Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music (5 page)

A stray thought like
It’s been a hard winter in my head
.

The phrase Simon spoke to his sister two days ago. At the very moment Simon uttered those words, I was opening up a link sent to us by Jay Johnson, the drummer for the Precious Littles. The link led me to a
TED
talk entitled
My Stroke of Insight,
by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. I watched it alone while Simon spoke with various members of his family, and was profoundly moved. As I made a pot of peppermint tea, I signaled him to wind up his conversation.

“You’ve got to see this,” I said when he hung up the phone. I restarted the talk and we drank cups of tea while Bolte Taylor retold her amazing story of the stroke she suffered at age thirty-eight and of her subsequent recovery. On the screen, she held up an actual human brain, wrinkled and runneled, and trailing it, like a long hairless tail, the spinal cord. She discussed how the left and right hemispheres differ in what they think about and how they think about it: the left hemisphere, linear and methodical and constantly abuzz with the work of structuring our perceptions into a continuum of past, present, and future, versus the right hemisphere and its kinesthetic intelligence rooted in the sensory and energetic perceptions of the present moment. Simon, like me, was profoundly moved.

Shock and lack of sleep fuel the sense that this recent memory is heavy with import, rich with the possibility of hidden insight into our current situation. How is it that two days before an artery ruptured in Simon’s left temporal lobe, we together, transported by Jill’s tale, imaginatively constructed the possible effects of blood flooding the left hemisphere of the brain? But this sense of significance, however tantalizingly close, remains elusive. As I sit beside the machines and my husband in this insular glass room, it dawns on me that meaning might not have a place here. Maybe Simon and I having watched Jill’s
TED
talk two days ago means nothing. Maybe this room, where I sit now and where others have sat before me, is the perfect setting for an unavoidable and brutal collision course with the fact, hard as stone tile, of meaninglessness.

Around five a.m., the neuro doctors arrive, a whole posse of them, for morning rounds, and they ask me to wait outside Simon’s room. After their huddled meeting around the bed, the doctor who is in charge approaches me. He smiles, shakes my hand, and explains that he was part of the team that operated on Simon’s brain. He has seen Simon’s brain. He has, at least for the moment, saved Simon’s brain. Suddenly alert, I catalog a series of irrelevant details: his lack of a doctor’s coat, his paisley cravat, and his worn leather Dockers. He is fair and young and pretty, and I think, distractedly, of Dorian Gray.

“Simon’s family will be arriving in a few hours,” I explain. “Will we be able to ask you some questions?”

“No.” His face clouds over momentarily. He only assisted; Dr. Haw, the lead surgeon, will answer our questions. He smiles again, courteous but distant, and says, “The underlying tissue beneath the bleed looked good. There is room to hope.”

Several questions wing through my mind as he moves away. Hope for what? Hope that Simon will live, however altered or damaged? Or hope, real hope, for life, for Simon, for his beautiful mind? I want to call out in the otherworldly quiet of the
ICU
, call him back, ask him to clarify, but I am afraid even to voice the question out loud, let alone hear the answer. Room to hope. It’s enough right now, no questions asked, to get me through the rest of the long night.

The nurses’ morning shift change is at 7:30, and they ask me to leave for an hour. I retrace my steps to the ground-floor hospital lobby. When I return with a cup of tea, the lights in the
ICU
waiting room are still dark and the young man and woman still asleep. In the doorway a middle-aged woman sways. She clutches for my arm as I pass and asks when she will be allowed into the
ICU
. She leans into me, her breath sour with vomit and alcohol; the heat of her grief is overwhelming.

“In an hour,” I say, backing away. “After the nurses’ shift change.”

She hangs on to my arm still, leaning in: a drowning woman. It is her son. He was beaten behind some bar on the Eastside. He is in a coma. She came in from Vancouver Island late last night, but she didn’t know where to go. Who to talk to. She has no money, so she slept in the bushes outside the hospital. Her son is in a coma, his face beaten so badly it is no longer a face. Her son. Her baby boy. What is she to do? She is incoherent, grieving, desperate. Toxic. I have no ability to filter out the rawness of her pain: her pain is my pain is a world of pain opening up beneath me.

