Surviving the Survival
They say we’re all just a single decision away from drastically—and irrevocably—changing the rest of our lives. They could not have been more right. And that profound prophetic proclamation resonated brutally with me on April 28, 2018.
It was the most perfect weather day—one that was especially welcome, given that the several days preceding it were particularly cold and dank. My husband and I had gone grocery-shopping, and once he had packed away all of our purchases, he suggested that we go for a ride: “This is awesome riding weather.”
Because I’d not yet done the weekend chore of laundry and had no clean jeans to complete a smart protective riding ensemble, I countered, “How about if we go to 5 p.m. Mass today and go riding tomorrow instead?”
“Nah. We can go to church tomorrow. I am definitely riding today; not wasting this brilliant biker weather.” And off he went, never to return the same man—and irrevocably changing our story.
My Story
It was about 4:30 p.m. when he revved up and rode out of our driveway. He had said he planned on riding over to the Harley dealership, which—if he had gone to the one he usually frequented—wasn’t too far away. I anticipated that he would be home long before dark. But a couple hours passed, and I found it odd that I hadn’t yet heard the roar of ‘TES’ making her way back into our cul-de-sac. More time passed, and it eventually did get dark. I tried to stop from plunging into frenetic worry by distracting myself with walking the dog. Marley wouldn’t do what she was supposed to after eating her dinner, but I knew that Gilbert could get her to do it—if he would just get back. WHY WASN’T HE BACK? From time to time, I would hear motorbikes in the distance, but my heart would sink again when I realized none of them were coming any nearer. My eyes fixated on our cul-de-sac, trying to will the sound of his bike into being. What if I never heard that sound again? Panic set in. As it got later, I finally gave in to the nagging to call him but got what I had so sorely dreaded: the straight-to-voicemail scenario. Now what? I calmed my racing thoughts momentarily by reminding myself that in the more than two decades we had been together, I had worried endlessly—and needlessly—umpteen times; he was never the best at calling to give me a heads-up about any delays, and, for once, goddammit, I was not going to let my Negative Nelliness rule me. So, I tried distracting myself again, this time with Facebook. As I mindlessly scrolled through my news feed, with some entertaining photos and posts relaxing my thoughts some, the phone rang. But it was not Gilbert.
The Mind Mine
“He’s at Kennestone Hospital in ICU.” Those are the only words I remember from that phone call from the hospital social worker. And I remember them clearly because the idea of him being in ICU, knowing that he was on a motorbike . . . well, my mind manically began mining all the gruesome images that could possibly be in store for me—and they scared the bejesus out of me.
I must have been in shock, though, because no tears or other hysterics manifested. I just made the calls I knew I had to: my sister, the relative closest to me (physically and emotionally) who could drive me to the hospital; my daughter who was hanging out with friends in Midtown Atlanta; my son who was downtown at his tattoo apprenticeship. With the calmest of demeanors, I explained to each of them that we needed to get to Kennestone Hospital because Gilbert had been in a motorcycle accident—but I had no further details. And without those details, there was not another call I was willing to make. Both his parents are deceased, but he’s No. 11 of 13 children, and I was not about to contact any of his siblings (none of whom reside in Georgia anyway) to frazzle my mind with their mania. Instead, after taking Marley out to relieve herself again and putting her back in the house, I waited for my sister outside in what was now the cold, dark, very eerie night. It was so incredibly still and filled with an indescribable emptiness that chilled me to my core. The feeling of aloneness and desolation was intensely palpable—disabling, really, like if my right arm had just been chopped off. Staring into the blackness at the bare cul-de-sac, which I now knew for sure was not going to produce Gilbert on TES023, I kept wondering where he really was. I wasn’t explicitly told that he was unconscious, but I was certain he had to be. Did he have a clue what had happened to him? How much pain was he in? Was he on the verge of crossing over from this world? Was his subconscious consumed with thoughts of us to keep him from taking his earthly exit? What was happening with his spirit? Was he ready to meet his Maker? I had to pray for his soul.
But first. WTF?!! Is this really how it ends?
How Dare He!
After 24 years of being one half of a couple, I simply couldn’t fathom how it could be my reality that my other half—just like that—could possibly no longer exist. And what about all that we were in the middle of? We’d finally started agreeing on what kind of tough-love steps we were going to impose on our errant 22-year-old; he was supposed to take me to Emory for my annual MRI to check the status of the regrowth of my brain stem tumor; we were planning on secondhand car shopping for our 18-year-old . . . Bloody hell, he was supposed to teach her to drive, something I was ill-equipped to handle post my brain surgery complications. Besides that, her high school graduation was just a few weeks away! How dare he leave me like this?
