Page Utilities
Karen Brennan, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (page 1 of 5) Page 1 of 5
A Story of Memory and Survival
Chapter 1
I want to begin with a dream I had in the summer of 1995. Because it was a dream with two parts, I entitled it “Dead Girl in Two Parts.” What follows is a direct transcription from my journal. Part 1: a girl in a school uniform falls from a ledge, from between the arches of a wrought-iron railing, to her death. I am sitting on the ledge and my daughter Rachel may have been there as well. The girl falls, I realize, because she is so small and (I think at the time) the wind blows her off. She is simply swept through the railing. When I look down I see her little pile of school clothes — it seems to be all that’s left of her. I feel regretful but not horrified.
In the second part of the dream we — me, Rachel, and the little girl — are at the seashore, sitting on a beach, close to where the waves lap up. Suddenly a large wave washes over the little girl and kills her. Rachel and I look at her face staring up at us from beneath the water. It is a distinctive image, the face of the girl, eyes closed, under the shallow water which moves softly over her. I feel more than regret now; I feel guilt. I feel that one of us (Rachel) should have been more attentive. There is a sense that Rachel had been in charge of this girl. I am therefore a little annoyed with Rachel’s irresponsibility, but this isn’t a major annoyance. It’s more like the resigned feeling I get in real life when someone’s done something wrong (as if, for example, Rachel wrecks the car I plan to give her for her birthday) and I realize it’s futile to make a big deal over it.
Approximately a month after I wrote this dream in my journal, I received a phone call in my Mexico flat — I had been spending the summer in San Miguel de Allende — informing me that my twenty-four-year-old daughter Rachel had been in a motorcycle accident and that she was presently in a deep coma in Denver General Hospital’s intensive care unit. Her friend, the driver, was fine, but Rachel’s CAT scan, the informant, a neurosurgeon, told me, was very, very ugly.
By eleven that morning I was on a first-class flight from León to Denver, sitting next to a woman who owned a travel agency in Guanajuato. She was pretty, I remember, dark-haired, dressed in cream-colored slacks and a white blouse. She wore a tiny silver watch on her wrist which, because I had lost my own, I had recourse to consult now and again. She was on her way to Denver for a romantic weekend with her husband. We had, what seems to me in retrospect, a pleasant conversation. I told her about Rachel’s accident; she consoled me. I did not cry. I spoke reasonably, I thought at the time, having all the while the bizarre sensation that I was speaking someone else’s words about someone else’s daughter. I suppose I must have been in shock.
I remember that as we conversed my mind raced along another track, somewhat at odds with our conversation. I imagined Rachel, even at that moment, woozily coming to, rubbing her eyes, her sore head. I pictured her fully awake, out of the intensive care unit by the time I arrived, and I planned her homecoming, her few weeks of rest. I even went so far as to imagine my sudden memory of this time — on the first-class flight to Denver, next to the woman in the cream-colored slacks, when I was terrified out of my mind.
My older daughter, Margot, met that Delta flight. My beautiful, usually unflappable daughter looked, I saw immediately, dismayed. We fell into each other’s arms and, for less than thirty seconds, we wept. I would discover that one could cultivate these fitful griefs, like catnaps — so much more economical than the longer, luxurious spells. Which is to say, right away we knew we would not be able to give ourselves over to the abyss of our worst fears, but had to pull ourselves together. I hadn’t, until those days, conceived of our family as the pulling-itself-together variety, but here were Margot and I having made a decision to dry our tears and walk briskly to the baggage claim, as she reported the events of the past day as efficiently as a wartime journalist. The coma, persistent, deep, 2 on the Glasgow coma scale; the CAT scan, showing bleeding in the brain itself and widespread injury to the cortex; the prognosis, unknown, gloomy.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said. “The men are so mopey.” The men were my two sons, Chris and Geoff, who had flown in from San Francisco; and two ex-husbands — Tom, the father of all four of my children, and John, their stepfather. There was Tim, a young man I’d not yet met, the boyfriend, the driver of the motorcycle which crashed for no known reason into a hillside off a long strip of country road in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
“You should hear them, gloom and doom,” Margot said. I could imagine this. The men in our family tended to be fatalists — if only to offset my own, occasionally foolhardy optimism. “They’re just waiting for the plug to be pulled.” It was a horrible sentence and it shocked me.
In the airplane I’d not allowed myself to think the worst and here it was: We could actually lose Rachel. Margot went on to explain how Chris had been the first contacted by the Denver General staff member. Chris was always changing his residence, and Rachel happened to have his latest phone number in the pocket of her jeans. “Your sister has been in a motorcycle accident and is severely brain injured,” the hospital worker had told Chris. “Are you willing to sign a release on her organs?” And Chris had been indignant. “She will need all her organs,” he told them. Soon after, he notified Margot in Tucson, then hopped a plane to Denver with Geoff.
But now, overwhelmed by hard evidence — Rachel’s failure to respond, the doctors’ frank and almost brutal assessments — even the boys, as I still called my grown-up sons, had given up hope. They were mopey and particularly hapless as they flipped too quickly through dog-eared copies of Time and Newsweek in the ICU visitor’s lounge. They stood uneasily when I arrived, as if ashamed to tell me what had happened — as if, in their manliness, it had been their duty to prevent it.
Excerpted from BEING WITH RACHEL: A Personal Story of Memory and Survival by Karen Brennan. Copyright (c) 2002 by Karen Brennan. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. books.wwnorton.com.
See All TBI Topics
Beautiful and moving!
May 2nd, 2010 10:24am