pathless
AFTER WE TELL Richard’s boss he isn’t coming back to work, his treatment program becomes his lifeline. Richard’s days include performing a list of household tasks the occupational therapist has assigned him and reading his anatomy and physiology textbooks. He has a black-vinyl-covered day planner to organize his life. He sets an alarm for taking vitamins, talking to family, doing his homework. He learns to set goals so he can study in small segments without falling asleep. He learns to use the simplest tools he can: the microwave instead of the stove, for example. He starts a load of laundry at 1:00 PM and must write Put clothes in dryer at 2:00 PM, or else he will forget the clothing is there. He doesn’t forget like you and I do. He forgets the clothing exists. He’s learning the activities of daily living, sensory-perceptual skills, communication, and social skills.
Patient has difficulty tracking tasks through to completion, his occupational therapist reports. Initiation and delayed thought-processing skills have been observed in treatment. . . . Compensatory strategies for these skill areas have been introduced to patient but at present he continues to require significant cuing to follow through with tasks.
“Did you start your homework?” I ask.
Richard nods his head. Stares, wide-eyed.
“Eyes.” The constant reminder to come into the culturally acceptable place of the adult.
Richard blinks. Goes back to the blank stare.
“What are you working on?”
“Grocery list.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What do we eat?”
“The assignment. What’s the assignment?”
“Go to the store and buy our food.”
“What do you want to make?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing?”
“I don’t know what we eat.”
“How about this. Get some rice and veggies, and then some chicken, and you can make a stir-fry.”
“Okay.” He writes veggies.
“What kind of veggies might you buy?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“What about a bag of frozen vegetables? Then you don’t have to make too many decisions.”
He writes bag.
He shrugs his shoulders. Stares with the big eyes.
“Fuck,” I say under my breath, turning away. I pretend to pick up lint from the floor. Raise up. See him watching me.
“Eyes!” I say, impatiently. He blinks. “I said ‘rice.’”
He looks at me, the question in his hovering pencil.
“Brown rice. Am I supposed to tell you where to find it?”
“No.”
“This assignment is not going so well.”
“No.” He looks up.
“I’ll drive you over. Do you think you can manage going into the store alone?”
He raises his shoulders.
“You’re supposed to do this on your own, right?”
“Yes.”
“You think you can?”
“I can do it.”
After our trip to the store, Richard tries to make dinner by tossing frozen vegetables in a frying pan with soy sauce, but he burns the concoction when he has to stop and make the rice. He hitches up his track pants and looks at me like I’m the mother who’s going to scold him.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
He does everything asked of him. Mostly looking like he’s trying to wake up from a really deep sleep.
Good God, I think. How long is this going to take?
“What else we got on that homework list?” I ask, hoping for something at which he can be successful.
When I get frustrated, I think of how humbling it must be to have to learn to be a human again. I make a new list.
1. Write a plan for making a telephone call, so you can remember how to talk to the people you know and love.
2. Make a shopping list, and go to the grocery store on your own.
3. Work on eye contact. Learn to blink.
4. Go into a public place. See if you can be around people for an hour.
5. Find a support group.
6. Just fucking survive.
The children and I are aware that we’re in the middle of a terrible event, but there’s no way to describe what this loss feels like. We find ourselves with a man who is here and who is not here. We’re not sure if the loss we suffer is real. As challenging as a diagnosis of “permanent disability” was to hear from Dr. L, it’s provable through a methodology. I like my facts; they’re a kind of truth based on a set of agreements. Yet people are unrealistically optimistic when they’re with us. They say things like: “He’ll be back in no time!” or “What an amazing recovery!” as if there’s no sense that anyone has gone missing.
Ambiguous loss is considered by social scientists to be one of the most stressful kinds of loss owing to its nature: it is the loss that happens without possibility for closure. When my grandparents died, it was a stressful event, but our family was able to say good-bye, speak about what their lives meant to us, mourn the loss with our beloveds, and receive offerings of their treasured objects. We were able to move through our grief by connecting with family and friends who had lost their loved ones. We were collectively seen as the survivors, the grieving family, those suffering a loss.
