Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music (29 page)

She’s been on my mind more than usual this week. And now she’s dead. Death. Gone. She is so much an integral part of me: her tall bulk, her big love, her holding too tight, her generosity, her need. I never wanted her to be alone.

This is the incomprehensible thing: her heart stopped. Red pepper pumping organ, weakened by chemo and radiation and smoking and a lifetime of stress. Si says I loved her and she drove me crazy. And now there is a big empty house full of her stuff. I am scared of that house without her in it. I am scared it is going to smell like death. She was there, dead, alone, for at least two days. There are going to be so many pictures and books and clothes. Boxes of crackers and bunches of celery. How could someone living alone buy so many big bunches of celery? How do I plan a funeral?

I RUPTURE. I
spill outside myself. Eli and Simon watch in horror as I puddle, barely able to stand for the waves of grief that roll through me. I ask Emily to come and, despite her very busy schedule, she arrives the next day to spend the weekend. She stays with Simon and Eli, filling our freezer with veggie lasagnas. My brother flies in from Singapore, and, together, he and I return to Mom’s big empty house.

THE DAY EMILY
leaves, Simon, Eli, and I travel up to Powell River for Mom’s service. Simon is desperately anxious about having to navigate a new, and possibly inaccessible, environment for the day. Eli is quiet, attentive, and extra helpful, but reserved. My brother and I have adopted the popular word
celebration
—today is a
celebration
of Mom’s life—but I am afraid, as we travel up to Powell River, that I have no more celebration left in me. We gather at the Laughing Oyster, a local restaurant owned by Mom’s friends. Despite the short notice, many people arrive: clients, co-workers, community members, my mother’s best friend, Sylvia, who has flown across the country. My mother would have been delighted to have so many of her friends gathered together in one room, and, to my surprise, I find a spark of celebration. To honor my mother’s great appetite, her extravagant love of food and drink, my brother has ordered an open wine bar and a buffet of exquisite hors d’oeuvres. Sylvia speaks of her more than three-decades-long friendship with Mom. I read Charlie Smith’s poem “The Meaning of Birds.” After, we all go to the beach where she walked her dogs every day. Eli, Simon, and I, along with Mom’s friends, build tiny paper boats and place lit candles in them. The ocean is calm, a textured expanse of luminous gray with sky-blue tufts of cumulous clouds scrunched and heaped along the horizon, backlit by the heavenly glow of the setting sun. Gulls and ravens wheel in the silvery light while Mom’s dogs, Molly and Finnegan, race along the pebbled beach, chasing the birds that dare to land. Simon’s wheelchair can’t navigate a route down to the water’s edge, so he parks at the top of the trail and sings “I Shall Be Released” as our convoy of white lights float out to sea.

The next day, as Simon and I travel back up to Powell River, he begins to shake, his torso shuddering so violently against the car seat that I think at first he is having a seizure. No, he tells me, he is cold. His skin turns ashen and he can’t stop shivering. His teeth chatter and his hands clench the car door. We are on the ferry, and I wonder if I should call for an ambulance to meet us on the other side. But, given the distance from the ferry terminal to town, I decide against it. I can get Simon to the hospital faster if I take him myself.

We wait for hours in the emergency room until finally a doctor explains that Simon has a serious kidney infection. He wants to admit Simon to the hospital. This doesn’t seem possible to me. Eli will be back at school tomorrow. Simon and I cannot remain in Powell River while Eli is on the coast, not after Mom has just died: it is an equation that simply doesn’t work. I sign a form stating I am taking Simon home against doctor’s orders, promising the anxious ER doctor that Simon and I will return to the hospital in Sechelt.

By the time we reach the coast, it is after nine at night and our local ER is filled with casualties from the annual longboard contest, fit young men and women with large patches of flayed skin or arm bones jutting unnaturally from their bodies. Simon is given a dose of an
IV
antibiotic, and we are told to return to the acute care ward once a day for the next ten days. We return to the strange rooms of interim housing just before midnight. Simon is dizzy with exhaustion and I am numb: too tired to be sad or too sad to be tired. After Simon is safely in bed, I write a final entry in my journal. But it is the last one I write for a very long time.

