by Abby Maslin
Others may wish to be included in the gritty details of TC’s injury, to share in the burden of maintaining my life, but my sister is one of the few I will allow this insider’s view. She is twenty-eight years old, one year into a weighty law career at the Department of the Interior, and most likely shell-shocked by her sudden invitation into domestic life: diaper changing, grocery shopping, and navigating eight hundred square feet of living space with a cranky, emotional spouse. Who, in this case, is me.
I need Bethany here, cannot bear the thought that she might’ve stayed in Portland, and yet I grouse at her for all the same things we’ve needled each other about for all our lives.
“Would it kill you to hang the towels up when you’re finished?” I hear myself lament after we’ve fallen into our roommate routine. Equal parts playfulness, annoyance, and ingratitude are detectable in my voice.
“Jesus, Abby,” she says, dismissing me. “You’re gonna have to deal with your house not being perfect right now. I’m sorry, but really.”
Bethany’s right. But I am a neat freak married to another neat freak, now living with a slob, and each mess sparks another twinge of out-of-control mania. So badly do I want this foreign life to resemble my old life that I am forcing that resemblance in each stupid area I can, still unwilling to shrug my shoulders and concede that I am the unemployed thirty-year-old wife of a severely disabled man, essentially the single mother of a toddler, and the cosigner of a mortgage I no longer know how I’ll pay.
Bethany is patient with me. She sits with me in the darkness of my own apprehension. She pours the Pinot Grigio and keeps her mouth shut when I go sit out on the stoop with a Parliament in hand. She watches me pick at my food as my muscles disappear and my face thins and I start to physically embody the old lady who has moved into my soul. She knows I will not be talked out of my depression. That I cannot indulge it during the day, so I reserve it solely for night, solely for her company. She knows that heartbreak is heartbreak. And that there are no significant words of consolation she or anyone else might offer. It simply is. I simply have to make my way through it.
CHAPTER 10
From our first days in the ICU, I was surprised to find doctors were eager to get TC into therapy. Every day, without fail, even on the days he was still mostly comatose, a physical therapist, an occupational therapist, and a speech therapist have knocked on his door, ready to start the work of rehabilitation. One day I am sitting in the armchair beside TC’s bed when Kerry, his physical therapist, knocks on his door, ready for the day’s session.
“Hey!” she says brightly. “We’re gonna try to get TC out of bed today. How does that sound?”
I nod in confused agreement, wondering how on earth she’s planning to turn water into wine when my husband is still barely conscious, capable of little more than the thrashing and scooting I’ve observed during his most alert moments.
But try to rouse TC she does, placing a thick plastic helmet on top of his head, as she explains that it’s a safety accessory he’ll be required to wear until the eventual surgery that will reattach his skull piece.
It is like watching a dying horse get forcefully pulled to its feet. TC is cajoled out of bed only through Kerry’s vocal and persistent demands. Kerry, who, at no more than 120 pounds herself, places a canvas strap around TC’s waist and hoists with all her strength to get him from the bed to the armchair. Once seated, he immediately slumps to one side, unable to support the weight of his upper body in an upright position.
“Very good, TC!” Kerry says, continuing to encourage him. She turns to me, upbeat. “This is impressive, you know. For someone just coming out of a coma.”
I nod at my husband’s slouched, defeated body. He looks like a drunk, settling in for the night in the corner of a bar booth. It doesn’t feel impressive; it feels sad. I’m not so naive as to expect overnight miracles, but the reality is jarring. Any progress moving forward is likely to be tiny and incremental. I must learn to celebrate each minor victory.
“It’s important we get him moving as much as possible,” she reminds me. “He’s been in bed for days now and on a feeding tube. His muscles will atrophy quickly.”
While I’m eager to see how much mobility TC has a shot of regaining, it is his speech on which I am keeping my most careful eye. Aphasia is a word now regularly being mentioned in conversations with TC’s team of physicians, and my growing understanding of this speech disorder is that, like language, it is multifaceted. While aphasia is commonly thought of as the loss of words, there are multiple kinds of aphasia. It is still too early to tell whether TC’s comprehension, his ability to understand oral and written speech, has been affected or if his challenges will be limited to the formation of sounds.
In any event, we won’t know more until he is fully off the ventilator, his trach tube has been removed, and he passes the infamous swallow test, an X-ray exam in which a therapist will test his ability to pass liquids and other substances through his esophagus. All of these milestones must be met before TC can move forward in speech therapy.
“Does he know who you are?” is the common question of many acquaintances. It is puzzling, people’s concern with amnesia, when I am more preoccupied with TC’s ability to ever communicate again.
Something, however, tells me amnesia is unlikely. Not only has no one mentioned it as a serious possibility (perhaps doctors are simply focused on more pressing matters), but I feel certain that TC recognizes me. As his eyes stay open for longer periods of the day, I can sense recognition in the way he looks at me, particularly during those frightened moments in which someone unfamiliar has entered the room. My presence seems to have a calming influence on him, one I try to take advantage of by making myself useful to the rest of his team.
