Chapter Thirteen: Hand Prints

MEMORY CHAIN

“Just remember,” says the quote, “we’re all in this alone.”

All alone.

Lonely.

Lone Ranger. Hi, Ho, Silver!Saturday afternoons with my brother and candy from Joe’s corner store.

Silver bullet.

Silver lining.

Does every cloud really have one?

Clouds have shapes. Sometimes they look like spilt milk.

A gallon of milk. A half-gallon of milk.

An empty milk carton. Dennis must be home.

Home alone.

Home sweet home.

Home, home on the range.

Range of motion. Range of freedom. Range in my kitchen. My new kitchen!

Kitchen cabinets.

Cabinet doors.

Front door.

Back door.

In and out.

Out to dinner. Out to lunch. Out for the count.

Out of luck.

Lucky day. Happy day.

Daybreak. Daylight.

Light of my life.

Life long. Long life.

Life preserver.

Life saver.

Save! Save! Save!

Sale! Sale! Sale!

Sail away,blown away, gone away. In and out the doors. Revolving doors.

Way out. Way in. which way to go?

Going my way. Going your way. Go away. Far away.

Way down upon the Swannee River. River of hope.

River of dreams.

Dream at night.

Nighttime.

Time to go. Out the door. Front of back.

Go alone.

All alone.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

AUGUST 24, 2000. 9AM.

            We spent some time in the emergency room yesterday. A hernia has popped up on one of Ron’s many incisions, so today we are on our way to see Dr. Huffman again and schedule more surgery. Poor Ron must feel like a pincushion by now! But this surgery, we've been told, can be done as an out-patient. No big deal. Funny how my perspective about surgery has changed this year; it used to be that any procedure would be a big deal

            The doctor who saw us at the ER (Dr Brauvard? Who can read a physician’s handwriting?) was impressed with the thickness of Ron’s chart. She asked him to explain what happened during the accident, but Ron’s memory became disjointed and his words began to stumble. She turned to me. It has become a new role of mine, being Ron’s translator to the world. “You've been through quite a lot,” she said, “ but the good thing is you’re able to talk about it. You’re up and walking around and with your family.”

            All things in perspective, we have been blessed. Lord, help me to remember that as the medical bills roll in from yet another hospital visit.

            Dr. Huffman is happy to see us and greets both Ron and me with a hug. “You look well,” she says to Ron. “You look tired,” she says to me. We are ushered into the examining room immediately because, “you people really need to move on with your lives.” Joan is pleased with Ron’s improvement and asks about work and memory problems. Carefully, she probes his abdomen. “This happens a lot when someone’s had abdominal surgery,” she says, “and Ron’s had many. The muscles just aren't as tight as they were before.” She would prefer, she says, to wait until January when Ron has had more time to heal and recover. “The body,” she says, “ is amazing at regenerating itself. I’d like to give it more time to recover.” Ron becomes insistent. He wants it done now. He wants to get it over with and put it all behind him. I see the sense of this. But I also know that Ron out of work for several more weeks will put a severe crimp in Christmas. I sigh to myself. Our shoestrings are used to being tightened. Dr. Huffman writes some notes on Ron’s chart and checks her schedules. She has rather reluctantly agreed to expedite the surgery. “We can get this done before Labor Day,” she says. I take out my pocket calendar and we agree upon a date.

            Ron is given a sheet of instructions to follow. No eating after midnight the day before surgery. No medications. Arrive at the hospital at 10:00 AM. Ron is chatting with Joan’s assistant when the surgeon pulls me aside.

            “Are you alright?” she asks me.

            I am startled. I have convinced myself and everyone else that I have spent the summer resting and recharging. I nod. “I’m fine,” I say. “School starts next week, so I've been busy getting things together.”

            “Is that all it is?”

            “Sure. Ron’s better. Things are good.”

            She gives me a long, hard look. “Linda, you've been carrying a lot. Have you talked to anyone about all this?”

            I shrug. “Some. A little. But I’m okay. Really. It’s Ron who needs your concern. Not me.”

            “Remember what I told you that first night, Linda? I worry about the families of my patients as much as I do my patients.”

            “You don’t need to worry about me, “ I assure her. “I’m fine. I can handle it.” I offer her my brightest smile.

            She nods, unconvinced. “Talk to someone,” she says. “Now. Before you need to.”

