Accident
MY HUSBAND AND I MET twelve years ago after he answered a personal ad I placed in the New York Review of Books. We met at the Moon Palace restaurant on Broadway and 112th Street. It was raining, he carried a big umbrella. He had beef with scallions and I had sliced sauteed fish. It took me about five minutes to realize this was the nicest man in the world and when he asked me to marry him thirteen days later I said yes. He was fifty-seven, I was forty-six. Why wait? We still have the magazine. I used to look at the page full of ads, mine the only one he’d circled, and feel the fragility of our luck. “Thank you for the happiest year of my life,” he wrote on our first anniversary. We envisioned an old age on a front porch somewhere, each other’s comfort, companions for life. But life takes twists and turns. There is good luck and bad.
Yesterday in his hospital room my husband asked urgently, “Will you move me twenty-six thousand miles to the left?” “Yes,” I said, not moving from my chair. After a moment he said, “Thank you,” adding in wonder, “I didn’t feel a thing.” “You’re welcome,” I answered. “Are we alone?” he asked. “We are,” I answered, the nurse’s aide having stepped out for a moment. “What happened to Stacy and the flounder?” he said, and I saw the hospital room as he must experience it, a kind of primordial twilight soup, an atmosphere in which a flounder might well be swimming through midair. The image stays with me.
My husband is having brain surgery next week. Today I am sitting in the dog park. The weather is what Rich would call “a soft day.” This is the place I try to make sense of things, order them, to tame what happened. Our beagle, Harry, makes his way around the perimeter of the dog run, with his nose to the ground. He is a loner. I, too, sit by myself, but I pay attention to everything. “Suffering is the finest teacher,” said an old friend long ago. “It teaches you details.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I do now. I watch the dogs, one tiny dachshund so skinny he looks like a single stroke of calligraphy. An elderly man with a very young chow reaches down to pat my dog. Harry skips away.
“Very good,” answers another man, who has just been asked how he is. It has been a long time since I answered that question that way.
Monday, April 24, at nine forty at night, our doorman Pedro called me on the intercom. “Your dog is in the elevator,” he said. The world had just changed forever, and I think I knew it even then. “My dog? Where is my husband?” I asked. “I don’t know. But your dog is in the elevator with 14E. You’d better go get him.” I stepped into the hall in my bathrobe. The elevator door opened and a neighbor delivered Harry to me. “Where is my husband?” I asked again, but my neighbor didn’t know. Harry was trembling. Rich must be frantic, I thought. Then the buzzer rang again. “Your husband has been hit by a car,” Pedro said, “113th and Riverside. Hurry.”
Impossible, impossible. Where were my shoes? My skirt? I was in slow motion, moving underwater. I looked under the bed, found my left shoe, grabbed a sweater off the back of a chair. This couldn’t be serious. I threw my clothes on and got into the elevator. Then I ran along Riverside and when I saw the people on the sidewalk ahead I began to run faster, calling his name. What kind of injury drew such a crowd?
I found my husband lying in a pool of blood, his head split open. Red lights were flashing from cop cars and emergency vehicles and the EMS people were kneeling over his body. “Let them work,” said a police officer, as I tried to fight my way next to him, managing to get close enough to touch his hand. They were cutting the clothes off him, his Windbreaker, his flannel shirt. Somebody pulled me away. “Don’t look,” he said, but I needed to look, I needed to keep my eyes on him. A policeman began asking me questions. “You’re his wife? What’s his name? Date of birth? What’s your name? Address?” Then as I watched they loaded Rich onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. I wanted to climb in too but they sped off without me. A policeman drove me to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital, three blocks away. The superintendent of our building, Cranston Scott, came with me, stayed until my family arrived, gave me his credit card number to call my children and my sisters. I called Rich’s former wife, who had the numbers of Rich’s children, his brother, Gil. I waited in a small room outside the emergency room at the hospital while dozens of hospital personnel went through the door where my husband lay. I found out later that the accident report the police filled out listed Rich as “dead, or likely to die.”
