Beyond the Bear (27 page)

“Hang in there, Amber. We’ve just about got him.”

The next thing I heard was a robust wail.
Our son!
The instant I heard Alden’s cry, my throat swelled and I was unable to speak.

“He’s gorgeous, a real keeper, Dad,” I heard someone say. “Ten fingers and ten toes, and just as pink as he can be. He’s perfect.”

A nurse took Alden from the doctor, carried him to the side, cleaned him up, and bundled him in a blanket. Then I heard her soft-soled shoes coming my way. I held my arms out but was thinking:
You’re going to hand that thing to me? But . . . that’s a baby! I don’t know what to do with a baby.
As I felt the weight of his warm little body in my arms I started to cry.

“Hey there, little guy,” I said in just above a whisper as I gently rocked him in my arms. “Hello, Alden. We’ve been so excited to meet you. It’s so great to finally have you here. Mama and Daddy love you so much.”

With Amber wheeled off to the recovery room, I held Alden until I had to hand him over for his trip to the nursery to get his vitamin K shot and the rest of the standard newborn routine. Our midwife, who’d stuck with us through the delivery, offered an elbow. I took hold and she guided me back to him. As we walked through the nursery doors, I heard someone singing, and my throat seized up again.

“Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Alden. Happy birthday to you.”

Our midwife showed me to a rocker. Once I was settled in, she gently lifted Alden out from under the warming lights, wrapped him in a blanket, and brought him to me. I pulled off my shirt, unwrapped Alden’s blanket, and held my son’s perfect little body against my own battle-scarred one.

By the time I finished my master’s program, Amber was seven months pregnant with our second child, our daughter Acacia, named for the trees Amber had lived among in Africa. I had two clinical internships behind me, one with Anchorage Community Mental Health, the other with my pre-bear employer, Alaska Children’s Services. I entered the job hunt with straight-A transcripts and a glowing letter of recommendation from Dr. Elizabeth Sirles, director of the UAA School of Social Work:

“It is not an exaggeration for me to say that Dan is the best student I’ve worked with in my fourteen years at UAA. He has excellent communication and interpersonal skills, a professional demeanor, an inquisitive mind, and a solid grasp of the theories and knowledge base for clinical social work practice. He has emerged as a leader with his peers and is respected by students and faculty alike.”

So I looked pretty good on paper. But potential employers wanted to know how I’d actually do the job, even with Anderson as my eyes. None had the resources or desire to look after me. I assured them that accommodating me would not be their problem, that I’d bring to the job all the mobility and technical support I needed through the state Division of Vocational Rehabilitation and the Alaska Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Their people would make everything accessible to me, and help me learn my way around the office, from my mailbox to the copy machine to the microwave in the break room. My computer tech would set me up with what I needed to handle paperwork and other office tasks. Those considering me must have liked the sounds of that because before I’d even picked up my diploma I had two job offers. A week after my walk across the stage at graduation, I began my new career as a clinician with Denali Family Services working with some of the most severely emotionally disturbed kids in the state.

On the home front, Alden had been doing such a stellar job of teaching me the ways of the blind dad that I had some tricks by the time Acacia joined us in July. Mastering the art of the diaper change was not one of them. At times, it was like trying to gift-wrap a flopping salmon in the dark. If we’re talking diaper blowout, my changing sessions typically culminated with a bath or shower for one or both of us.

By then, I had acquired a tolerance for cacophony and survived enough near heart failures to know that just because a child may sound like he’s auditioning for a Stephen King movie doesn’t mean he’s seriously hurt. Among the worst was the day Amber was away and I was giving Alden a bath when he suddenly leapt up, slipped out of my hands, pitched forward, and did a face-plant on the faucet. First came that dreaded silence as he stockpiled enough energy to launch a scream missile. Then he unleashed his fury with enough power to propel his lungs right out of his chest.

“Oh, Alden, I’m so, so sorry. Oh my god, you okay, little buddy? Oh man.”

