59 Years Minus 12

I’ve just spent 45 minutes sorting through my husband’s things as he moved from one assisted living establishment to another.  Yes, it has been over a month since he moved, but who can face the detritus?  Not I.

In September we will have been married for 59 years.  In 2013 my husband fell and suffered a traumatic brain injury.  That sort of spelled the end of our “normal” marriage because he would never be “normal” again.

I assumed everything would get back to normal, that he would recover because, let’s face it, who wants to think otherwise.  But then he proved me wrong on a trip to Assateague island in Virginia.

It was a car trip, planned as a healing experience, a chance to get away from real life for my daughter, who had recently lost her son, for me and for my husband because would’t he like to see the wild horses?

So we set out from northern Illinois and made our way slowly toward Virginia.  Our first stop Pennsylvania to see my youngest son.  How were we supposed to know the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing that weekend and there’d be no room at the inn—any of them?  Call us unprepared.  But my son showed up, and I’m sure my husband was grateful.

Onward toward Virginia.  We had to be there at a set time, as we were joining a group.  We didn’t make it.  As we drew closer to our destination, my husband claimed he was desperate to pee.  So we stopped.  Every five minutes.  No pee.  Meanwhile, I’m getting calls from the organizer of the group asking where were we.

We made it at the tail end of the dinner hour.  Then we were assigned rooms, my daughter and I sharing, my husband on his own.  The rooms were next to one another. What could go wrong?

Upon getting ready for the evening lecture, we stopped by his room so that he could come down with us.  He said he’d be right there.  Not wanting to be late—again—my daughter and I went down. Yes, down one flight of stairs, there was no way anyone could miss it.  We thought.

Time passed.  It was hard concentrating on a lecture when one person supposed to be with you is missing.  My daughter said she’d go check.  Silver alert, anybody?

She couldn’t find him.  Whither had he wandered?  Off the property, where he fell into a garden of rose bushes, the ones with thorns.  He ended up with scratches all over.  No, we didn’t have bandages and Neosporin, nor did the organizer, so a trip to the drug stores was a necessity.

I have to say I do remember that trip fondly because we sort of ditched my husband and left him with the group to almost fend for himself.  Well, what were group organizers for if not to shepherd a wayward flock?

We spent most of our time at the beach.  My daughter was in pain from her loss, and all I could do was stand by her.  Not that we totally ignored our group-ly duties.  There were activities in which we participated.  But I think it clued us in to how off the wall my husband was.  And those were the good years.

After Assateague we drove down to South Carolina to see our other son.  Yes, we ditched my husband again—for a while.  When we came back, our son just looked at us and asked, “Why is he always talking about the rose bushes?” So we explained to him what had happened and saw that my husband had even drawn a map to justify not just coming down a flight of stairs, but leaving the motel entirely and ending up on another property into a garden of thorns.

A garden of thorns is appropriate for what I’ve been dealing with ever since.  I know I’m not alone in this awful situation of watching someone disappear.  But not everything can be a tragedy.  And so I laugh when I fondly remember the rose bushes.