Dad didn’t leave his bed for two months unless one of my brothers

was carrying him. He peed in a bottle, and the enemas continued. Even
after it became clear that he would live, we had no idea what kind of
life it would be. All we could do was wait, and soon it felt as though
everything we did was just another form of waiting—waiting to feed
him, waiting to change his bandages. Waiting to see how much of our
father would grow back.

It was difficult to imagine a man like Dad—proud, strong, physical—
permanently impaired. I wondered how he would adjust if Mother
were forever cutting his food for him; if he could live a happy life if he
wasn’t able to grasp a hammer. So much had been lost.

But mixed in with the sadness, I also felt hope. Dad had always been
a hard man—a man who knew the truth on every subject and wasn’t
interested in what anybody else had to say. We listened to him, never
the other way around: when he was not speaking, he required silence.

The explosion transformed him from lecturer to observer. Speaking
was difficult for him, because of the constant pain but also because his
throat was burned. So he watched, he listened. He lay, hour after hour,
day after day, his eyes alert, his mouth shut.

Within a few weeks, my father—who years earlier had not been able
to guess my age within half a decade—knew about my classes, my
boyfriend, my summer job. I hadn’t told him any of it, but he’d listened
to the chatter between me and Audrey as we changed his bandages,
and he’d remembered.

“I’d like to hear more about them classes,” he rasped one morning
near the end of the summer. “It sounds real interesting.”

It  felt    like    a   new beginning.