My mother nearly died in a car accident on President’s Day 1986
The borrowed car my father was driving skidded over the center line and into the path of a car with a snow plough on its front. Mom’s seatbelt saved her life, but she broke a collarbone, multiple ribs and lost lots of blood. Already out on the road due to other accidents, paramedics heard the collision and drove immediately to the site. Even with their speedy arrival, she was given a 1 percent chance of living.
Then a junior at Stanford University, I flew home to Boston from California several days later. I walked down the white tiled hallways in the hospital where I had worked the previous two summers, absorbing the building’s antiseptic smell. After entering the intensive care unit and shuddering involuntarily as I approached her bed, I braced myself and looked at Mom.
Her eyelids looked like purple eggplants covering her closed eyes. Tubes snaked in and out of her body. A respiratory machine pushed air into her lungs though a diamond-shaped hole that had been cut in her throat. The machine hissed inexorably, each push up and down illustrating her dependence on it for her tenuous hold on life. I wanted to rip the tubes out of Mom’s body, to take her home and go to Chef Chow’s, our favorite Chinese restaurant. I talked and talked, uttering desperate words of encouragement to her that I did not believe, yet felt compelled to say because the alternative was too terrifying.
More hissing. The same hospital smell. No movement from the bed.
Although visiting Mom for the first time was one of the most difficult things I ever did, it was harder still to come back for the second, third and 40th times during her three-month stay in intensive care and a nearby rehabilitation facility. But my brothers Mike, Jon and I did just that. Dad did not come home for close to three weeks, so we developed routines of visiting our parents at the hospital before eating the turkeys, lasagnas, and chickens deposited magically by our neighbors on our front porch and watching the Larry Bird-led Celtics steamroll toward their sixteen championship.
Mom came out of the coma within two days and began making an achingly slow, gradually forward-moving recovery. Then 48 years old, she was thrust back to the beginning of life, having to relearn how to stand, walk and control her bladder. The massive closed head injury she sustained meant she also had to learn how to talk and behave appropriately in social situations again. When she first started speaking, for example, her aphasia led her to call G-d “Brillo” and describe pain as “in the negative.”
Due to her tenacious will, extensive medical treatment and willingness to try alternative therapies, Mom regained strength and language as she moved through developmental stages and resumed life as a functioning adult. She reached out to others who had endured trauma, too, traveling to Washington, DC, to testify before Congress. She started a non-profit organisation, Vital Active Life After Trauma, to help build a world where those who had suffered similar injuries could live dignified and fulfilled lives. An accomplished poet before the accident, she resumed writing, using more plain and soulful language than before the crash.
Mom lived fully and well for more than three decades, encountering more physical challenges as she became a mother-in-law and grandmother of four and meeting them with her customary grit. After contracting adult-onset diabetes in the 1990s, she shed close to 100 pounds and maintained a healthier diet and lifestyle in the years afterward. Her failing heart led to the installation of a pacemaker in 2010, the same year she had her right hip replaced. She kept moving, even as she used a walker more and more regularly each year. When she turned 80 years old in 2017, our families gave her a book we had assembled and I edited of her poetry and writing. My brother Jon’s picture of a grave rubbing adorned the cover. We divided her work into the time before and after the accident to illustrate its seismic change.
Three years ago, after recognizing her social isolation imposed by COVID, Mom made another brave decision to leave the city where she had lived her entire adult life and move to San Francisco to be near family. It has worked out well. Mike and his family have provided unstinting support. Their weekly visits for Saturday or Sunday lunch have become highlights of the entire dining room which doesn’t often see young children. Mom’s made friends and sits with the same group of women for meals, even if she doesn’t always remember what they discussed
Not everything has been smooth. A second hip replacement shortly led to another arduous and incomplete recovery. She had a recent 10-day stint in the hospital to remove excess fluid that had accumulated in her lungs and around her heart due to congestive heart failure.
Once again in a familiar place of caring for our ailing mother, we are no longer young men, but middle-aged husbands and fathers. The corners of our eyes, hair color and posture bear the imprint of our decades of life. While talking about the Celtics potentially defending their eighteenth crown still brings us comfort, watching Mom struggle to recall her words and formulate thoughts hurts. So, too, does watching her physical ailments. Like many people in their late 80s, she is at a place where her body’s woes have compounded to make formerly routine actions like standing up from her chair and walking around her two-room apartment a slow and painful affair.
So on this day that our nation honors the births of one president we consider our father and another who guided us through our most searing conflict, I feel deep down grateful for the gift of nearly 40 years of life Mom very nearly did not have. Yet my gratitude is mingled with sadness at her decline and the steadily approaching end of her remarkable, miraculously extended life.
By Jeff Kelly Lowenstein
The author is the founder and executive director of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and an associate professor in the Journalism, Broadcasting and Digital Media program at Grand Valley State University. Parts of this essay have been previously published by the Daily Maverick.