Mom. There are a few things I wanted to tell you.

1. I cut my hair the week after you and I went out for lunch. It’s short. Okay, but pouffier than I wanted. It reminds me a little of your hair when we lived in Orangeville but, unlike you, I don’t fight the curls.

2. Eli got his license. He was so proud of himself, and you were the first person he wanted to call.

3. I don’t have swine flu but Simon is really sick. I am scared and worried every minute of the day. Most of the time I have no idea what to do.

4. Simon was embarrassed after receiving the Gert Vorsteher award because in his acceptance speech he thanked the
GF
Strong nursing staff of the second floor when, of course, he spent his entire stay on the third. More than anyone, I know you would have loved the ceremony. It was a day to honor those who are truly inspiring and courageous and you would have been very proud of Simon.

5. I’m sorry we didn’t go to the nursery and pick our spring bulbs and seeds together.

6. They have finally started renos on the Cooper house. Oak floors and fir doors! We are very excited, but moving in still feels very far away.

7. I was thinking about you all week.

8. I was worried the cancer might come back. I was worried if it did I wouldn’t be able to be there for you. I’m happy that you weren’t sick for a long time and I hope you weren’t scared when it was time to go.

9. Your garden is beautiful this spring.

10. I love you.

THE MOMENT WHEN
Eli arrived in the world was the most densely real moment of my life. Simon’s, too. So real that for a brief time Eli outshone everything beyond the reach of his radiant newborn energy. The world outside faltered in its frequency, all the newspapers and lawsuits and stock options and grocery stores less real and substantial than Eli’s tiny perfect fingertips, his wide-open eyes and hungry mouth. The moment I walked into the glass room in the
ICU
and saw Simon, hooked from every part of his body to various machines and missing a third of his skull, was an equivalently dense moment, a moment so real that everything else that followed became unreal in comparison. Life continued to play out its shadowy dance, but now we were only images flickering in and out of focus on the wall of Plato’s cave, a reflection of something that was once more real.

So even something as simple as brushing my teeth becomes an act I perform for the person staring back at me in the mirror, a sensation that is even more acute when I watch Simon. It is in his reflection, as he shaves or flosses, that I see the effects of the stroke on the left side of his face. What I routinely don’t notice—the lack of mobility and the droop of his lip, the extra-wide opening of his eye, the slight sag to his cheek—is shockingly clear when I look at his reflection. More real? I want to ask him. Or more unreal? But I don’t. It’s not a question sensible people ask out loud, and the real answer is a non sequitur. The real answer is this: something shifted in all our spirits after Mom died. After months and months of living in a heightened state of awareness, we are all beyond exhausted by the extremes of our happiness and our sorrow, swells of emotion that are less like riding a roller coaster or surfing colossal waves and more like being the patient in a violent game of Operation, our hearts routinely plucked from our chests only to be dropped back in again.

Simon finishes his round of
IV
antibiotics. There are no further extreme complications from the infection, but neither does he recover completely. He is plagued by an uninterrupted series of infections in his urinary tract and begins taking an almost daily dose of antibiotics. He and I travel to Vancouver, where he takes a two-week-long driver retraining course, learning to drive a car with only hand controls, and re-earns his license. Eli finishes grade 11 and gets a job washing dishes.