With Richard having disappeared in a traumatic brain injury—or when any member of a family disappears through addiction, dementia, mental illness, kidnapping, genocide, holocaust, or other mysterious disappearance, whether common or catastrophic—the remaining family members are catapulted into an ambiguous, tenuous uncertainty. Pauline Boss, an expert on treating ambiguous loss, defines it as “any kind of loss with no clear information on the status of a missing person.”
“In such uncharted territory,” she says, “a family may become paralyzed, unable to grieve and heal.” Wars and terrorism are particularly cruel in creating disappearance, and even though families mourn with symbolic rituals that help them cope, the disbelief that the loss is permanent can be so profound that hope for survival never diminishes. In psychological loss, there is no body to bury, not even the symbol of one, and the loss cannot be resolved with the usual rituals.
We will have to find some way to form an attachment to the Richard who is present. But first, we will have to find our own ways to mourn the man who died in the ICU that day.
Once Richard is diagnosed as “permanently disabled,” our family begins the process of educating ourselves about what to expect from rehabilitation. While no other medical professional has been willing to discuss the caregiver and family’s role in recovery, Dr. L makes it part of his program to offer guidance about how we can support Richard, including explaining what care will be tricky to manage.
“The family is usually more anxious than the brain-injured person, who may be unaware of his situation. You’re going to become his primary motivator,” Dr. L says, looking at me, watching me narrow my big eyes with seriousness. I stand straight, give the doc a nod of the head: I’ve got this.
I do not have this. I don’t know that recovery might take years, or that in accepting this new role, I will lose my relationship with my husband as a partner and equal. In begging Richard to leave his comfortable room, coercing him to do his homework, and writing notes in preparation for doctors’ visits, I become his motivator. I don’t enjoy leaving the role of his lover to take on what feels like becoming his nurse, teacher, and mother. But I refuse to acknowledge my anger, even to myself. I’m determined to become the fiercest, most virtuous caregiver anyone has ever seen. I cry only when I’m away from the house. I watch our teenage daughter express all the anger I don’t dare admit that I feel.
Richard has few of the aggressive behavioral issues of the brain-injured. He doesn’t exhibit embarrassing compulsive behaviors like temper tantrums, but he’s socially inappropriate and often forgets basic manners, something that never would have happened before thanks to his excessively polite Brit-Canadian education.
We’re waiting in the silent anteroom of the doctor’s office when he belches, a manly rawwrrr of a burp, and then sits quietly, his hands folded in his lap, not a suggestion of mischief.
“People commonly say ‘excuse me’ when that happens.”
“So?”
“What?”
“Say ‘excuse me,’ please.”
“Excuse me, please.” Calm, like he knows diddly about decorum.
I ask him to refrain from licking each of his fingers while eating meals. On one disastrous restaurant outing, he chomps a pie slice in three minutes, and then lifts the plate to lick it clean. Through gritted teeth, I mention that’s something he should do only at home.
I’m waking up to a new reality: brain injury happens to families. Our son copes through absence; our daughter copes through anger; I bury all of my grief and become the “good woman,” an extension of the nice girl I tried to look like I was when I was young. I decide to model myself after the mentors I’m in awe of, instead of being true to myself. I listen to their suggestions for how I might live my life. I adopt their language, enfold myself in their values. This is how I end up writing this letter to my friends:
Richard has what is called brain trauma by Western medicine, but I call it a bit of enlightenment. There’s been a space amid the cognitive rearranging for a new self to show up. . . . I most notice absence of the masculine, but when I attune to the new man before me, I see that he has the most natural yangness about him, it’s just that it surfaces more slowly, gently, like a wave, watery yet powerful. I notice in myself that my personality is adjusting to being slowed down, to traveling more organically with changes as they appear rather than trying to always be out in front of them. I am being tested to let go of my expectations of how things will be, to stay in the present moment.
This is me, full of shit. The one who wants to get it right, to sound more evolved than she is. If only I could cry, scream, pound, throw, hit, slap, smash, scrunch, crunch, piss, run away, tear things, knock, freak, shout: Fuck you motherfucker! Instead, I want to be grateful, righteous, spiritual. I want to be the best caregiver anyone has ever seen. The modest, slightly suffering partner, making a go of it. I don’t like her. And I forgive her. She is only trying to survive. She can’t yet risk saying what’s true. She has to borrow the truth of others until she knows.
