And, worse yet, it’s your story, too.
By midnight my mom had finally arrived, having found a family friend to come over and watch the kids so that she could get to the hospital and relieve my dad. She walked into Brad’s room, catching her first glimpse of him tethered to every tube imaginable and breathing with the help of whirring machines. The three of us—my mom, my dad, and me—all quietly hugged. And then my dad left, too choked up to say anything else.
“I want to get you out of here for a while,” my mom said, giving me a one-armed hug. “Who knows how long Brad will be here. You need to make sure that you get some rest. Otherwise you’ll be no use to anyone.”
“You should,” said a nurse behind her. “You have a long road ahead. You need to get all the rest you can right now so that you’ll be ready.”
“But we can’t just…go, can we?” I asked my mom. “We can’t just leave him.”
“Catherine, you could be here for weeks. Months even. There is no place for you to sleep here, and you’re going to have to rest at some point. We’ll be back in a few hours, but you need to get out of here.”
We started gathering up my things and moving toward the door. I suddenly heard Brad making noise and I rushed over to his side, hoping that he was about to wake up. I stood there holding his hand and staring at him as if willing him to start talking to me like nothing had happened. And then I realized what the sound really was.
My God. Was he choking?
I left my mother in the room and ran to find the nurse. I pulled her in, saying, “Do something! He’s choking!”
She remained irritatingly calm as she took out her stethoscope and checked his vitals. I could not figure out why she wasn’t as alarmed as I was, and the fact that she wasn’t running out the door for more medical personnel made me want to hit her over the head with a bedpan. “He’s not choking,” she finally said. “He’s got the hiccups. It’s not uncommon.”
“Can’t you do anything about it? He’s got broken ribs. That can’t feel good.”
As if to confirm what I was saying, Brad jolted upright in bed, the first activity I’d seen from him in hours.
“Feel bad,” he said with his eyes still shut, collapsing back onto his pillow.
“Brad? Brad?” I said, taking his hand again and hoping that he would say something else.
“He’ll be fine,” the nurse said and walked out of the room. I sat next to him for a few more minutes, feeling helpless. My suspicion that he was in pain had finally been confirmed, even though everyone had been assuring me that he wasn’t feeling anything. I waited until the painful hiccups subsided and Brad was quiet once again, his breathing slow and measured, his body relaxed.
“Cath?” said my mom from the other side of Brad’s bed. “Let’s go get some air.”
Reluctantly, I let go and let her lead me out of the room. I had no idea that “feel bad” were the last words I would ever hear my husband say. But I left, thinking that everyone was right and that I should prepare myself for the marathon of caregiving we all thought loomed before me.
My mom and I checked into the first roach motel I’d ever been to, complete with one working parking-lot light that made me suddenly feel like we were actors in a bad made-for-TV crime drama. If the situation hadn’t been so serious, it would have been comical. As we let ourselves into the room and quickly bolted and chained the door behind us, we took stock of the threadbare blankets and pillows that had the support of good envelopes. I took one look at the shower and decided that it just wasn’t worth the risk of infection.
We each lay in our beds, waiting for the other to fall asleep. I knew my mother was watching for movement, and I was doing my best to stay still and stare straight up so that she would go to sleep and get some rest. I tried to make designs with the popcorn on the ceiling that was illuminated by that one dim light in the parking lot, badly wanting to numb my mind from the fear that was circling around, trying to sneak its way in.
But it was stronger than I was.
Silent tears started streaming down the sides of my face, and I heard my mom move from her bed to mine. She wrapped me up like a two-year-old as I hiccuped my way through, “Oh God. What’s going to happen to us? What am I going to do? How do we move forward from this? How can I handle a man in a wheelchair and three toddlers?”
“Shhhhh.” She rocked me back and forth. “It’s okay. You won’t be alone. We’re here. We’re going to figure this out.”
“I can’t just lie here anymore,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I need to be with Brad.”
So, my mom and I made our way back to the hospital after spending only hours in that motel room (something I felt sure that the management was used to). At 5:00 a.m., the doctors took Brad in for a CT, and when they were finished, they led us into a windowless room no bigger than a walk-in closet and sat us down.
Dr. Robins, the gray-haired trauma doctor who had been following Brad since his admittance into the ER the day before, cleared his throat several times as if trying to cough up the words he didn’t actually want to say.
“Catherine.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Brad’s brain is swelling. And at the rate it’s going, I don’t think he’s going to live past the next seventy-two hours.”
I heard my mother inhale sharply, and she suddenly turned to me, her blue eyes wider than I had ever seen them.
I grabbed her hand and said in disbelief, “Did I have the stroke? Is Brad really okay and I’m in a coma, dreaming this whole thing up?”
I watched her mouth working as if she was trying to say something.
But nothing came out.
2
I’ve seen TV shows and dramatic movies where once the soon-to-be widow has been given the tragic news, she falls to her knees in a theatrical heap, screaming and crying that her life is over.
I didn’t do that.
