We received so many notes of support in those early days, but there was one in particular that provided a lifeline for me. Lee Woodruff, married to ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff, had been through her own life-changing experience as the partner and caregiver to a traumatic-brain-injury patient. Bob nearly lost his life when his convoy drove over a roadside bomb while covering the Iraq War in 2006. I had gotten to know Lee a little over the years, first when I was working at ABC News, and then in the writing world we shared as authors in the New York area. Lee had reached out after the stroke through my sister, Emily, gently making herself available to talk—an open invitation with no pressure or expectations attached.
One Sunday night, I took Lee up on the offer. Dave was asleep in his ICU bed, and I did not have an apartment to go home to because we were in the process of moving and my whole bedroom was packed in boxes and bubble wrap. I was crashing on a friend’s couch for a couple of days. Curled up on that couch, I dialed Lee and I wept. We talked about how the phrase “Everything happens for a reason” fell painfully flat. We spoke about how scared I was to have a baby—I didn’t know how I could possibly take care of Dave and a newborn. We spoke about how unfair it all felt. We spoke about how the many unknowns were the cruelest part. Lee promised me that it would get better, somehow, some way.
“I know you can’t possibly see it right now, because it’s so new and horrible and it’s so scary, but I can promise you two things. Number one, it will be different. Life has changed, life will forever be different. But here’s number two: even though it will be different, it will be OK,” Lee said. “I promise you, somehow, it will be OK.”
I didn’t see how she could be correct, but I clung to her words. She was, after all, speaking with the insight and understanding of someone who had walked a path similar to my own. Someone who had scaled a similarly grueling peak and had made it to the summit, where things did begin to look manageable—albeit entirely altered—once more.
“Life will never look exactly the same as it did before. But as my Bob tells me: Who knows what it would have looked like and who would ever believe it could be perfect? What is perfect anyway? And who cares now? Those imaginary visions are only a film torture loop. Turn off the movie in your head called My Once and Glorious Life. We don’t get to take that particular footpath now. That one got shut down by an avalanche. As soon as we accept the fact that we got rerouted, we can move forward into the world with all the tools and love and friends and grace and hope and faith and beauty that we just got reminded are ours.”
I absorbed these words—crying and nodding. They brought both pain and hope. At one point, I asked: “Why are you doing this, Lee?” It was a Sunday night in early summer. Lee has four kids and a husband and a full career and a huge and happy life, and I could not believe she was taking an hour to talk to some weeping person she’d only met a couple of times in passing. “Why are you making this time for me?”
“I’m doing this because, though you might not believe me right now, someday your life will be good again. And someday, years from now, someone will need to hear from you about this moment. And so you’ll find yourself sitting on the couch at home on a Sunday night, speaking to someone who needs you, and you’ll tell this person that they can get through whatever it is that they are going through. That’s all part of the deal, OK?”
I agreed.
Lee said: “I am here as your friend to welcome you to the ‘Club of the Bad Thing.’ ”
It was a club I wanted no part of. Of course I wanted no part of it. Who would? But, there I was. And then, thinking back to Dave’s playlist of classic rock, the one I had played in the emergency room that first night in Fargo, I began to hear the tune to the Eagles’ hit “Hotel California.” You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Chapter 16
Paris, France
May 2010
On my first day in Paris I ignored the jet lag and I walked all the way from the sixteenth arrondissement, just northwest of Avenue Foch, past the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, through Place de la Concorde, past the Louvre Museum and the Tuileries Garden, across Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis and over to the Left Bank. There, sitting on the terrace of a café eating a late lunch, overlooking the Seine and Bateaux Mouches boats that glided by, gawking at the gargoyle spires of Notre Dame in the near distance, I could not believe that I had done it. I had quit my very sensible job writing daytime news and had left my New York City apartment in the hands of a subletter and had relocated, alone, to Paris.
And not just Paris, but Paris in the full and rapturous throes of springtime. The chestnut and plane trees hung heavy with new leaves along the riverside quays; adorable little children squealed with delight as they skipped across cobblestones on their way home from school. From where I was sitting, I could hear an accordion. I could hear fragments of French as people passed by. I could hear the peals of Notre Dame’s bells. On my walk home, I could stop at any number of bakeries and get myself an oven-fresh pain au chocolat, the gooey inside still warm and liquid. My soul was dancing for joy.
Dave had fully supported my decision. He had seen better than anyone how deeply I had longed to make a career change. He was finishing up an intense period of medical school and was busy himself. I would be back in New York City in the fall.
I saw my time in Paris, my favorite city in the world, as a chance to replenish my soul. After feeling stressed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled during the years working a job that was not the right fit, Paris was a chance to make a meaningful shift. It was time to be by myself and contemplate what I wanted for these next steps in my life and in my career and in my relationship with Dave. It was, as I saw it, a last opportunity to go off on my own and have adventures and live according to my whims in a rich and beautiful and transient moment.