The renos proceed slowly but are far enough along that in June, a week after Simon’s thirty-ninth birthday, we move into the house. Dave’s team has done a transformative job. Along with the agreed-upon renos to make the house accessible, they have added skylights, wood floors, and fir trim: the house is big and bright, open and beautiful. Many of the tradespeople who worked on it donated costly supplies and labor. The accessibility renovations immediately and profoundly change our day-to-day existence, as Simon is now more capable of being independent in his showering, dressing, and bathroom routines. It is a good, good thing, a great gift, this house. Eli, Simon, and I know this, but it is more difficult to
feel
the excitement and gratitude. The move derails the simple but nourishing schedule we established in interim housing, and although we are relieved to be settled in our permanent residence, this new house, no matter how bright, beautiful, and accessible, is not home yet. The empty rooms are filled with the packed-up contents from both my mother’s house and our Hobbit house, and we all move over and around the unopened boxes like quiet ghosts. Eli is less help than he would normally be. When he is not working, he prefers to escape to the beach with his friends Jesse and Nate. I don’t begrudge him the fluid world of the ocean, and besides, I have no energy to argue or insist he do anything. Simon, tired of apologizing for not being more help, escapes to his own world, reading novels and playing cashless games of online poker. The work I do opening each box, sorting through the remnants of my mother’s and our previous lives, is slow-going and treacherous; a molasses feeling of fatigue settles into my body. I know that depression would be an accurate way of naming our collective exhaustion, irritation, and numbness, but I see no point in doing so. For the moment, exhaustion, irritation, and numbness seem a reasonable response to the past eleven months. There is nothing to do right now but to get up each day and keep moving through it as best as we can.

Emily, Sarah, and their kids, along with Marc and Lorna, arrive on the coast the third week of July. It is the first time Oscar, who is nine, and Alice, who is six, have seen Simon since his accident, and their approach of loud, rambunctious, open-hearted curiosity is a gift to our quiet house. Lorna is amazed by the house’s transformation and immediately retracts all of her reservations.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “You two have done an amazing job.”

On the twenty-second, the first-year anniversary of Simon’s accident, Emily and Sarah cook up a feast, and we invite Joe Stanton and his partner, Sue, over. A second bottle of wine is opened after dinner and Marc suggests bringing out guitars. Joe retrieves his from the car but Simon declines to play. It is seven o’clock on a sunny summer day but he is sapped of energy. So am I. We leave our guests on the back patio and retreat to our bedroom.

“There’s no anniversary to mark,” Simon says as I help him into bed. “What happened a year ago—it hasn’t stopped. It’s all still happening for me and you, isn’t it? It’s never going to stop.”

OSCAR AND I
walk to the corner store to buy small brown bags of penny candy. Born and raised in Toronto, he is delighted by the ducks and deer and raccoons that populate our semirural streets. He points to the thick brambles dotted with pinkish-white flowers that line the side of the roads.

“Are those raspberry bushes?” he asks.

“Blackberry,” I say. “In a few weeks they will be covered in big, juicy blackberries, and when the weather gets hot, the road will start to smell like cotton candy. Or hot jam.”

“Hot jam?” he says, eyes shining. “Oh. My. God. I can’t wait to smell that.”

I nod. “Me too.”

Ten days after they arrive, the family leaves. During their visit, a great deal of work has been accomplished. Lorna hung pictures, adjusted furniture, and filled vases with artful arrangements of flowers. Marc completed a series of odd jobs—touching up paint, organizing the garden shed, flushing out the eaves of windfall and construction debris. Emily helped establish a triage order to the unpacked boxes, opening what needed to be opened and storing what could wait. Sarah filled our freezer with brisket shepherd’s pie. The kids laughed and tussled and had water fights with Eli, Paloma chasing after them with an oversized stick in her mouth. It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment, but sometime during their visit our big, beautiful house has become a home.

The day after everyone leaves, Dave delivers the piano that Simon arranged to buy for my birthday last year, and every evening for the following week Simon teaches me chords to familiar songs: “Hickory Wind” or Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” During the day, I take Simon to physio sessions at the hospital, where he practices standing upright, braces on his legs and balancing on parallel bars. The workout is challenging but exciting. Theoretically, this work could lead to Simon’s being able to stand upright and “walk” short periods using crutches. However, this eventuality is unlikely given the great probability of falling, and therefore the risk of another brain injury. But it is good, exciting, to see Simon working out right on the edge of his ability, pushing his limits. It is a great week, one that feels full of the promise of new beginnings, but it all ends when, on Sunday night, I check Simon’s feet at bedtime. While the family was visiting, Simon had an appointment with a podiatrist to address the problem of ingrown toenails. The podiatrist removed a wedge-shaped piece of the outer edge of Simon’s big toenail on each foot. The left toe healed nicely, but the right toe is slow to close up and now looks infected, the skin darkening to a blackish purple.