Harry wanders over. He looks up at me and I reach down to stroke his head, his ears. He comes to me to reassure himself that I am still there, I think, or perhaps to reassure me that he is still there. He was a stray; we adopted him from a friend into whose yard he had wandered, starved and terrified, a year ago. Rich hadn’t wanted a dog. Every time I dragged him to look at yet another puppy I’d discovered in yet another pet store, he would look at it and say something like “Yes, but isn’t his face a bit rodentlike?” When I took him to met Harry he said, “Well, that’s a very nice little dog.” Five months later Harry got off his leash and Rich ran into Riverside Drive to save him. I don’t look at Harry and think, If only we hadn’t got him. I don’t blame myself for this accident, or our dog, although I believe if it had been a child who was hurt I probably would. We were two adults living our lives and this terrible thing happened. I don’t find it ironic that the very reason Rich got hurt is the creature who comforts me. There is no irony here, no room for guilt or second-guessing. That would be a diversion, and indulgence. These are hard facts to be faced head-on. We are in this together, my husband and I, we have been thrown into this unfamiliar country with different weather, different rules. Everything I think and do matters now, in a way it never has before.
I seem to be leaving in the road behind me all sorts of unnecessary baggage, stuff too heavy to carry. Old fears are evaporating, the claustrophobia that crippled me for years is gone, vanished. I used to climb the thirteen flights to our apartment because I was terrified of being alone in the elevator. What if it got stuck? What if I never got out? Then there I was one Sunday morning in the hospital, Rich on the eighth floor, the elevator empty. What had for years terrified me now seemed ridiculously easy. I haven’t got the time for this, I thought, and got right in. When the doors closed I kept thinking, Go ahead! Try it! What more can you possibly do to me?
The head injury my husband sustains is a traumatic brain injury, specifically damage to the frontal lobes; part of his brain descended into his sinus cavities, dragging arteries along with it. There is a hole or holes in his dura, the casing around the brain; his skull is fractured like a spiderweb. Everywhere. The danger of meningitis is real. They must remove the dead brain tissue, repair the dura, relieve the pressure in the buildup of fluid, repair the damage to his skull. It is a long surgery, and carries with it its own danger of infection. The surgery was scheduled three weeks ago but had to be postponed when Rich developed a fever three days before.
He was fine in the morning, and in a good mood, but by afternoon he felt warm to my touch, and he was unlike himself, unlike any version of himself. He spoke in a low raspy voice like Jimmy Cagney, and I couldn’t reel him back from the deep water he seemed to be in. I knew that one of the early signs of meningitis is a personality change and I was scared. The doctors immediately treated him as if this were meningitis, and bags of sinister yellow liquids dripped into his arm. The lumbar puncture came back negative, but the surgery was postponed until his fever went down.
It is June, the weather is warm, and Harry is shedding. When I brush him he stands absolutely still. At night he sleeps in bed with me. I feel his warm breath on my neck, his ear “like a velvet lily pad,” as Rich described it, against my cheek. I don’t sleep on Rich’s side of the bed, Rich’s side is Rich’s side, his pajamas still neatly tucked under his pillow. When I first saw them, and his trousers over the back of the chair, I wept. When I think about the past I get sad, our mornings of coffee and the newspaper. After his shower he would appear in the kitchen w
ith the bathroom wastebasket in his hands, announcing “the naked dustman.” I miss my husband. I miss the comfort of living with this man I loved and trusted absolutely. When I gave a reading in May, I missed his shining face among the others. I missed his pride in me, his impulse to take everyone in the audience out for dinner. Walking down our street I missed him by my side. The past gets swallowed up in the extraordinary circumstances of now. But mostly it hurts too much to let my mind go back.
My son called last night. “Are you worried about the operation?” he asked. “I don’t think so,” I answered. It is what I have heard one of the surgeons call “meat and potatoes” surgery. What terrifies me is seeing Rich in the recovery room. This doesn’t make any sense, but I keep remembering his face just after his accident, ruined beyond recognition, blood pooling in the corners of his swollen eyes. Those first days his daughter, Sally, and I took twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, sitting in a chair next to his bed, listening to the beeping of monitors in the ICU. We were afraid to leave him. It was as if we were trying to hatch an egg, keeping him warm with our presence, and we didn’t want him to wake without a familiar face nearby. “¿Qué pasa?” were the first words he spoke when the doctors removed his breathing tube. I put my ear close to his mouth. “¿Qué pasa?” This man who failed Spanish. It is a funny miracle.
