In an Instant
In December, dawn is the perfect time for a quiet conversation over our morning coffee. “What day is it?” I ask Kit. Then, “What’s the date.” Short term memory evades him still months after a traumatic brain injury and series of seizures. We are a team. Must be if we are to get through the recovery period required to regain whatever we can of normalcy. Executive functions. Familiarity with his computer keyboard. Handwriting now barely legible though improved from earlier when all he could write was “Kit.”
I’ve decided that I am going read aloud during our early morning coffee hour and in the evenings that now grow dark before the dinner hour. Books begin to stack up around the reading chair that I’ve chosen as my base, facing Kit who is cozy under a Scottish wool lap blanket in a lounge chair near the fireplace. With a lamp on next to me, dappled backlighting begins to emerge through the tall pines and firs at the edge of our secluded acre in the Sierra foothills. I then open In an Instant—a dual memoir by Lee and Bob Woodruff, former ABC News Co-Anchor—and begin reading aloud.
The passage where we pick up the story is Bob’s remembrance of events that took place in Taji, Iraq, January 29, 2006—the day he suffered a traumatic brain injury that nearly killed him. While embedded with the Iraqi military, the roadside vehicle he and his cameraman Doug Vogt were riding in struck an IED (improvised explosive device) that severely injured him. Recalling that moment, he writes “Soon after that I passed out, and for more than a month I would be completely unaware of anything that was happening around me. My mind would journey to a place that to this day I cannot describe or even remember.”
To this day, Kit does not remember the series of seizures that followed the April 23 right craniotamy he underwent after an MRI revealed a subdural hematoma from a fall months earlier. I witnessed them all, counted their frequency and length, and filled a journal with conversations I had with neurologists and seizure specialists tasked with finding the medications that would ultimately control the seizures. What followed was our own tower of terror—what Lee Woodruff refers to as the moment she got the news of Bob’s injury via a phone call from ABC President David Westin and the uncertain months that followed.
Kit and I talk about how our own life changed in an instant last spring. A fall, brain surgery, a series of seizures, three hospitalizations, weight and muscle loss that followed weeks in a hospital beds. Then once home, daily PT and speech therapy. But like the Woodruffs, we too are a team. Right now, I’m the general as Lee Woodruff had to be. Making the decisions every day to keep our lives on the road to recovery that is possible even after a traumatic injury to the brain. It takes time. Determination. Spirit. Support. Love and healing. But it can happen as it has for Lee and Bob Woodruff.
In the coming months, I plan to continue reading aloud to Kit. On our list are the newest novels by authors Craig Johnson and Louise Penny—two New York Times award-winning mystery writers. Johnson’s Longmire novel and series is based in Buffalo WY. Penny’s Inspector Gamache series and newest novel A World of Curiosities moves between Montreal and the tiny Canadian village of Three Pines. Both authors’ mysteries are powerful thrillers. Penny writes, “My books are about terror. That brooding terror curled deep down inside us. But more than that, more than murder, more than all the rancid emotions and action, my books are about goodness. And kindness. About choices. About friendship and belonging. And love. Enduring love.”
This week, we watched a Netflix movie based on Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ 2008 epistolary novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Without passports or luggage, Kit and I traveled back to January 1946 London and arrived on Guernsey Island in the English Channel during World War II. That is the power of this wonderful epistolary tale.
The book is the story of a small island community of disparate people who formed a literary society during the brutal German Occupation of the Channel Islands from 1940 to 1945. That forbidden human contact allowed them to protect, comfort, and in some cases to save one another. As they gathered to discuss books and authors, they formed fast friendships that keep their collective spirits alive. Like Penny’s novels and characters, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a story about enduring friendships and the power of love.
These December days, Kit and I find fellowship in sharing books. We connect with characters real and imagined who face terror and manage to endure. At times when Kit feels he is living in a fog, reading aloud provides a light—one we hope will guide us both back to the reality we knew before his life changed in an instant.