My calendar remains full of plans, meetings, assignments. On the outside, I look like I’m a normal, albeit driven, woman. But I’m hiding a dirty secret. A secret that makes me feel crazed.
I can no longer read.
From the time of Richard’s surgery, and through this first year of his recovery, my mind cannot absorb the written words of others. I check books out of the library. Books sit open and unread on my lap. Books are stacked three feet high next to my side of the bed. I pretend to read. Not one word enters my brain. I watch Richard fall asleep over a chapter of his anatomy textbook and wonder if exhaustion is contagious. One day my friend Jennifer, a poet, comes to take me for some private time at our apartment complex’s pool.
“I have to tell you something awful,” I say. Jennifer is from Manhattan, and has more than a few hair-raising stories of her own.
“I’m not reading. I mean, nothing.”
“That bad, huh?” Jenn says, raising an eyebrow on her freckled face.
“I mean, for fuck’s sake, not even the words on containers.”
“You read containers?”
“Shampoo, toothpaste, cans, recipes, even tampon boxes. I’ve been reading since I was four. Reading got me through a tornado that devastated our neighborhood when I was in first grade. Reading got me through a mother who has been on pills most of my life. Reading gave me a literature degree and bonded me to my friends and saved me from my melancholy. Books are my lifeline. What am I going to do?”
“The same thing happened to me after 9/11.” Jennifer lost friends that day.
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s horrible for a while. You’ll live to read again.”
“Promise?”
“I’m sure of it.”
It won’t be during this year of doctors’ appointments, therapy visits, and getting our daughter off to college. This year, instead of reading, I write half a novel, a story about a young woman living alone in a cave during World War II. While I’m writing this book, I think the story has nothing to do with my life.
After Richard has gone to sleep, I stay up and write. In addition to writing a novel, I’m writing screenplays. The year Richard was first diagnosed with cancer, I placed in the Nicholl Fellowship competition, and, feeling buoyed, I decided to keep writing for film. I visited the Writers Guild in Los Angeles to attend programs and meet other screenwriters. I booked myself into screenwriting conferences and pitched my work to producers. I wrote three screenplays. I entered and won two more contests. This year, I want to practice my skills diligently. But the commitment required to enter the field is all-encompassing. I can’t give myself over to work that takes me out of the home for long hours when Richard needs constant care. Perhaps when he’s better, I reason, I can return to film and writing books.
For the time being, I write in my journal, nothing purposeful, just feelings, impressions of what’s happening around me. Late at night, when I stop doing things, the stars are stretched across the canyon in their fearless, formless realm. I hear Richard breathing. I walk to our bedroom and stand near him. The same beautiful legs. The long, wavy hair. Inside that mind, the same spaciousness as that which holds the stars. Oh, yeah, I think, you imagine he is your sweet dream. You imagine he is your nightmare. You are, of course, correct. Your husband has nothing to do with it. In your inability to love him no matter how he shows up, you are looking at what you think of yourself. Husbands, wives, lovers, even the storyless like Richard—all a projection of the self.
I keep waiting to find out how this is going to end, how we’ll be a couple again. But a strong, steady voice inside me keeps saying: This is it. The life that you’re in now, the one in which you’re chaotically alive, that’s the one you’ve got, honey.
“There’s one thing about loss, Dad; it sure is making me resilient,” I say over the phone to my father at our weekly check-in.
“You can tough this out,” he says, meaning that he doesn’t want more of my personal agony, that it’s time to brave the situation with strength, not vulnerability.
The first song my father taught me was “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Dad was a semipro baseball player, a coach, and an umpire. The eldest of his four children, who arrived in four years, I often spent time with him in the dirt of a ballpark. My father taught me many things: to find the best education I could afford, to question authority (as long as it wasn’t his), to explore science as a means to truth.
At the time that Richard was trying to decide about this rigorous surgery, my father wrote to him: Your title with me is son-in-law, but I look at you and love you as a son. The decisions I have had to make about my health have not been as complex and difficult as the one you have to make. Whatever your decision is, know that I support you. Dad showed up at the hospital, and in weekly telephone calls, and, now, at the apartment, staying with Richard when I have work out of town. Throughout my childhood, Dad was often impatient with me, giving vent to his anger in blows to the top of my head with his knuckles. Richard didn’t suffer the same fate with him. They’re free to have a different relationship. Richard never had a father who showed up for him, and he was beloved by mine, as he was by every member of my family.
