Beauty in the Broken Places

by Allison Pataki

  Here was my chance. I was being exposed to plenty of reason to doubt; I had days when I was angry and sad and confused. I did not understand why this stroke had happened or where we would be going from there, and I certainly did not feel like giving thanks for the trial of it all. I wanted no more of it—I wanted that burden to pass away from me. I wanted things to be good and predictable, like they had once been. I wanted Dave back, like he had once been. I wanted my old life back.

  Ultimately, I realized, this was the moment when things between God and me finally got real. This was when I needed to live the faith that I had been thinking, for thirty-one years, that I had been living. I did not understand why the things that had happened had happened. But did I still—even in that place of not knowing or understanding, especially in that place of not knowing or understanding—believe that God was with me? Was He there beside me in my pain and brokenness, just as I had always believed Him to be beside me in my joy? Did I believe that God could take this heartbreak and this fear and this fatigue and somehow weave something beautiful from all of the frayed and feeble threads? That there was a divine plan at work here, a much larger picture than the one I could see, a framework that exceeded my capacity to understand?

  Yes, I realized. I did. I did still believe that God was beside us. I did, because of so many reasons, so many bright spots that had already shone on us, piercing even some of the darkest places. I had felt God at work, already, in so many moments large and small since that terrible June night on the airplane. I had felt it in the steady hands of Dave’s doctors and nurses and therapists, in the peaceful moments while Dave slept in his hospital room, in the faith and friendship of Omar, in the pure and perfect joy of our daughter, in the gentle but immutable strength of my mother-in-law, in the unwavering support of our steadfast community of friends and family, in the ferocious love of my parents and siblings and in-laws and even complete strangers. It was especially in the times of the most unbearable pain that I had seen the most beautiful acts of grace and love, shining forth in sharp relief.

  A few years ago, I had a meaningful conversation with Kathie Lee Gifford, a friend and warm supporter of my books and a person whose faith, strength, and generosity of spirit I’ve long admired. That chat, wonderful for so many reasons, resulted in Kathie Lee sending me a book of daily faith readings—readings that I still close every day with before bedtime. Well, years later, in the dark, wintry days when I worried about Dave’s recovery and I worried for our family, I came across a passage in that book from my friend, and it spoke directly to where I was in that moment. I read it multiple times in bed that evening, dog-earing the page so that I could return to it again and again. “The truth is that self-sufficiency is a myth perpetuated by pride and temporary success. Health and wealth can disappear instantly, as can life itself. Rejoice in your insufficiency, knowing that God’s power is made perfect in weakness.”

  The words reached up from the page and hit me in both the mind and the heart. That was it. That was the truth laid out before me. Amen.

  A loved one questioned my faith during this time, asking me whether it was scary to rely so heavily on something so intangible, something so impossible to verify. “On the contrary,” I answered, “far scarier, in my opinion, is the idea of trying to get through this life without relying on faith.” Making it through life with only science and proven facts to depend on—that would seem to me like gliding over a ravine without a safety harness. Like trying to get comfortable sleeping on a bed of rocks.

  We had met so many angels, hadn’t we? There had already been countless miracles along the journey of Dave’s recovery, and I could—I would—give thanks for those moments and those angels, while affirming my belief that they would continue to appear for us.

  I went deeper in other relationships, too. I went deeper in my relationship with my in-laws and parents and siblings and friends—I ditched the idea of keeping up appearances or acting for the world as if I had it all together, and instead brought an honesty to my relationships that, in the end, strengthened the bonds of those relationships and drew me closer to the people I love. I hugged Dave tighter in the middle of the night. I cherished the new giggles and smiles of our precious baby.

  On many nights I went from weeping one moment to looking into my baby’s smiling face and laughing. I took photos and videos of Lilly and I shared them with family. “Thank God for her,” my mom wrote back. “She’s special, Alli. She’s a miracle baby. God sent her to bring your joy back.” As my father-in-law told me and Dave one morning: “I’m not a spiritual man, but if ever there was something that was going to make me believe in God, it would be that little baby.”

  It was true; in addition to the brain that was regrowing itself inside Dave’s head, we had another little mind that was just opening up and beginning to flower right there in our very home, and she brought with her so many giggles and smiles and feelings of unadulterated joy.

  I gave thanks for the unwavering friends and family members who rallied to be by our side and support us. I forced myself to keep the faith that Dave’s progress would continue. That we, our little family, would get through it together. That there would be happy days for us on the other end of it all—even if our new idea of “happy” had to also mean “different.”

  I felt stuck, yes, forced at age thirty to live in a place that felt cruel and foreign. But Dave’s brain was not stuck where it was; I reminded myself of that each day, and others reminded me of that on the days when I forgot (and there were many days when I forgot). Dave’s brain, like all brains, was plastic, changing, evolving. And the healing, as slow and invisible as it seemed at times, was happening. For his brain. For his body. For our entire family.

  Chapter 35

  Chicago

  January 2015

  The day I found out I was pregnant, I rushed out to Target and bought a gender-neutral onesie that said “I love my daddy.” That evening, when Dave got home from work, I presented him with the gift bag.

