Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music (26 page)

Marooned. This is the word you use. Today, you feel marooned. We talk throughout the day, each of us adrift. Eli and I eat dinner together and then he goes over to Nate’s to kick the soccer ball around. It’s my first time alone, at home, since the accident. The house feels small and unfamiliar and the air has a distinctly unloved quality to it. I am stunned looking at your guitar, Eli’s collection of soccer cleats, the blue bowl on the kitchen table, stunned at how everything looks so clear and sharp but distant. I am a stranger now in our home. There is so much stuff here, stuff that no longer seems to belong to us. Still, it’s true: I can’t begin to imagine packing up the last twelve years of our life without you here.

EVERY MORNING I
make a list. I focus on executing these chores, checking them off with a smug little tick, with the same single-minded approach with which Simon tackles his daily rehab schedule. Don’t look left or right. Don’t look back. Just straight ahead.

Keep your eyes on the prize.

This is a phrase I’ve taken to saying. It is what I tell Lorna when she calls, ravaged by blooming and panicked anxiety, the reasonable by-product of distance and justifiable worry. “How—
how
—are you managing...?” she asks. It is less a question and more an open-ended statement, its implied meaning: there is no possible way you can be managing.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m keeping my eyes on the prize.”

And later when I express my own panicked anxiety, she kindly echoes it back to me: “Just keep your eyes on the prize, Kara.”

It’s a ridiculous phrase, the type of motivational jock platitude I usually hate, along the lines of
It’s all good
. I am of the particular disposition that believes it is rarely, if ever,
all
good, and when someone tags a conversation in which they are describing a personal issue—an ailing grandparent, a minor conflict at work, car trouble—with a
But it’s all good,
I am irritated. How could you say that? Think that? Mean that? But my own ridiculous phrase—
Keep your eyes on the prize
—is a lifeline, powerful as an itemized list, and I regroup, reground, each time I say it.

I do not have a clear vision of what exactly the prize is. But that’s okay.

When Simon was in the
ICU
, I turned my body into a boat, my ribs the ribs of a canoe that floated us downstream to some unknown destination. We’re in a sailboat now, one built by many hands, and even though there is no finish line in sight, we are not going to refuse the gift of the wind. This is what I mean every time I say I am keeping my eyes on the prize. Anger, grief, and fear, while a big part of this journey, will not be the anchors we throw overboard, mooring us for God knows how long in some deep, unfathomable place.

WHILE IN REHAB
, Simon discovers a previously untapped appetite for reading, and now he is never without a book. We sit and read through the lunch hour, he a copy of
Water for Elephants,
me
The Brain That Changes Itself,
our heads buried in our books to block out the general cacophony of the cafeteria. I am reading Chapter 5, the one that describes an aggressive rehabilitation model for stroke victims, when I have an idea.

“Hey,” I say. “Let’s spend twenty minutes every day at the end of lunch transcribing a passage out of whatever we are reading using our left hands.”

“Why?” Simon is unimpressed. “Lunch is my break time.”

“New activities create the potential for plastic change.” I hold up Doidge’s book and wave it in his face to back myself up. I adlib: “It will help with the guitar playing.”

Simon is skeptical but agrees. Over the next few weeks he fills a notebook with oversized and spidery cursive writing, the penmanship of a klutzy seven-year-old. It is an annoying task, but he persists, noting that even in a relatively short amount of time he has gained more strength, control, and connection in his still sleepy left hand.

ONE DAY MIDWEEK
, Sean requests that Simon bring his guitar to physio. Simon is suspicious of the request.

“There’s no way,” he rails as he rolls side to side in his hospital bed, pulling his sweatpants up inch by agonizing inch. “I’m not ready to play in front of people.”

“Sean must have a reason,” I say. “And it’s not like you’re going to be performing in front of an audience. Everybody is doing their physio.”

“Maybe,” Simon says. “We’ll see.” As he moves through the rest of his morning routine, he decides a few more times that, fuck Sean, he will definitely not take the guitar to the gym, but when it’s time to go, he reluctantly agrees to let me carry it down. Just in case.