I am sitting on my bench; behind me three dogs are digging a hole to China. The odd woman who wears a Band-Aid across her nose and white gloves, who often stands at the gate excoriating dogs and their owners with tales of being trailed by the FBI, has just sat down next to me. She has a whippet. Whippets, she tells me, were dogs that hunted rats in the mines. “Wales, or Scotland or Ireland,” she goes on. There being no room to break their necks in the small spaces, they twirled and twirled, snapping the rat’s necks that way. “That’s interesting,” I say cautiously. Talk moves on and about, like a dog looking for a good place to lie down. Somehow we speak of the old radio shows. Clyde Beatty, Sky King, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. She asks do I remember the real-estate offering they made? I shake my head. “You could buy one inch in Alaska,” she says. All day I can’t get the idea of owning an inch of the Alaskan wilderness out of my head. I am searching for meaning in everything.
In the first weeks after his accident, Rich spoke in mysteries. It was as if he were now connected to some vast reservoir of wisdom, available only to those whose brains have been altered, a reservoir unencumbered by personality, quirks, history, habits. “It is interesting to think that one could run farther and longer and perhaps find the answer,” he said one evening, drifting in and out of delirious talk. “What would you get to?” I asked, eager for the answer. “The allure of distance” was what he said, a dreamy phrase.
Last week, as he struggled to make sense of the world, unable to find words, my youngest daughter, Catherine, came to visit. “Do you know who I am?” she asked, and he peered at her intently. “Do you eat field mice?” he asked, a strange question we thought, until I realized the first three letters of her name spell “cat.” Perhaps this was a glimpse of how the mind pieces things together after an assault, trying to rewire itself. “The goat’s mouth is full of stones,” he said one day, and I leave that as it is, a mystery. During the days when it is impossible to communicate in words, I get into his bed and we hold hands. Nap therapy. This is a familiar posture, something we can do without speech, without thinking.
How are you managing? friends ask. How are you doing this? They leave me food and flowers, they send me letters and messages. They pray. I love these people, I love my family. Doing what? I wonder. This is the path our lives have taken. A month ago I would have thought this life impossible. Sometimes I feel as if I’m trying to rescue a drowning man, and I only have time to rise to the surface for one gasp of air before I go back down again. There is an exhilaration to it, a high born only partly of exhaustion, and I find myself almost frighteningly alive. There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment. Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles. Now there is an intensity to the humblest things—buying paper towels, laundry detergent, dog food, keeping the household running in Rich’s absence. One morning I buy myself a necklace made of sea glass, and it becomes a talisman. Shopping contains the future. As my daughter Jennifer says, shopping is hope.
On the day of Rich’s surgery, his daughter, Sally, and I are there at six thirty in the morning to accompany him to the operating room. We walk beside the stretcher and try to calm him, but he is disoriented and very agitated, until the anesthesiologist gives him an injection of Versed. “Can we get some of that to go?” asks Sally. When they wheel him into the operating theater we go to have breakfast in the hospital cafeteria. Sally has two boiled eggs, Cream of Wheat, corned beef hash, and coffee; she’s a nurse and she knows what she’s doing, it’s going to be a long day. I have a banana. The waiting room is a large place with high ceilings, and through a sliver of window I can see the brightly colored clothes of pint-sized campers out on Fifth Avenue with their nannies, the green of Central Park behind them. Outside the weather is cool and clear, and Sally and I settle down for the long wait. The surgery is expected to take all day. I am not worried about Rich, but my dog has gotten sick, his ears were hot and he didn’t eat, his stool was bloody. My sister Judy has agreed to take him to the vet. Suddenly panicky, I begin calling my sister every fifteen minutes. Patiently her son tells me his mother is still at the vet. I can’t think straight, what would I do without Harry? Finally in my desperation I call the vet himself. It turns out Harry has colitis and all I need to do is feed him lots of rice and give him medicine for five days. This is such a huge relief that I wonder for a second why I was so worried and then it hits me that I comfort Rich, but Harry comforts me.
