I admired a lot about my dad, and I tried to remember those things when I felt mad at him. Once, when I’d been along on one of his house calls, I watched him tell a sick farm woman she was going to be all right before he left or he wasn’t leaving. He held her hand and told her stories. He got her to laugh and then he got her out of bed. She said “Why, Doc, I do feel better.”
I asked him later how he knew she would get better. “I didn’t,” he said. “But if you don’t push too hard and you keep their morale up, most patients will get things fixed up themselves.” I wanted to ask why he didn’t treat his own family that way, but I thought better of it.
If I wanted to be by myself, I would retreat to a river birch by the stream that fed our pond. It forked at ground level, and I’d wedge my back up against one trunk and my feet against the other. Then I would look at the sky or read or pretend.
That summer I hadn’t had much time for my tree. One evening as my father and I walked past it, he said, “I remember you scrunchin’ into that tree when you were a little kid.”
“I don’t,” I said sullenly.
He looked at me sharply. “What’s got into you?” he said.
Amazingly, I heard myself say, “What the hell do you care?” Then I ran off to the barn. Sitting in the tack room, I tried not to cry.
My father opened the door and sat opposite me. Finally I met his gaze.
“It’s not a good idea to doctor your own family,” he said. “But I guess I need to do that for you right now.” He leaned forward. “Let’s see. You feel strange in your own body, like it doesn’t work the same way it always had. You think no one else is like you. And you think I’m too hard on you and don’t appreciate what you do around here. You even wonder how you got into a family as dull as ours.”
I was astonished that he knew my most treacherous night thoughts.
“The thing is, your body is changing,” he continued. “And that changes your entire self. You’ve got a lot more male hormones in your blood. And, Son, there’s not a man in this world who could handle what that does to you when you’re fourteen.”
I didn’t know what to say. I knew I didn’t like whatever was happening to me. For months I’d felt out of touch with everything. I was irritable and restless and sad for no reason. And because I couldn’t talk about it, I began to feel really isolated.
“One of the things that’ll help you,” my dad said after a while, “is work. Hard work.”
As soon as he said that, I suspected it was a ploy to keep me busy doing chores. Anger came suddenly. “Fine,” I said in the rudest voice I could manage. Then I stormed out.
When my father said work he meant work. I dug post holes every morning, slamming that digger into the ground until I had tough calluses on my hands.
One morning I helped my father patch the barn roof. We worked in silence. In the careful way my father worked, I could see how he felt about himself, the barn, the whole farm. I was sure he didn’t know what it was like to be on the outside looking in.
Just then, he looked at me and said, “You aren’t alone you know.”
Startled, I stared at him, squatting above me with the tar bucket in his hand. How could he possibly know what I’d been thinking?
“Think about this,” he said. “If you drew a line from your feet down the side of our barn to the earth and followed it any which way, it would touch every living thing in the world. So you’re never alone. No one is.”
I started to argue, but the notion of being connected to all of life made me feel so good that I let my thoughts quiet down.
As I worked through the summer, I began to notice my shoulders getting bigger. I was able to do more work, and I even started paying some attention to doing it well. I had hated hole-digging, but it seemed to release some knot inside me, as if the anger I felt went driving into the earth. Slowly I started to feel I could get through this rotten time.
One day near the end of the summer, I got rid of a lot of junk from my younger days. Afterward I went to sit in my tree as a kind of last visit to the world of my boyhood. I had to scuttle up eight feet to get space enough for my body. As I stretched out, I could feel the trunk beneath my feet weakening. Something had gotten at it—ants, maybe, or just plain age.
I pushed harder. Finally, the trunk gave way and fell to the ground. Then I cut up my tree for firewood.
The afternoon I finished the fence, I found my father sitting on a granite outcrop in the south pasture. “You thinking about how long this grass is going to hold out with rain?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “How long you think we got?”
“Another week. Easy.”
