When Abigail Thomas’s husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his brain shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institution. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude. It is also about her relationship with Rich, a man who lives in the eternal present, and the eerie poetry of his often uncanny perceptions. This wise, plainspoken, beautiful book enacts the truth Abigail discovered in the five years since the accident: You might not find meaning in disaster, but you might, with effort, make something useful of it.
The wife of a man who was institutionalized after an accident left him violently brain damaged describes her efforts to rebuild her life in a small country town with three dogs, a process during which she struggled with a very different relationship with her husband, passed her days knitting, and found comfort in friendships and her changing perceptions about life.x
What Stays the Same
This is the one thing that stays the same: my husband got hurt. Everything else changes. A grandson needs me and then he doesn’t. My children are close then one drifts away. I smoke and don’t smoke; I knit ponchos, then hats, shawls, hats again, stop knitting, start up again. The clock ticks, the seasons shift, the night sky rearranges itself, but my husband remains constant, his injuries are permanent. He grounds me. Rich is where I shine. I can count on myself with him.
I live in a cozy house with pretty furniture. Time passes here. There is a fireplace and two acres and the dogs run around and dig big holes and I don’t care. I have a twenty-seven-inch TV and lots of movies. The telephone rings often. Rich is lodged in a single moment and it never tips into the next. Last week I lay on his bed in the nursing home and watched him. I was out of his field of vision and I think he forgot I was there. He stood still, then he picked up a newspaper from a neat pile of newspapers, held it a moment, and carefully put it back. His arms dropped to his sides. He looked as if he was waiting for the next thing but there is no next thing.
I got stuck with the past and future. That’s my half of this bad hand. I know what happened and I never get used to it. Just when I think I’ve metabolized everything I am drawn up short. "Rich lost part of his vision" is what I say, but recently Sally told the nurse, "He is blind in his right eye," and I was catapulted out of the safety of the past tense into the now.
Today I drive to the wool store. I arrive with my notebook open and a pen.
"What are you doing?" Paul asks.
"I’m taking a poll," I say. "What is the one thing that stays stable in your life?"
"James," says Paul instantly.
"And I suppose James will say Paul," I say, writing down James.
"No, he’ll say the dogs," says Paul, laughing.
"Creativity," says Heidi, the genius.
"I have to think," says a woman I don’t know.
"The dogs," says James.
Rich and I had a house together once. He was the real gardener. He raked and dug, planted and weeded, stood over his garden proudly. Decorative grasses were his specialty. He cut down my delphiniums when he planted his fountain grass. "Didn’t you see them?" I asked. "They were so tall and beautiful." But he was too busy digging to listen. I lost interest in flowers. We planted a hydrangea tree outside the kitchen window. We cut down (after much deliberation) two big prickly bushes that were growing together like eyebrows at either side of our small path. We waited until the birds were done with their young, then Rich planted two more hydrangea trees where the bushes had stood. I don’t want to see how big they are by now, how beautiful their heavy white blossoms look when it rains. "I love what you’ve done with the garden," my friend Claudette says, looking at the bed of overgrown nettles in my backyard. I weeded there exactly once. I want to plant fountain grass out there, but first I need a backhoe.
Rich and I don’t have the normal ups and downs of a marriage. I don’t get impatient. He doesn’t have to figure out what to do with his retirement. I don’t watch him go through holidays with the sorrow of missing his absent children. Last week we were walking down the hall to his room, it was November, we had spent the afternoon together. "If I wasn’t with you and we weren’t getting food, the dark would envelop my soul," he said cheerfully.
He never knows I’m leaving until I go.
Copyright © 2006 by Abigail Thomas
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ABIGAIL THOMAS is the author of Safekeeping, a memoir, as well as a novel and two story collections. She lives in Woodstock, New York, and teaches at the New School.
Approximately five years ago, Thomas's (Safekeeping ) husband, Rich, was hit by a car, a trauma that left him with an erratic memory and injuries requiring institutionalization. In this heart-wrenching memoir, Thomas tells of her struggles to build a new life. She and Rich met through a New York Review of Books ad when he was 57 and she was 46. It took her "about five minutes to realize this was the nicest man in the world and he asked [her] to marry him thirteen days later." A writer and teacher, she moved from New York City to a smaller town to be closer to Rich. She added two more dogs to her family, learned to knit, and found support in unexpected places. More important, she faced her guilt, turning it into a quiet gratitude and finding the necessary emotional resources for survival. In lesser hands, their backstory might have seemed sentimental or cloying, but Thomas balances the reader's need to know with sensible boundaries that are respectful of privacy. This is highly recommended reading for all caregivers and healthcare professionals.-- Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
[Page 117]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Stephen King's front-cover endorsement of Thomas's memoir as the best he's ever read--and a "punch to the heart"--will surely pique interest in this wrenching, elegiac portrait of her third husband, Rich, who flounders in a miasmic present after a hit-and-run in their Manhattan neighborhood shatters his skull, destroys his short-term memory and consigns him to permanent brain trauma. A deft balance of fevered pathos and dark humor link this memoir, in spirit and theme, to Safekeeping , Thomas's collected vignettes that memorialize her second husband. But Thomas also finds wellsprings of inspiration in her tragicomic interactions with Rich and in the self-reliance she's forced to develop, aided by her faithful dogs (the book's title adapts an aboriginal phrase, derived from the tradition of cuddling with dogs on frigid nights). Rich--himself reminiscent of a Stephen King eccentric--utters eerily prescient, absurdly poetic non sequiturs, probing the essence of time and love with ingenuous intuition, though his acute paranoia and confusion make these exchanges truly heartbreaking. Thomas's quick-cutting chronology and confessional narration subtly re-enacts the soupiness of her husband's mind, even as she quietly thanks him for the wisdom of living in the present. (Sept.)
[Page 55]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
