19.

Nowhere to Hide

By Friday, my body had been on triple intravenous antibiotics for four

full days but still wasn’t responding. Family and friends had come from
all over, and those who hadn’t come had initiated prayer groups at their
churches. My sister-in-law Peggy and Holley’s close friend Sylvia
arrived that afternoon. Holley greeted them with as cheerful a face as she
could muster. Betsy and Phyllis continued to champion the he’s-going-to-
be-fine view: to remain positive at all costs. But each day it got harder to
believe. Even Betsy herself began to wonder if her no negativity in the
room order really meant something more like no reality in the room.
“Do you think Eben would do this for us, if the roles were reversed?”
Phyllis asked Betsy that morning, after another largely sleepless night.
“What do you mean?” asked Betsy.
“I mean do you think he’d be spending every minute with us, camping
out in the ICU?”
Betsy had the most beautiful, simple answer, delivered as a question:
“Is there anywhere else in the world where you can imagine being?”
Both agreed that though I’d have been there in a second if needed, it
was very, very hard to imagine me just sitting in one place for hours on
end. “It never felt like a chore or something that had to be done—it was
where we belonged,” Phyllis told me later.
What was upsetting Sylvia the most were my hands and feet, which
were beginning to curl up, like leaves on a plant without water. This is
normal with victims of stroke and coma, as the dominant muscles in the
extremities start to contract. But it’s never easy for family and loved ones
to see. Looking at me, Sylvia kept telling herself to stay with her original
gut feeling. But even for her, it was getting very, very hard.
Holley had taken to blaming herself more and more (if only she had
walked up the stairs sooner, if only this, if only that . . .) and everyone