He turned and looked me deep in the eyes. Of course I wasn’t really talking about the pasture as much as I was trying to find out if my opinion mattered to him. After a while he said, “You could be right.” He paused and added, “You did a fine job on our fence.”
“Thanks,” I said almost overwhelmed by the force of his approval.
“You know,” he said, “you’re going to turn out to be one hell of a man. But just because you’re getting grown up doesn’t mean you have to leave behind everything you liked when you were a boy.”
I knew he was thinking about my tree. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of wood the size of a deck of cards. “I made this for you,” he said.
It was a piece of the heartwood from the river birch. He had carved it so the tree appeared again, tall and strong. Beneath were the words “Our Tree.”
Leaving the Miami stadium that day, I saw the man and the boy walking toward the parking lot. The man’s arm rested comfortably on his son’s shoulder. I didn’t know how they’d made their peace, but it seemed worth acknowledging. As I passed, I tipped my cap—to them, and to my memories of the past.
Mother Courage
By Linda Kramer Jenning
June 2009
Every morning, Becky Ziegel gets anxious. Just before ten, sitting at her kitchen counter with a cup of coffee, she tries to concentrate on the day ahead. But her eyes keep drifting to the cell phone at her elbow. Where is the text message from Ty?
“If I don’t hear from him,” she says, “it’s panic time. I’ll call him, and if he doesn’t answer, I’m in my car. I’ll drive over to his house with my heart pounding so hard, I can feel it in my neck.”
Now a chiming sound signals a new message, and Becky’s shoulders relax as she reads it: “Brain and bodily functions seem to be working as ‘normally’ as possible.” She can head upstairs to her sewing room knowing that her son made it through another night.
“I’d be dead if my parents weren’t within driving distance,” says Tyler Ziegel, who is 26 and lives in his own place about ten miles from his family’s home in Metamora, Illinois. Ty, a former Marine, is officially retired from the military, with disability compensation for the massive injuries he sustained in a suicide bombing in western Iraq. He lost part of his left arm and right hand, most of his face, and a piece of his brain. Today, he has recovered enough to function without constant care, but seizures and other health problems have sent him to the ER four times in recent months.
In 2006, two years after he was wounded, Ty wed his hometown sweetheart, Renee Kline, to whom he had proposed between his two deployments to Iraq. The event drew worldwide media attention. But the marriage unraveled, and the couple divorced after a year. (“We grew apart, went our own ways,” says Ty, with practical detachment.) Since then, Becky, like thousands of mothers of disabled vets, has been her son’s main caregiver. While Ty credits his whole family and his friends for rallying around him, he singles her out. “My mom has been awesome,” he says. “She’s been there for me through everything.”
“I unloaded him, and now he’s back,” Becky says, laughing. She drives him to appointments at the Veterans Af
fairs clinic in nearby Peoria and the VA hospital more than two hours away in Danville. She makes sure he eats well and takes his medications. She helps him with the housecleaning and bill paying. And, of course, she checks every morning that her son is still breathing.
“I’m the mom,” she says. “This is what I do.”
Becky is 49 and the mother of two Marines, both of whom joined up after high school. Ty shipped out to Iraq for his second tour in the summer of 2004, shortly after his little brother, Zach, left for boot camp. With both boys gone, Becky admits, she “did the happy dance.” She and her husband, Jeff, 56, a heavy-equipment operator, finally had an empty nest. “I was thinking, They’re grown; they don’t need me anymore. Who do I want to be?” She considered taking some college classes; she planned to visit friends she hadn’t seen in years.
One day in December, Ty was on patrol in Anbar province when an Iraqi insurgent detonated a carload of explosives beside the convoy’s troop truck. Of the seven men on board, Ty took the hardest hit. A buddy pulled him out and smothered the flames. Ty was evacuated to a military hospital at Balad Air Base, where surgeons worked to save his life.