“The social worker,” I say, pointing to an office door down the hallway. “Maybe she can help?” It is all I can offer. I forcibly extract my arm and move away, knowing I cannot be anywhere near this woman. The strength of her pain will pull me under. I will drown. I retrace my steps back to Sassafras, the large cafeteria adjacent to the
ICU
wing and the area that will become a meeting place over the next eleven days.
Sassafras,
I write in the notebook I carry with me.
A long bank of windows, many tables filled with interns, nurses, and people that are not you.

I AM THINKING HARD
about time. I would like to rewind it. Lines of a T. S. Eliot poem land in my thoughts like a whistling bomb:

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

I am shattered with clarity. I will myself back in time, twenty-four hours earlier, to my own unattended moment: I lie tangled in bedsheets. Simon stands at the foot of the bed, scowling. The day is warm already. The birds were particularly loud earlier, a disjointed cacophony that started just after four a.m. and that had, with sunrise, gradually become more shrill, more manic. They gather in our cherry tree where, too high to reach, the last of the tree’s abundant fruit has fermented. Birds, keening, trilling, squawking: drunk on cherry wine. It is an annual ritual, this mad song of the birds, one that announces that the fullness of summer has finally arrived. The heat is a balm to my sore back, and as I stretch awake, I am porous, content, gloriously limber, and free of pain. I can smell the dusty, sweaty, sweet cedar of Simon’s work clothes. He rubs his wrist.

It’s sore.

“It hurts,” Si says. “But it’s my last week. Shit.” He wavers, irritable and indecisive.

“Eli’s not here,” I say. “We could play hooky together.”

“Yeah, but Dave will kill me if I don’t come in today,” he says, resolving our brief discussion. He pulls on his shirt and heads for the coffee machine. If his wrist is still sore, he will take Friday off and give it a full day of rest before the gig.

This is the moment I return to over and over again. It is so close I can smell it, touch it, taste it. It seems possible, if I think hard enough, to return to it. This moment, before Simon takes his cup of coffee and walks the dog up the lane into the forest; before he gets in his blue and white beater of a pickup truck with the creatively rigged ignition. Before he leaves this moment, this time around, I’ll grab his wrist, the one that isn’t sore, and pull him back into bed. I’ll say,
Don’t go. Don’t leave the house today. Stay here with me.

I MET SIMON AT
Orangeville District Secondary School on the first day of grade 10, September 1984. This event has taken on a fabled quality in family lore, but the long-lasting ramifications of that first meeting were not immediately apparent, at least not to me.

“That’s a great shirt,” Simon said by way of an introduction. He spoke across the width of the third-period history room. He was fourteen, a year younger than me, and his hair was cut in a goofy bowl shape. He was tall for his age, still in what his sister refers to as his Baby Huey stage, a boy grown suddenly to the size of a man. I glanced down at my new T-shirt; it was baggy, to cover up my general scrawniness, the white cotton printed with an 1950s Roy Lichtenstein comic book–style drawing on the front:
Wouldn’t it be wonderful,
a man in a bowler hat was saying to a well made-up lady,
if the world was full of weirdos?
It seemed an important question at the time.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, a tangle of pleasure and embarrassment at being noticed, typical fifteen-year-old girl.

“No, really,” Simon said. “It’s a great shirt.” He wasn’t shouting, but his voice was loud and resonant, and it cut through all the pre-class chatter. For one brief, mortifying moment, the entire class glanced my way. The blood in my cheeks came to a slow simmer. Who was this bozo, anyway? New guy, acting like he owned the place.

“Quiet, class,” the history teacher, Ms. Sodonis, said as she entered the room, thankfully ending my moment of mortification. “Everyone take their seats.”

From across the room Simon smiled and gave me a thumb’s up. Weirdo, he mouthed and sat down at his desk.

Hmm. Simon was nice enough, I decided, but in a loud, crude, boy way. Prim and calculating—I was hoping to befriend his sister, Emily—I decided he was, as a boy, not to be overly encouraged but to be politely tolerated, an attitude that lasted maybe half a week, until the day Simon invited me and my best friend, Veronica, over for lunch. The Paradis living room, painted sky blue and bathed in light from a large bay window, was home to the largest collection of record albums I had ever seen. That day we sang and danced to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, T. Rex, Lou Reed, Taj Mahal—an explosion of sound and movement nested between biology and geography class that was transformative.