            “Alright, “ I agree reluctantly. I am already wondering whom I could talk to. My pastor, who has already left for his new job across the river? Ron, who is not yet a whole man? My friends, who extol my virtues as a wonderful, strong Christian wife? Or my children, who need to know that they still have one parent left that can count on?

            I can handle this, I tell myself as we leave Joan’s office. This is a minor bump in the road. We've been through much worse than this.

AUGUST 24, 2000. 5 PM.

            In a way, the car accident has made it easier to explain Ron to the world. Bi-polar disorder is a complicated and little understood malady, as hard to define as it is to live with. When Ron’s first episode landed him in the hospital, an acquaintance asked me if I had known Ron had mental problems when we married. It was a startling question. Had I? How could I? I was twenty years old with stars in my eyes. Ron was tall and good-looking and had the same beliefs I did. He loved me and if I sometimes worried that he loved me more than I loved him, it was all the love I had to give. I panicked a week before our wedding, wondering if I was indeed doing the right thing. I knew Ron would never have an important job or be rich. Those things meant little to me. What mattered was the way he made me feel: safe and loved. His mother had told me that she felt he probably had some learning problems that had never been diagnosed, that he was a “little slow” at learning new things. And in the year we dated before our marriage, I was aware that his tongue often stumbled over difficult words.

            And so we wed. For better or worse. When mental problems first began to rear their ugly heads, I repeated the vows to myself. I wouldn't leave Ron if he had diabetes or cancer or heart problems. Why would I leave him now?

            The way I answered that acquaintance became the way I answered all others. “No,” I said. “None of us knew.” A counselor tried to convince me later that of course I had known and on some level had chosen Ron because of the mental problems. He would always be someone I could control. I have never been able to accept that theory. What do twenty-somethings know of mental disorders or miscarriages or mortgages or trauma units? And anyone who thinks you can control someone with bi-polar disorder is just, well, crazy.

            After March 1, my explanation for Ron became a lot simpler. Doctors, like the one in the ER with the indecipherable nametag, would turn to me. “He was in a serious car accident,” I would say and they would nod their heads knowingly. If he became frustrated making himself understood to store clerks, I would intervene. “A car accident,” I would explain and receive a sympathetic nod. Dennis became adept at playing what he called “the Dad card.” “If I need a day off from work,” he explained, “ I just make my face look all sad and say to my boss, ‘There’s been a problem with my dad.’”

            If I sometimes feel like C3PO, cyborg interpreter from Star Wars, I just shrug and add it up to my duties as a Christian wife. The list is growing long.

AUGUST 27, 2000. 10 AM.

            Before He left His disciples to return to Heaven, Jesus said that He would bring them peace, “but not as the world brings peace.” I wonder what those simple, uneducated fishermen thought of Jesus’ conditional promise. There were those among them who thought their Rabbi had come to free them from Roman rule and establish an earthly peace. But in those final words, Jesus made it clear that His brand of peace was not something the world could give. Or even understand.

            I know this peace. I cling to it. It is the reason I sit here on the 4^th floor of Crozer Hospital, pushed once again into a turquoise plastic chair, waiting for the surgeon to come and tell me that Ron’s operation is over. I do not pace or tap my foot. I do not bite my fingernails. I know that Ron is in God’s hands.

            As far as waiting rooms go, this one is not bad at all. It is open and airy, a few green plants and pastel paintings breaking the beige tedium of the walls. There is coffee in one corner and a television set suspended from the ceiling in another. No one is watching it—I have yet to be in a waiting room where anyone really does—but its noise lends a level of reality to this suspension of life. Some people are reading or pacing or conversing with others in hushed tones. I am the only one writing.

            It seems important to me that I am able to write and concentrate on ink and words. Since Ron’s first surgery six months ago, I have learned a lot about trust, about peace, about letting go. I hope that I have learned enough. Through the long, traumatic months—despite the outward chaos in which I lived—the peace that Jesus promised to His disciples took root in me. While I was often unable to verbalize to others why I could remain so calm, that peace carried me to many hospital waiting rooms. I thought it had carried me past them altogether. I had hoped.

            Peace. We think of it as being the lack of disruption or anxiety in our lives. But that is not what Jesus promised. The disruptions will still exist. Before I left the house this morning to bring Ron in for surgery, I had to pick up Dennis’ check, run to the bank, pick up fruits at Produce Junction and cold cuts at Dons’ Deli, finish the laundry I began last night, write and mail a couple of checks, and start supper in the crock-pot. Life just keeps on happening. But I hummed as I did it all, taking pleasure in my ability to use my arms and legs and brain, knowing that even then God had Ron’s surgery and its outcome firmly in His hands.