Before Richard got his cancer diagnosis, I was painstakingly private. My husband’s illness pushed me to invite others into my heart, including the father whom I hadn’t always experienced as an ally. This year, whenever Dad calls to ask if he can come stay with us, I let him come. I let him take Richard for walks along the beach and to doctors’ appointments. Dad takes us out to dinner, usually meals that we couldn’t afford. I know that I want to become, as W. P. Kinsella writes in The Thrill of the Grass, someone who “has fouled off all the curves that life has thrown at her.” In the confusing aftermath of Richard’s surgery, adversity is teaching me how to foul off the curves in a way that comfort never seems to do.
While Dad is with us, I tell him I’m considering consulting a lawyer who might help us determine if we have a case for medical malpractice. My friends, upon seeing how we were evaluating Richard’s potential for a return to work, set up a meeting with a lawyer in Santa Monica.
“Collect the information,” Dad says. “You can always decide later.”
In July, we visit the lawyer, who informs us that we can file a legal suit only in the state in which the damage was done. The kind lawyer looks at Richard across the table and his expression suggests he is seeing his worst nightmare: a man who was once fluent and determined, now unable to access personal power. Richard sits in calm silence. I ask questions about the process, how long we have to decide. Thirty minutes later, we go out into the sunshine, buy a sandwich, sit in the street, and eat it, saying nothing.
When we get home I research medical malpractice teams. I want someone with trial experience, but also someone I can trust not to waste our time and energy. Barry Nace is a gruff, authoritative man with forty years of experience working for justice for the injured. I learn that Mr. Nace works with his sons and his wife, and that they believe in meticulous preparation and the art of oral advocacy. I imagine, as in my own family, he transferred these skills to his children while debating at the dinner table. I call Mr. Nace and explain that we are nearly a year from Richard’s surgery, and that he’s still struggling to communicate. Mr. Nace listens and tells me about medical malpractice cases in his state—they are complex, expensive, and hard to win in the Bush era. With the new tort reform, a climate of distrust of the individual has been created, and well-paid lobbyists work hard to strip the rights of citizens to sue big business. He tells me about corporate funding for “citizen action” groups against so-called “frivolous” lawsuits, groups that are demonizing the very people who have been wronged. He details how political spin is being used to make victims afraid to sue medical organizations for fear that they are contributing to an overburdened justice system and preventing good doctors from doing their jobs. If we are going to sue, Mr. Nace says, we have to be in for the torturous haul.
I hang up the phone and sit on the bed, breathing slowly. Richard is in the living room, doing his speech therapy exercises. His progress is barely perceptible. Still, I want to see how he does before we enter into a lawsuit. I want to forget about everything a lawsuit would require of me.
All that last summer together before the empty nest, we drive Richard to therapy, we attend Dylan’s school events, we visit with Joshua, we walk on the beach, we make dinner, we clean up, we talk, we sit in silence. By July, Richard graduates from the first stage of occupational therapy and is excited to be eligible for a work trial as a physical therapist. Dr. L writes in his report: Patient’s family report him to be performing well in self-care. At home, he participates in homemaking tasks such as meal preparation, laundry, and cleaning. He has performed multistep grocery-shopping activities, having to shop at various stores. It is felt by his rehabilitative team that he is appropriate for a work reentry trial.
By the end of the month, Richard begins a work reentry trial with a local physical therapy clinic. Dr. L sets him up with one of his colleagues who is willing to supervise Richard’s work and offer an evaluation of his physical therapy skills. Richard works two days a week for four hours each day, and comes home exhausted. I pick him up from the clinic, since he hasn’t been cleared to drive on his own. He falls asleep in the car on the way home, then sleeps in our bedroom for the rest of the day. Richard reports to his occupational therapist that he’s fully restored after forty-five minutes of a jolly good catnap when he returns from work. He can’t stand the thought that he’d be kept from his work because he isn’t recovering from his fatigue.