ALTHOUGH IT IS
not entirely true, it could be said that before I fell in love with Simon, I fell in love with his family: his very poised older sister, Emily; his successful parents, Marc and Lorna; their beautiful, Victorian-styled home. The yellow canary named Bird. Because of Charlie Parker, Simon explained, and I nodded as if I understood the reference, which I didn’t. The Paradis family had moved to town over the summer. Emily, it was rumored, wrote poetry. Lorna was finishing up her law degree. Marc worked at the Royal Bank developing computer systems by day; at night he came home and played guitar. Marc and Lorna offered up a radical new vision of what parents could be: When Marc unpacked the groceries on a Saturday afternoon, he bumped hips with Lorna as she made herself a sandwich. They would play fight for a tea towel, teasing one another. They laughed together; they sang.

Over the next few years, I received a comprehensive musical education under Simon’s tutelage. I first heard Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” in his living room, and Patti Smith’s “Horses.” We swayed with psychedelic surrender to Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow,” thrashed around to the Clash’s “Rudie Can’t Fail,” broke our hearts to David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” and had our minds blown by Hendrix’s “Manic Depression” and Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” I bought an old and scratched
Learn How to Disco
album at a church sale, and Simon, Veronica and I would practice the step-ball-step-turn moves, laughing until our sides ached, racing back to school between the first and second end-of-lunch bells.

That year Veronica fell in love with a boy, an artist who made beautiful silk-screened T-shirts, and they began spending all their time together. Our cozy triangle lost a corner. After school, Simon and I went to the little Dutch deli alone and ordered Havarti sandwiches on rye with black coffee and, our favorite, strawberry tarts, which Simon, in a moment of inexplicable whimsy, renamed “friendship tarts.” One day he told me that his friend Cole wanted to ask me out.

“He likes you,” he said.

“He doesn’t even know me,” I said. “I’ve never even spoken to him.” Still, I knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. A punk—an artist, too. A fine-boned beauty who dressed like Sid Vicious and who, like Simon, played guitar. They had been talking about starting a band.

“Well, he wants to ask you on date. Are you interested?”

“Sure, I guess.” I shrugged, attempting a nonchalance I didn’t feel. Unlike Veronica, I had never had a boyfriend. Had never kissed anyone in the back fields behind the elementary school. Never been invited to the parties where kids played spin-the-bottle in someone’s basement.

For our first date, Cole invited me over to his house after school. He lived in a farmhouse at the end of a long tree-lined laneway on the outskirts of town. We set up a large panel of wood in a back field and pinned balloons filled with paint across its surface, then threw darts until we, the panel of wood, the trees, and the grass were dripping in an apocalypse of bright color. Back at the farmhouse, as we were rinsing our paint-streaked hands and faces, Simon phoned, his voice loud enough that I could clearly hear the question he asked Cole.

“Have you kissed her?”

“Not yet.” Cole smiled and looked at me. “But I’m hoping to.”

Later that night Simon biked over to my house and took the stairs two at a time up to my bedroom. He was quieter than usual, and he avoided meeting my eyes.

“Look,” he said. “I think I made a mistake.” He was pacing around my room, which was still the room of a child, filled with books, a dollhouse, and stuffed animals, the gray-blue wallpaper patterned with small white flowers, the pink satin laces of my ballet pointe shoes hooked over a nail in the wall. Simon was gripping a stuffed baby horse, his large hands wrapped in a murderous twist around its neck. “I asked you if you wanted to go out with Cole when what I wanted to ask was whether you would go out with
me
.”

“Oh. Well,” I said, my lips still shimmering from that first-ever kiss. I didn’t know what to say. In Veronica’s absence, Simon had quickly become my closest friend. I knew him. I loved him. But Cole? He was as fantastic and foreign as the far side of the moon. “Look,” I said, scrambling for the right words. “The thing is, as soon as you and I kiss, we are going to have to get married and have a baby and spend the rest of our lives together. I think we should see other people first.”