            A hospital is a busy place, full of interruptions and anxieties. My life is also a busy, hectic one, crammed with teaching and home and family and graduate school. To the outward eye, it is far from peaceful. Yet in my hectic home and this bustling hospital, I have found the peace of Jesus. Whatever is happening on the outside cannot disturb it.

            Inside, I dwell in peace.

August 29, 2000. 7AM.

            When I get out of the shower the next morning, there is a handprint on the mirror in the bathroom. No, I do not think that Hollow Man has invaded my privacy. As children, my brother and I would often draw in the fog in the car windows, then wipe the windows off with a coat sleeve and wait for our drawings—mostly panda bears wearing big bow ties—to reappear when the windows fogged up again. We didn't know anything about scientific principles. We thought of it as magic.

            The handprint in the mirror is too big to me mine or Bonnie’s, too small to be Ron’s. That leaves Allen as the possible culprit who planted his palm in the middle of the mirror, probably with the same pleasure Harvey and I gained from our panda bears. I choose not to reach for the Windex under the sink and obliterate this eerie image. It is a reminder to me of the unseen handprints in my life, handprints that belong to God.

            It is often difficult to see these prints. While Ron has struggled for years with bi-polar disorder and I have attempted to educate myself to support my family, I have not always recognized God’s hands. But lately I have tried to me more aware of His intervention in my life. It was He who led me away from The Christian Academy and to a job whose salary has supported us through Ron’s recovery.

            The handprint will stay, for the time being, on my mirror. I like getting out of the shower each morning and being reminded that God’s hand is on my life, even if I do not always see it.

Chapter Twelve: Breathing Room

A SHORT LIST OF REASONS I DON’T WRITE MORE OFTEN

I’d write all the time

--and we know that I would—

But things don’t just happen that way.

The bills are still due

On the first of the month

And so far my writing doesn’t pay.

If I wrote in the morning

While the sun is on the rise

I could get a few pages done.

But sooner or later

They’d disturb my peace

My husband, my daughter, my son.

I could write in the day

(while they’re all away)

On, the words would be wrought!

But the sixth grade students

Who clutter my room

Have come to expect they’ll be taught.

If I wrote in the evening

I am ever so sure

A novel would easily be writ.

But the people at my house

Need to be fed

And the cook has just up and quit.

There’s homework to do

And papers to grade

And the kitchen’s in need of a scrub

I could be Will Shakespeare

If I just had the time

But, ah! There’s the rub!

Did people expect Papa Hemingway

To don an apron and cook?

Did Emily Bronte scrub pots and pans

While crafting the pages of books?

The time I do find

To scribble my lines

Is stolen in snatches and snips.

Somehow the writing

All intertwines

With my life as I’m living it.

The truth is if I

Were to hermit away

And shut out these things in my life

My pages would be

All pristine and blank

For I’d have absolutely nothing to say.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

JULY 21, 2000. 12 PM.

            God is trying to pull my fingers away. Since Ron’s accident, my fists have been tightly balled. Probably I clenched them tightly before that, when bi-polar disorder became the ruler of our lives. The children—especially Allen!—were so young! Like any mother tiger, I wanted to protect my offspring and spare them heartache and harm. There was so much to be lost. I stood as the shield between my three babies and the rest of the evil world.

            After the accident, my grasp became even tighter. The rules I was familiar with and had carefully followed no longer applied. I used to tell my children that if you followed the rules and played on the side of right, you wouldn’t get hurt. When the truck ran the red light and crashed into Ron, the rules changed. In fact, there were no longer any rules. Suddenly, every evil lurked outside my door, eager to grab my darlings. Dennis—smart one!—had already escaped to the city, proclaiming his independence quite vocally when he was nineteen. He gave me no recourse but to let him go.

            Bonnie and Allen were not so lucky. I wonder now that they did not choke and suffocate but—bless them!—they seemed to understand my need to reassure myself several times a day that they were still safe. Bonnie expected me to call Genuardi’s if she was half an hour late coming home from work. She carried her cell phone with nary an “Ah, Mom!” and didn’t make faces when I reminded her—again—to keep her car doors locked. I know I rained on a parade or two when she’d made plans with friends and I nixed them, pulling the “you live in my house” routine. She never complained. She told me she understood.