He’s a kid. He doesn’t know how to do things yet. He has to try a lot. He gets lost easily. He doesn’t know who people are when he meets them the third or fourth or fifth time. If he doesn’t write it down in his day planner, and then later his iPhone, it doesn’t exist. Beginner’s mind is supposed to be what we all yearn to achieve. But no one pays you for that (unless you start a business as a spiritual guru). I’ve never seen Richard try so hard and fail so often. He’s unaffected. The stealth stubbornness he seems to have been born with is his greatest ally.
Soon, he’s working three days a week and driving himself to and from work, having passed his driving test. All summer he has practiced and has discovered that he’s able to work with supervision as a staff therapist. He has one final session before he’s discharged from occupational therapy. But he’s hiding the severity of his fatigue from his medical team. I know that there’s no way Richard is ready to go back to work full-time.
The supervising physical therapist is honest in his appraisal of Richard’s skills. He reports that Richard is having difficulty with initiation conversations and thought-processing skills, particularly in novel situations. The same kind of stuff that jams him up at home.
We talk to Dr. L about the plateau of Richard’s progress.
“Should Richard return to active employment, he would be best with positions in which he works at a modified level,” he says. “He must manage his residual fatigue and cognitive issues.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep focused on just one aspect of your life,” I add, but I can tell by the set of his jaw that Richard isn’t going to give up his goal to get back to work. “Let’s get Dylan off to school, and then see where we are, okay?”
Richard’s hands clasp and squeeze around themselves obsessively in his lap, a self-pacifying gesture he falls into whenever he’s feeling anxiety. He’s afraid he won’t make it back.
“I’m not giving up on you, I promise.” I put my hand at the back of his neck. His hands calm. He breathes.
That summer, we shop for college gear. Dylan has received a scholarship in vocal studies to Indiana University Bloomington, near my family. In August, we will move our daughter into the dorm. I look at the color-coded calendar on my laptop. After we attend the Family Picnic and the Freshman Ceremony, I’ll have to get on a plane and go back to our silent apartment. This place isn’t home, but I don’t know where home is any longer.
Each day, after Dylan goes to her summer job, I sit in her room at the apartment in Laguna. Sometimes I talk to my sister on the telephone, both of us sobbing over our girls, born within months of each other, now off to college.
“No one tells you that it’s going to be like this,” I say.
“You’re going to miss talking to your girl,” Christie says.
“This is going to be a really quiet house without her.”
I look at the framed family photos on her dresser. None of the photos are from after the brain injury.
“What are you doing for your anniversary?” my sister asks. I’d forgotten I had one. “Do something for the two of you,” Christie says.
I say good-bye to my sister and walk to the living room. Richard’s head hangs over a book, his mouth stretches downward at the corners, and his cheeks hang slack, his muscles drooping to his neck. I gasp to see him appear as if he has aged twenty years. I lean against the wall, wondering if he is alive. His eyes blink. His chest rises and falls.
“Richard!” I say, startling him. He looks up slowly, eyes fluttering fast, a dazed hummingbird. “You scared me. You look like you have a stroke face.”
“I’m sorry, sweetness.”
These months, he has been completely oblivious about how he appears to others. This man, whom I fell in love with for his beauty, grace, and magnetism, has eroded into a craggy, strange beast. I not only despise losing the beautiful man I adored, but also hate myself for being a woman who would care about such a thing as his physical beauty. I look at my face’s reflection in the sliding door. I grit my teeth so hard that my jaw is like a boxer’s. My body is lean, strong, capable. There’s no softness to me, as there has been in the past. Ironically, I appear as I have always wished to be—angular, resolute, robust. The months of taking care of him while he recovered have made me this way. In the reflection, I see a sleek, raucous raven that wants to fly. I open the sliding door and look out toward the chaparral canyon.
“Yes,” I say, and then I realize I have heard his unspoken question in the silence: Are you going for a walk?
He wants to come with me, but he will not ask. I breathe in the grassy bluffs, the dusty old cattle land, the salt from the coves below. When I turn back to him, his gaze is a child’s, baby blue, all innocence and entreaty.
“Want to go?” I say.