I prodded his face with the tips of my fingers in search of blood. But he was dripping wet, so I couldn’t tell if he was coated in blood or bathwater. I dried him off, patting his face as gently as I could. No blood. No concave anatomy. The face-bonk had smarted but was not life-threatening. It didn’t even require a Band-Aid. Something about being torn up within an inch of your life brings perspective to these things.

By the time he was two, Alden had already picked up that there was something different about me. At the National Federation of the Blind convention in Dallas, sharing a hotel with two thousand blind and visually impaired people, he cracked us up by walking into walls, then laughing hysterically, over and over. Before he was three, he knew, as did all three dogs, to get out of the way when he saw me coming. Or to at least speak up.

“I’m here, Dad.”

“Nice job, Alden. Thanks for letting me know.”

He knew the way I saw things was through my hands.

“Dad, I got this really cool car.”

“No kidding? How cool is it? Can I see it?”

He’d bring it over and put it in my hands.

“Wow. This is one cool car. Check out those tires. Awesome. No wonder you like it. What color is it?”

Alden knew I needed help finding things.

“Hey, Alden, time to go. Where are your shoes?”

“Here they are, Dad,” he’d say as he’d bring them to me.

This didn’t become painful until he started asking why I couldn’t see.

“How come your eyes don’t work? Are they broken?”

“Yeah, Daddy’s eyes are broken. Daddy doesn’t see the way you and other people do.”

“If you wear your sunglasses can you see?”

“No, my sunglasses don’t help at all.”

“Maybe tomorrow you can see?”

“No, I won’t be able to see tomorrow, either.”

“If you go to the doctor, then you can see?”

“No, Daddy’s probably not going to be able to see ever again. It’s called being blind. Close your eyes. Close them tight. Are they closed?”

“Yep.”

“You’re not peeking are you? You have them covered with your hands?”

“Yep, Dad. I promise.”

“That’s what it’s like for me. I can’t see anything. Nothing at all. It’s like walking around with your eyes closed all the time. What do you think of that?”

I could almost hear the concerned look on his face. I could tell he didn’t think highly of it at all. I was putting him to bed one night, lying next to him atop his dinosaur quilt, when he told me what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“I’m going to be a big fireman so I can help you because you’re blind,” he said, his hand upon my cheek. “If there’s a fire, I can save you. Or I can save you if you climb up in a tree and get stuck because I’m going to be a big fireman.”

I had to laugh. But he kept asking why I was blind, and it got to the point where my answers weren’t cutting it. He wanted to know what had happened to me. Here I was schooled in how to have difficult talks with kids, and I didn’t know what to say to my own son. I didn’t want to make up some story, like that the Eyeball Fairy forgot to bring me some, or that I’d lost them in a poker game. I decided to be as honest as I could short of giving him nightmares.

“Why are you blind, Dad?”

“Well, here’s what happened. I was out fishing one day, and I saw a mama grizzly bear. She thought I was dangerous, so she was scared of me. She thought I was going to try to hurt her babies, which I wasn’t, but because she thought I was, she bit me. She was just doing what mamas do. She was protecting her babies. Just like Momma keeps you safe, that bear was trying to keep her babies safe, too.”

Alden was silent a while.

“You mean the bear poked you because she was very mad, and that’s how you got blinded?”

Close enough. I didn’t want to give him more details than he needed.

“Hmm, yeah. A bear got scared of me and she poked me. That’s how I got blinded.”

Since I’m a big believer in honesty, in this case dished out in small doses, I wouldn’t do it any differently. But the result is that Alden isn’t just afraid of monsters in the closet, he’s also afraid of bears in the woods. Sometimes he’s afraid to go to bed at night because he’s worried about what’s lurking outside his window.

“There’s a bear out there, Dad, and it’s going to poke me in the eye.”