And another thing: I really felt like I had met my crisis quota! With an ongoing explosive young adult problem that brought fire-and-brimstone chaos to our household every few months, plus my own life-threatening health battles—complete with meningitis and hydrocephalus emergency dramas—all taking place within a ruthlessly tight five-year window, it didn’t seem like I was due for this magnitude of turmoil in my family again. Can I not catch a damn break?
Maybe.
The Hospital Reveal
I got to the ICU, and his face was perfect. Relatively speaking, of course. Yes, there were bruises. But not the kind that told the story that he’d just been mowed off his Harley by an SUV. Hallelujah! My husband was in the ICU because of a motorcycle accident, BUT he was actually in one piece! And that, right there, sustained me.
So, because, to me, he looked like he was just in a peaceful sleep—albeit aided by a web of tubes—I was able to finally do the needful and call his family, at least the ones he was closest to in Canada. (I would then task them to work the family grapevine in their usual fashion to get the word to the other relatives in Florida and Trinidad.) I suppose steeling myself to speak with my in-laws also fortified me, in a way, for my kids who were a slobbering mess when they arrived at the hospital.
Once they arrived, my son—uncharacteristically—took the lead on trying to reach the police officer who was on the scene of the accident. He hadn’t answered the cell number (that was given to me by the hospital) any of the numerous times I’d called, so we were still clueless as to the circumstances surrounding the accident. It was close to midnight when he eventually answered Jean-Luc who then put me on the line to get the details. That’s when we learned the man responsible for causing the accident was arrested for driving under the influence—with an open container—and with his wife and 5-year-old as passengers, no less.
The Irony
Are you kidding me? Could it get any more ironic?
When I met my husband, he was a long-established biker. He was riding motorcycles before he even had a license to drive a car. In the early stages of our marriage, we lived in Miami, and, in our household, there were always two cars—and a Harley. The models and colors changed over the years, but a two-wheeler was always a staple in our garage. At one point, he even tried to get me to ride my own. But after a few riding lessons in our subdivision, I decided I was way too much of a coward to navigate the streets myself; I’d be much happier sticking with my pillion rider status and him in control of the bike. Truth be told, I always felt safer riding with him than I did driving with him. As a driver, he would entertain distractions; as a rider, though, he was always laser-focused. But that outlook didn’t matter when we decided to move back home to Trinidad in 1999. I didn’t care that he was the world’s most diligent rider; all I knew was that I couldn’t sanction the riding of a motorbike in one of the world’s most lawless societies where stopping at red lights is practically optional, and drinking and driving is culturally acceptable. Sure, there are laws against drinking and driving, but in a country where the laws are basically impotent because of flagrant, rampant police corruption, I was hell bent on enforcing the no-Harley rule for the Espinets—as long as we lived there.
“But, babe, if we ever move back to the States,” where I contended that society is generally a lot more disciplined, and road rules are typically adhered to, “you can always get back on a Harley.” And that he did about five years into our moving to Georgia, only to be plowed into a couple years later by none other than a bloody drunk driver!
Coming to Terms
At his bedside several hours after being notified of the accident, I began to try facing the truth about the turn our lives had so catastrophically taken. At this point, deep down, I knew he was not at risk of actually dying. But that was of little comfort when I considered what the damage inflicted might really mean; I became a lot more scared, to be honest. Apart from at least five broken ribs, collapsed lungs, and broken vertebrae in his neck, his brain was bleeding. To be more medically precise, he had sustained diffuse axonal injury (DAI, a cruelly mocking abbreviation that sounded like ‘die’). This essentially meant instead of doctors being able to identify a localized area of trauma (and so predict what types of brain function might be specifically affected), they were dealing with multiple lesions affecting a widespread area of his brain. Vague translation: It was likely that several areas of cognitive ability would be negatively impacted, including his executive functioning capacity. So, the doctors said I could probably look forward to beastly personality changes, which led me to worry about the anger management issues my dear husband had to begin with. Seriously? Of all things? But besides that, I couldn’t help but focus on the other great irony of this situation: Gilbert Espinet, the patient; Brigitte Espinet, the caregiver. WHAT?! How could the good Lord get it so wrong? What an unfortunate reversal of roles if there ever was one.