One of my chief tasks during the day is to assist with respiratory therapy, a strange treatment that involves turning TC on his side and pounding on his back with a large vibrating cylinder. The goal is to break up the remaining mucus in his lungs, so that it can eventually be suctioned out. But TC hates it. The therapists roll him so we are eye to eye, and I hold him still as the pounding begins.
I suppress the urge to cringe as I allow nurses to show me how to insert a long, plastic tube into TC’s trach and pull out the pink-tinged mucus that coats his lungs. The mucus is a sign he’s coughing up the final dregs of pneumonia, and the machine next to his bed indicates that he’s finally beginning to participate in his own breathing again. These small indicators of progress give me relief, but there are times in which caring for TC feels so intrusive, I consider making excuses to leave the room. Over the years, I’ve seen how this type of brutal intimacy has made it difficult for my parents, especially my mother, to return to the roles of husband and wife. If I see too much, will I begin to feel more like TC’s nurse than I do his wife? Is this even a question caregivers are allowed to ponder?
I’ve never known my husband’s body like this. The mechanics of it. The excretions. The fluids. The first time I memorized TC, I did so as an invited visitor, learning it through touch. Now I am one on a team of mechanics, standing next to it in stunned observation, waiting to take a look under the engine.
Throughout the day, nurses change his catheter and exchange the sheets beneath him. They hold the back of his gown together to protect his privacy as they roll him out of bed. As the days turn into weeks, a dark, thick beard begins to shadow the lower half of TC’s face, causing him to more closely resemble a man I recognize only from photos—a man who recently told Sean on a phone call, “Thanks for letting me know. Have TC call me when he’s better,” after learning of his son’s violent assault.
I nearly fell to my knees when Sean informed me of their father’s reaction. Why bother telling him? I longed to scream, so outraged I could barely form the words. Instead, I let the fury pulse through me, managing only to utter to Sean, “Never tell your brother about this. Promise me, never.”
I beg nurses to shave TC. Not only is this bearded man not my husband; he is my husband’s greatest heartache. But they are bound by the rules. “Blood thinners,” they explain apologetically. “We can’t take a chance he might bleed.”
TC’s body has always been a source of beauty and pleasure, but every day at the hospital I am reminded that it is, primarily, an instrument of function. That beneath olive skin and soft eyelashes, he is identical to every other living being: a fragile ecosystem of inhalations, exhalations, and heartbeats.
And now that we are without communication, without words, I must learn to speak to him in that place—the most fundamental part of his being. The part of him that is still TC.
* * *
There’s this phenomenon that occurs during the moments of gravest crisis: as one boulder falls, shattering everything in its wake, the others dangle in suspension. With TC demanding every molecule of my attention, it’s as if everyone else in my life has received a memo requiring them to pull up their britches and hold it together. Even Jack.
There is so much to love about my sweet boy, I must resist the temptation to list his every magical quality. If I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop, and quickly I’d find myself rattling off a laundry list that would make me sound as obnoxious and hopelessly subjective as any new parent.
I’ll say only this: that some babies are born happy and that Jack was one of them. He came out smiling, seemingly destined for a lifetime of melodic giggling at people’s funny faces. I’ve never loved TC as much as I loved watching him journey into parenthood. It didn’t matter that Jack was tiny and idle for so many months, attached to my breast and unable to be jostled. Those traditionally male expressions of father-son bonding seemed completely antiquated to my husband. He treated each dip in Jack’s whale-shaped bathtub as if he were painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, gently scrubbing at the skin of Jack’s delicate neck folds, stoically confident in his bath-time dexterity.
The joy we derived from parenting only made our initial hesitancy more absurd in retrospect. If we were worried parenting would upend our lives as young people, we’d have been wise to have reminded ourselves we’d never truly known that feeling of being footloose and fancy free anyway. For as nearly as long as TC and I have been together, we’ve been facing some kind of major transition, parenting being the easiest and happiest transition of all. With Jack, we had nothing to fear.
I should worry about my son more than I do right now, but I am as confident in him as I am in all the people taking care of him. It is on my to-do list of items to come later: concern myself with the trauma in Jack’s young life. For now, the precious minutes we spend together at home after visiting hours keep me going. They are my reminder of everything that’s still good.
“Mama!” He falls into my arms when I pick him up from Rachel and Mladen’s house at the end of the day. I scoop his tubby legs onto my lap.
His nanny, Mallet, hugs me tight and looks in my eyes with concern. “How’s Mr. TC?” she asks. She asks me this question every afternoon, and it breaks my heart with gratitude that she cares enough to repeat it each day.
“He’s hanging in there.” I force a little smile. Any other explanation takes much too long. In fact, conveying any meaningful update about TC’s progress is becoming increasingly difficult to do. Every explanation requires more time and more commitment from the listener than I’m sure anyone wants to sign up for.
My sister devises a creative solution to the problem. “You should start a blog,” she suggests one afternoon. “People can’t possibly get it. But it’s not their fault. So just tell them what the situation is. Only the people who care will read it anyway.”