But I knew everyone was watching and waiting to see how I was going to react. And I felt guilty that I didn’t feel like reacting. After all, if there was ever a time when making a scene would be forgiven, this would have been it. But my body had suddenly gone numb.
I walked back into his room and took in the changes that had been made that morning. The small oxygen tubes that had been in his nose the night before had been replaced by an ominous-looking blue hose that was hooked to his mouth and made even more noise than the machine before. He was bound in blankets, his bed sitting up at a comfortable angle, but his coloring had changed. Instead of looking like a man who might be coming home someday, he had taken on the pallor of someone who would never open his eyes. Who would never hold his children. Who would never hold me.
It scared me that I didn’t feel like crying. To be honest, it made me feel like a cold, heartless bitch, and if I felt that way, I couldn’t imagine how my attitude was being perceived. And so I walked into Brad’s room with many eyes watching me and I somewhat threw myself across his chest.
“Oh, Brad!” I forced a sob. “Oh, sweetie! Don’t go!”
And for some reason, I felt like that little display made the other people around me feel a little better.
I’m not saying that I wasn’t sad. I was. But I was in complete shock. Anyone who has been given information suddenly like that can’t possibly fathom the enormity of it all. Because if the body let all of those emotions in at one time, I feel sure that it would shut down.
“Ah, yes,” everyone was probably thinking with relief after my public display of grief. “There she goes. For a second there it looked like she was going to keep everything bottled up. Whew! She’s doing this right. That’s right, kiddo. Get it out so that you’ll be fine in a few weeks.”
In reality, this was it. A defining moment for me. This was when my ability to react “properly” grabbed my sense of normalcy by the hand, suddenly did an about-face, and left me for good. From the moment I heard the words “He’s no
t going to make it,” my life changed from disgustingly boring to “She’s doing what?” I went from no one really noticing (or caring about) my responses to feeling like people were counting the number of tears I shed or how many times I probably shouldn’t be smiling.
What began to happen then was that time slowed, sped up, and then stopped in an unexplainable pattern. One minute I would think that the clock was broken, and the next it seemed to have jumped ahead two hours. People came in and out. New nurses began their shifts. Kristi arrived, looking scared and pale, and I felt a rush of relief when I saw her.
Although we have always been incredibly close and think a lot alike, I’ve always thought of my older sister as the more capable of the two of us. A woman with a wicked sense of humor and no time for bullshit, she would get this whole mess straightened out. I was sure of it. But when she saw me standing in the waiting room of the ICU, she took me by the shoulders and looked me straight in the eye.
“Cath,” she said, tearing up. “You know how people blow things off by saying, ‘Oh…this isn’t the worst thing’?”
She took a deep breath.
“This is the worst thing.”
I stared at her, stunned with disbelief that even Kristi couldn’t make this go away. And for some reason, that seemed to confirm without a doubt that this was actually happening.
We all took turns pacing back and forth between Brad’s room and a smaller, separate waiting room within the confines of the ICU that we, all at once, seemed to have taken over. I began to feel the need to sit on the floor because I had reached a point where I could no longer sit in chairs, sure that the spinning gravity in the room would knock me down at any moment. In the corner, I would rock with my knees to my chin and my arms trying to hold my legs as close to my body as possible. I needed to feel grounded. I needed for my body to feel stable. I needed to feel the structure of the walls holding me up.
“Mrs. Tidd?” I heard from the doorway of the waiting room. My sister and my parents turned to look at the chubby, gray-haired man wearing suspenders and a cheerful rose color on the apples of his cheeks.
“Yes?” I said from the floor in the corner.
He walked over and sat down in a chair in front of me as if he was used to talking to people who couldn’t stand up. One of Brad’s nurses followed and shut the door behind her while my family circled around so they could hear what he had to say.
In a daze, I listened to the doctor explain to me that there was an option, a possibility of keeping Brad alive. “We’ll remove part of his skull,” he explained. “That will give the brain room to swell. There’s a good chance that he still won’t make it. But I wanted to give you that option.”
Needing someone to explain this procedure to me in plain English and knowing that most doctors aren’t capable of that, I turned to the nurse and asked her to really tell me what he was talking about. She gave me the statistics—that if they did the surgery there was still only a 5 percent chance that he would make it—and then I asked her, “But what will he be like if he lives through it? Can he make a full recovery?”
She knelt in front of me and forced me to look her straight in the eye.
“Sweetie,” she said in a quiet tone. “If he survives the surgery, he won’t ever know you. He won’t ever recognize his children. He won’t be able to feed himself. If he makes it, you’ll have to put him in a nursing home with twenty-four-hour care for the rest of his life.”
I looked at her with wide eyes and forced myself to swallow. For the first time, I felt the need to run from this situation as fast as I could. They could carry on without me. There were plenty of people more capable than I was to make this decision. I mean, I wasn’t even smart enough to know how to set the clock on my VCR.
Were they really going to leave a decision like this to a thirty-one-year-old woman who had almost failed every science class she’d ever taken?