I do not mind traveling alone. In fact, I love traveling alone. I bought a Europass, and I took the train all over Europe that spring. I visited family friends in glorious Florence and then took the bus through Tuscany and visited Siena. I went to Geneva to stay with my aunt Tessa, whose Parisian apartment I was occupying, and we rode a chairlift across stunning Alpine vistas and climbed old church bell towers. I met my friend Charlotte in Bruges, Belgium, and we traveled together to her family’s hometown on the coast of the North Sea in Ostend, Belgium, where we ate frites and drank Belgian beer and meandered through the markets and squares. I traveled throughout France, visiting the medieval walled city of Saint-Malo and the Breton coast (where my mother’s family originally came from) and capping off a wonderful séjour with my cousin’s beautiful wedding at her family home in Plouër-sur-Rance.
I remember, one afternoon in Florence, I was walking around the city, several generous scoops of gelato balancing atop a cone in my hand. I was devouring the ice cream; I was devouring the views of that magical city. I was savoring my freedom and the sounds of the church bells and the snippets of Italian and the wonder of it all. I passed shops and kiosks and wound my way through narrow cobblestoned streets, enjoying myself without a map or an agenda. As I ambled across the magnificent Piazza del Duomo, one of the store owners raised his arms, proclaiming: “Bella signorina, you look happy!”
I smiled and answered: “I am.”
Chapter 17
“Plastic.” I’d never known it was a word that could describe a human brain, but it was something we heard all the time in those early days and weeks after the stroke. “Neuronal plasticity.” A cursory Internet search will tell you that neuronal plasticity is “the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.”
Sizable portions of Dave’s brain were dead, wiped out from not having received oxygen. Neuronal plasti
city would be Dave’s best hope for recovery. Neuronal plasticity became our buzzword, our lifeline, our mantra, and our hope. All brains have this plastic quality, which is why even Alzheimer’s patients in their eighties can and should work to stimulate their brain’s functionality. We are all encouraged to do things to facilitate plasticity, even something as simple as brushing your teeth with your nondominant hand or taking a shower with your eyes shut. New experiences and challenges force us to get out of our automatic routines and encourage the brain to form new neuronal pathways, thereby staying active and agile.
The brain is the most remarkable and least understood organ in the body, and its ability to regenerate and evolve defies scientific understanding. But here’s the thing: neuronal plasticity, that nebulous characteristic that allows for “miracles” in victims of traumatic brain injury, changes over the course of a life. A huge part of plasticity is related to age. Newborns are incredibly plastic. Anyone who has ever observed a baby knows this to be true: their brains change very quickly, on a daily basis as they learn and grow. Plasticity decreases with age, so the older you are, the less plastic your brain is. The cutoff for when this neuronal plasticity begins to decrease? Around age thirty to thirty-five. Dave was thirty years old.
If Dave had had this stroke even one year later, his hopes for recovery might have been significantly reduced. If he had had this stroke five years later, he very likely would not have survived. At thirty, Dave had youth—and more neuronal plasticity—on his side, and that helped his chances of recovery.
We needed this plasticity because while my husband was there physically, he was still not there mentally. As we checked days off the calendar, Dave still did not know where he was, even though it was the hospital in which he had spent every single day for the previous three years. What was especially heartbreaking to me was that Dave did not remember that we had a beloved black mutt named Penny. Dave and that dog were madly in love; the last thing we had done together before getting on the plane was look at photos of her. At one point, he told me we had a cat (we’ve never had a cat). At other times he told me we had a yellow Lab or that her name was Xena, who had been his childhood dog.
On Monday, June 15, the rain was absolutely apocalyptic over Chicago. My mother, who was staying with me for a couple of weeks, drove me home from the hospital, and we thought we were going to get stuck in the flooding. The voice on the radio informed us that there had been a tornado outside Chicago earlier that day. “I hope the game doesn’t get canceled,” I said. Dave’s favorite hockey team, the Chicago Blackhawks, was playing to win the Stanley Cup that night.
Dave watched from his bed in the ICU with Brad, one of his best friends, as I headed home after a long day. The Blackhawks won. The old Dave would have been so happy. He had followed the whole season and postseason with a giddy hope. He had planned to watch the championship games in Hawaii. I would not have cared, to be honest. In that alternate life, given the time difference, I probably would have been outside reading by the ocean and would have come inside to Dave’s smile and happy proclamation that his team had won. I would have been happy that he was happy, but I would not have been moved.
But that was in the alternate life. The one that was no longer going to happen. In this life, I cared. I watched every minute of the game that night in Dave’s honor, deeply invested. When they won, I wept. Dave’s friend Russell texted me, elated: “That was for Dave!”
Our apartment faced west, looking out over the Chicago River and the western suburbs. I stood before the window and stared out; I could see Rush in the distance, where Dave was, across the flat Midwestern landscape. I could see, not too far from Rush, the United Center, where the Blackhawks had just won hockey’s highest honor. Fireworks burst across the sky. All of Chicago was celebrating as I stood at the window and wept.