I don’t know the first thing about writing a blog, but I throw together a quick page on Google and fire off my thoughts in one raw and emotional purge.
I can’t envision the TC I knew two weeks ago. I can’t hear his voice in my head or imagine him talking to Jack or giving me a kiss or sleeping next to me. I can’t do these things because the anger that lives inside of me rushes to the front of my brain, making me want to scream, throw things, sob uncontrollably, and seek vengeance.
Who is this man lying in the hospital day after day? His left eye puffy, protruding from his head. His swollen skull held together by 50 staples. His right limbs tensed, unable to move. His neck invaded by a wide tube that sucks out bloody mucus so grotesque that I actually have to turn away. This man, this stranger, is my husband—the kindest, most intelligent, most caring human I have ever known. There is no one on this planet less deserving of the hell he is in.
Later that night I am uptown, sitting in a three-hour graduate class I must complete to maintain my teaching license, when I check my blog once more. Five thousand hits. Five thousand hits in a matter of hours. Who is reading about my husband? I wonder.
Everything in life is wild and foreign now, so I file away this unexpected response along with all the other wild and foreign information I have yet to make sense of. I’ll wait to try to understand it later.
* * *
Like my son, my father is another one of those relegated to the suck-it-up category during this time. TC and I have been keeping a steady eye on my dad ever since his stroke seven months ago, but suddenly he is the furthest thought from my mind.
For the first time since he became sick, I feel I have nothing to give to the situation anymore. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s just that at this moment, all forms of care are a luxury. For now, it will have to be my mom’s job to keep my dad standing, even if it means she has less capacity to be there for me. My mother is well versed in emergencies at this point. Hell, from the day of TC’s assault, Kate snapped into gear with the same efficiency she’d shown during my father’s liver transplant. Start a binder, she instructed me. Keep every medical document inside it. I won’t bother you until you tell me you need me.
My mom is good like that. She’s no fuss, no nonsense: one of those houseplants that requires minimal maintenance, like an aloe shrub or a ficus. She never calls on the phone unless it’s with a predetermined question: which website to use to buy plane tickets, a reminder of Jack’s diaper size, please. Other than that, I don’t have to worry about neglecting her.
The fact that I’ve begun calling her “Kate” rather than “Mom” over the past few years only lends itself to the evolving dynamic of our relationship. We are increasingly equals, more friends than kin. More partners than blood.
Four years of caregiving for my dad has fostered our parallel dependences on late-night coffee (cream and just a dash of sugar for me, a double dash for her) and subsequent bursts of adrenaline. Sometimes I worry my sister feels wedged out. Law school kept her at a physical distance for much of my father’s illness, and now her budding career keeps her occupied as well. It’s not that Bethany has any reason to be envious of my mother’s and my shared waiting-room experience; she just seems frustrated not to be able to engage with us separately.
“You guys are literally the same person,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’s funny how you pretend you can’t get along sometimes.”
She’s probably right. It’s one of those enlightening and unexpected lessons I am learning as the years roll on: that I am as much my mother as I am my father.
Growing up, I resisted being anything like my mom. Nothing ever seemed to be good enough for Kate Sullivan. It didn’t matter if we were vacationing in a villa in Tuscany or parked in front of the couch watching our Friday night sitcoms; it always felt as if she was never at ease, always stressed about some small way we were failing her.
“A fucking PhD from Notre Dame and your father still can’t figure out how to throw away an empty milk carton,” she’d snap, as I watched her rifle through the refrigerator.
My mom liked order. Depended on order. Could not function without order in her living environment, and yet she was the only one in our family of four who seemed to
value it in any large measure. For all the connection that motherhood supposedly promises, it is also painfully isolating. For my mom, motherhood seemed to illuminate two facts: one, that she was responsible for managing the load of a busy household, and two, that no one else had a vested interest in helping.
She didn’t mother like the other mothers I knew. Kate didn’t bake cookies or sew costumes or pack school lunches. She was a working mom, a full-time school librarian at the K-8 school in which I’d also been a student, and her time was almost solely devoted to that room of books she’d single-handedly built following a whim to volunteer.
I couldn’t recognize the fire that stoked inside her, her unwillingness to identify herself as only a mother. Life kept trying to push her into that role, first at nineteen when she became pregnant with my half brother (a marriage that quickly ended), then again at thirty-one when she became a mother to me, and once more two years later with Bethany. She wanted children, but she resisted the total sacrifice of self that society seemed to demand along with it.
That a mom could have her own dreams never occurred to me. That she might not be satisfied living in the shadow of her successful husband was a revelatory idea. And that she might love her children at the same time that she begrudged the nuts and bolts of mothering was unconscionable. After all, they couldn’t be separated, could they? A mother’s love for her children and her commitment to fulfilling their every need?
If it was the internal conflict of that struggle that made her hard, I don’t how or when she softened, but it happened. Perhaps it’s when she started needing my help to take care of my father and I finally learned how to intuit those needs. Perhaps it’s when I saw the life go out of my dad’s face, and my mother stare longingly into it, waiting for him to come back, that I realized she wasn’t all nails inside.