June 9, 2016

Dear Dave,

You had a stroke one year ago today. A massive, scary, improbable stroke that took us completely by surprise and changed the course of our lives forever.

With your stay in the ICU and your state of amnesia came a series of letters that I decided to write to you, along with the hundreds of letters and emails and prayers that I would collect from so many people who love you.

This is the last letter I am going to write you that will be a part of this DearDave Word document.

After today, we move forward, onto a new, blank page.

I’ve measured time for a year in relation to June 9, 2015. Everything was bracketed in my mind as either “before June 9” or “after June 9.” Every day of this past year I have woken up and looked down at my calendar. First, I would check what it was that we had to do that day. Then, I would scroll back to this day one year prior; I would take a moment of refuge and solace in looking at the simple activities of the same date, before the stroke. I’d recall what we had done, two people in a state of innocence, enjoying the busy excitement of fulfilling work and the early days of a first pregnancy. I’d remember us how we were before that plane ride. Before the fall. Before everything changed.

One year ago today, June 9, was the worst day of our lives.

Today, we are going to celebrate. It’s your “Alive Day.” Tonight we will take your parents—the first people I called from the ambulance in Fargo—and your family out to dinner, and we will celebrate the fact that you are alive. Your mom called me yesterday, telling me she had bought a balloon for you that said “Welcome back!” We thought that seemed right.

This weekend you and I and Lilly will gather with a group of friends and we will raise a glass to your life and to your loved ones and the community that rallied to our sides one year ago today, and every day of this past year.

When organizing this little get-together, I wrote the following email to our friends, with the subject line “Dave is Alive!”:

Hi friends!

June 9 marks a not-so-fun one-year anniversary for us. We can’t think of a better way to commemorate this crappy day than by surrounding ourselves with people we care about.

Please come on over & join us on our rooftop as we raise a glass to our favorite stroke survivor & rehab rockstar—life is good and it’s been a remarkable year.

Love,

Alli, Dave & Lilly

It is June in Chicago again. It is the best time of year once more, and the sunshine has returned. I will spend the day reflecting and giving thanks. We have so much for which we can be grateful.

This past week, we published a piece in The New York Times discussing a little bit of what we have been through. The piece elicited very strong reactions from the readers, and we’ve received hundreds of thousands of clicks and countless incredibly thoughtful and moving responses. One email struck me in particular. It came from a young woman who goes to Yale. Her father had a stroke several years ago, and she wrote this to us:

I’m happy to say that my dad lived through his stroke, and while he is very different from how he was before, he, my siblings, and my mom have only redoubled our commitment to him and our love for each other. Every day his walking and talking improve, and he smiles very often, especially around our family.

He is very different from how he was before.

We’ve redoubled our commitment to him and our love for each other.

Every day he improves.

He smiles very often.

That’s it, isn’t it?

The life we knew, Dave, before the stroke—that’s gone. That version of ourselves and our loved ones and that particular path we might have forged is gone. It’s all been replaced by something new and different, and perhaps it’s a little less innocent and simple. But, as different as the world and the family and the people in it may appear, things can still be good. Life can still be filled with hope and, as this young woman so beautifully put it, with love.

Celebrated neurologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl said, “Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.” I think about that quote a lot. Did we want this to happen? No. Do I feel as though we understand everything that has unfolded and will continue to unfold for us as a result of this stroke? Hardly. Do I feel as though we’ve been able to draw meaning in all of this? Yes. Every single day, yes. And I know that we will continue to do so.

I hear you in the next room, playing with our daughter as I type these words. Your mother recently confessed to me that, on their midnight plane ride out to Fargo, your father had very seriously prepared her and Andy for the fact that you might die, that it was very likely a flight for all of them to see you one final time and say goodbye. And if you didn’t die, we probably could never expect much more for you than a life of complete helplessness and 24-hour care.

I hear you now, in there, playing with Lilly, making her laugh. I say: thank you, God. Thank you so much for this moment. For the fact that Dave knows Lilly and Lilly knows her father.

That is no small thing.

We never made it to Hawaii. We never had a “babymoon” trip. We got rerouted, and the journey we took instead was one we never expected and one we never would’ve chosen, but it happened. This year has been lumpy. There have been glorious peaks and ghastly valleys.

Brain injury is so especially difficult on a patient and the loved ones because we can’t see the wound in the brain. We can’t set it like a broken bone in a cast, we can’t watch as a scar slowly heals and diminishes and maybe even disappears. To believe that a brain is healing requires faith; it requires one to submit to time and to patience and to trust—to hope without proof that the unseen is occurring. It requires a deep and abiding faith that, though we can’t see it—the mind is doing the miraculous work of regenerating, a million tiny but mighty cells coming alive and coming together, working once more to create miracles large and small, seen and unseen.

All this year, we’ve heard so much talk about fighting and striving for a full recovery. Everyone hopes and believes you can make a full recovery. I’ve thought so much about this phrase, these words. I’ve wondered just what a “full recovery” would mean or look like.

Full recovery. To me, I think there’s something in the first word there: “full.” I think we need to focus on that. A full recovery, in my opinion, means that you are able to once again live a full life. What does that mean—a “full life”? That’s a question that each of us can and should answer differently. But this I know for certain: it does not mean a perfect life. Because that’s not possible, and never would have been, stroke or no stroke. Nor does it mean an easy life. A predictable life. We now know that that is not possible, either. A life without long trials and sudden, shocking disruptions does not exist. Not for us, not for anyone.

There are still so many good moments to be had. Life has been beautiful. When I stop to really think about just how beautiful it has been, it becomes a bit overwhelming. I have studied yoga in the rain forest in Costa Rica and I have studied Shakespeare in the Gothic buildings of Yale. I have looked out over the world from atop the Swiss Alps, and I have looked up at the sky while swimming in the Great Barrier Reef. I have fed the homeless in Chicago and have sat down to dinner with two sitting presidents. I have laughed so hard that I was unable to catch my breath, and I have cried so hard that my head felt like it would split apart. I have cradled my newborn baby in my arms and wept; I have cradled my sick husband in my arms and not wept, because I was far too frightened of what would happen if I allowed the tears to begin.

Even, with all of that, without a doubt, the greatest adventure of my life is the one we are living, Dave, each and every day. The greatest story I will ever tell is the one we wake up to and write anew each morning. “Choose to be in your life, to be in your marriage, every single day.” That is what the priest told us at my brother Teddy’s wedding to Emled, years ago, and though I did not fully understand it at the time, I think that I do now. No marriage is easy. No love is easy. Faith is certainly not easy. Tragedy can come at any time and in any shape. Life gets scary and it gets hard. We scream and we cry and we fall to the floor, railing with fists clenched that we just don’t want to do it any longer.

And that is when we have our greatest chances and our greatest choices.

We choose, today, to strive toward a full recovery. A full life must inevitably come with its challenges. But it also means a life full of love and loved ones. A life full of gratitude for both the beauty and the brokenness. A deeper faith and a more meaningful appreciation for every single day that we are given. Acknowledgment of our blessings and a genuine compassion for those who are struggling. We choose that.

The stroke was sudden and it was painful and it forever changed the road on which we walked. But today, and every day, we must remember to look back and see how far we’ve come. We see the many steps behind us, and we nod to them with gratitude and understanding. We see the many steps before us, and we look toward them with gratitude and hope. We see that, on our journey, we still stand beside each other, hands intertwined, and we choose to keep moving forward on the new road that stretches ahead.