Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music (11 page)

Simon, at twenty-one, two days after Eli is born. He has left to go do laundry at his aunt’s house and, because of a faulty dryer and the distraction of an empty house in which he can practice guitar for his upcoming exams, is away for much longer than he intended. I am outraged at being left alone, a fatigued and nervous first-time mother. The following day, anger dissipated, I snap a picture of Simon and Eli: Simon, asleep on the yellow crow’s-nest chair, Eli, glowworm-wrapped and snuggled so securely in the expanse of his father’s broad chest.

Simon and Eli, only last Saturday, up at Connor Park, Simon helping Eli to perfect a set play penalty kick, the soccer ball curving neatly under the crossbar.

Waking, that first time, with Simon in my bed. “Your legs are gorgeous,” I say. “I never noticed before.”

I WAS SEVEN
when my father died, and I have always attributed my sense of loss and aloneness to that early childhood experience of death. In
On Keeping a Notebook,
Joan Didion writes that “keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss,” a passage I recognized myself in when I read it in my early twenties. It is part of my process of magical thinking that I now see that all my earlier presentiments of loss were not, as I had previously thought, due to my father’s death or a writerly quirk of my nature. Rather, the strange sense of loss I felt had always been leading toward this moment. Not as a preparation for it, but because of it. Simon’s death, or his loss of meaningful consciousness, is a potential loss that is so big, I have, it seems, already spent my whole life grieving it.

Beau. Dear Beau. You know you are the music while the music lasts. Please let the music last. Please.

LEGS, SHMEGS,” I
say to Emily as we lean against the nursing station, waiting outside Simon’s room until the on-duty nurse finishes her routine assessment of his status. “Just give us his brain back.”

“Oh, Stan.” She reaches for my forearm. “I love you.”

It has been a tough night. Emily lost her wedding ring, an event that would be terrible in any circumstance but that, in our current context, contributes dramatically to the sense that the entire world is unraveling around us. She correctly identified the hand-washing station at the doors of the
ICU
, where we stop upon every entry and exit to rigorously scrub fingers, palms, and wrists, as the last place of contact. As Emily scoured the floor and shelves around the sink, the sympathetic overnight nurse methodically uncrumpled every scrap of discarded paper towel from the emptied wastebasket and managed to locate Emily’s ring in one such crumpled twist. It is back on her finger now, on the hand holding my forearm, a reminder that sometimes things work out all right. Sometimes, even when things seem irrevocably lost, they can still be found.

I feel lost. Lost in the seconds, minutes, hours that make up a single day. All I can ask of myself, all I can do, is hold fast to my promise that when I am in the glass room beside Simon, I will be strong and positive. I will be present. I will stay with him as long as it is possible. When I need to cry and whimper, when I need to remember and weep, I will go to the chapel or the hotel room. There I will allow my desperate need to surface, allow the subterranean prayer, the one that refuses to be silenced, the howling
please please please,
to find its full voice.

Simon comes to my mother in a dream and tells her to tell us to be patient, he is there. He is coming back. I distrust this dream and take no comfort from it, maybe because I receive no such dream-visits from Simon. I have only one dream. In it Simon is on the couch, awake and bored, and his legs do not work. I am rushing around, late for something, and Simon is trying to get my attention. I am irritated by the distraction and tell him so and it is precisely this irritation, this friction, that is comforting.

I want—am praying for—the luxury of being pissed off at Simon again.

“I keep thinking there is someone missing who needs to hear what has happened. Someone we haven’t told yet. Someone who could make everything right,” Lorna says as we stand in the cafeteria line at Sassafras, “and then I realize: It’s Simon. He’s the one that’s missing. He’s the only one who can make it right.”

LATE IN THE
evening, after Marc and Lorna have returned to North Vancouver, Emily and I arrange another meeting with yet another doctor, another new face, a young resident.

We ask questions about Simon’s shivering, the fever, the glu-cose levels, and she does her best to answer. Although the meeting is at my request, it is Emily who does most of the talking. I am saturated with information. And we have asked all these questions and heard all these responses before. I’m only looking for the margin of error in the doctors’ diagnoses, and there is only one question I really need answered.

