Crumbs are observations I make through the day about anything. Search posts for ‘crumbs’ and you’ll see what I mean. They’re unedited, unspell-checked, and unelaborated. For this one though, written in 2022, I add a proviso for TBI Tuesday.
It’s easy and normal to imagine that this – your or their TBI – is the end. That this is what you’ve got. I wont tell you that it might not be true. My wife thought about this a whole lot. How to take care of me? How to take care of the girls? How to pay the bills? I tear up now under the weight of these thoughts. I have no memory of me in the hospital and none whatsoever of this exchange, but, for weird reasons, I’m glad to see it. I’m glad that I could see her struggle and didn’t laugh the whole thing off, drunk with what they pumped into me.
I came across this little gem/not-gem today cleaning a stack of files I’ve kept about my accident. It’s my wife’s pocket notebook from when I first went to the hospital. On 5/31, amid other observations about my living and dying and the tubes pumping in and out of my body, she noted:
“Also, you said I looked sad.”
This breaks my heart even now, five whole years later later. She says that I was confused ,and I’m sure that’s the least of it. I joke with her – ha ha! – that the accident and recovery were easy for me: I never knew what happened, never really experienced it, and – at least at first – was doped up like a ghost in a Munch painting. But even then, even with all this stuff, even flashing in and out of conciseness, I saw her sadness. I know now that she wondered how to take care of the girls by herself and how she would tell them I was gone.
Whew. Tough.