For all the years we’d been together, he always took care of me and our family. It really was Gilbert who was in charge of the things—of all the things! For instance, when our kids were newborns, he’s the one who gave them their baths; when there was puke to be cleaned up, he handled it; when a big family meal was prepared, it was his labor of love. Plus, he never ailed. Well, maybe once or twice, but when that was the case, he was not to be pampered or even assisted in any way. I remember the time when he shattered his heel while jumping over our fence, taking the shortcut to Walgreens. This did not stop him a few days later from stacking a 20-pound bag of cat food from Costco on his shoulders and near gracefully negotiating the entryway steps into our home—cast and crutches and all. In fact, when I think about it, he really was kind of my personal Rambo. Now, while there was never occasion for him to stitch himself up in the wilderness like Rambo did in First Blood, there was the time when he was laying the wood floors in our living room and a nail (not a baby one, either) got him in his foot. He pulled that sucker out without so much as a whimper, cleaned up the blood, and went back to pounding the floor—never skipping a beat. There was also that time when I walked into the bathroom and found him shaving—absolutely oblivious to his bleeding foot. He had not realized that one of his blades fell giving him a considerable cut, sizable enough to incite high-pitched, frantic questions from me about whether he needed stitches. But his reaction was blasé at best: “Oh. Didn’t even realize I got cut.” He then ever so coolly again cleaned up the blood and continued getting ready for our night out.
For sure, this was not a man wired to have me or anyone else (not even cute nurses—in fact, especially not cute nurses) wipe his derriere, feed him, or even help him walk: all probable scenarios given the extent of his injuries.
I, on the other hand, the lagniappe that surprised my parents more than a decade after the births of my older sisters, was accustomed to and welcomed the prospect of being taken care of. Frankly, as the one in the hospital bed a couple years before, I totally had no problem with Gilbert or anyone else pampering or nursing me. Remembering that period in time, I evaluated my current situation, weighing Brigitte’s brain tumor crisis against Gilbert’s brain trauma crisis and realized I would’ve given anything to be facing that situation again versus this one. Though my life—and certainly quality of life—was threatened, from my perspective at least, there was a certain ease and security in being the patient. And, as my daughter put it, while my situation was frightening, it wasn’t as frightening as Gilbert’s because I was always conscious. There’s just a certain confidence or comfort that comes when consciousness is part of the equation.
Or is there?
Waking Up
Fast forward to when he finally woke up. I should clarify that his waking up was quite the process—one that none of the doctors could properly explain. There was always the question as to whether his unconscious state was a natural result of the DAI or if it was being intensified and prolonged by the sedation which they said was necessary to protect him from his traumatized and combative self. The process involved lowering his levels of his sedation and waiting several minutes for the sedation to wear off to where it made sense for the neurosurgeon to try to get a response from Gilbert.
“Mr. Gilbert, waking up. Waking up, Mr. Gilbert,” he would say in his thick Chinese accent as he thumped on Gilbert’s chest, seemingly unaware of the broken ribs issue. “Mr. Gilbert can you open your eyes? How about a thumbs up? I need to see a thumbs up, Mr. Gilbert.” The first few times this took place, there would be no response. Then, he would get me to try, which eventually began producing responses, but not necessarily what we had hoped for. Instead of Gilbert opening his eyes and following commands, he would gradually begin to twitch: first his toes, then his legs, then his arms. The twitching would then quickly escalate into thrashing legs and flailing arms that fought to rip every live-preserving tube out of his body—all while tears ran down his half-open eyes as he tried to speak—or scream—hard to tell which because of the breathing contraption stuffed down his throat. The process was pretty much like the rousing of The Hulk (yes, that’s really what that scene brought to mind for me), which inevitably ended with an army of nurses descending upon him to contain his combativeness, ultimately dousing him with heavy sedation all over again. It was surreal to watch, and has been described by my daughter as the most traumatic thing she’s ever witnessed. “I’m sure there will be worse in my lifetime at some point, but as of right now, it’s No. 1. Every time I think about it, it feels like a PTSD flashback,” Chelsea told me once.
Just great. He was finally responding and with enough physical force in his arms and legs to demonstrate that paralysis would not be an issue. But such levels of agitation made him a danger to himself and to others. Good Lord, what were we in for next?
