In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing

So he spoke, I thought. He spoke. This is going to be okay. The General in my brain dictated that nothing less than recovery would be acceptable. There were no other options. Bob would be okay. He was always okay. He was lucky and bright and hardworking and a good man. Things like this didn’t happen to good people. I could feel hope in my heart, on its simplest level, as clear and bright as the streak of a shooting star. Hope is the most basic human emotion. It was the hope that wives have had since the days of the caveman, when they sent their mates out past the campfire to fight marauding tribes. Hope was good. It was a brain-stem reaction. The General in my brain moved hope into the front lines, preparing for the next maneuver.

“Lee,” David gently reminded me, “there are security people on the ground to escort you out of there. The plane is standing by; you just need to tell us what you want to do. Let us know what time you want to go. When you get home, we are working on getting you to Germany, where Bob will be transported.”

For one moment the silliest thought flashed through my mind. I thought about how much my kids had wanted to ride the Soarin’ attraction and see the rest of Epcot. The part of my brain that was still in shock weighed the option of not ruining their perfectly planned morning for about a tenth of a second before I clicked into action.

“David, let me process this,” I said. “I have to call Bob’s folks and my family, and then I have to wake up the kids and pack. And I need to think. Let me just get outside of this hotel room so I can talk, and then I’ll call you back as soon as possible.”

I slipped on some clothes and grabbed my cell phone. No one stirred on the pull-out couch or in the second bedroom. Four innocent heads dreamed kid dreams. I sucked in my breath and eased the door shut behind me. How would I tell them their father had been hurt in Iraq? Was there a right way to do this? It was all their worst fears boiled down into one phone call.

There was a small lake outside of our hotel, and I immediately set off around it at a fast pace, heart racing, lungs pulling in fresh air. I dialed the number for Bob’s parents’ house without thinking through what I would say.

“Hello?” Bob’s mother, Frannie, answered on the first ring, her voice slightly tense. It was 7:20 a.m. on a Sunday.

“Mom?” I said.

“What’s wrong?” she asked immediately. After seventeen years, my mother-in-law could read my voice almost as well as her son’s. Days later, one of Bob’s brothers reminded me it had been their dad’s birthday.

“Bob has been hit in Iraq and he may have taken shrapnel to the brain,” I said matter-of-factly. The General was in full swing. I was already thinking ahead to the next call. I had completed one lap around the lake already and was keeping my voice low as I passed other joggers and early morning walkers.

“Oh, God,” Frannie said. It was half moan, half cry. It was the visceral pain a parent feels when something tragic happens to a child, the upending of the natural order of the universe. Then my mother-in-law’s own inner General took over. It was the last time I would hear or see anything resembling weakness. She was a master at pulling it together. This was a woman who had raised four boys with sports teams and ER visits, crazy schedules and reams of laundry. She’d gotten them all into navy-blue blazers for Sunday-night country club dinners. Yet somehow she never let anyone see her sweat.

Frannie would call Bob’s brothers, so I moved on to my family, with a simple plan for fanning out information. I would make only two calls and then get back to the room to pull us out of here. I was on lap two or three around the lake. Moving felt better than inertia. It felt like I was taking action.

Bob’s elder brother, Dave, heard the news from his mother and collapsed on the kitchen floor with a cry. Brother Mike, the third son, heard the news on NPR while driving in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his cell phone turned off. He headed immediately to his parents’ house in the Detroit suburbs. Youngest brother Jimmy was setting up a ski race course for his sports marketing company at the X Games in Aspen. Frannie Woodruff called while he was in the shower. When he saw the message on the phone Jimmy instinctively knew it was about Bob. He turned on the TV and saw a photo of our family flash on the screen. From the moment they first heard the news, each brother began a journey toward Bob and our family that would spin a web of love and protection around us for months to come.

I called my own parents next. They were calm and rational and concerned. They would call my two sisters. Calls begot calls. Aunts, uncles, dear friends, cousins: like a dye spreading through tissue, the horrible news began to trickle out to the people we loved.

As I rounded the edge of the lake, my cell phone lit up. It was Melanie Bloom, the one person I knew in the world who could understand what I was going through. Her husband, David Bloom, an NBC correspondent and good friend, had been embedded with the army during the 2003 invasion of Baghdad. He had died of a pulmonary embolism on Iraqi soil. Melanie understood the cost of being married to a journalist. She was also the only person outside of Disney World who knew what hotel I was in. We’d had a long chat on the phone the evening before, as I had watched my kids swim in the pool.

“Lee,” Mel said, in her breathy, almost Marilyn Monroe voice. For her, this must have felt like raking up all the pain of her own initial phone call about David three years earlier. This was, as she and I used to say so many times after her husband died, a “fresh hell.”

“Mel.” I collapsed into tears. “Can you believe this? What is happening? I’m outside, and right now I have to go back in and get my kids up. I have to tell my kids. How did you do this?” I moaned.

“Lee, it’s going to be okay. It will be okay. Bob is going to be all right, I can feel it.” Mel began calming me down. “One foot in front of the other,” she said. “Just take one task at a time. First you have to pack, and then you tell the kids.”