Excerpt from One SImple Text.... (Shaw & Brown): Back to the Woods
A
nurse named Ally carried a big, white binder into Elizabeth’s room. It contained,
according to Ally, all the information I would need to help me understand what
to expect in the coming days and weeks. As Ally guided me through the binder,
the truth that Elizabeth was not yet out of the woods—not even close—began to
sink in. My heart pounded in my throat, and tears gathered at the corners of my
eyes.
“Just take it hour by hour,” Ally told me, just as the
TRU nurse had.
I learned about the two critical periods in the early
recovery for a person with a brain injury. The initial critical period when
injuries may be so bad that they cause death, even with the best care, occurs
the first day or two after the injury. Those who survive this period face
another critical period a few days later, lasting for approximately two more
weeks during which time the brain may swell and complications occur at any
time. Elizabeth had now entered into this second period.
I sat in the ICU, trying to find some part of my
daughter’s body that I could hold onto that didn’t have a bandage on it or tube
running into it. Our bleak reality and the uncertainty of my daughter’s future
expanded and filled my vision. Even if she lived, her education and her dreams
felt gone. Would she ever be able to leave home and become an adult?
I felt enormous guilt for all the arguments we’d ever
had. How I wished she could hear me say how much I loved her and how sorry I
was for all the hostility! How had we
even gotten here, a mother and daughter,
fighting and hurting?
As an infant, Elizabeth had a big pudgy face with big,
dark-brown eyes. Her hair stayed white-blonde until she was four years old,
then turned golden. She loved the outdoors so much that you could call her a
tomboy. From her adventures outside, many a frog, cricket, and gnarly spider
entered our home with her help. With great excitement, she would show me what
she’d found and ask if she could keep it. She filled jars with lightning bugs
each summer night and placed them by her bedside to watch them glow. In the
morning, after Elizabeth had punched holes in the jar’s top so the bugs could
breath, the bedroom would be filled with the rogue insects, trying to find
their way back outside.
Because of their age difference,
Elizabeth and Logan never really played together, but they shared a definite
connection that held over the years. We had our ups and downs—raising a
teenager and toddler at the same time was hard. To help out Frank, a
self-employed contractor, I worked at a local bank.
We lived in Centreville then, a suburban town on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland, in my dream home. Frank and I had wanted a house we
could flip, but when we laid eyes on a neglected 19th-century house
in 1996, we both saw its potential. The house was originally two buildings that
had been pieced together; in the attic, you could see where the two roof tops
met. We made an offer within days.
We moved in after 18 months of restoration when
Elizabeth was three-and-a-half. It felt immediately like home. Elizabeth’s
large bedroom held lots of sunlight and stuffed animals; dusty pink walls
framed windows with white curtains that touched the floor. Elizabeth’s
furniture consisted mostly of hand-me-downs from her brother along with her
great-grandmother’s white wicker rocking chair.
One night, while I lay on Elizabeth’s bed, reading a
book to her, she pointed upward and blurted, “Look, Mommy, there is someone
watching us from the ceiling.” I laughed and patted her hair, and then
continued to read, but she pointed again and said, “Oh, they moved to Mama’s
chair.”
I stopped reading, tried to stay calm, and asked her
what she meant.
“A lady watches me at night, and she is here
again.”
I grabbed Elizabeth, ran out of her room, and sought out
Frank.
“She watches too much Scooby Doo,” he said and
laughed.
As the days passed, I started to think that maybe he
was right—I had made a big deal out of nothing. Then, a couple of weeks later,
in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, the sound of footsteps
woke me—three creaking sounds like someone was walking up the stairs. I lay in
bed thinking I might be dreaming, but then I heard the sound again.
I woke Frank. He listened and agreed that he heard
creaking sounds, too. He jumped out of bed and grabbed the baseball bat we kept
by our bedside for protection. As he opened the door, he listened for the sound
again. This time, we heard nothing. He started down the stairs,
turning on every light switch as he stepped. Within five minutes, the house was
lit up like a Christmas tree. I stood at the top of the stairs until I finally
heard him say, “There is no one here.”
From that moment on, we believed our house haunted. In
the coming months, Elizabeth mentioned this lady many times. Even Logan’s room
emanated a lot of strange sounds heard only at night. Thankfully, he slept
through the night, and the noises never affected him in any way.
Eventually, I decided I would talk to these “ghosts.”
I know it sounds
ridiculous, but I felt I needed to do it in order to stay in the house. So, I went into Elizabeth’s bedroom with a
box of matches, thinking I would talk to the lady ghost of the house, you know,
woman to woman.
I stood in
the middle of her room, took out a match, and said in a firm voice, “Whoever
you are, leave us alone, and don’t hurt my kids. If you do, I will burn this
house down. I promise you I will burn it down to the ground.”
“We can share the house; there is plenty of room,” I
added. “Just leave us alone.” From that day on, the house went silent.
Life seemed to be moving along just fine until we
decided to move to a small, abandoned church building—a “fixer upper” Frank
called it—on Tilghman Island, three square miles of land on the Chesapeake Bay.
Before moving to Centreville, we had lived in a house close to the water, and
ever since Frank had missed the convenience of walking down the road to get to
his boat to go fishing and crabbing. The abandoned church building also had
water access right down the road; that is why we purchased it. It was to be our
weekend getaway until the kids moved out, and then it would become our
retirement home.
