#Drive 1, Commencement
As we celebrated my youngest's milestone moment, the dramatic start to our journey remains unfathomable, even to me.
“I wanted this speech to be so perfect—but I scrapped it all,” 22 year-old Ally said. The audience at Penn State Hazelton’s Class of 2022 Commencement laughed with their president. Finally gathering without face masks, you could see from their smiles, they were right there with her. We all scrapped a lot to get here.
Ally made eye contact with the audience, in her element. This speech to 300-plus people wasn’t her first. “It’s messy, disorganized and frustrating, like life! And that’s ok. It ‘adds character’ as my mom would say—” she said and smiled over the mic at me. “A phrase that has been drilled in my head for as long as I can remember–” she said and was rewarded with another communal laugh.
I laughed, smiled at her, then at Josh. Props to Calvin and Hobbs--and to Josh for reading them. I looked past my husband of two years, Mom and Dad, over at Josh, almost three years older than his sister, a Drexel University BS under his belt and an MBA candidate now. He’d graduate in three months with an MBA! First in family to graduate school. Not bad for the son of an electrician and a school bus driver.
Unbidden, the image of 15 year-old Josh running darkened, rural roads looking for 13 year-old, runaway Ally as I drove out and back on different roads flitted through my mind. We’ve all come a really long way to get here.
The pandemic hadn’t slowed either of them down. The challenges of COVID-19 felt kind of vanilla compared to our family. Who knew that deciding to homeschool—despite being separated and jobless and broke many times—would get us here?
Even I, someone who didn’t know what a G.P.A. was until ninth grade, had graduated, first-in-family to college, magna cum laude with honors from the University of Pennsylvania.
Twenty-five years prior, their dad embodied my idea of the Gothic heroes in my favorite romance novels, more than any of the guys I’d dated. He was confident, had overcome so much, and was oh, so charming. His formal mannerisms and gentle speaking patterns made both my grandmothers gush. It should have been a red flag—but it took me a while to recognize it was just pretense.
Three days after Christmas 1997, Josh was six months old when an invisible visitor peeled some of those layers off in one fell swoop. Even then, I was the last to get it.
He had awakened early that Monday around midnight with a headache. Two hours or so later, he still couldn’t get comfortable. He rolled around and around in our bed, trying to situate himself, moaning about his head. When he wouldn’t take anything and wouldn’t do anything, I went to our guest room. Not happily, but I went. Nobody makes a big deal about a headache, right?
I awoke up with warm December sun on my face and the sounds of Josh babbling away to himself in his crib from the next room. The master bedroom was quiet now, so I took Josh into the kitchen and got busy about our day.
Sometime before lunch, I went in and found my husband curled up on the bed. He seemed cold but all of his covers were pushed off. His eyes were squinted shut, too, as if something hurt.
“Hello?” I gently said.
Nothing.
“Are you ok?”
Again, nothing--but that was more normal than all the complaining he’d done the night before.
“Can I get you anything?” I said and layed my hand on his shoulder. He promptly grunted and rolled away from me, which I assumed was caveman for “Leave me alone.”
So, I considerately pulled the room-darkening blinds down and left the grump alone.
Around 4pm, I went back. If he needed anything—chicken soup, NyQuil, ginger ale—I didn’t want to go out after dinner. The late December afternoon was already collecting shadows, so if I had to go out with a six-month-old, it was time to talk.
But he didn’t talk. He was on the floor. Huddled in the fetal position on his side, his back against our dresser.
Completely creeped out, I set Josh down out in the hallway then went back into the bedroom. I bent towards him, where he lay on the floor, unsure if I should touch him.
“Hello?” I whispered.
Nothing.
“What’s going on?” A more urgent whisper this time. I kneeled to get closer to him. I heard ragged breathing through a throat full of flem at the same time the strong odor of urine hit my nose.
“What the—?”
Still nothing.
Giving his shoulder a gentle nudge flopped his right arm off of his side. His hand was curled at the wrist in towards his arm, locked in place, like a hook. As my eyes adjusted to the dusk-darkening room, I noticed his olive skin had faded to a sickly celery-green.
My hand on his shoulder again, I leaned him back a little. His eyes were still tightly squeezed shut, as if intense pain racked his body, but clearly, he was unaware of me. His teeth were bared, his lips in a grimace, spittle dried in a white crust around his mouth. My stomach lurched as his breath rasped through whatever remaining moisture was in his throat.
“Oh, God, help us!” I whispered, afraid to raise my voice. I felt panic tighten my chest and looked desperately around the room. For what? I can’t imagine, but I saw Josh at the doorway making his way into the bedroom, smiling and babbling as he skooched towards me, his little arms dragging his body and legs over the carpet.
“No! Josh, no!” I almost screamed, wild with a sense to protect him from whatever was in that room with his dad.
Josh’s little face, with eyes as dark as his chestnut colored hair, registered a complete, unhappy surprise. He stopped in his efforts to join me, and pushed himself to sit before his little expression started to crumple.
What had I done? I left my husband and rushed to our son, trying not to crumple myself on the way. I consoled both of us by scooping him up .
I paced the hallway to the kitchen, bouncing Josh, who resumed his babbling as soon as I picked him up. What makes someone green? Poison? I’ll call Poison Control… Where’s the phone book…
“Hello, um, I think my husband may have food poison or something? He’s, um, green and, um, not responding to me … No?... Ok. Yes. I’ll call 911 right away…”
I dialed 9-1-1.
