In the intensive care unit at Bethesda Suburban, the nurses were
shaking their heads. This was the third pedestrian accident they’d
seen that week. In D.C. alone, there are over 800 such accidents a year
and the number is rising despite more speed cameras. Dad suffered
seven broken bones and a traumatic brain injury, and nobody could
predict how well, or if, he’d recover. At first, he looked good, still tan
and strong in the starchy, space-age hospital unit as though he’d
mistakenly landed on the wrong stage set, but that soon changed. He
was in terrible pain, unable to eat, and very confused. He couldn’t
understand language and he was capable of muttering only the phrase
“condo fee” over and over. He didn’t know where he was and he kept
trying to pull his various tubes out and bolt. He was, in the
unexpected lingo of the hospital, “an elopement risk.”
I’d already lost one parent and I didn’t want to lose another. After
two weeks in the ICU, he was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital
known for achievements in neurology. Because of its high
concentration of medical researchers, facilities and experience with
everyone from returning veterans to gunshot victims, Washington,
D.C., is an excellent place to have a brain injury. The belief is that if
you rehab early and hard, you can recover much function.
This is the man who taught me to love nature, to cross rivers by
jumping on rocks, to lean my weight out while scampering down a
boulder, to tack a sunfish and to steady a canoe. This is the man who,
even in New York City, would scurry us up to the bleak, tar-covered
roof to watch the orange sun dip beyond the Hudson River. Every year
for Christmas, he made me a book about our wilderness trips the
previous summer. They were filled with grainy images of river rapids
and rock cliffs. The one from 1978 is titled “Adventurous.” In his
acknowledgments, he calls me out. “This is specially written for her.
It is printed in a limited edition with only one copy.” For a long time
these books were sort of painful in an embarrassing way for me to
read. My father’s earnestness, his sentimentality, my eye-rolling