, but not before his parents and brother were able to see him with his eyes briefly open. The air in the hospital room suddenly pulsed with a heady mixture of euphoria and relief and hugs and high fives. Dave had woken up! As dazed and groggy as he had been, he’d nevertheless heard me and responded to my voice. He had obeyed a command with a purposeful movement.

“He looks so strong,” my dad said, staring at Dave’s motionless body as he drifted back into sleep. It was true, he did; from the outside, the athlete’s frame was still whole and intact—broad chest and strong arms and healthy coloring. But he was intubated, his inhales and exhales still being regulated by the endotracheal tube. With the most basic of human functions beyond his brain’s capacity, Dave was being administered fluids by an intravenous tube, his bladder being regularly emptied by a catheter into what looked like a large Ziploc bag. He had developed pneumonia from aspirating the orange juice they had tried to administer to him on the plane, so a series of tubes and baggies was in place to empty his pneumonic lungs. Needles punctured his skin in various places. He had wires attached to his chest and head. The clicks and beeps of the various monitors reminded us every second how unstable his condition was. His hair was a tangled mass from where the wires and nodes of the EKG had been attached. But in spite of this, his body looked strong.

We had a family powwow and decided to take shifts by the hospital bed. Not knowing how long our stay in Fargo would be, we booked a couple of rooms at a nearby hotel and dug in for the long haul. There was really no further planning to be done; it was very much a situation in flux. For me, a perennial planner, this was foreign and uncomfortable and added to the dread surrounding the entire situation; I hated being so utterly unaware of what was happening and what we could do about it. I hated not having a plan.

My family members were fielding the phone calls and emails and text messages that were pouring in from hundreds of friends and relatives, so that I could focus exclusively on Dave and his medical care. Though I was deliberately delegating that duty to others, I knew that a powerful surge of prayers and loving thoughts were flooding toward us all day. There were friends who arranged to have food delivered to the hospital room so that we did not have to leave Dave’s side. There was a friend who spent hours on the phone with hotels, airlines, and tour companies to get our entire ill-fated babymoon trip refunded.

I spoke to two people on the phone that day. The first was my sister, Emily, who wept with me from her home in New Jersey. At more than eight months pregnant and with a toddler at home, Em was not able to fly to Fargo. “I just wish I could be there with you,” she said. “This is all so fucking unfair, Alli; I’m so sorry.” Em told me that her two-year-old daughter, my goddaughter, had been saying all day that she wanted to call Dave.

The second person I spoke to on the phone was a colleague of Dave’s. The Rush community had mobilized with gusto to try to help Dave in whatever way possible. I received a call from one of Dave’s friends and co-residents, named Yale. He let me know that he had informed the Rush neurology department of Dave’s stroke, and they all felt very strongly that we needed to get him back to Rush, where they have a world-class stroke team and one of the country’s top neurology intensive care units. Yale introduced me to a doctor in the neurology department. This man, who knew of Dave in passing as a colleague, reiterated the desire of his department to treat one of their own. “Alli, we want Dave back at Rush. But…he’s very sick. We can’t move him until he is stable enough to handle the plane ride.”

Hearing those words filled my stomach with a leaden heaviness. He’s very sick. I knew it was true, but to hear it spoken aloud made it that much more of an inescapable reality.

Late that night, walking from the hospital to the hotel—Dave’s nurse’s direct line written on a piece of paper in my hands and her assurance given that it would be OK if I called throughout the night to check in—I looked around for the first time at the city into which we had so suddenly and unexpectedly dropped from the sky. It was a balmy evening in early summer, and the Fargo night had come alive, with people crowding the main strip, live music spilling out of restaurants and bars, a scene filled with laughter and drinks and carefree conversation. In Chicago, people welcome the return of the warm weather with a giddy determination to make merry—I imagined that this would be equally true in a city like Fargo. I passed apartments with lights on, television sets tuned to the late-night news or some reality-TV singing contest. I thought about all the people living their lives on the other sides of those windows. It was Wednesday, a weeknight. People were home from work, cleaning their dinner dishes, thinking ahead to the next day or the coming weekend. I envied them all.

That night, alone in my hotel room, I called the hospital several times to check in on Dave. “His face is calm, his brow isn’t wrinkled, which tells me he’s not in pain,” the kind nurse told me. I then called my brother Ted and his wife in Austin, Texas, and asked them to pray with me over the phone for Dave. I sat on the floor of the hotel room next to the electrical outlet, my dead phone plugged in to the charger, and we prayed and cried. After that, I pulled myself up and crawled into bed.

Dear Dave,

I had a dream last night that you told me Jesus was holding you by the hand, and you told Jesus about the situation: you had suffered a stroke on an airplane. Your wife was expecting a baby, our first.