“Um, 13-O-7 Willow Street … Well, my husband is unconscious… No, I don’t know why… NO, he doesn’t do drugs… He woke up with a HEADACHE overnight and now he’s GREEN. He won’t move when I shake him but he crawled onto the floor and peed in his pajamas and-–I DON’T KNOW! THAT’S WHY I CALLED YOU.”
I slammed the phone back on the receiver, shaking with frustration and fear.
Minutes later EMT’s arrived and took him out on a stretcher.
After Mom and Dad collected Josh, I broke every traffic law on the two mile drive to the hospital.
By the time I got to my husband in the ER, his body was hooked up to two IVs and a catheter. Looking back, I think I expected him to sit up any moment and apologize for all the fuss, crack a joke.
But he didn’t.
So I stood on the right side of his gurney in the curtain-walled room, not wanting to touch anything, or him, wondering what was going on when a dark, brackish liquid spewed from his mouth like he’d drowned in murky water and someone had just pushed on his stomach to expel it. Only no one had touched him and he hadn’t almost drowned, he’d just had a headache and couldn’t settle down and …
What was happening? He could drown ... We’d only been married twenty months and he was the father of our six month old son and ...
The air got so heavy, right then. I staggered under the weight of it and struggled to push the billowy, white, white divider curtain aside to get to the nurse’s station.
“Can… someone… help…?” I barely spoke loud enough for anyone to hear. “Some-thing… is…” I tried to enunciate, but tears caught in my throat and flooded my eyes and everything blurred.
Someone yelled, “He’s going under!”
They didn’t mean me, but I was drowning somehow, too. Drowning in the air? How?
A crazy throbbing had filled my ears and head as four maybe five white coats pushed past me on both sides to get to him. They restrained his body as it lurched, arms and legs flailing and falling heavily to the gurney as if from defibrillator jolts with the force of his stomach’s expulsions.
I stood, staring, less than five feet away, until the curtain was swept back into place.
A kindly-faced man with freckled pink skin and strawberry hair approached me. His white lab coat and demeanor implied he was a doctor. “Are you his wife?”
As I focused on his words, I realized that my hand covered my mouth and lowered it before nodding. He gently guided me to wait in a private room on the side of the ER.
I obediently entered the ugly, enameled-concrete block interior closet of a room and stood in the middle of it, my eyes closed, trapped and alone with memories of what I’d just seen.
Opening my eyes and looking up, in a flash, I saw Jesus asleep in a boat in the corner of the room where the ugly putty walls met a drop ceiling, like an immersive video experience of Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Sea of Galilee.” His face was peaceful and relaxed, and he never even opened his eyes, even as the storm raged.
I wasn’t sure if I believed in visions, but at the sight of his face, perfectly at rest, the tension and the anxiety melted right out of me. No post-adrenaline shakes in my elbows, no weak knees, no trembling. Just deep calm.
I wasn’t alone. And if Jesus could nap in a storm like that, I figured, what did I have to worry about? So, for the moment, I simply sat down.
When a sister-in-law stopped by the ER a short time later, I was still calm, if confused, by what was happening. I still didn’t know what had happened, but had overheard that “meningitis” was the suspected culprit. After she left, I borrowed a phone in the waiting room to call Mom and asked her to look it up in her Reader’s Digest family medical reference .
Bacterial meningitis confirmed, he was in a coma. I had witnessed his body shutting down in the ER. For the next three day, I lived in the darkened waiting room outside of the ICU, waiting for a 15 minute visit with him each hour.
On each visit, I searched for a sign of life beyond the blip of a heart monitor, the silent drip of the IV, or the suck of the ventilator hanging out of his mouth.
Each day, my clothes hung a little looser on my 5’3” frame as I lived on the free coffee and hot chocolate in the waiting room. Mom kept Josh with her by day, put him in his own crib overnight, and brought him for a visit in the lobby each evening. Fortunately, he had been sleeping through the night for months, and although I still nursed him, he’d taking bottles several times a day and eating food since three months old. He didn’t miss a beat.
It was the evening of New Year’s Eve when my husband opened his eyes and stared at me blankly for a minute before wheezing, “Huh?”
I was elated, but held my emotion at bay. “You’re in the hospital, honey,” I told him, gently.
“Huh?” He continued staring, his mouth hanging open.
“We missed you so much,” my eyes teared up with relief.
“Huh?”
“You had, uh, have meningitis.”
“Huh?”
“It’s going to be ok.” I said. Whatever ok is.
And three hours later, still, “Huh?” from alien eyes that used to know me. He didn’t register anything I said. He didn’t recognize me. He couldn’t speak.
I had been so happy, so relieved, he was awake! They had moved him out of ICU as soon as he came to. And now, I just wanted to scream and cry and shake him out of his body, if such a thing was possible, because he wasn’t really awake at all. You have a son! He needs you to know him. I need you to know me.
But he didn’t know me.
And I didn’t scream.
And I didn’t cry.
I just sat with him, in the chair next to his bed, in a semi-private room, and we stared at the television together in silence.
When the room grew dark except for the hallway light and the glow of the tv, visiting hours ended. As his spouse, I was permitted to stay overnight, but I wasn’t sure if either or us was a spouse anymore.
No one could tell me if it made any difference if I stayed with him or not. And I was suddenly aware that I hadn’t been home or showered since bringing him to the ER three days prior, so I left.
As I drove out of the hospital parking lot, I had to pull over to clutch the steering wheel while sobs that had been building since I found him on the floor of our room racked my body. The pain squeezed my chest so hard, I thought it would crack open.
Had I done this to him? Had I waited too long to get help? When the tears finally stopped, I didn’t feel anything at all. I was just empty. I put the car in drive and went home.