  “A surprise for you,” I said, trying to temper my grin as I gave him the package.

  Dave reached into the tissue paper and pulled out the onesie, along with the stick that presented the positive test results—yes, the same stick on which I had peed, but he’s a doctor; he’s not squeamish about bodily fluids.

  “Really?” He looked up at me, incredulous.

  “Really.” I nodded. “We’re going to have a baby.”

  Dave was thrilled—and completely surprised. He admitted that when he had first seen the baby outfit, for a brief moment, he had assumed out of habit it was a dog outfit for Penny. He had not even thought it possible that I’d know I was pregnant so soon.

  The day after my father’s presidential announcement, I flew back to Chicago for our twenty-week obstetrician appointment. That morning we had a forty-five-minute transabdominal ultrasound in which we gleaned a thorough view of our healthy baby. We saw everything from the length of the leg bones to the outlines of the ten tiny fingers. It was also during that appointment that our doctor determined the baby’s gender, but we opted not to be told that day. Instead, the technician in our doctor’s office called a family member with the results. This family member then went and picked up a piñata, filled with candy. When Dave and I gathered with family members that weekend, we hit the piñata and pink candy sprayed all over the room. We could not have been more thrilled to discover that we were having a girl.

  Now, a moment of important context here: Dave is the youngest of six boys. Dave likes sports. A lot. Dave had planned to raise a pack of boys, all of them little left-handed athletes whom he would coach in baseball, lacrosse, basketball, football, and anything else they found time to play.

  In spite of this conviction of his—or perhaps precisely because of this conviction of his—I had come to believe that Dave was destined to have a brood of baby girls. I saw him sitting patiently while one little daughter
smeared lipstick across his cheeks and another sprinkled his hair with brightly colored barrettes. I knew my mother-in-law, the mother of all boys, also really wanted to add a baby girl to the ranks of Levys (she confessed after the fact that she’d worn a blue shirt the day of the piñata because she was mentally preparing herself to welcome yet another boy).

  “When I first saw that pink candy, I immediately felt this protective instinct,” Dave told me. “I’ve always known very little about women, not having had sisters. It was funny to me to be having a little girl—it was a big growing experience because it dawned on me that I would be having a little girl whom I would introduce to the world. I would teach her, but I would learn about little girls in the process.”

  That night, Dave read a bedtime story to our two-year-old niece, Annabel. He went over the images on the pages with her, delighting in her pronunciation of the words “banana” and “yellow.” I could just see a change in him, and my sister-in-law Erin, Annabel’s mom, pulled me aside to tell me what a wonderful dad Dave was going to be.

  What I remember from those weeks was just how excited we were. Just how lucky we felt.

  Chapter 36

  Chicago

  June 9, 2015

  We had half an hour until we had to leave for the airport.

  I barged into our home office, urging Dave to pull himself away from his laptop and pack his suitcase. “Yeah, yeah, soon, I’m almost done,” Dave said, eyes remaining fixed on the computer screen as he shooed me out of the office. He was on a deadline to submit several orthopedic research papers, and he wanted to get them done before leaving for vacation.

  Finally, Dave clicked SEND on the last email and pushed himself away from his desk. “I’m going to go for a run really quickly, and then I’ll pack,” Dave said. He saw my face drop. I am the type who packs the suitcase days in advance, who shows up to the airport three hours before the flight. Dave likes to play what I consider a dangerous game of brinksmanship with the ticket agent, boarding the flight as the plane doors are shutting after a mad dash through the airport.

  “Just kidding!” he said, his face breaking open in a teasing smile. “I just wanted to see you freak out. I’ll pack now and then we’ll go.”

  How many times since that moment have I wished that Dave went for that run? That he had moved his blood and stimulated his circulatory system and flexed his muscles after sitting still all day. Might he have prevented the formation of that clot? Might we have been able to thwart the stroke that derailed life as we knew it? Would the trajectory of our entire lives have played out in a completely different direction? If Dave had gone for that run—could it have prevented that emergency landing in Fargo? That horrifying night in the emergency room? The harrowing days and weeks and months and…might everything have been different?

  I’m not sure.

  I’ll never know.

  I’ll always wonder.

  “If only”…the saddest words in the English language.

  But Dave did not go for a run that day. For whatever reason, whether it had already happened or would happen in the taxi to the airport or on the plane, the clot formed. We got on that plane as one version of Dave and Alli, and we made an emergency landing, several hours later in Fargo, as an entirely different version of Dave and Alli.

  Dave had a stroke when he was young and healthy, when we were expecting our first baby and we were so very happy.

  It was a massive stroke, and it nearly killed Dave. He did not die, but our lives changed forever. There is no way to undo any of this, no way to alter that reality.

  In the airport security line, Dave had news for me. “I found out that I was selected to be on the resident advisory board for The American Journal of Orthopedics.”

  I looked at him a moment, pausing a beat, before clapping my hands. “Really?”

