Healing Week 5

Five weeks of recovery is now under our belt.  We have learned to adjust to life in the slow lane- to linger over coffee, read magazines cover to cover, and put away the alarm clocks. Our home is like a time capsule. Kev's briefcase leans against his dresser- still unpacked from his flight home the night before the accident. That sofa I was reupholstering is frozen, mid-room, ghostly draped in muslin.  My studio door remains closed while healing takes top priority.

The final toll was heavy: 8 broken ribs, smashed scapula, dislocated clavicle, punctured and collapsed lung, pneumothorax, hemothorax, and the crushing blow of two pulmonary emboli.  The discovery of the emboli was nothing less than divine intervention. Had it not been for the tenacity of a student doctor to stand up to his supervising physician and push for c-scans Kevin would've been released with two time bombs in his lungs.

I have never not known this man.  We grew up across the street from one another, raided each others' forts, spent summer nights in homemade tents, and shared a first kiss playing spin the bottle in his garage.  The past two weeks at home have felt like those nights in the backyard tent- not sleeping close, but wishing we could.  Talking about dreams and childish wants until we fall asleep.  Words filling darkness, chasing away fears of mythical beasts, erasing uncertainty.

 

At times in the hospital I would see that 10 year old boy with eyes green as early spring moss blinking awake in an unfamiliar room.  Through the night he woke often, sometimes believing he was in Thailand, other times in Dhaka, and he wondered why the airline let us linger so long in this hallway. His days blended, confused in hydrocodone mists and blinding fury of pain. Those days are memories now and despite the trauma, Kevin has little recollection of just how much danger he was in.  For while he hallucinated, I hung tightly to the precipice of every breath, every lab result, every unmade memory for which I foolishly believed we had time.

What unfolds in these moments is the realization that life was getting the best of us.  Before the accident, days were planned according to outdated goals.  We endured weeks apart for the few days together between work, travel, and jet lag.  We became normalized to love in fragmented time.

Slowly we are reclaiming what routine has a bad habit of burying.  Perhaps we're that half full type of folk who see the positive shining brighter than the bad.  Maybe it's the scare of nearly losing life that sharpens one's focus and blurs out the frivolous.

 

 

Now as we reconnect, we see the disconnect and are not content to resume that mode.  In many ways the accident brought us closer than ever before.  Words left unsaid have been spoken and roads we've wanted to explore will now be traveled.  What lies ahead will be greeted together, with one voice, and hands clasped with the strength of every life past life we lived together.

LOVE  &  RECOVERY

The Even Side Of The Street

Something happened this weekend on the roads between Goliad and Galveston.  I realized that after 20 years of marriage and 40 years of friendship, my husband and I don't agree on the basics.  Oh we love each other with a kind of love that just feels like we've traveled through many lifetimes together.  We are true soul mates. But ask us to agree on something like artistic vision and we will defend our separate grounds with gusto. 

 

 
 Standing in the middle of the empty road somewhere outside of Tivoli, Texas, as I was framing up a perfect shot of the sun kissed fields with my iPhone, Kev put the car in drive and started moving on down the road.  He'd had enough of my artsy ways.  I've come to expect these limitations from him.  After all, he was from the even side of the street.

 

Growing up across the street from one another, his house number was 360, mine was 363.  He was from the even side of the street.  The OTHER side of the street. One of THOSE kind. It's the fundamental difference that has divided us like an asphalt river all these years.  It's as black and white as his thinking.  The even side of the street was home to the engineers, the mathematicians, and the architects.  My odd side of the street was where all the historians and free thinkers lived. We were the preservationists, the art teachers, and the activists. 

Road trips lend credibility to the even/odd debate.  Kev prefers a map.  I prefer driving on instinct.  Kev likes Willie Nelson where I like Sublime (though one could argue these two artists are joined by their mutual affinity for weed).  Kev enjoys righting the wrongs of offensive drivers whereas I am just thankful no one caused an accident.  I will stop the car every 5 feet if the sun changes the photo composition ever so slightly.  Kev will roll down the window so I can catch the sun's changes at 80 mph.  If Kev finds a souvenir he likes, he buys it.  I will consider the price and determine I can make one myself... and then regret not buying it because I know I have 654 "things I can make" ahead of it.  You get the idea. 

Luckily we don't sweat the small stuff.  And though there are days we wonder what it would be like to find a mutual fascination somewhere between Shakespeare and the poetic voice behind Eminem's twisted lyrics, we've always enjoyed a healthy debate on even and odd.  But every now and again, we are tempted to drive off into the Texas sunset, leaving the other in the middle of the road.  But we'd always come back.  At least I would.

 

LOVE  &  SOUL MATES

Twenty Years Later

It's a question most newlyweds ask themselves, half laughing, half dreaming after the vows are said and the bind is legal; "I wonder where we'll be in 20 years?" Asking and never imagining the twisty turny journey of the years ahead where the brave hold fast and a deeper love transcends expectation.

Hubby and I will spend our 20th anniversary in San Antonio, bringing our only child to her college orientation.  Texas would've been my last guess on my wedding day. Just a year prior to our wedding we had fled the great state of Texas after a failed grad school adjustment at Baylor.  It's a hard transition at 21, from liberal Boston to ultra conservative Waco back in the day of the Branch Davidians.  But here we are.  Yankees turned Texans.  With a Southern child who says y'all, loves her guns and cowboy boots. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I've never not known my husband.  We grew up across the street from each other, went to the same high school, went to proms together but not as each other's date.  We went on double dates together, but not as each other's date- even though we'd be playing footsie with each other under the table.  It wasn't until one June when we were both home from college that we started seeing each other as more than just friends.  We figured it was just a summer thing, an odd curiosity, an unusual blip in our life long friendship.  But once September arrived and we returned to our separate colleges, we simply couldn't shake the idea of "us".  Four years later, we married.  My mother swore it would never last.

Twenty years seems like forever when you are 23, but as we all know it zips by with bullet speed and suddenly what was once the fodder of late night discussions is now all written in a shared history.  Looking back, it was twenty years of magical memories and grueling challenges. No matter what we faced, we always stood by each other, defended one another, and put our selfishness aside to be certain we stayed strong as parents, friends, and partners.  Marriage is hard work but yields great reward. And so on our 20th anniversary, as we sip margaritas on the River Walk, I can't help but ask my Hubby, "I wonder where we'll be in 20 years?"

 

LOVE & SOUL MATES