“Want to go?” I ask my husband across the table at Mama’s restaurant in San Francisco. It’s two weeks before we take Dylan to school. Richard and I are on an impromptu weekend road trip to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast where Allen Ginsberg slept, visiting City Lights Bookstore, walking the winding road up to Coit Tower. I joined my San Francisco friends for an evening of writing, which turned into brunch with Maya, a willowy poet and chef whom I met at a writers’ retreat. Now, she’s telling me about her father’s home in Brittany.
“I’ve been there, and it’s beautiful,” Maya says. “He has to come home and sort out some business and is looking for someone to take care of the house while he’s gone. Maybe a couple of months.”
The coffee nearly sloshes onto the saucer as I jump.
“Would you two be up for something like this?” she asks.
“Would we like to be caretakers of a four-hundred-year-old water mill?” I ask, the hell yes implied in my tone.
The French toast stops halfway to Richard’s lips.
“We’ve got absolutely nothing holding us here,” I say. “It’s two months. We can do that, right?” I bypass Richard’s startled expression across the table for my own romantic notions of what such an adventure promises. The Breton culture! The time to write! The cheese!
“Let me talk to my father and get back to you,” Maya says. “I’m sure he’d love to have you stay.”
I never wonder if we are going.
Mid-August, we fly across the country, visit my family, and settle Dylan into her dorm room. We find the organic grocery store and the campus bookstore. We go bowling in the Memorial Union. We visit the Lilly Library and Kinsey Institute exhibit. We hang out at the art museum and go for brunch in the Tudor Room. When we leave, even though we will see Dylan in one month, I cry all the way home. I cry for three weeks. I no longer know if there are limits to my grief.
We return home. I get back to my contract work for a couple of nonprofit organizations, and Richard returns to his therapy. Sometimes I go into Dylan’s room and open her closet and look at the clothes. I call her every day. Soon after, she says to me in her firm, take-control voice, “Mom, don’t call me for a while. I have to figure things out.” And thereby sets me out to see what kind of relationship I have remaining with my husband. I know that the absence of our daughter and son at a time when we are trying to cope with the loss of Richard’s identity is a shocking transition, but through my daughter’s request, I realize that Richard and I have to learn we can rely on each other, not in our roles as parents but as people who can hear each other’s truth. Our marriage has been full of large and small denials. Six years ago, we learned how to get honest. If we’re going to find each other again, I have to see how our marriage really is, not just dwell in the relationship of the past.
I ask him on a date, to see if we can explore who we are. I pick a casual restaurant, one that won’t challenge his naive etiquette and desire for fewer people. We’re eating our burritos when I tell him how it felt to bond with my daughter when he couldn’t talk.
“Do you remember the day she was born?” I ask, recalling the view of the mountains as I panted to slow down the too-fast delivery.
Richard shakes his head.
“Nothing? Not one fragment? The day Joshua was born? The day we got married?” I can barely breathe. It hasn’t occurred to me that everything might remain wiped clean. I put down my fork and start to cry. A tray of frosty margaritas slides by, and I want to grab them and drink them until I’m gone too. Tears teem. I use the wadded napkin to dry my eyes. When I look up, Richard seems terrified. He’s crying just watching me cry.
“It’s like I’ve made the idea of Our Marriage from these messy, beautiful moments of our past. Like the time we went skinny-dipping on a deserted island on our honeymoon. Like taking Joshua to his DJ gigs. Like when you lived with Mimoo when you went back to school.”
“She had dinner ready for me every night.” He says it slow, like he’s coming out of a dream.
“Really, baby? Did she make you her fried chicken?”
He gives the raised shoulder, the big Whatever sign. I realize that I’m trying to get him to believe in these stories, these beautiful symbols of who I think we are.
“Do you really think it’s a good idea to go to France?” he asks.
“I think that it will give us a chance to get off this crazy ride we’ve been on for nearly a year. I’d like to write and I’d like you to get some rest.”
“It’s a long way to go.”
We decide to ask Dr. L about it at our next meeting.
“His high motivation could be a problem for him.” Dr. L is sitting in his leather chair and I’m sitting across from him on the couch, waiting for Richard to complete his final occupational therapy visit and join us. “Richard could go back to work too early and risk being vulnerable.”
“You mean lose his job,” I say.
“He lacks executive-thinking skills, and without the proper support, he’s too fragile. What do you think about his energy?” the doctor says.