  He nodded his head, yes. This was particularly satisfying for him because of how much competition there was for this board. Residents did not apply; they were simply selected, which made the appointment feel like that much more of an honor.

  This mattered so deeply to Dave because he had spent much of the past three years of residency feeling deeply self-conscious about his abilities as a doctor. No one is harder on Dave Levy than Dave Levy, and he had done a fair amount of self-flagellating throughout residency, and in medical school before that. If he is not perfect, he’s convinced he is terrible. If he’s not the best, he’s convinced he’s the worst. With Dave there is no ability to project a veneer of bravado; there’s no “Fake it till you make it.” It’s the best thing about Dave and the worst. It’s what makes him work so hard and strive for excellence, but let’s just say it isn’t always the most pleasant experience for Dave or, say, his wife, when he is going through these self-critiques or crises of confidence.

  But here it was, a big, fat stamp of approval. For an affirmation junkie like Dave (I’m one, too; it’s probably a large part of why we understand each other so well), it was some deeply satisfying validation from his peers and seniors, the long-withheld gold star that he had been craving for years. The confirmation that all of his hard and honest work was paying off—he was doing a good job.

  I looked at him now as we made our way through the security line. “Can we finally put to rest this fallacy that you are a bad doctor?”

  He smiled knowingly, nodding after a moment. “Yeah, OK.”

  After years of self-doubt, Dave was finally beginning to feel satisfaction with all of the work he was putting in. The years of sleepless nights in the hospital, putting himself and his family last after the needs of everyone else, working every weekend and holiday and birthday and anniversary. The years of self-sacrifice and meager pay and school and tests. Dave was finally hitting his stride. Dave was finally getting his groove back. It would all be worth it. We were so close.

  We cleared security and found our gate. We ate dinner. We prepared to board our plane, completely unaware that life as we knew it was about to change in the blink of an asymmetrically dilated eye.

  * * *

  —

  When I first told people about this airport security line conversation—one of our last in the final minutes before the stroke—I told it with a sense of the tragedy of it all. Dave was finally feeling good about his career. He was working on a ton of exciting research, and gaining the acknowledgment of his colleagues in doing so. He was finally entering the years of his residency when he would be a senior member of the team; I knew that he would love teaching his juniors, that he would love mastering his surgical skills. And I would love having him around for, say, a few weekends and nights and holidays. We would finally have the time together as a couple that we had longed for. He would be there to delight in our daughter. Dave was finally turning a long-overdue corner; we were finally turning a corner as a family.

  As Dave’s parents said, “You were robbed of the golden period. You were robbed of the joy of your pregnancy, of what should have been your happiest time.”

  There is a certain amount of tragedy to the timing, it’s true. Just as things were about to get really good, they got really bad. I do feel like Dave got robbed of his final years of residency and we got robbed of a joyous period on the cusp of new parenthood.

  But now, many months out from the stroke, I can also see it in a different light.

  Here we sit in our apartment. It’s an unseasonably warm day in late winter. Dave woke up early this morning and worked on an orthopedic paper. Next week, he will fly by himself to a conference in Florida to present on three different research projects. Then he will fly, alone, to New York to meet me and Lilly, where we will spend two weeks on the book launch of my novel Sisi. Dave will come with me to launch events and press appointments, and he’ll take care of Lilly while I go through the wonderful madness of a book tour. Even just a few months ago I might have laughed dismissively if someone had told me that all of
this would be possible.

  We went to brunch today with dear friends. Afterward, we walked along Lake Michigan with Lilly and Penny. It was a nice Sunday; it was all pretty ordinary, much like something we would have done in our former life. Except, in one big way, it was different. In the old days, I would not have paused every few minutes to think: I’m so grateful for this moment; I’m so grateful that we are doing this together.

  When we got home from our walk, Dave was humming a Bee Gees melody and so I pulled up that song on my iPhone and we danced to the recorded version. “Hey, Dave!” I said, clapping to the music. Lilly looked on, amused. “Guess what the name of this song is that you were humming.”

  “What?” Dave asked, shaking his hips as the music played.

  “ ‘Stayin’ Alive!’ Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive! Stayin’ alive!” I pointed at him. “No wonder you have it stuck in your head! You know about staying alive!”

  Now, as we sit side by side, our daughter naps in the next room and our dog snores with her head on Dave’s lap. Dave remembers our dog once more—boy, does he remember our dog. I’m back to being the third wheel in many of their cuddles, and I could not be happier about it.

  I’m reading a book, and Dave is reading from his letters—his “Dave Fan Club” book. He’s read these letters before; he read them in July when we first got home from RIC, but he does not remember them. Now, as he makes his way through them again, alternating between laughter and low, emotional groans, it is as if he is seeing these words for the first time. Absorbing the love and admiration that so many people feel for him, steeping in the support that so many loved ones rallied to send his way. It’s like he gets a glimpse of his own funeral, a peek at all of the eulogies that loved ones might have written in his honor, only now he gets to weave these words into the fabric of his life moving forward.