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Perfectly Imperfect Lee Woodruff, Random House (page 2 of 8) Page 2 of 8

After Alicia left that morning, I resumed crying again. And then the oddest thing happened. I closed my eyes and suddenly, a soft, white light blossomed, a burst of enveloping warmth, indescribable but somehow calming. Mysteriously, a feeling washed over me that hushed me, told me I would be okay, this would all eventually be all right. There were no flowing robes and no golden staffs. It was more like an authoritative voice. It was bigger than me, more than me — that’s the only way I can describe it now. And in that moment, the terror subsided as quickly as it had consumed me. Once again, I had gone steeply down a precipice and crept back up.

Still, I knew I could trust the light I saw and felt that day on the couch. The mere existence, the possibility of that kind of calm, gave me hope. I didn’t need medication, didn’t need to numb my mind in order to survive, I thought. Someday I would move through this. As awful as I felt right then, there would have to be better times. Life simply moves on. People adapt, or so I told myself.

Around that time, another sign came to me. This one shook me deeply but ended up giving me strength: my diamond ring broke. When we had lost a child years ago, Bob had given me a small band of seven diamonds, one for every year of our marriage. It had been my idea to remember the child we’d never known and honor the years of our union. All of a sudden, as I was driving to our friends the Bakers’ house, it simply snapped. Fingering the roughness of the cracked metal, I looked down in surprise to see the ring intact, but split across the band. I froze at the implied symbolism of this sudden, spontaneous break.

Panicking, I pulled Susan aside as soon as the twins were playing upstairs. “This ring was for us, for Bob and me,” I said. “It’s broken — does that mean that Bob is broken? Why this timing? Why now?” I needed to understand how this could possibly not augur an ill outcome.

Susan looked at me coolly. “Don’t you see, Lee?” she said without hesitating, in her southern comfort accent. “This is actually a good sign. Yes, Bob is hurt, but your marriage is intact. The ring didn’t fall off. It’s still a circle, and you didn’t even lose a stone. It is a symbol, Lee. Bob is going to need to be fixed, he is broken, but it’s all still there inside of him.”

I will always love her for that interpretation, her soothsaying. Susan had talked me down from the ledge. But my connection to future hap•piness was so tenuous, so unknowable, that I needed to spread my faith out to encompass everything — to, in effect, hedge my bets. I needed prayers and chants and symbols and omens and objects to keep myself up, to keep myself going. In point of fact, I needed all of the goodness of the universe on my side to pull us through.

While Bob was as fragile as an egg on a spoon in a children’s relay game, I hung on everyone’s encouraging words. I was the eager, crippled woman in a religious revival tent, riven with sorrow and praying for a miracle. My friends and family, the therapists and doctors, our minister, all of these people were the shamans of my tribe. Although I knew they did not work magic, I desperately wanted to believe they could.

Take care of yourself, everyone said. Make time for yourself, consider what your body needs. But it was impossible. If they could have seen my life, the overwhelming crush of responsibility mixed with all of the little things, the permission slips and school notices, the tax extension and the haircut for Mack, they would have known better than to utter those words. How does any caregiver really make time for herself in the midst of a cyclone? I just hung tight to my game of Chutes and Ladders and waited for the end of the ride.

The months ticked on, and soon Bob was approaching the date for his surgery to place the acrylic skull over his exposed brain. He had lived with a plastic climbing helmet on his head anytime he was on his feet. It would be a long and involved procedure and not without risk. Essentially, they would have to peel back Bob’s scalp and lay it over his face as they fine-tuned the size of the acrylic skull plate so that it would fit as precisely as a puzzle piece, then set it into place and use a special epoxy to bond it to his existing skull bone.

He was understandably frightened and anxious. Unlike the dozens of surgeries he had undergone when he was unconscious, he was well aware of this one and its risks. And the thought of having neurosurgery terrified him.

With all of this pressure and worry building up, and everyone still reminding me to take care of myself, I decided I was finally ready to talk to someone. After choosing a therapist near my home, I went for a few sessions. Each time I found myself crying for a solid hour, asking the woman questions she couldn’t possibly answer about Bob’s ultimate outcome and what would become of us. It soon became clear that my abstract whining in the psychiatrist’s office wasn’t getting me anywhere solid. She helped me develop some imagery — I was to picture myself on a raft in the middle of my favorite lake — but the night terrors still stole into my room each evening and capsized my calm water scene.

I liked this therapist, I really did, but I found the whole idea of grief counseling disturbing in that, no matter what I was doing or how I was feeling, if it was nine-thirty on Wednesday I had to drop everything and go prepare to grieve. Even if I’d been having a good day, I had to be ready to leave that room after an hour with tissues pressed to my nose, sniffling or holding back sobs. It felt like mourning on cue, and I grew to resent it.

“You need body armor,” Dr. Mary Hibbard announced to me one afternoon. Although she was Bob’s neuropsychologist in New York, she had agreed to counsel me too. She knew Bob; she monitored and marked his progress. She had concrete answers about brain injuries and examples of other success stories, though admittedly they were few and far between.

Excerpted from Perfectly Imperfect by Lee Woodruff Copyright © 2009 by Lee Woodruff. Excerpted by permission of Random House Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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