“I think he’s overdoing it.”
“We do too. He needs more time to restore his health. Brain injury patients need periods of deep rest because they deplete faster than most. This makes sense if you think about the energy it takes to learn new skills.”
Richard appears at the door. Dr. L stands up to shake his hand and congratulate him on his “graduation” from the program.
“What’s next?” Dr. L asks.
“There’s an offer to go to France to live for a while,” I say. “What do you think?”
“I think it could be an answer to a prayer,” the doctor says.
Before we can leave California, Richard wants to finish his work trial. It’s September, and I’m teaching at a conference in Seattle, then spending some much-needed time with Joshua. After I return, we’ll visit Dylan in Bloomington for Freshman Family Weekend. We’ve already decided that if we’re chosen to be caretakers for the home in Brittany, then we’ll depart in November. The kids will be invited to spend Christmas with us.
Joshua and I haven’t had a chance to be alone since his father’s memory loss. In the time we’ve been attending to Richard’s life, our son has become a man. He’s working a full-time job at Microsoft, producing DJ gigs on weekends, and majoring in media and communications in college. It’s a quick trip, but I stay the night at his Seattle apartment, teach the workshop, and have lunch with him before I fly out a few days later.
When I leave Seattle, I lean over to pick up my bag and realize it’s not the men in the airport I’m smelling but myself, the aroma of aftershave, the scent of musk and longing, of sweat covered over with flowers, a perfume I can’t place until I track it back to the parking lot at Madison and Sixteenth, where, upon my arrival, I hand Joshua the packages.
Joshua places the packages on the gravel lot and then he grabs me up, transferring his fragrance onto my sweater, my son lifting me into the air as I once swung him, my feet flying out in back, arms bigger than his father’s, clasping so hard I exhale fast, trying to make myself lighter. He laughs and says something then, but I can’t recall it because I’m thinking about how it would be to live in this city again, which is his city now. I’ve been thinking of what it means for Joshua, what it is to find yourself a stranger in your own life, to live years and years with the biting wit of your father and then suddenly to notice the complete absence of that bite. I’m wondering how it might feel to be the son of a man who’s sustained a brain injury: to experience the loss of stories from your own childhood, the disappearance of your father’s past. I’m thinking of his father’s anger, how it took a toll on this child, and wondering if it was a relief or a restraint to have the story taken with the cut of a surgeon’s knife. Where do the boy-regrets go? Do you speak of the wrongdoing of your father when he’s not the same man who raised you? What reconciliation is possible, necessary?
My son is smiling down at me and I’m remembering how it was to have a strong husband, an exuberant man who could lift me high. Richard wouldn’t think of doing such a thing now. He has no need to relate in many ways at all. I haven’t noticed that I’m living without such delight, until I see my son.
We walk into Joshua’s apartment above Madison Market. He makes me tea and we talk much of the night. He asks questions about his father’s reality until I hear the sound of held tears in his throat. I reach my hand to his leg.
“Please cry. It’s okay.”
When he can speak, I’m surprised at the source of his sadness, though I ought not to be. “It’s like being cut off from your history, when there’s no way back to your father’s people.”
I tell my son a story I can recollect, of discovering I was pregnant with him, our first, the first grandchild on both sides, how we found out two weeks after his grandmother died, how she’d been driven over on the street while giving directions to a stranger. I told him how I was awakened one night a year later while he slept in the bassinet next to me, startled by his grandmother’s shimmer at the foot of the bed, how she walked over and placed her hand on our baby boy, offering a sign of protection, a signal that she’d be there for this one, and how, when my fear grew stronger, his grandmother disappeared.
“That happened?” he asks.
I can’t imagine that I haven’t told him. Maybe these stories were told only to the boy-child, the one who used to believe in magic. Maybe I’ve forgotten that the man needs the stories, too, needs them as much as the food we’ll send him when the demands of school and work intensify.
Or maybe the lost ought not to be reimagined. Perhaps the gift to this one would be the mutation of the mind that occurs when there is insight without the shadow of the past, enabling him to live in truth, what Krishnamurti called “a pathless land.”
“I thought it happened,” I say to my son, the ground under me shifting still, one radical brain change causing another, pushing me to reconsider, relinquish what I knew, once, to be true.