Becky was getting ready to wrap Christmas presents when a Marine officer called with the news. When Jeff handed her the phone, she didn’t cry but pumped the officer for information. He could offer little more than a sketchy description of the attack and Ty’s injuries. The house soon filled with relatives and friends.
From Balad, Ty was flown 17 hours to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. The Fisher House Foundation—a national nonprofit that aids and temporarily houses the families of wounded soldiers—arranged for plane tickets for Becky and Jeff, along with Ty’s fiancée, Renee, and Zach, who was just home on leave. They got to Brooke on Christmas Eve.
A neurologist filled them in on Ty’s condition. Surgeons at Balad had removed the shrapnel-pierced part of his left frontal lobe. It was too soon to know if his mental capability or his personality would be altered, if he would be paralyzed, if he’d even wake up at all. Everything above his waist was severely burned. “They really didn’t expect him to make it,” says Becky.
When the family entered Ty’s room, they found him wrapped in bandages with a tube protruding from his head. “We couldn’t see his face,” Becky recalls. “But his legs poked out, and I could see the crossed-rifles tattoo. That’s how I knew it was Ty.”
Ty endured multiple surgeries. His left forearm and three fingers on his right hand were amputated—the thumb, index, and middle. He was kept sedated most of the time. Then, after several weeks, the doctors removed the bandages. “Bits of his face looked like him, only burnt,” Becky says. “I can’t describe the color—charcoal, brown. No ears, no nose.”
Later operations, including one that used a muscle from Ty’s back to cover the exposed part of his brain, changed his appearance even more. For a few months, he wore a lacrosse helmet to protect the area, until a molded prosthetic was inserted and his skull stitched closed. “He went through so many stages of healing that I just grew into how he looked,” says Becky, who says she was more concerned with Ty’s emotional well-being than his physical appearance.
After Ty survived the first critical weeks, his father and brother flew back to Metamora. Becky and Renee stayed behind, moving into a suite at the local Fisher House. The women rotated shifts at Ty’s bedside. They fed him and helped him shower. They stretched his remaining two fingers—both badly burned—to increase their range of motion. “I remember days I’d think, I can’t walk in that room and put on a happy face,” Becky says. “I don’t know how I did it. I just did. My kid.”
Ty, his perception fogged by sedatives and painkillers, only gradually became aware of his disfigurement. Following the doctors’ advice, Becky didn’t volunteer details but waited for him to ask. One day, when he wanted to blow his nose, Ty remarked, “As bad as I was burned, I’m surprised I still have a nose.” Then he saw the look in his mother’s eyes. “No nose?” he said. “I must really look like an alien.”
Once, as they entered a treatment room, Becky wasn’t able to block her son from a full-length mirror. It was the first time he got a good look at himself. Remarkably, he seemed more curious than horrified. As Ty healed, he and Becky made forays into San Antonio to shop and eat, and Becky would stare down gawkers. If Ty was bothered by the attention, he rarely let it show.
That May, Jeff came to visit and brought Becky a ring with three diamonds—past, present, and future—to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. They strolled on San Antonio’s River Walk and took in the sights. Becky had been living at Fisher House for five months. One more anniversary would come and go before she got back home.
She’d never spent much time away from the patch of country outside Peoria where she was raised. The eldest of seven children whose parents separated when she was a teenager, Becky learned to be independent and hardworking and to put others first. She waited on tables during high school and later took a courier job at the hospital where her mother was a registered nurse. She married Jeff at 20, and they bought her grandparents’ old house, which is still her home.
“I never could have imagined living somewhere else and not having family and friends around,” she says. But her 19 months in San Antonio opened up “the little box” of her world. “Now I can go anywhere and make friends and find family.”
Terri Fulkerson, whose daughter was also in the burn unit at Brooke, would sit with Becky in the gazebo outside Fisher House after long days at the hospital and “talk mom.” “That girl could find humor in a rock,” says Terri. “She has a way of pulling laughter out of someone even if their dreams are crashing down around them.”