At six o’clock we find out that Rich’s surgery has gone well. We can go up and see him in the recovery room, the SICU. He is asleep, bandages around his head, beneath them are the staples that cross his head from ear to ear. The doctors have done what they set out to do. There being no bone left unsplintered in his forehead (shattered like an eggshell, they tell us), they have built him a new one, made of titanium. They have rebuilt the floor of his brain, they have removed the dead tissue. The brain fluid that had been building up is relieved. His right frontal lobe is gone, and the left damaged. They tell us again that there will be differences in Rich’s personality, only time will tell the nature of the changes. I have never processed this information. Changes? Just give him back to me and everything will be all right. We begin the round of phone calls to friends and family.
But in the days immediately following the surgery Rich enters the stage known as “Inappropriate Behavior.” This is euphemistic for the anger and irrationality that is part of the process of recovery. Rich is angry and confused. He doesn’t mention going home; there is no destination except “out of here.” I betray him all the time, he says, by not saving him. He thought he could trust me, he thought we loved each other, but now our love seems very thin to him, he says. Roughly he pushes my hand away as I reach for his. My feelings are hurt, I can’t help it, although I try to reason them away. Sitting with him hour after hour, his face glowering, makes me think of the stories I’ve heard of people who after traumatic brain injury bore no resemblance to their former selves. I am terrified that a change like this will undo me. This man is not the man I married. None of this is his doing, he didn’t choose this, but neither did I.
One day I look out the hospital window high above Central Park, and I feel as if there’s a tightrope connecting Rich’s hospital room to our apartment, and all I do is walk back and forth on it, the city far below. I can almost see it shivering like a high-tension wire above the trees. This is when I learn that I have to take care of myself, even if my leaving makes him angry, or worse, sad. I need to eat and sleep. I need to do something mindless, go to a movie, fritter away an afternoon. And I
realize something even more startling: I can’t make everything all right. It’s his body that is hurt, not mine. I can’t fix it, I can’t make it never have happened.
Rich still refuses food and medicine, everything has been poisoned. “Why are you so fatuous?” he asks angrily as I try to say something cheery about the potassium in a banana. Remarks like this sting me, especially because I sound like Pollyanna even to myself. When we wheel him down a hospital hall for a CAT scan, he says, “You always know you’re in for it when you’re going down a long hall with nobody else in it.”
Afterward he tells me, “I felt I was at a casual execution.” When he’s lost almost thirty pounds they put a peg in his stomach. Through this tube, which resembles a monkey’s tail as it curls out from under the covers to the IV pole, they give him nourishment and medicine. The shape of the tube may be what gives rise to Rich’s belief that there is literally a monkey in the bed. “There’s no monkey,” I tell him. “Don’t be so sure,” he says, lifting the sheet to peer beneath it.
How do I separate the old Rich from this new Rich, what allowances do I make for his injury, when do I draw the line? How do I draw the line? The nurses say this is just a stage but I am not comforted. I miss my old husband. I miss the old me. When I run across something from before the accident, a snapshot of Rich smiling his beautiful smile, I feel such staggering loss. What happened? Where did my husband go? I clean the closet and find a tiny portable fan Rich bought me for trips because I can’t sleep without white noise, and it makes me cry.
“I DON’T KNOW WHO I am,” Rich says over and over. “There are too many thoughts inside my head. I am not myself.” Yesterday he said, “Pretend you are walking up the street with your friend. You are looking in windows. But right behind you is a man with a huge roller filled with white paint and he is painting over everywhere you’ve been, erasing everything. He erases your friend. You don’t even remember his name.” The image makes me shiver, but he seems exultant in his description. There are days when he is grounded in the here and now and days when his brain is boiling over with confusion. When he is angry I go home after only a short visit. Staying does neither of us any good. Where do I put these bad days? Part of me is still hanging on to the couple we were. Where do I put my anger? What right have I to be angry? My husband is hurt. Part of him is destroyed. I don’t even feel my anger most of the time, but it’s there, and I only acknowledge it when I find myself doing something self-destructive, going for a day or two without eating, drinking too much coffee, allowing myself to get lonely, tired.