The summer he was three, we were at soccer practice when he wandered away from his team. Amber watched him walk over to the fence, grab hold with both hands, rest his forehead against the chain links, and peer out into the woods.

“Alden, what are you doing, buddy?” she asked when she reached him. “Don’t you want to get out there and play?”

“No, I don’t want to play. I’m watching out for bears.”

The world is not a safe place. No matter how kind you are to others, no matter how much good you try to do in life, sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes horrific things. I’d learned that at twenty-five. I just wish Alden hadn’t had to learn it at three.

CHAPTER 23

Whale Watching Blind

Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.

—Lao Tzu

I have moments I forget I’m blind. I’ll be out sledding with the
kids and take off post-holing through the snow, with the ever-vigilant Anderson loping after me like a border collie trying to herd in a renegade sheep. I’ll run and run, just like I did with Jay in the Red River Gorge back when I was blinded by the lunacy of youth rather than for real, when we almost ran off a cliff. Or I’ll take Alden’s hand and the two of us will dash through a field together whooping like a couple of four-year-olds. At times like these, I feel like I’ve sprouted wings. Then reality will rear its ugly foot and stick it out in front of me. Playing squirt guns with Alden one time, all it took was three running steps to find a lawn chair the hard way and end up all bloody and bruised.

Blindness is a callous teacher, with pain and embarrassment as powerful motivators. I’m not a model student in that regard. I’m still pulling head-bonkers and face-smashers on par with being punched in the face by a three-hundred-pound man. Sometimes I clock myself hard enough to send me crawling into bed for the remainder of the day. After toweling off from a shower one morning, I was going for my clothes on the floor when I bashed my forehead so hard on the edge of the sink I gave myself whiplash.

On the other hand, I’ve earned a black belt in patience. And, because I do so much of it, in waiting. Waiting for rides. Waiting for Amber to find something I need. Waiting at parties for someone to talk to me. I’m always waiting
.

Strange things happen to those who do an inordinate amount of waiting. People assume you have nothing better to do than sit still when nothing could be further from the truth. One winter day when I was still in school, I was waiting after a counseling appointment for a lift back to campus. There was no place to sit while waiting, so I made myself at home near the building’s foyer, cross-legged on the floor with Anderson and my laptop. I could hear the front doors opening and closing, accompanied by a rush of cold air. Listening to people coming and going, I heard a man stepping off the elevator yammering away on his cell phone. His monologue grew louder and more annoying as he came my way, then stopped in front of me. I lifted my head. “Hold on a sec,” he told the person on the other end. He bent down and thrust a five-dollar bill into the palm of my hand. “Here. Why don’t you go get yourself a burger.” He resumed his phone conversation and pushed his way out the door. I sat paralyzed a moment, the bill burning the palm of my hand.

Did that guy just give me money? I’m blind so he thinks I need a hamburger?

“That was nuts,” I said to Anderson. “How about you go take that guy’s leg off.” Anderson’s tail began to thump against the floor. I stuffed the bill into my pocket, and later passed it on to a neighbor kid raising money for a school sports trip.

Blindness has not only restructured my relationship with time, it’s restructured my perception of space and all that resides within it. I live in a world of disembodied voices and faceless people. Even the Amber I interact with on a daily basis is a presence, a personality, a voice and energy that I love rather than a two-legged, curvy woman with blue eyes and a shoe fetish.I am aware of where she is in a room but I don’t need to visualize her to feel a connection. I save that for special times, like when she slips into a pair of heels and that little black dress of hers, and clasps a string of pearls around her neck. Times like that, with my hands upon her hips, I see her perfectly.

I see her face when she busts up laughing. I see her face when she’s reading bedtime stories to the kids. Dip-netting for red salmon at the mouth of the Kenai River, I see her face every time she gets a hit in her net and goes, “WoOOoo!” Faces fade over time, but I’ve made a practice of remembering hers. To me, Amber will always be twenty-three.