“Standing-frame day,” Sean says and leads Simon over to a large black chair with a hand pump on the side. Simon transfers, on his own now and without a sliding board, onto the chair. Sean adjusts several safety belts and then shows Simon how to pump the handle until he is in a standing position. “You might feel dizzy,” Sean says. “Just let me know.”

“You’re so tall,” I say. In the standing frame he is a foot taller than I remember him ever being. He looks like a giant to me.

“I thought you could see how it feels playing while you’re upright,” Sean says.

“Let me see it,” Simon gestures to his new guitar. He plays a few blues progressions, and there are scattered murmurs of approval from the various plinths around the room where people work as Simon has—balancing, rolling over, stretching, doing hand exercises and seated push-ups. The guitar progressions are simple, rudimentary by Simon’s previous standards, but his execution is musical and precise.

“Sing something,” Sean prods. Simon gives him a dirty look but launches into Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”

“Hey,” an older man using the stationary hand bike calls out to Simon, “do you know any Elvis?”

And Simon, the reluctant but consummate performer, launches into “That’s Alright Mama.” Afterward, he plays a few more bars of blues progressions before handing back the guitar and transferring into a seated position.

Later, on our way to dinner, a woman in an electric wheelchair stops Simon to thank him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had such a hard day at physio. I was lying on the plinth thinking ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this’ when you started playing,” she says. “It helped me get through it, hearing you play.”

MARC RETURNS TO
Vancouver for Simon’s November 26 departure date. Simon and I have been collecting email addresses in an address book and saying our farewells throughout the week so that this final morning isn’t a series of emotional good-byes. Sully arrives just after breakfast with his truck, and he and Marc load up Simon’s new equipment and the boxes of stuff we have accumulated over the past months while Simon and I do a final, fuss-free, mostly tear-free, parting round, receiving last-minute hugs and advice from the nursing staff and the therapists. I am so thankful to have Marc and Sully there. Without them, I would be swamped by the logistics of this big change; with their support, I am able to be more fully present with Simon. Melissa, the
OT
, hands Simon a card covered with signatures and warm wishes through the open window of the car, and waves to us as we pull away.

On the coast, on our way to the new Cooper house, we stop for a quick look at one more potential interim housing spot that Joe has found in a small subdivision outside of Sechelt. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I’ve seen yet. I write a check for the first month and damage deposit. We can move in at the beginning of December.

The new Cooper Road house is empty of furniture save for our bed and Eli’s, a few boxes of pots, pans, dishes, and towels, and a floor lamp donated by Joe. But the house is warm and well lit when we arrive, and our friend Julie has a feast awaiting us: quinoa salad, sliced beets, cabbage, and steamed greens and—Simon’s favorite—a large turkey shepherd’s pie. More friends arrive, gradually trickling in. A brief and spontaneous party to celebrate our homecoming ensues. No one stays too long. They toast Simon’s return and then leave us, exhausted, to retire to the big empty rooms of our new house.

Deep in the middle of the night. We both lie awake. You say, I’m not the same person you fell in love with. I’m not the same person you married.

I say, yes. Yes, you are.

Came a Wind

COMING HOME...
There is a point after a big trauma when all you want is to get back home. There is also a point when you realize that you will never, ever go home again. That home has now become an evolving state, a rebuilding process, contingent on establishing routines and objectives. The best you can hope for is that “normalcy,” whatever shape it now takes, will resume at some point. We’ll find our new normal, Kara kept saying.

Despite the fact that I was very fond of my therapists, nurses, and fellow inmates, it was easier to leave
GF
Strong than I anticipated. The
GF
Strong staff had done their job well, and I guess I knew it was time to brave life on the outside. It was, however, harder to arrive on the coast than I had imagined. It was intimidating to realize that my physical perspective of this oh so familiar landscape had totally changed.

