Chapter 22
Dave’s rehab floor at RIC afforded glorious panoramic views of Lake Michigan, and on the Fourth of July, we looked out over an expanse of shimmering blue water dotted with boats. Music traveled up to us on the warm air and rattled our windows. The beach was packed, and our view was filled with people swimming, laughing, reveling.
That week was to have been the first week of Dave’s fourth year of residency.
Dave’s parents drove down the morning of the Fourth of July, his mother bringing us sweets and baked goods, before heading back north to join the rest of the family for a parade. How I envied them all the ability to do something as ordinary and carefree as go to a parade. There is just something about holidays and happy times that makes it so much harder when you yourself are in pain. It is hard to feel deeply unhappy on any day—but all the more so when you are confronted, like on a holiday, with so many other people who just look and seem so darn happy.
Our friends Lizzie and Kevin came to RIC that afternoon, and the four of us walked outside to the lake. It was Dave’s first outing far from the RIC campus without medical supervision, and he was not himself—unsteady on his feet and not entirely coherent when he spoke—so we joked that everyone would assume he was just another reveler who had perhaps enjoyed too many adult beverages.
We were one month out from the stroke, and I was still running on adrenaline and positivity. But I could not ignore the fear and confusion and discomfort I saw on the faces of some of the friends who visited. I knew some people had to be thinking, Thank God this didn’t happen to me. It was only natural. One particular remark that stung was when the wife of a visitor told me she had “hugged her husband extra close in bed the night before, thinking about how it could have been him.” I knew people had to be thinking that, of course. Candidly, I would have had the same thought had the places been reversed, but she did not win any awards for empathy by saying it aloud.
In an email to Dave’s friends updating them on the move to RIC and letting them know about the policies for visitors, Andy laid out some basic facts to prepare people for what to expect. He asked people to project positivity during their visits; to talk to Dave and ask him questions and try to trigger fond memories and associations. Andy wrote, “I know it’s sad to see a guy wearing Yale Lacrosse shorts who can’t cut his own food.” Yes, it was, I realized, when I saw it spelled out so plainly in writing.
May we always remember how lucky we are.
After long days in the hospital, I would return home to our empty apartment and I would see that photo of the four-leaf clovers and I would want to tear it off the wall and hurl it across the room. What had I been thinking, writing such a thing? Had I really needed to tempt the fates like that? Had I needed to revel in my good luck, gloating before the gods, daring them to rob me of my fortune?
Sometimes I would stare at my iPhone calendar and lust after the life of June 8. I’d relive the moments and days that predated the stroke, all of them now washed in a blissful, halcyon glow of bygone innocence and ease. I would rewatch the iPhone video from the day, just a week before the stroke, when we found out we were having a girl—our shocked, delighted faces, our long hug. I would wallow in a temporary amnesia that pretended that life was as it had once been, back when the biggest problem was a parking ticket or a tight work deadline. I would barter in my head, negotiating with God: “If only you will give me Dave back, I promise I will…”
May we always remember.
Remember? Dave could not even remember what city we lived in. He could not remember our anniversary. He could not remember the name of our beloved pet dog.
Fatigue, too, was a constant combatant. Dave would nap between most therapy sessions, on top of thirteen hours of sleep each night. At bedtime I would cuddle him—full light outside the window, these being the longest days of the year—in the narrow hospital bed until he fell asleep. As he drifted off, I would pray for healing. I would pray that the Holy Spirit would work miracles in that room and inside his head.
In our old life, the life before his stroke, our bedtime ritual had been very different. I was always the one who took longer to get ready—all Dave had to do was brush his teeth, whereas I would brush my teeth and take out my contact lenses and wash my face and apply a whole lineup of toners and lotions. Dave would lie in bed, battling sleep. “Hurry up, I’m falling asleep!”
I’d hurry through the rest of my routine and then hop into bed beside him and Penny (yes, we let our dog sleep with us). Dave would wrap his arms around us, a big sandwich, and he would say, sighing: “This is my idea of heaven.”
One night at RIC when I got in bed with him to snuggle before sleep, I told him about that. “You’d always say: ‘This is my idea of heaven.’ Do you remember that?”
He shook his head. Marya, visiting, had witnessed our nighttime hospital ritual, and so, several weeks later, a pillow showed up with Penny’s face on it. She wanted the three of us to be able to continue our bedtime ritual. So each night we would snuggle, the two of us and my big belly and the Penny pillow, and I would say, “This is my idea of heaven.” I would fight back the tears as I hoped that one day Dave would remember that ritual from our old life. That one day we would return to the place where he would hurry me through my nighttime face-washing and I could hop into bed and he could say: This is my idea of heaven.
The days were long and full of rehab, and I continued to add to my DearDave Word document each night. I would write as the sun dipped through the window over Lake Michigan. I would look from Dave’s sleeping figure around the darkening room. Just beside the bed, the digital picture frame our friend Russell had sent would be rotating through photos, the scenes of our former life on an endless loop. Dave, suntanned and relaxed with our friends in Lake George. Dave and me, jubilant, running out of the church on our wedding day as flower petals rain down. Dave, proud, standing next to his father at his medical school graduation. Dave playing lacrosse in college. Each photo was a fresh punch in the gut. The shards of a life that had once belonged to two very different people.
Dear Dave,
Holding you tonight, watching you drift off to sleep, I wept silently, not wanting to wake you up. This digital picture frame in your hospital room reminds me of so many joyful memories, so many memories that, now, hurt to look at. Will you ever come back to me in the same smiling, strong, glorious form as the one in the pictures I now see? God, I miss you.
There’s a phrase I like, one that I have told myself often during hard times. It’s always darkest before the dawn. I do not know whether that was necessarily the darkest moment; there would be no point in trying to identify that. It was a dark moment, but it is certainly true that a major spear of light followed shortly after.