My relationship with my own face is a troubled one. We are estranged. All these years later, I still have dead-nerve zones and phantom pains in my nonexistent eyes. I sometimes get the sensation of blood running down my right cheek, but when I go to wipe it away, nothing’s there. Our bodies are resilient but they can also hold a grudge. I miss my old self like a lost twin, but I don’t see the point of trying to remember a face that no longer exists. When I inspect the damage with my fingertips, from the titanium bridge of my nose, to the metal-hard edges of my eye sockets, to the patchwork on my forehead, what I feel is detached.

Marlene Buccione, one of my nurses during my last surgery, is one of the few who knows what my face looks like on the inside. She recognized me and my scars at the pool one evening during a family outing at Alyeska ski resort, introduced herself, and told me that in thirty-six years of working as a surgical nurse, I was the only patient who made her cry. She’d never seen so much hardware inside one head. My CT scan looked like RoboCop, and there I was in the recovery room afterward giving her a smile and a thumbs-up.

In facial trauma as severe as mine, healing is a lifelong process, with scars that are constantlyremodeling. The area around my prosthetic eyes is still on the move, sunken in places, bulging in others. Fortunately, I can hide the chaos behind dark glasses, which I do whenever I’m in public or around people I don’t know well. Dr. Kallman—Dr. K, as I call him now that we’re as much friends as we are doctor and patient—would jump at the chance to make me look better.

“When I see you my usual reaction is, I wish I could do more; I really wish I could,” he told me one Saturday afternoon over lunch at Café Amsterdam, not far from where we first met in the emergency room. “Sometimes I feel disappointed. The healing process has left you with some distortion of your features that wasn’t there initially. The piece of bone missing in your forehead—that the guys in San Francisco took out because it became nonviable—I’d like to put some kind of implant there, not only to re-establish the contour, but to protect the brain. And I’d like to make your eyelids tighter. Tissue has died, and as time goes on, things have started to sag a little bit. We could conceivably tinker with you indefinitely, trying to make this or that a little bit better. With facial trauma, there’s almost an infinite number of tweaks we could do.”

I have no doubt he could make me more presentable to the general public. But I’ve had my fill of anesthesia, scalpels, stitches, staples, bandages, and drugs that make me loony tunes. My family loves me the way I am. My friends and coworkers see past my skin. Unless a medical issue arises, I’m not interested in having my head opened up anymore.

Strangely enough, I have regained a little of my lost sense of smell. Dr. Kallman, who is intimately familiar with my obliterated nasal anatomy, can’t explain it. Even so, I swear I can smell coffee brewing and burgers on the grill. Yet, wave a jar of kimchee under my nose and I wouldn’t know it. Gasoline, ammonia, dead skunk in the middle of the road—nothing. I don’t care if it makes no sense; if all I get is a thimbleful in a full world of smells, I’ll take it.

Besides never having seen my own children, what sucks most about the blindness piece of my injuries is when people who don’t know me assume I’m incapable. Like buckling my seat belt for me. Like asking if I need help putting on Anderson’s harness. One evening I came down the porch stairs with a bag of trash, walked across the driveway to the garbage can, lifted the lid, dropped the bag inside, put the lid back down, then heard a neighbor stroll up.

“Man, how’d you do that? We’ve been watching you, and I had five bucks you were going to fall on your face.”

“Um . . . I was just . . . taking out . . . the trash.” What I wanted to say but never would was, “You should see me chew gum and play the stock market at the same time.” Or better yet, “You should see me preparing a multimillion-dollar foster-care budget.

Budget analysis is just one piece of my current job description. After a little more than a year as a clinician, I was promoted to director of therapeutic foster care, and am now overseeing sixty homes for Denali Family Services, the largest provider of therapeutic foster care in the state. These are kids who drew the short straw in life. Some were born mis-wired, or with fetal alcohol syndrome, or addicted to crack in the womb. Too many have had adults in their lives cook meth, commit suicide, get murdered, or be sentenced to prison. The traumas some of these kids have been through at the hands of those they should have been able to trust the most puts a random assault by an overly protective mother bear in its place.