            Allen learned early that it was easier to leave me notes and messages then have me stomp around the neighborhood looking for him, conjuring up kidnapping plots in my mind. He never failed to tack a note onto the front door if he went out before I came home. If he was cruising the neighborhood on his bike and alighted at a friend’s house, he’d call. “Mom, I’m at Greg’s. Just wanted you to know.”

            I have been trying hard these last few weeks, with Ron’s return to the work force and the world of driving, to relax a little. I no longer cringe when my family is out of my sight and I hear the sound of an ambulance. I still like to know their whereabouts and estimated time of arrival—I’m cooking dinner here, you know—but I have begun to trust them and their good judgment.

            “Oh, my God, I trust in thee,” says Psalm 25:2. How can I say this if I do not trust God with my children?

JULY 24, 2000. 3PM.

            Ron is planning a garden for next spring. While he is not necessarily gifted with a green thumb, he’s decided that the front hill should bloom with bright colors next year to elicit feelings of warmth in passers-by. It may be just a ploy to get out of cutting the grass on the front slope, but the garden Ron is planning will require much more care and concern than a simple swipe of the mower blades. A new garden, with its tender shoots and fragile buds, needs watering and nurturing, snipping and weeding. It is a large investment of time and energy, not to mention trips to the Home Depot, that may not pay off if there is a late frost or a mid-summer drought. It is a risk. But, if all the elements come together in the proper measurements, what a wonder it can be! I can close my eyes and see it now, the way Ron envisions it, a profusion of anemones and petunias, marigolds to keep the rabbits at bay, nasturtiums and blue irises, a rainbow of hues and colors lining our hill.

            I am not much of a gardener myself. In fact, I had to open up the “F” volume of my encyclopedia to come up with that many flower names. The fault lies not in my soul—which craves both beauty and poetry—but in my hay-fever and severe reactions at the mere mention of poison ivy. I grow things in pots that do not have to be weeded. I have not been above using silk flowers in an outdoor planter. (In fact, my friend Ginny has a wishing well in her front yard with a gorgeous array of artificial blooms. The little girl next door waters them every day.) Any gardening done around here will be done by Ron.

            I realize that a lot of people begin planning their garden at this time of year, sending for seed catalogs and samples from Burpees. It’s not something that can be left until the last minute. There is soil to be turned and layouts to plan. That’s the whole point: Ron is planning a garden. Ron doesn’t—or at least, hasn’t for the last eight years—plan anything. It has been enough of a burden for him to get through each day. He has lived by the words of Matthew 6:24, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil therof.” But he has missed the hope of verse 35, which says,” Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.” Many were the days he wearily arrived home from work and went to bed, too overwhelmed with shadows to be a part of our family. Or the alternative, even worse: complaining all evening, at every turn of the conversation, about his miserable life. The kids and I became adept at ignoring him, choosing instead to remember the “pre-depression era” Ron. This was hard for Allen to do, since his memories of Ron have been built more recently. He depended upon his older siblings to fill in moments that went with the family photographs.

            But now Ron is planning a garden and the key word is “planning.” Webster’s defines “planning” as “deciding upon a future action.” In envisioning next year’s garden growing on our hill, Ron relies upon a future. For him. For us. For our family. For those carefully chosen, carefully tended flowers he hopes to grow. It is risky business, given not only the vagaries of nature but of life. It may not turn out as he had planned. He is willing to take the risk.

            So am I. For eight years, I have waited and prayed that the demons which poked and prodded him would one day be vanquished. Sometimes it seems as if the darkness would never end.

            There may still be a promise of spring.

AUGUST 18, 2000. 11AM.

            I DID IT! With two weeks left to spare before I face the world of blackboards again, I have conquered all ninety levels of Sokoban this summer! The mad Japanese transport game came on my laptop and I staunchly ignored it for a year, too busy learning the programs I actually needed for teaching at Westtown to involve myself in anything quite so frivolous. But this summer, I became entranced by the little breathing Sokoban ball that so intently pushed locked boxes through the mazes, lining them up in perfect order. To my disappointment, there was no fanfare when I completed level 90, but it only momentarily depleted from my sense of fulfillment. Along with working on my novel and getting a second hole in my ears, beating this game has been right up there with my summer goals.