I wasn’t driving yet and so had to ride in the passenger side. I hate the passenger side. Even though we were assigned an accessible spot on the ferry, we quickly realized, as cars filed in beside us, that it would not be accessible for a wheelchair. Plus, even if I could have reached the elevator, the daunting task of doing the sliding board transfer in and out of the car hardly seemed worth the brief time up on deck. So I waited below in the car for the entire ride. As we drove along Highway 101, I saw all the familiar places of my community: the bars and halls I had so frequently played gigs at; the parks I had taken Eli to for soccer practice; the beaches we had swum at and the trails where we had walked Paloma. Ambulating, I had taken access to all these areas for granted. Now I realized returning to many of them would be, at best, a difficult and arduous process; at worst, uncertain or impossible. My left-side weakness made me feel especially vulnerable. One of my goals that I hadn’t achieved while at
GF
Strong was to be able to perform a floor-to-chair transfer. If I fell out of my chair, I would not be able to get back up on my own.

Even with these lingering anxieties, I knew that it was time to get on with the next phase. I had to learn to adapt to my family and social life—whatever that entailed. So, as much as driving up the coast and seeing all of the familiar landmarks was scary, it was also exciting. My sense of smell was gone, but I could imagine the salty air of the ocean and the wet-earth smell of the forest. It was a great and huge feeling to know that I was over the first big hurdle of the health crisis and could now turn the page, so to speak. I felt as if I could reinvent myself accordingly to suit any environment, given the changes I had already navigated in such a short time. As long as there was at least the intention of forward motion, I believed an evolution of self would continue to occur.

Our arrival on the coast announced a whole new beginning. It was terrifying and exhilarating, depending which way the wind blew.

SIMON AND I
are melting chocolate. Two twenty-pound slabs of milk and dark chocolate dominate the kitchen as they do every year at Christmas. The work of whittling off chunks proves too challenging for Simon’s left hand, but he is comfortable parked by the stove, stirring chocolate and, when it is fully softened, tempering it by throwing in an additional handful of meltable flakes, cooling the overall mixture down. He helps me roast almonds, rub the skins off toasted hazelnuts, mix up bowls of dried berries, and cut slivers of crystallized ginger. We mix various combos of nuts and berries into the chocolate and, as I pour the heavenly slurry onto an old cookie tray, Simon uses a spatula to spread it thin. We move it to a cleared spot in the refrigerator and I lick the chocolate-covered spatula clean. Simon laughs.

“This is your happy place, eh, Willy Wonka?” he says.

I laugh too. It’s true. Later, when the chocolate has hardened, we will break it up into jagged pieces of bark, fill tissue-lined dollar-store cookie tins, and hand them out to friends. This familiar seasonal routine is both comforting and gloriously indulgent this year in the midst of so much strangeness and difficulty.

We are in interim housing, a fully furnished two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Sechelt, surrounded by the objects of a stranger’s life: unfamiliar family photos, vibrating leather recliner chair, a bright red and white art deco kitchen table, quirky can opener and dull vegetable peeler, enormous life-sized
TV
that takes pride of place in the narrow living room. The rooms are painted in various pastel hues, colors I believe are better suited to Easter eggs than living spaces, and the thick shag rug makes it challenging for Simon to wheel. He inches down the hallway, breaking into a sweat as he moves from bedroom to kitchen. Most difficult, though, is the lack of a truly accessible bathroom. Simon worked with such intent and fearlessness to securely transfer from his wheelchair onto a raised toilet seat, but the bathroom in this house is too narrow for him to continue practicing. Instead he has to use a commode chair, a type of wheelchair that can be rolled over a toilet or into a shower. Our first commode chair is a loaner from the hospital equipment share shed, and it is a disaster. Designed so that a patient has to be pushed, Simon now has to rely on me to get him into the washroom. Wobbly and rusting, the commode chair also has no straps on the footrests to secure Simon’s feet, so with the slightest motion his heavy legs thump off, scraping into the rug. I have to crouch down and wheel him by pulling on the footrests so that his feet don’t fall off, making the short trip from bed to bathroom excruciating for both of us. When we explain the situation to the WorkSafe
BC
occupational therapist, she immediately orders us a new and much more functional piece of equipment. Still, the dimensions of the commode chair do not allow Simon to be independent in his morning bathroom routine.