I get a lot of recognition for being a fighter, not just for my life, but for my quality of life. Five years after my attack, the Governor’s Committee on Employment and Rehabilitation for People with Disabilities presented me with an Alaskan of the Year award. Prescott College and the University of Alaska have given me Distinguished Alumni honors. Because I have made a full, rich life for myself, people respond to me like I’m something special. I just do what I have to do. The alternative would be to live in a straitjacket of misery. Life isn’t too short to live that way, life is too long. The same spirit and will that kept me going at the Russian River keeps me going today. The bear took my face and eyes, not my dignity, and not my ability to dream, and dream large.

“Most patients with severe facial injuries, their lives implode and they withdraw from the world,” Dr. Kallman once told me. “What sets you apart from the average patient in my mind is we did our best to give you another chance and you have run with it.”

The first time someone called me an “inspiration,” I was still in bandages, unable to speak, and moving like an old man with two-by-fours for legs who’d taken an auger in the middle of his forehead. I was living in the hotel, with my parents in the adjoining room, and home-healthcare nurses coming and going.I was still trying to comprehend what had happened to me. But mostly I was still in survival mode, and just trying to make it through what each day required of me, which amounted to a lot of lying around in bed. So when one of my nurses told me I was an inspiration, I didn’t take it well.

I’m so glad my misfortune is an inspiration for you. I’m so happy my pain and suffering and the loss of my eyes makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Although I never crossed paths with the woman again, she became a teacher of mine, and an integral part of my healing journey. The bitterness I felt that day illuminated exactly the kind of man I did not want to be. Being angry at the world, or wallowing about in the quicksand of “why me,” had the potential to ruin my life far more than being blinded by a bear.

Wrapping up a stellar day of fishing one moment, waking up blind the next forced me in the most fundamental way to examine where my life was headed and consider what kind of man I did want to be. It forced me to reevaluate and reorder my priorities. As Alaskan author Kim Heacox puts it in his moving memoir,
The Only Kayak
, “Living a life unexamined is far riskier than sleeping on a beach with bears.”

Since my eyes are gone and never coming back, I have chosen to embrace acceptance. Since I no longer take each breath for granted, I have focused on being grateful for what I have: My wife, my children, my friends, my work, my community, my potential to help others find strength and hope. If not for the bear, I would, no doubt, still be an adventure-hopping vagabond and commitment escape-artist. Amber would have considered me a lost cause and moved on a long time ago. Alden and Acacia would never have been born.

As the man I’ve become since the bear, I can say with certainty that being a husband and father has brought me greater joy and fulfillment than any peak I’ve bagged or turns I’ve carved in backcountry powder. The career path I’ve chosen challenges and rewards me in ways I may otherwise never have known. I have learned to accept what life offers, and have discovered that misfortune can lead to fortunate things.

My daughter, Acacia, is now the age Alden was when he first started asking about my eyes. She recently started calling me her Big Blind Daddy, although she still doesn’t quite know what that means.

“Daddy, are you blind?” she asked me the other day.

“Yep, I am blind.”

“Are you happy?

“Yep, I am happy.

She paused a moment, then asked: “So, you’re blind
and
you’re happy?”

Staying upbeat takes vigilance. It takes hard work. It takes humor. I’d be sunk without my ability to laugh at myself. When pushing a cart through a home-improvement box store and I hear on the PA system,
Customer service needed in the blind-cutting area
, I can turn to Amber and say, “Quick, to the blind cutting area! That’s the perfect job for me!”

I can laugh about the time we were camping, and I was just about to drift off to sleep, when Acacia started exploring my face, one of my prosthetic eyes dropped out, and she snatched it up in her tiny hand and squealed, “I got Dada’s eyeball!”