Hopelessness and Aloneness
A praying woman I’ve always been, but this was one situation in which I felt prayerfully paralyzed. I truly did not know what to pray for. I confided to my priest: “Normally, I would be in the midst of some kind of Novena with a specific request. But the truth is—as ashamed as I am to admit it (and I won’t say this to anyone else)—in my mind, he is gone. And I don’t want to be praying for him to come back to us as a person who can’t take care of himself. Nobody would want to be in that position—but most especially him. He’s fiercely proud and has zero patience in situations where he’s had to convalesce for even short periods. I keep thinking that I need to focus on the miracles that I know God is capable of, especially because I’ve received my fair share of big ones in my life. But I just don’t feel like there’s one waiting to happen this time.”
In response to my anxiety and desolation, Father Fred challenged me to “not think about tomorrow for now; just deal with today.” This kind of situation, he advised, required that I “figure it out minute by minute, and day by day.”
It was not easy to do, but I recognized that following Father Fred’s recommendation was really my only choice. It was just unbelievably overwhelming otherwise. Up till now, I’d always had Gilbert at my side to help me navigate life’s challenges, but now I was absolutely alone. I tried to imagine what other situations I could have been handed to deal with that might be worse than being a forty-something-year-old ‘widow’—with the burden of figuring out how to take care of a severely disabled husband. The only thing I could come up with was my children being kidnapped. That’s the only agony that could possibly be worse than the torture I felt losing my husband in this way. And the funny thing about it is that drawing that parallel with the children brought to the fore one of the most stinging points: Dealing with tragedy that has affected your spouse can be a lot more draining than tragedy that has touched your children. If your child is the one in the hospital bed, you and your spouse could grieve together; could make tough decisions together; could relieve each other in terms of care-taking responsibilities; could simply hold each other. But when it’s your spouse, you’re on your own, baby. You have to make power-of-attorney, healthcare, and financial decisions (to name just a few) all by your lonesome. You have to be positive for the children while counseling them through their grief and fears, and deal with their breakdowns and outbursts completely on your own. You also have to cope with family members who all have opinions, thinly veiled as questions, about what plans you as wife and mother should be making—without the benefit of the husband who would usually be at the ready to tell them all to take a long walk off a short plank! Indeed, when it’s a spouse you’ve lost, you gain the most unforgiving understanding of how incomplete half really is, which leads me to the other big irony of this story: the intense ache of missing a loved one you’ve lost who you’re actually seeing every single day.
Descent into Dementia
As the situation aged, however, it turned out that seeing him every single day was no longer viable because of how his behavior wildly deteriorated.
Once we got past the acute stage at Kennestone Hospital, it was on to arranging rehabilitation for him. We were fortunate enough that the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, reputed to be one of the country’s best for traumatic brain injury (TBI) cases, had a bed become available just in time for him. And once he arrived at Shepherd Center, he reached several milestones. He began to swallow on his own—never mind it was one of his agitation episodes (where he ripped out the feeding tube) that led to the discovery that he could, in fact, swallow. He also was able to get out of bed—never mind he was initially restricted to a wheelchair.
But with the milestones came challenges. In fact, they were more like harsh forewarnings. While at Kennestone Hospital I went through the stage of wondering whether he would even survive his injuries, and when he spoke for the first time, I questioned whether the garbled ramblings he uttered would be a permanent problem, at Shepherd Center, I didn’t have those kinds of fears to deal with. He had met such significant milestones that physical death never once crossed my mind again, and his beautiful voice—the one that was still able to charm me more than two decades into our relationship—was back to normal. But, oh my, what came out of his mouth was far from normal. And as the days went by, the crazy talk only got worse. In the early days, the scariest declarations would be that we were married for just five years and that it was 1988, but then he began having entire conversations about building a new house so we could accommodate Lucia, his mother who had been dead for six years!
The crazy talk was so exhausting and just downright discouraging. How would I learn to live with New Gilbert? I remember thinking how much I felt like John Nash’s wife. I said to my coworker one day as she was driving me from the office to Shepherd Center: “Have you ever seen A Beautiful Mind?” She said she had, and I went on to explain that it was one of my favorite movies, one that I’d watched with the husband and kids more than once. I then blurted out in exasperation: “How crazy is it that I’m now the wife in A Beautiful Mind?!”
The next day, she presented me with a lovely greeting card reminding me that I was in her thoughts. She ended it with words from Alicia Nash in that movie: “I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible.”
Now, I had something else that would sustain me, this time for a new phase in this godforsaken journey—when the innocuous crazy talk transmogrified into an even-harder-to-deal-with problem.