“What areas of his brain,” Emily asks, “might be affected by the bleeding?”

“Well, the damage is global, so there could be a wide range of things: hearing, vision, movement, memory, language, personality. Intellect.”

In other words: everything. I can’t hear it all over again. “Can I...,” I interject, finally screwing up the courage to ask my question. But it is almost unbearably difficult to voice it out loud. Once again Emily leans in to me, lending her support. “I need to know if... Is there... Is there any room to hope?” Up until the very moment I say this out loud and see the dismayed expression on the poor doctor’s face, I realize I have believed she could answer this question, definitively. But, of course, she can’t.

“Well...,” she says, looking away then back. She smiles, ruefully but not unkindly, and meets my gaze. “... it’s always a good thing to have some hope.”

I AM WAITING
for my bowl of soup at the tea shop across from the hotel when I notice for the first time a poem written on the wall in an ornate, cursive script.

Silently, silently I steal into my chambers.Deserted,Deserted and barren is the great hall.Waiting,Waiting for a man who will never return.Resigned I go to my tea
—Wang Wei

I cry as I read it. I cry most of the time I am not in Simon’s room. For the first time, I retreat for a few hours to the hotel to make phone calls. I contact Veronica and some of our other mutual friends from high school. I cry some more. Then I shower and return to the hospital. It is only when I am in the glass room that I can find some strength and resolve. I let the rest of the world drop away so that I can reside in a place where death is no more mysterious than the taking or not taking of the next breath. Breathe in. Breathe out. I have made a promise to stay with Simon as long as I possibly can, and something inside is telling me we are coming to the end of our long, dark river. I don’t dare touch his shivering, shuddering body, but I hold my hands an inch or two above his skin and imagine us floating along in our canoe-shaped embrace. It is a kind of a waking dream, this image, and right now it is all that exists.

By the end of the night, Simon’s fever has broken: the
ICP
levels begin to stabilize, and the shivering subsides. Simon is tolerating the nutritional feed. The doctors initiate a new protocol to slowly lower his levels of sedation. I return to the hotel room but cannot sleep. Anticipation, aching and bright, is a punch of adrenaline straight to my heart. With lower levels of sedation will Simon wake up?

JULY 28, DAY 7

Nurses’ note: 14:15 Pt. coughed and opened eyes slightly while being turned.

JULY 29, DAY 8

Nurses’ note: 8:30
NEURO ASSESS
: Pt. opens eyes to pain. No fixed stare. No purposeful movement. Abnormal withdrawal with both upper extremities.

SIMON FELL LAST
Tuesday. He has survived the week. I start to write him daily updates in my notebook.

4:30 a.m. I’m here, Beau. And you’re here. We’re here together. The doctors have decreased the morphine and sedatives you are on. The last
CT
scan showed there is still more swelling in the brain. It’s okay, we were expecting that, but it should start getting better soon, especially as you seem to be resting so peacefully right now. You need to take a shit—you’ve been resisting that, I think, with every molecule of your body—but of course it’s critically important.

Your body is breathing on its own a little. Every few breaths, you out-breathe the ventilator machine. The tube in your mouth is causing you distress but if you keep all this breathing up, hopefully they will remove it. Small steps, but they feel huge. One of the nurses advised me to reflect on your progress, not hour by hour or even day by day, but week by week. This seems wise. This time last week, I was on the ferry desperate to reach you. I was being given small bits of info and the potential seriousness of the accident was washing over me, wave after wave of denial, anger, disbelief, horror, and panic. You, Beau, were in surgery, doctors struggling to stop the bleeding. You were, and have been, fighting to stay alive.

THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT
the nurse continues to perform neurologic assessments. She pinches Simon and yells his name. “Squeeze my hand, Simon!” she yells. “
Simon! Simon! Squeeze my hand!
” Each time she writes in his chart that although he appears to be emerging from the sedation, he is demonstrating no ability for meaningful contact.