“Yes, I know you,” this dream version of Jesus told you. “I’m familiar with your story. And let me just tell you that I’ve received more prayers for you than I’ve ever received for anyone. I hear, and I’m on the case.”

I awoke feeling comforted by that dream. I had a sense of peace that Dave and I were being supported from around the world by the thoughts and prayers of so many loved ones. If ever the power of prayer could work its magic, as I believed it could, then surely we had a very strong chance of getting to the ear of God.

The next morning I found Louisa by Dave’s bed, her head down on his leg, looking like she was asleep. I stepped into the room and she turned toward me. “Were you sleeping?” I asked.

“No.” She shook her head. “I was just praying.”

I slid a chair beside her and stared at Dave’s motionless body. He was in a loose-fitting hospital gown, intermittent splotches of blood caked on his skin from all of the needles that had pierced him. I stared at those blood splotches, their color varying from a rusty brown to a startling scarlet, depending on how recent the pinprick was. As an English major in college, I had been especially drawn to Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s plays, there is so much emphasis placed on blood—not in a ghoulish, grisly, Halloween-corpse sort of way, but, rather, through the themes of family lineage and inherited grudges and the questions of legitimacy and power. King Henry V marries a French princess—the daughter of an erstwhile enemy—because she holds the blood of France’s royal family in her veins and he hopes that their union might heal a war-torn England. Hamlet is at risk from his evil uncle Claudius because he carries the blood of the murdered king, his father, within. And, of course, the play Romeo and Juliet sees so much blood spilled over inherited grudges passed between families over multiple generations. Even a comedy like As You Like It sees the heroine, Rosalind, forced to flee to the Forest of Arden because she is the legitimate heir, through her blood, to her father’s duchy.

And it’s not just Shakespeare; everything from the Bible to The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones takes up these themes. Even the Harry Potter books deal with the issue of bloodlines and legitimacy and heritage and power. Hermione is not born of pure wizarding stock, so she is derided as a “Mudblood.” Members of the Weasley family are labeled “blood traitors” because they, though pure of blood themselves, are willing to associate with those who are not.

I really hate having blood drawn and I pretty much hyperventilate whenever I see needles, but these themes are something I’ve always found interesting in literature and history. It’s why Anne Boleyn was murdered—she couldn’t produce a male heir to carry on her husband’s bloodline. It’s why wars are started and why relatives kill one another and why families and kingdoms so often rip apart. It’s something that comes up in literature and history all the time.

That morning in the hospital room in Fargo, seated beside Dave’s mother and staring at the stains of blood on Dave’s body, I thought about this. I thought about how blood, like so much else, is passed from one generation to another. Dave had already imbued my baby with half of her genetics; that was a done deal. Regardless of what happened with Dave, if the rest of the pregnancy went smoothly, there would be a baby born four months after the stroke who would have Dave’s blood pumping in her veins, and that was something in which I did take comfort. But there was so much more that I wanted Dave to give to our baby. I wanted her to know him and love him. I wanted him to help me raise her and love her and teach her. Dave needed to wake up, to be Dave, so that our daughter could have more than just the blood and genes that he had already given to her.

I turned to my mother-in-law, both of us staring at the bloodstains, and I said, “That is the same blood that my daughter will have.”

Louisa nodded. Perhaps she found the comment a bit odd, as well she should have, but she did not say so.

I asked: “Can we pray together?” She nodded. We took hands and prayed aloud, taking it in turn. Afterward, I played some hymns on my iPhone and we sang to Dave.

I believe I won the parental lottery not once but twice. My mother-in-law is the kindest, strongest person I know. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Louisa is equal parts Southern belle and rock-solid steel magnolia. Louisa never does anything but the right thing—she is literally always thinking about the other person, sometimes to the detriment of her own interests. I’ve never known anyone who loves as self-sacrificially as she does.

My father-in-law is a man of science. His nickname is “Nitro Nelly” because, at the age of ten, Nelson brewed himself a batch of homemade nitroglycerine—TNT—from a child’s do-it-yourself chemistry kit and proudly brought it into school for show-and-tell. Nelson is a frank and rational man of honesty and character, a black-or-white realist. My mother-in-law is a woman who sees and loves and understands everybody’s shades of gray. They are a case of opposites attracting in the best way possible. The pragmatist and the optimist. Louisa is the rock of her family, and her greatest joys in life are her children and her grandchildren. I realized something right then: I was Dave’s wife, I was the one for whom people were worried, but his mother was hurting just as much as I was, perhaps even more. This was her baby. This was her blood. I could not have asked for anyone better to be by my side and, more important, to be by Dave’s side. After all, Dave had joined me in creating the life that grew within my own belly at that very moment, but thirty years earlier, Louisa had been the one to give Dave his life and his blood. She and Nelson were in this with me and for Dave in a way that nobody, probably not even I, could understand.