Wife-Blaming
When the confusion and crazy talk began to be accompanied by Gilbert’s belligerent demands to go home, these usually came in the form of profane verbal attacks directed at me, accusing me of signing documentation for him to be kept in jail. Escape attempts necessitating a lockdown of an entire Shepherd Center floor were usually part and parcel of these belligerent events. And that’s when my daily visits were brought to an end. His case manager explained to me that my visiting and not being able to take him with me was just a source of agitation that was getting increasingly difficult to subdue, so they would have to limit how many times a week I could visit, as well as how long those visits could last. Then the day came when she delivered the news that because of these frequent, intensifying occurrences of agitation, Shepherd Center would be unable to discharge him to come home with me—even though he had been physically rehabilitated to the point where he required minimal assistance with activities of daily living and no longer even needed a wheelchair.
Speaking of wheelchair, I must write this aside to mention how devastated I was when I first saw him in one. The day of his admission to Shepherd Center was the first time I’d ever set foot there, and it was jarring to walk the hallways and be surrounded primarily by wheelchair-bound patients. But it was more than I could stand, the day that I walked into the common gym area (where all the patients on his floor congregated for physical therapy), to see my once virile, spry, handsome, in-control husband as one of those very same wheelchair-bound patients. I mark that day as the hardest day of this crisis. Honestly, it was 100 times easier to look at him bedridden, life support and all, than it was to see him up and around—but in a wheelchair. In my simple mind, his bedridden state wouldn’t be permanent; his wheelchair-bound status could very well be, though—paralysis or not. And I was completely shell-shocked. I kept asking myself: How could this now be our existence? How could my husband be an invalid? He was always invincible to me. Remember, he was my Rambo, so I just could not compute the situation I had before me. No way. I mean, it took me the longest while to use the term ‘coma’ when the accident first happened, but I eventually did. I also couldn’t bring myself initially to refer to him as having ‘brain damage,’ but I came around there, too. But no, I would NEVER be able to accept that I had a handicapped husband.
I broke down in the foyer of our church explaining that inability—unwillingness really—to Father Fred. That breakdown was an example of something that had become a daily tradition for me. When the accident first happened, I didn’t shed a tear for the first two days. Then I cried every single day for the next several months. He was living a mental hell locked away in a rehab facility “waking up every day without my wife at my side” as he would put it, and I was free to come and go as I pleased in the real world—except doing it without him was my own mental hell: I managed, for instance, to keep up our routine of going to church every weekend, but sitting in the pew without him holding my hand overwhelmed me with sadness. I would look at the elderly lady who always sat several rows ahead of us—at one point, unfailingly with her exceptionally attentive husband. When she began showing up without him, I always wondered if illness had caused him to become a shut-in—or worse, if he had died. And while I speculated about which it was, I also tried to guess at how she was coping without him at her side. And now, coming to the realization that I was not only Alicia Nash, but that I was this fellow parishioner, too, I wondered if others were looking at me also guessing as to why I was strangely without my husband. It was routines like this in the real world that were especially hard because he was always part of mine. But then, there were also instances that were not so routine that were equally tough, like the night I had to attend a retirement shindig for one of my team members at work. I was the only guest without a significant other.
But I digress. The point is Gilbert had graduated from the wheelchair and was making impressive physical gains, but he still was not coming home. After some medical insurance wrangling, Shepherd Center was able to organize his transfer to a neurobehavioral facility called Restore, a specialty rehab center that admits TBI cases involving behaviors that make it unsafe for patients to be reintegrated into the home setting. From the point of view that Restore had a reputation for “working miracles” as our Shepherd Center case manager had said, this was good news. The really bad news was that they would not allow me or anyone else to visit him for his first two weeks there.
Separation Anxiety
I tried to explain to the Restore case manager that I had serious reservations about this plan, particularly because his family had always shared stories about how he would be inconsolable as a little boy if his mother tried to leave him for even short periods so she could run errands. But his case manager insisted that this was an age-old strategy at Restore, and it was necessary so they could properly assess him, distraction-free. She said that, as a compromise, I could speak with him daily on the phone. Those phone conversations usually went something like:
“OK, B. You can come pick me up now.”
“Babe, I really am not feeling well and am not able to come now,” I would respond, not wanting to let him know that it was Restore that basically forbade me from visiting—lest I irreversibly pit him against them.
