Post 16: Time & Remembrance

Day 21: John: “Give It Time.”

“We’re 21 days in. Eight days ago the brain activity we’ve been seeing abruptly stopped. It is not the most encouraging news.”

  Dr. Creasey puts on a well-practiced clinical face.

“We’re three weeks post-trauma and Drew is stable, but not breathing on his own. He’s had two surgical procedures. One to reduce the swelling on his brain, which has been relieved, and the second, to repair lacerations to his spleen.  We’ve been seeing consistent brain activity almost daily. Up until now.”

I want to be an optimist. I want to be told not to worry.

“So what do we do?”

“I’m not sure I understand your question.” Dr. Creasy looked puzzled.

“What do we do next? To stimulate the brain activity. Should I be talking with him more, playing familiar music? His cousins, like brothers to him really, are coming to visit later today.”

“That sounds fine.”

“But?” I feel the patience draining out of me. Dr. Creasy, now a member of Team Drew for three weeks, recognizes the impatience in my face and addresses it directly.

“John, there’s no one easy answer for this. I know you need to feel like you’re helping and you are.” Dr. Creasy gestured to Kit and Emma. “All of you are, just by being here. You are Drew’s connection to his past—his life.” Dr. Creasy removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. For the first time he looked tired. He looked like we felt. Looking back at me, he continued. “So, John, no, I don’t have the answers you want—the ones we’d all like. What I can tell you is that his vital signs continue to be strong. His wounds are healing nicely. The swelling  in his cranium seems to have subsided and we see no evidence of permanent brain impairment. The answer I have is the one that will take the most patience. We—all of us—are simply going to have to wait.”

Dr. Creasy put his hand on my shoulder for a brief moment. “Give it time, John.” Then he gave a knowing smile, turned and left.

Day 24:  Drew, The Dream: Family History

Oh, my god. Is that my cousin Denton’s voice? Sounds like a mixture of him and his brother, David. I must be in really bad shape. Those two didn’t show up when Mama was dying. I can’t believe it. John, did you call them? I remember somewhere that it’s good for people in a coma to hear familiar voices. Holy shit. David, Denton and I haven’t talked since 2013, when cousin Natalie died. Wonder why it is that we only talk at the last minute? Wait. Here we go. The movie is starting. It seems it’s in color this time. I want popcorn, but I gave up on that awhile back. 

*

The spring John and I packed and culled through old boxes in preparation for our move from Towson Street to Old Merton Park, I  discovered a yellowed photofinishing envelope from Berman’s Drug Store, dated May 22, 1963.  Those were the pre-digital days when cameras had film that required careful loading and unloading to avoid exposure to light.

For a third-grader like me, it was trial and error.

Exposure by error while loading meant that my yet-to-be-snapped photos of our duck, our dog and my friends would almost certainly be marred by ghostly white blotches that obscured faces and fun. Execute a faulty unloading of your film, and the crisp photofinishing envelope delivered disaster: carefully cropped prints of deep, unwavering blackness. However, with care and practice (and tutelage from Mama, who was a professional photographer with her own studio in her pre-children years), my trips to the photo counter at Berman’s almost always rewarded me with photos that satisfied then and pricked memories in the years that ensued.

The pictures from May, 1963 contained photos of Easter weekend, among other stray images. Easter was part of the triumvirate of family holidays—Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas—for which all of the family on my mother’s side made an understood command appearance. They came to see their mother, Margaret, “GranMag” to us grandchildren. Some years, various aunts and uncles added in Mother’s Day and GranMag’s birthday for good measure. GranMag was the glue and the powerful force that drew her five remaining children and her fifteen grandchildren back to her several times a year.

We gathered in my hometown, a beautifully average Virginia town of about seventy thousand people at the time. Over the decades that preceded all of my cousins and me, the town had seen the gradual demise of family farms and the rise of businesses fueled by the post-war boom of the ’40s and ’50s. My mother and father had been born and raised there.

On my mother’s side, GranMag and her husband Peter Fishburn were both college-educated, a rarity for a couple starting out in 1908. GranMag was a grade school teacher, teaching all eight grades in the one-room and later a three-room schoolhouse in her district. GranDaddy, whom I never really knew, was trained in business, but yearned to be and later struggled to become a farmer. It has long been implied but never confirmed that GranDaddy “came from money.” The only other talk of money in our house was the strong implication that we didn’t have any.

GranMag took several years off from teaching when she and Pete had six children in quick succession: Martin, Virginia, my mother Elizabeth, Camille, Benjamin, and Emily. Benjamin would die of encephalitis the year he turned twelve. None of us cousins can remember hearing much about Benjamin other than that Aunt Virginia doted on him and his death brought a dark cloud over GranMag for the better part of a year.

T he family unfolded by decades. Martin was the first to marry, to Emma Knox, by all accounts a local beauty. They proceeded to have two sons in the ’40s: Daniel and Pete. A family pattern was started when Uncle Martin and Aunt Emma had two more girls, Maddie and Ann Marie, in the ’50s, after a pause of more than eight years.

Martin’s younger sister, Virginia, was married next to Robert Davis who I remember as a gregarious uncle with a comforting smile. He smelled of a pleasing combination of pipe tobacco and spearmint chewing gum. He filled a room and had a booming laugh. He was a favorite of Aunt Camille, who said on many occasions that everyone “adored” Robert, and this from a woman who doled out compliments with discretion. Aunt Virginia and Uncle Rob had three children in the ’40s: Colleen, Kate, and Charlton. A decade later, they had two more boys in the course of three years: David and Denton.

Because I was born immediately after Denton, and because we lived with only two houses between us, David and Denton became my de facto brothers, tolerating me from an early age and befriending me during the awkward years between middle school and university.

My mother, Elizabeth, was next to marry. According to her younger sister, Camille, “Elizabeth was the smart one and the pretty one. It wasn’t fair.” After knowing Bradford Carter for seven years and dating for three, she married him in a quiet evening ceremony just six weeks shy of Mama’s twentieth birthday. There wasn’t money for a reception, but Mama insisted on a new dress of navy crepe wool, which GranMag made in their living room.

Daddy was almost seven years her senior. He stood a few inches taller and spoke with quiet authority, not wasting words. Pictures of him with Mama from their earliest years together leave only one word to describe him: smitten.