The next morning when I arrived at Dave’s hospital room, he did not remember that the Blackhawks had won. He did not remember that he’d watched, that Brad had come for the game and that they’d sat together and eaten pizza and that his favorite player, Patrick Kane, had scored the game-winning goal.
The letters I wrote to Dave at the end of each day became all the more important. If he came back, he could read these letters and understand what he had gone through. If he came back. God, it hurt. If he came back. I loved so many things about Dave, but, most of all, I loved his brain. I loved his mind. I loved his wit. That, over the years, we had developed our own shorthand of inside jokes and code words and shared experiences. These were the things that made Dave mine. That was what made this injury so completely devastating: an arm, I could do without. But his mind? How could I live without Dave’s mind?
Dear Dave,
I need to be patient. I just miss you so much.
Chapter 18
Adirondack State Park, New York
August 2010
I suspected that Dave was about to pop the question. It was the end of the summer, and I had just moved back from Paris to New York. In a month, Dave was to start an independent research year between his third and fourth years of medical school.
Dave’s parents were flying out to join us at my parents’ place in upstate New York, where we have a family farm on Lake Champlain. I thought Dave might propose that week, with both sets of family there and the peaceful, natural setting as a backdrop. The reason Dave was taking a research year was so that he could have a period with a more manageable workload between seven straight years of schooling, and for both of us to catch our breaths before he began applying to residency programs. I’d quit news, and we were both taking steps to find more happiness in our day-to-day lives, specifically on the work front, and we had decided to make our relationship a higher priority. The timing felt right.
The morning Dave’s parents were scheduled to arrive, he and I sat by the lake, just the two of us. I had my feet dangling off the dock, the view of Vermont’s Green Mountains spanning the scene before us.
Dave turned to me and said, casual as could be: “I guess I should get your ring size at some point.”
I paused a moment, taken aback. “Wait, what?”
“Your ring size. If I’m going to propose at some point, I should know the size of your finger.”
I looked out over the water, silenced. Huh, I thought, so he is just now getting around to the thought of getting a ring. I guess it’s not happening this week.
I noticed the sinking feeling in my stomach. I’d questioned whether I was ready to get engaged, but here I was, disappointed. As it turned out, I was ready to marry Dave, more ready than I had thought.
That afternoon, after several flight delays and a ferry ride across Lake Champlain, Dave’s parents arrived at our farm. While they settled in before dinner, Dave suggested he and I take a quick walk with the dogs. We headed away from the lake and the house, meandering up the hill to a field carpeted in clover. My mom had told us that it was a great place to scout for four-leaf clovers. All that week Dave had been on the lookout for a four-leaf clover, but so far neither of us had had any luck in finding one.
I paused to scan the view from this hill. It was the predinner hour, and upstate New York was awash in gentle summer sunshine. Before us stretched rural green fields that met Lake Champlain, and beyond that, on the other shore, layers of Vermont’s stunning mountains. There was no point in taking a photo, because no photo could have fully captured the beauty of the moment.
“Look, a four-leaf clover!” Dave bent over as we crested the hill. I followed his pointing.
“I don’t see it,” I said, but then I looked at him. He was on one knee, and he was holding—to my surprise—a ring. He told me that he couldn’t imagine life without me. He called me by the series of nicknames he had used over our six years together. I cried, my hands trembling as Dave slid the ring on my finger—a ring he’d designed to look like my grandmother’s, because I had told him years ago that I loved my grandm
other’s ring. We sat together on the hilltop and looked out over the lake and joined hands to offer up a prayer of thanksgiving.
When we returned to the house, there was champagne and hugging and ogling of the ring. It was all so sickeningly sweet.
The next day, on a walk with our families, Dave and I found three four-leaf clovers.
We were giddy—we’d never found one before that day, and now suddenly we had three. We took it as a propitious sign.
We kept those clovers. I pressed them and glued them to a photo of us. The photo was taken by Dave’s dad on the afternoon of that walk, right when we found those clovers. In it Dave and I stand side by side, beaming, glowing from our suntans and the excitement of the engagement, still less than twenty-four hours old at that point.
I wrote a note on that photo, right beneath the pressed clovers:
Dear Dave,
May we always remember how “lucky” we are to have one another—
Love,
Alli
At my bridal shower three months before our wedding, my godmother gave me a necklace with a silver four-leaf clover, in honor of our story. On the night before we got married, my mother-in-law told everyone this story at the rehearsal dinner. When I looked at the man seated beside me, holding my hand through the evening of toasts, I wanted to bottle it all up, save it, carry it with us into our future together.
May we always remember how lucky we are. I gave that photo with those clovers as a gift to Dave on our wedding day. I’d written that caption because I knew, even then, that in spite of how much we loved each other, in spite of the fact that we were so happy to be marrying each other, that there would be days when we would forget the good fortune that had brought us together. We would have days when we took our lives and our love for granted. When we failed to give thanks for our many blessings and would need a reminder. I knew that, even with that message hanging on our wall, there would be days when we would forget, and that on those days, we would need to remember.
Beauty in the Broken Places Page 10