Frank had started to restore the house, and I knew
with his exceptional talents as a carpenter, the old church would become a
lovely home for us. That happened sooner than planned, however. Logan enrolled
in a community college in Annapolis and moved in with his mother who lived near
this college. At that point, Frank pleaded for us to move, too. He really
missed the water. Eager for him to be happy, I ultimately relented though
moving so far away from our community concerned me. We put the Centreville
house on the market.
Elizabeth and I went from the
convenience of living in a town with shops, grocery stores, and the local
library just a few blocks away to needing to drive 25 minutes for a gallon of
milk. Frank spent most of his time working on the church, and on his days off,
he just wanted to go fishing or rest. So, Elizabeth and I had only each other
for company. We did everything together: shopping, riding bikes, and going to
the beach at the end of our road for picnics.
Once Elizabeth started her new elementary school, a
small school for the children on the island, she quickly became friends with
the other students. She had no more than 20 classmates in her second-grade
class. She seemed to be happy and adjusted just fine. Unfortunately, Frank and
I had a less happy experience.
Once we moved to Tilghman Island, the cracks in our
marriage began to show. Restoring the church took a lot more time and money
than we had anticipated. I still worked for the same bank, though at a new
branch, but I didn’t make much. Tight money put an extra strain on our
marriage. Frank seemed happy, but I missed the big, beautiful home we’d left
behind in Centreville and grew resentful that I had given it up to live in the
middle of nowhere. A magnificent place of water and sunsets in the summer, in
the winter Tilghman Island gets cold, especially when the wind kicks up. When
the tourists leave, the island feels deserted.
As the months passed, Frank and I fought every day. We
began to realize that we’d had issues before the move to Tilghman Island but
had simply been ignoring them. Considering it only a matter of time before one
of us left the marriage, I made the decision to go.
Our separation devastated Elizabeth, then nine. Logan,
already a grown man, worried more about his little sister, Elizabeth, who hoped
we’d reunite. The separation, ugly at first, turned into a mutual decision by
the time we divorced. Frank and I shared custody of Elizabeth, and she spent
every other weekend with her dad, as well as a night or two during the week.
She seemed to be handling the situation with resilience—until her teenage
years.
Once
Elizabeth turned 13, the closeness we had shared dissipated. I had remarried,
and my second husband (Jim) and I lived in Easton with Elizabeth. The arguments
and battles between Elizabeth and me subsumed our lives. At first, only typical
teenage daughter complaints dominated: she felt I wanted to control her and
raged that I wouldn’t let her hang out with older kids or wear makeup. However,
time revealed what fueled her anger: fury for leaving her father. She would
scream at me that she hated me and would never forgive me for what I did to her
father. She would also say how much she hated her new stepfather and how he
would never replace her father. I do not regret getting a divorce, but I will
always have misgivings about breaking up the family.
In the years that followed, my relationship with
Elizabeth remained strained. We loved each other, but the bond I longed to have
with her simply did not materialize. We learned to walk away from each other
when our arguments got too heated, swallow hurtful words before expressing
them, and cover over our feelings. She made little effort to get to know Jim.
At best, she tolerated him. Jim tried his best to get Elizabeth to warm up to
him through generosity with money and displayed great patience with her despite
her icy attitude.
While Elizabeth’s personality could be ugly at times,
she had grown up to be stunningly beautiful, popular in high school, and the
object of many boys’ attention. She went to parties and high school sports
games with her friends, got great grades, and was well known throughout her
school as one of the “cool” kids.
In
10th grade, Elizabeth expressed interest in becoming a model. We
signed her up at a modeling school in Wilmington, Delaware and every other
Saturday for a year and a half, she and I made the two-hour drive so she could
attend classes. The modeling school excited Elizabeth, and the drives gave us
time to talk about her future and lay a better foundation. She would graduate
from modeling school, finish high school, and then pursue her dream of becoming
a model while taking community college courses.
Some
of those dreams did come true. She finished modeling school. She experienced
the normal teenage life: high school (an honor student), boyfriends, driver’s
license. Lying ahead: enrollment in community college and a modeling career.
By Tuesday, three days after the accident, Elizabeth’s
condition had improved, if only slightly. The doctors told us that she was
doing surprisingly well for a person who had suffered such severe injuries, but
she remained in critical condition and on strong medications that prevented her
from moving. Not moving also helped control her breathing (she was still on a
ventilator), blood pressure, and other vital signs. She could, however, follow
some commands. The nurses would ask her in a firm loud voice to move a finger,
her toes, or squeeze a hand. If she could follow through on a command, this
meant that the brain still functioned. That Elizabeth had followed a few
commands gave hope.
I sat next to Elizabeth and told her how much I loved
her and how proud I was of her for being so strong and brave. I sat in silence
for a moment and heard the sounds of the machines keeping my daughter alive.
Colored lines moved diagonally across screens. I heard the sound of a
helicopter just outside our room then and went to the window. A medevac
helicopter headed toward the hospital roof. As I lost sight of it, I put my
hands together and prayed for the patient it carried—and the patient’s family.
Comments
Post a Comment