            I haven’t finished my novel yet and I’m still sorting out all of my journals from the accident. The material for my new kitchen curtains is lying on my sewing machine. The basement is only half-cleaned out. But I have had victory over that controlling, heavily breathing blue Sokoban creature and its locked boxes! My daughter watched me complete the last two levels with something akin to amusement. Mom? Computer games? She commented that I had developed “fast fingers” and ran through each course much more quickly than I had in June. I’ve made fewer mistakes in the last twenty levels. In fact, not to brag, I completed levels 88 and 89 on only one try.

            “Must be getting easier,” I told Bonnie.

            “No,” she replied. “You’re getting better.”

            Getting better. Ear piercings aside, it was what we all needed and wanted this summer. There was an ad a few years back—I forget for what—that decried, “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better!” It has become my battle cry this summer as we all drifted away from the hospital zone and learned to treat Ron as a “normal” person again. I say it with fervor. We are all getting better. Ron’s gentle rise from the gripes of bipolar depression has raised our own spirits. The last eight years have been shrouded in gray clouds. The sky seems a bit clearer.

            I wonder sometimes at the stress I was able to bear and still keep on going, mostly smiling. The “better” me marvels at the woman who held it all together.

            True, I still bear a lot of responsibilities. While improving, Ron needs a lot of encouragement and help. Slowly, I am trying to transfer back to him some of the responsibilities given over to me. He is now handling his own credit card bill. I needed to walk him through the process, step by step, just as I did the older children when they began to handle their own finances. Ron is once again responsible for car maintenance and repairs. The bulk of our home-life and finances is still mine, but I have a little breathing room.

            I am getting better. In those final levels of Sokoban, I realized I was carefully scrutinizing the board for possible problems before I began to move. Most of the time, it enabled me to avoid the pitfalls altogether. I sailed through the final stages, planning each step beforehand. It is just one more lesson learned from the Japanese game: look for the potential problems and avoid them before they occur.

            I return to the real world in just ten days. There is a classroom to be readied, lesson plans to finish, new students to meet. But I will return better than I left, renewed, refreshed, and rested. Ready. The respite of the summer and the lessons learned from a computer game will carry me across the long stretch of blackboard jungle.

            I’m getting better. As a woman, as a wife, as a writer, as a teacher. Better because—for the first time in a long time—I gave myself a break and spent some time doing something that wasn’t going to make a hill of beans difference to the world. And as I moved my little Sokoban creature, huffing and puffing its way around the board, the world went on without me.

            It’s probably better for that, too.

AUGUST 20, 2000. 8PM.

            Our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary looms ahead. The kids like to look at our wedding album and point out how young their dad and I were. They laugh at the powder blue tuxedos—it was the seventies, after all—and Uncle Tom with an Afro. And they are planning an anniversary service for us, complete with music and ushers and a reception and a chance to renew our vows. Invitations have gone out to sixty people. Most are coming. Even Pastor Lou, who will be leaving our church for a position in New Jersey next week, is coming back to do our service.

            Ron has already written the words he will recite to me. I heard this from Bonnie, who helped him print them out on the computer. I have thought carefully about what I will say but have not yet put pen to paper. I admit I was a little nervous about asking Ron to write his own. He’s not what you call a poetic soul, particularly since the clouds of depression have obscured much of what is good in his life. When we talked to Pastor Lou about our plans, he gave some pointers to Ron to help him: look through some books and ask for suggestions from friends. The most important thing will be, Lou pointed out, that Ron speak from the heart.

            Ron wrote them without help. Yesterday afternoon when the house was deserted of all life except one cat, Ron composed them on a piece of lined paper that is now printed out and folded into his wallet. He reviewed them again and again, making the words familiar to his mind. Since the accident, we have found that things sometimes slip through the cracks of his brain. Language that was once familiar to him looks foreign. He is determined that the words he speaks on October 7 be familiar and said without hesitation.

            It doesn’t matter what he has written. The simple—difficult for him—act of writing them, of looking at them several times a day and practicing the words until they can roll off his tongue, are my true gift. It is another indication that Ron is healing. I cannot imagine the pre-accident Ron, who lived in a world composed of dark thoughts, committing himself to such a loving task.

            But the words are there, on that piece of folded paper, tucked into his wallet along with the list of names we planned on giving our children the night we got engaged. There have been more than twenty-five years between those two slips of paper. They are both tangible reminders not only of our love and commitment to each other, but of God’s love for us.

            Promises made. Promises kept.