JULY 30, DAY 9

3:00 a.m. I’m here with you, Beau, and you’re here, fighting so hard to wake up. Too hard. The doctors are concerned you are spending too much energy resisting the sedation. You need to rally all your energy to heal all the bruised and swollen places. You were moving your shoulders and chest all night as if you were trying mightily to wiggle out from under some heavy weight. You squeezed my hand, maybe. You heard me telling you over and over again how strong you are. How loved you are.

THE SENSE THAT
Simon is fighting to wake up is so palpable, I cannot leave the
ICU
, even though we are approaching the 7:30-to-8:30 shift-change hour, the time I am routinely asked to clear out. I sit, clasping his right hand with both of mine, as the nurses, preoccupied at their station, review charts. I lean in and kiss his cheek.

“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty. It’s time now. It’s time to wake up.” I kiss the edge of his lips, still so swollen and parted around the intubation tube. “Wakey wakey, rise and shine,” I sing-song. “You’ve had your sleep; I’ve had mine.” It is the rhyme, learned from his mother, that Simon always used to rouse a sleeping Eli. I kiss him again and, staying close, cheek to cheek, say in as steady and resonant a voice as I can muster: “If you can hear me, Simon, squeeze my hand.”

Squeeze.
It is undeniable.
Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

Communication! After a moment of this interaction, Simon appears to drift back into his sedated sleep. I am able to update both the departing overnight nurse and the arriving day nurse before I leave to report this momentous breakthrough to everyone.

It is a moment of exaltation. As Emily points out, this simple act is amazingly exciting because it means that Simon can hear, that he can understand spoken language, and that he has enough motor control to curl his fingers.

“All three useful skills for a guitarist to have,” she says.

For an instant all the exhaustion lifts and is replaced by a sense of absolute joy, a radiance that lights the world from the inside out. But as the day wears on and exhaustion returns, we are all shipwrecked on our small island of absolute joy in a turbulent sea of fear. What we all want, of course, is for Simon’s eyes to open and for him to sit up and say
What. The. Fuck.
Instead, there was a single hand squeeze and then a long, sleeping silence. When his eyes open, it is difficult to say what it is he is seeing. The questions that have tortured each of us—Will he wake up? And if he does, who will he be? What will remain? What will be lost?—are about to be answered. We have been told so often that he is unlikely to make a meaningful recovery that we are all scared to hope. So there is joy and there is fear. But also, and maybe most importantly for Emily and me, there is a new sense of purpose. Long after Sassafras has emptied of friends for the day and Marc and Lorna have returned to North Vancouver for the night, she and I remain, massaging and mobilizing the stiffness out of Si’s hands.

We are updated by the night nurse, who again reminds us that if Simon really wakes up, his behavior might be unpredictable and out of character. He might be violent. He might swear.

“Swear?” Emily says. “After what he’s gone through? I’ll be more surprised if he doesn’t swear.”

A doctor arrives in the room with consent forms. They want to perform a tracheostomy the following day, for several reasons. It is time to remove the intubation tubes: the longer Simon remains intubated, the greater his risk of infection, and the greater the risk of windpipe and vocal cord damage. It will be traumatic, the doctor tells me, for Simon to wake with the intubation tubes in his throat, yet it is critical to keep an airway secure. Simon is currently breathing along with the ventilator, but his body is not reliably regulating its oxygen levels. So they will make an incision in his trachea and insert a tracheostomy tube and he will be unhooked from the ventilator machine. I sign consent and Emily signs as witness.

TERRA, ONE OF
the soccer moms, calls to tell me she is bringing Eli in to the hospital the next day and asks if there is anything I need from home.

“There’s a block of unopened cheddar in the fridge,” I say. “Could you bring that?”

JULY 31, DAY 10

Trach in today. After your surgery, you reached up and stroked my face. Also, reached down with my hand in yours and pressed on the top of your legs. I tell you that you have fallen and that you have hurt your head and your back and that we have been keeping you still to let the swelling subside. I tell you that this is a moment in time and that we are moving through it together. I tell you that you are strong, that your body is strong and that you can trust it. It knows exactly what to do.