Becky also became expert at dealing with medical personnel. “I would never have dreamed of arguing with a neurosurgeon before,” she says. She supported the decision to transplant Ty’s big toe to his right hand to create a thumb, though doctors warned it might not work (it did), and stood by when they fitted him with a prosthesis for his left forearm and hand. When he became an outpatient and moved in with Becky and Renee at Fisher House, Becky watched therapists retrain him in skills such as making a bed and loading a dishwasher.
Becky was delighted to see Ty moving toward independence. Aside from headaches, he showed no signs of lasting brain damage. He was as blunt and stubborn as ever and had inherited his mother’s wry humor: He regularly rattled young medics by pointing to himself and warning, “Don’t smoke while shining your boots.”
With Ty making progress, Becky took some time for herself. She walked for miles on a track near the hospital. On the “your-son-getting-blown-up diet,” she shed 60 pounds. She let her short blond perm grow shoulder-length and dyed it auburn.
“I was finding me,” Becky recalls. “I felt better about myself.” She even began doing public speaking to raise support for Fisher House. Then finally, in July 2006, Ty and Becky headed home.
After Ty got married, his mother enrolled in the college courses she’d looked forward to for so long. Even after Ty and Renee separated, Becky held on to her new freedom. Ty stayed in the white clapboard bungalow he’d lived in with his wife. He’d been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but medication helped lessen his anxiety. He spent his time roughhousing with his boxer pup, tinkering with his truck and noodling on his guitar (he’d learned to drive again and to pick out tunes). At night, he’d hit the local bars with friends and even dated a bit.
Then he was struck with a severe sinus infection, which led to two ER visits. The second time, it was the day after Becky had had surgery for a tear in her shoulder. She called Ty and got no answer; Jeff went to check on him and found him dangerously dehydrated. Ty was rushed to the hospital. Jeff suffered a suspected heart attack and landed in the ER himself.
Zach sent an e-mail to Becky from Iraq, where he’d been deployed the previous fall: “What was God thinking? Why does a
ll this stuff have to be happening to us?”
Becky typed back, “Because we can handle it.”
There’d be more to handle. Becky and Jeff couldn’t wake Ty up at his home one evening; at the hospital, he was diagnosed with seizures—a previously undetected result of his brain injury—and prescribed pills to keep them at bay. Yet a few months later, a neighbor found Ty lying semiconscious in his driveway; there was another trip to the ER, where his medication was adjusted.
Becky surfed the Internet researching seizures and has now learned to recognize the warning signals. When Ty began to nod off—a red flag—over breakfast at his grandmother’s recently, Becky persuaded him to come home with her. Hours later, he woke up and asked, “Would you feel comfortable taking me to my place?”
“Honestly, I wouldn’t,” she replied.
Ty complained to Jeff, in mock irritation, “She’s holding me hostage.” Still, later that night, he allowed, “When I’m at your house, Mom, I know everything will be fine.”
At dinnertime, Becky and Jeff are hanging out, waiting for a pizza delivery. The phone rings: Ty asking how to defrost a hot dog bun. Chuckling, Becky imparts some motherly wisdom.
Sometimes—not often—she feels almost overwhelmed by the hand life has dealt her, and she worries. “What if something happens? What if I don’t get there in time? It scares the hell out of me.” She finds comfort, though, in her circle of loved ones and her “second family” of wounded vets and their parents. She tries not to dwell on what she can’t change.
“Ty asked me once if I was angry about what happened to him,” Becky says. “But who would I be angry at? The bomber? He’s dead. Ty? I’m proud of him. I couldn’t pick anybody to be angry at, so I wasn’t angry.”
Her studies on hold, job offers let go, Becky fully expects to pick up where she left off sometime in the future. She imagines the day when Ty will need her less, even marry again. “The woman who ends up with him is going to be lucky,” she says. “I can’t wait till he has his own kids.
Treasury of Joy & Inspiration Page 18