That excuse would then be opposed with a confused explanation from him that Restore was just a short ride around The Savannah (Trinidad’s largest traffic circle) and that he couldn’t understand why I was avoiding coming for him. Not abiding my excuse-making for too long, he would launch into a frustrated obscenity-laced tirade, which always led to the Restore shift manager abruptly ending the call.
But then there was the call, close to the end of the two-week separation, that was different. He was so excited to let me know that he remembered his Social Security number. Wow! That was, indeed, a big deal. Now, I would have to test him on the call the next day to see if his brain was carrying over information from day to day. I did, and it was. And a couple days after that, I was actually able to go visit him.
The visit was a wonderful reunion—at the start. Then came the accusations: I must be having an affair, he shouted. That would explain why I had him committed to this facility with a bunch of insane people, and why I stayed away for so long. Eventually, because our visits were always supervised, his neurobehavioral counselor (NBC) chimed in and offered that my absence was, in fact, a Restore requirement. That definitely changed his tone with me, but he made it known to his NBC that he felt it was an inhumane policy.
“How could you expect that depriving me of the touch and smell of the person that’s been at my side for the past 30 years (yet another example of confusion) would help with my recovery?! Bullshit!”
But whether he wanted to admit it or not, whether it was coincidence or not, the fact is that during those two weeks of separation is when he started coming back. Though we’ll never know if it was that inhumane technique that petrified his brain in to rebooting or if it started to reboot in spite of the separation, I was just overcome with hope and joy because I could see that he was actually making the comeback that I never thought possible after such a prolonged period of post-traumatic amnesia.
The Resurrection
He was definitely on his way back. And it seemed his mood alteration meds had finally been adjusted just right so that his outbursts were basically nonexistent. So, my visits with him were now back on a daily schedule. At this point, I thoroughly enjoyed going to visit him because he was now extraordinarily affectionate, could hold a coherent conversation, could read materials I took to share with him, and could participate in discussing upcoming plans (with the remarkable progress he had been making, the case manager began working on unsupervised visits off-campus for the two of us).
There was one problem, however. Although he wasn’t exhibiting the scary agitation that had become the norm at Shepherd Center and at the beginning of his Restore stay—he began consistently harping on the negative in a way that made me feel mentally and emotionally battered.
“These meds that you insist on letting these doctors give to me,” he would say, “they’re making me nauseous, and they make everything taste like cardboard.”
There was also his finding fault with how I handled the motorbike insurance settlement. I should never have settled for such a meagre amount.
Another point of contention: “You’re never going to let me ride a bike again. But you married a biker,” he would say. “I may not have died, but now you want me to stop living?”
And, the big one: “You signed papers for them to keep me locked up here in Restore. Why won’t you fight to have them discharge me?”
No matter how I explained that we had to stick with their recommended treatment plan to ensure that his therapies were carried out in the suggested time frame to reduce the likelihood that he would regress, he insisted that the doctors didn’t know what they were doing, and I needed to stand up to them.
I wanted to punch him out. How could he not see how far he’d come—whether it was because of or in spite of the jail-like Restore—and why would he want to jeopardize that progress by aborting treatment early? More importantly, why was he finding every reason to blame me for his being in this situation? Hello!!! I was the one in the first place who suggested that he not get on the bike that damn doomed day in April!
As it turns out, he was discharged from Restore earlier than the doctors originally suggested. His accelerated progress—both physically and cognitively—made it impossible for Restore to justify to my medical insurance company why they needed to continue paying for his care.
So, he’s been home for about three months. And I still find myself just staring at him in disbelief, feeling really like I’ve won the lottery because how many women can truthfully say their husband has been resurrected from the dead? I, however, can say it with conviction. I roll over in bed and there’s no longer an empty space, I hear his beautiful deep voice echo down the corridor (even though it’s to ask me the same question he did five minutes before), I run my fingers through his soft salt-and-pepper hair anytime I want, and he’s once again next to me in church holding my hand every weekend. I just am so disheartened that he does not—and, to be fair, cannot (because he has absolutely no memory of the accident, remembering only when life was good then experiencing a period of nothingness before rejoining the land of the living, but as less than half the man he knew)—share my gratitude and positive outlook.
But, see that irony? Who would have thought that a 47-year-old Negative Nelly could embrace positivity at this late age and stage? Well, they also say that every cloud has a silver lining. The fact that I have now been able to finally reject my inner Negative Nelly once and for all because I know now—without question—that the extraordinary is, indeed, possible means that I have secured my very own lifetime silver lining.