I started thinking about a day just weeks earlier when Brad and I and the kids had visited my grandmother in the nursing home. We walked the halls, looking at people limp in their wheelchairs who were having an “outing” that involved just getting them out of their rooms so that their beds could be changed, and Brad said to me, “I hope something like this never happens to me. Promise me you’ll do anything you can to keep from putting me in a nursing home.”
“I promise.”
As I sat there, rocking on the floor, I glanced up at Kristi, who looked more terrified than I’d ever seen her. My dad looked like he would prefer jumping off the top of the building than watching his youngest daughter make this decision. And my mom watched me with watery eyes, waiting to hear what I thought.
“I don’t think I can do that,” I said. “I don’t think he would like that. Do you? What do you think? I just can’t do that to him.”
I watched them all exchange silent glances as if telepathically agreeing what should be done. And then my family performed one of the greatest acts of bravery I have encountered before or since.
They backed me up.
“He wouldn’t want that.”
“Brad would hate to live that way.”
“We’re with you 100 percent.”
I suddenly found myself, the proactive worrier, living in the moment because it was safer than picturing a future that I could no longer imagine. Finances. The house. What health insurance would cover from all of this and what it wouldn’t. The kids. College. All of it tried to break its way into my mind.
So, in that moment, I decided to focus on a more immediate problem.
The fact that we were waiting for my in-laws to arrive so that we could give them the news.
3
Brad’s family had taken off early that morning to catch a flight from Pittsburgh to Denver and had assured me that they would be at the hospital by noon. Since they left so early, the last thing they knew was the information I had given them on the phone the night before: that Brad had had the stroke. I found out that he wasn’t going to make it while they were on the plane, and I really didn’t think this was news I should deliver over a cell phone while they were waiting to pick up their rental car.
So we waited. And waited.
After hours of torture, it occurred to me that my in-laws never get anywhere on time. It’s hard to even get them all going in the same direction at the grocery store, much less off a plane, into a rental car, and to a final destination in another town. Normally this little idiosyncrasy is just a trait to be chuckled over, but at that point, the waiting was about to drive me completely insane.
I started to worry that even though the doctors had given Brad seventy-two hours, my in-laws might not be able to make what would normally be a two-hour drive from the airport before he died.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wasn’t the only one who was in panic mode over when my in-laws would arrive. Kristi kept running back and forth from Brad’s room to the main lobby, trying to intercept her husband, Sean. He’d jumped on a flight home to Denver from Seattle, where he’d been on business, the moment he heard the news. Knowing that he not only thought of Brad as a brother but also a best friend, Kristi realized that Sean would probably be somewhat of a weeping mess and was petrified that he would walk into the hospital at the same time as my in-laws, who didn’t know the full extent of what was happening.
But, thankfully, they missed each other’s grand entrances. As I sat, holding Brad’s hand, I heard the soft voice of the nurse behind me.
“Brad’s brother is here.”
Looking up and expecting to see Brad’s younger brother, Jeremy, I saw Sean in his usual business attire, his face red and tear-stained, so choked up he couldn’t say anything as he pulled up a chair and took his place next to his friend.
The room was quiet with just the two of us sitting there. At one point, Sean left and I watched him go into the hall and ask the nurse for the results of Brad’s CT,
something I knew wouldn’t make any sense to him, but it didn’t matter. It was something tangible that might explain why all of this was happening. I watched as he nodded and asked the most educated medical questions a business consultant could possibly come up with. But in the end, he never got the answer he was looking for, because no one could ever successfully explain how a perfectly healthy thirty-four-year-old man could suddenly be dying in a hospital bed.
That is something we would never understand, even if the experts had an answer.
Time stretched on, and by three, my in-laws still hadn’t arrived. I started worrying that they had gone to the wrong hospital or that, Heaven forbid, something had happened to them during all of this madness. I stayed in Brad’s room, staring at the clock and clenching my teeth while my parents, my sister, and my pastor, Doug, waited for them outside the doors to the ICU. And that’s where, at 3:30 p.m., Bonnie, Jim, Brad’s younger brother Jeremy and his wife Bobbie Jo, his sister Brenda, and his two-year-old niece Amanda finally heard that he wasn’t going to make it.
It seems cowardly, doesn’t it? That I made my family and my pastor perform my dirty work for me? And it was, in a way. Since my in-laws were a very religious family, I was hoping that Doug might have some words that would comfort them as they were told the news, words that completely escaped me. And after losing their oldest son, Jeffrey, when he was only four years old, I couldn’t bear to tell them that they were about to lose another one thirty years later. Part of my fear was that I couldn’t stand being the person who was about to bring their whole world crashing down around them. But what I was really scared of was that, somehow, they might blame me for the situation we now all found ourselves in.
As many widows do, I had been going over and over what had happened, trying to figure out what I could have done to stop it. This is a complete waste of time, but most of us do it anyway. And as I sat there waiting for them in the hospital, I obsessed about the decisions I had made over the entire course of our marriage, especially in the last thirty-six hours, wondering where my in-laws’ blame might land.
Confessions of a Mediocre Widow Page 3