Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music by Kara Stanley Page B
Authors: Kara Stanley
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such crumpled twist. It is back on her finger now, on the hand holding my forearm, a reminder that sometimes things work out all right. Sometimes, even when things seem irrevocably lost, they can still be found.
I feel lost. Lost in the seconds, minutes, hours that make up a single day. All I can ask of myself, all I can do, is hold fast to my promise that when I am in the glass room beside Simon, I will be strong and positive. I will be present. I will stay with him as long as it is possible. When I need to cry and whimper, when I need to remember and weep, I will go to the chapel or the hotel room. There I will allow my desperate need to surface, allow the subterranean prayer, the one that refuses to be silenced, the howling
please please please,
to find its full voice.
Simon comes to my mother in a dream and tells her to tell us to be patient, he is there. He is coming back. I distrust this dream and take no comfort from it, maybe because I receive no such dream-visits from Simon. I have only one dream. In it Simon is on the couch, awake and bored, and his legs do not work. I am rushing around, late for something, and Simon is trying to get my attention. I am irritated by the distraction and tell him so and it is precisely this irritation, this friction, that is comforting.
I want—am praying for—the luxury of being pissed off at Simon again.
“I keep thinking there is someone missing who needs to hear what has happened. Someone we haven’t told yet. Someone who could make everything right,” Lorna says as we stand in the cafeteria line at Sassafras, “and then I realize: It’s Simon. He’s the one that’s missing. He’s the only one who can make it right.”
LATE IN THE evening, after Marc and Lorna have returned to North Vancouver, Emily and I arrange another meeting with yet another doctor, another new face, a young resident.
We ask questions about Simon’s shivering, the fever, the glu-cose levels, and she does her best to answer. Although the meeting is at my request, it is Emily who does most of the talking. I am saturated with information. And we have asked all these questions and heard all these responses before. I’m only looking for the margin of error in the doctors’ diagnoses, and there is only one question I really need answered.
“What areas of his brain,” Emily asks, “might be affected by the bleeding?”
“Well, the damage is global, so there could be a wide range of things: hearing, vision, movement, memory, language, personality. Intellect.”
In other words: everything. I can’t hear it all over again. “Can I...,” I interject, finally screwing up the courage to ask my question. But it is almost unbearably difficult to voice it out loud. Once again Emily leans in to me, lending her support. “I need to know if... Is there... Is there any room to hope?” Up until the very moment I say this out loud and see the dismayed expression on the poor doctor’s face, I realize I have believed she could answer this question, definitively. But, of course, she can’t.
“Well...,” she says, looking away then back. She smiles, ruefully but not unkindly, and meets my gaze. “... it’s always a good thing to have some hope.”
I AM WAITING for my bowl of soup at the tea shop across from the hotel when I notice for the first time a poem written on the wall in an ornate, cursive script.
Silently, silently I steal into my chambers.Deserted,Deserted and barren is the great hall.Waiting,Waiting for a man who will never return.Resigned I go to my tea
—Wang Wei
I cry as I read it. I cry most of the time I am not in Simon’s room. For the first time, I retreat for a few hours to the hotel to make phone calls. I contact Veronica and some of our other mutual friends from high school. I cry some more. Then I shower and return to the hospital. It is only when I am in the glass room that I can find some strength and resolve. I let the rest of the world drop away so that I can reside in
I feel lost. Lost in the seconds, minutes, hours that make up a single day. All I can ask of myself, all I can do, is hold fast to my promise that when I am in the glass room beside Simon, I will be strong and positive. I will be present. I will stay with him as long as it is possible. When I need to cry and whimper, when I need to remember and weep, I will go to the chapel or the hotel room. There I will allow my desperate need to surface, allow the subterranean prayer, the one that refuses to be silenced, the howling
please please please,
to find its full voice.
Simon comes to my mother in a dream and tells her to tell us to be patient, he is there. He is coming back. I distrust this dream and take no comfort from it, maybe because I receive no such dream-visits from Simon. I have only one dream. In it Simon is on the couch, awake and bored, and his legs do not work. I am rushing around, late for something, and Simon is trying to get my attention. I am irritated by the distraction and tell him so and it is precisely this irritation, this friction, that is comforting.
I want—am praying for—the luxury of being pissed off at Simon again.
“I keep thinking there is someone missing who needs to hear what has happened. Someone we haven’t told yet. Someone who could make everything right,” Lorna says as we stand in the cafeteria line at Sassafras, “and then I realize: It’s Simon. He’s the one that’s missing. He’s the only one who can make it right.”
LATE IN THE evening, after Marc and Lorna have returned to North Vancouver, Emily and I arrange another meeting with yet another doctor, another new face, a young resident.
We ask questions about Simon’s shivering, the fever, the glu-cose levels, and she does her best to answer. Although the meeting is at my request, it is Emily who does most of the talking. I am saturated with information. And we have asked all these questions and heard all these responses before. I’m only looking for the margin of error in the doctors’ diagnoses, and there is only one question I really need answered.
“What areas of his brain,” Emily asks, “might be affected by the bleeding?”
“Well, the damage is global, so there could be a wide range of things: hearing, vision, movement, memory, language, personality. Intellect.”
In other words: everything. I can’t hear it all over again. “Can I...,” I interject, finally screwing up the courage to ask my question. But it is almost unbearably difficult to voice it out loud. Once again Emily leans in to me, lending her support. “I need to know if... Is there... Is there any room to hope?” Up until the very moment I say this out loud and see the dismayed expression on the poor doctor’s face, I realize I have believed she could answer this question, definitively. But, of course, she can’t.
“Well...,” she says, looking away then back. She smiles, ruefully but not unkindly, and meets my gaze. “... it’s always a good thing to have some hope.”
I AM WAITING for my bowl of soup at the tea shop across from the hotel when I notice for the first time a poem written on the wall in an ornate, cursive script.
Silently, silently I steal into my chambers.Deserted,Deserted and barren is the great hall.Waiting,Waiting for a man who will never return.Resigned I go to my tea
—Wang Wei
I cry as I read it. I cry most of the time I am not in Simon’s room. For the first time, I retreat for a few hours to the hotel to make phone calls. I contact Veronica and some of our other mutual friends from high school. I cry some more. Then I shower and return to the hospital. It is only when I am in the glass room that I can find some strength and resolve. I let the rest of the world drop away so that I can reside in
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