One night my husband took the dog out. It took The janitor called on the intercom: “Your dog is getting on the elevator.”
And her husband?
“Her husband was hit by a car. Run!” Rich was lying in a pool of blood with his head open. Harry had let go of his leash and Rich took off running after him. My life had just changed.
Diagnosis?
Cranioencephalic trauma to the frontal lobe. Part of the brain seeped through the sinus cavities.
Did he meet a new Rich?
Yes, and a different me. My perception of time changed, for Rich the passage of time did not flow in the same way, it was complex time, it could take 40 minutes to put on a sock, and I learned from it.
Rich couldn’t live at home?
He lived in a center for people with brain damage until his death. He suffered hallucinations, fits of rage, terrors, and sometimes, briefly, he took out his old head again but with unusual perceptions, he knew things that were impossible for him to know, as if other channels of perception had been opened.
Give me an example.
I was in Mexico looking at some beautiful tiles and talking to him on the phone. I asked him what they were doing downtown and he said they were making tiles, and they didn’t do that and never had.
Did it happen to you often?
Yes, and that made me think that there are people who know what is happening elsewhere or what will happen. He also had very deep thoughts.
Do you remember any of them?
“The goat has a mouth full of stones”, seemed to me a sentence taken from the oracle of Delphi. I liked his way of seeing the world.
Even brain damaged?
In the center was a very large aquarium full of fish and Rich was asking me if those fish would know where they were and if they would remember being in other aquariums or in the sea – a very lucid comment for someone with such extensive brain damage.
Did you recognize her?
Yes, I knew we were married. One day he asked me: “We got married a year ago?”. “Seventeen”, I told him. “Abby, our life has been so simple that the days go by without feeling”. Before the accident he was a very generous and sweet man, and he didn’t lose that, only at the beginning, he was very angry because he didn’t understand anything.
Then he had three dogs.
The dogs were a great comfort, and even a joy, I loved looking at them, seeing how they live the present. It was easier to be a herd with them than to be with the people.
Did you feel guilty?
When I left Manhattan and moved to a house in the country, in Woodstock, near the residence, I started to like my life, I made new friends, I started teaching writing workshops, it was nice.
And that tortured her?
“You’re building this life around Rich’s tragedy,” I said to myself.
What is the scariest question ever asked?
If I could go back and prevent Rich’s accident from happening, would I?… I hesitated and felt that I didn’t deserve to live.
How hard.
And as I always do when I’m insecure, I looked up a word in the dictionary: acceptance, one of the meanings had to do with thread, I thought that we weave life with a thread of light, and I continued weaving.
What happened to their relationship?
I continued to love him very much and see the person he had been in the many people he had become. What I needed to overcome it is to talk to myself, that’s writing, and it saved me.
What did you learn from that trance?
Patience, and that love continues, albeit in a different way. I learned to live in the moment and wrote a book that I love. For the hard things that happen to us, we need to create a place for them to live that is not always inside us.
what is love
Even if things happen that radically change everything, love doesn’t go away, you just need to make small adjustments; and you always have to have a dog, they know how to love.
His love is unconditional.
What is beautiful is to feel that this unconditional love is from you to the dog and not the other way around.
What is your advice?
Even if your mind makes things complicated for you, don’t put yourself through hell.
What does living consist of?
Stay curious, get excited. And although life is sometimes tragic, it always has things to discover. You know, I really like being old, because there are so many things that I don’t give a shit about.
