It has now been almost six years since taking ill and needing emergency life-saving spinal surgery which left me far more disabled. I have written about how this happened in February 2017.
I have mentioned in the last several months that I’ve been thinking about how much my life has changed. In my last post, I wrote (actually in my latest Claremont Courier column) about how my life has changed even as or perhaps even because I incorporate certain elements from my life before the surgery.
I’ve also wondered, as I believed I’ve also mentioned, why I’m thinking about all this perhaps more than ever all this time after the surgery. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me I would have moved on from on from such musing by now. A friend tells me, or reminds me, that this past will always be with me.
In any case, I am increasingly aware that the illness and surgery were really the culmination of a year, an extraordinary year, of dramatic events, extraordinary, dramatic events. I don’t remember if I was aware that this year was changing my life or would end up with my life changing so much.
The year actually started some 14 months before, in December 2015, when I went up to the Bay Area just after Christmas to see my family. I learned just before going north that my mom, who was in her 80’s, had fallen when she was alone and tried walking without her walker and had broken her hip. This meant a good part of the visit was spent going to the nearby hospital in San Rafael to see her. (A few years earlier, my parents had wisely moved to a senior living community with a nursing facility on the premises. My dad didn’t really like it, not only because, ironically for its Bay Area location, most of the residents were conservatives, but he really moved there for Mom, who was quite happy with all the social opportunities.) My attendant David told me often to take it easy and stay calm and gently reminded me that things could have been much worse. Indeed, to his great amusement, the first thing that Mom said when she saw me on my initial visit was, “Can somebody comb his hair?” As if a nurse would come running in to do it. Yep, she was still Mom.
Except that, as my dad kept reminding me over the next months, she wasn’t. In long, almost regularly scheduled e-mails, Dad reported, or, more accurately for him, lamented and/or complained that Mom wasn’t “trying hard enough,” wasn’t keeping up with her rehab exercises, and was not getting better. In other words, much to his frustration, Mom was going downhill.
I had the chance to see this for myself when it turned out that Pacific Yearly Meeting, the big, annual regional gathering of Quakers, was taking place at Walker Creek Ranch in rural Marin County, about an hour north of where my parents lived, in June instead of later in the summer as usual. But it turned out the my visit while staying in the Bay Area before heading further north for the 5-day gathering, once again with David in tow, was going to be considerably more fraught.
David and I had just gotten off the 1-0-1a and were just down the hill from my parents’ residence when something went wrong. At least, that’s what it felt like at first. I didn’t realize that we had been hit. It was nothing like what I thought being in a car accident would be like. There was no looking up and seeing a car coming, no screeching of tires, no shattering of glass, no airbags filling. It was like it happened in slow motion. I didn’t even realize we had been hit – and we were hit in the front on the passenger side, where I was sitting.
But we had been hit. We were in an intersection, literally at a gas station – how handy! David and I were rattled, but he managed to pull into the station (I don’t remember if we had help with this), and when I got out, I saw that the front of the van was crumpled, smashed in. It wasn’t pretty. When I look back now, I’m amazed that the windshield wasn’t damaged.
Obviously, I was upset about this, but I was at least as upset that my dad had to be involved. Of all the times and places for this to happen. David called my dad, and he came right down and, surprisingly, was pretty calm and understanding. This helped, as David and I were pretty rattled, and I was in no shape to face his questioning. While David traded information with the other driver, my dad called for his retirement community’s wheelchair-accessible bus to come down the hill and pick me up. Sometimes, such services are especially handy! We gathered all our stuff – hats, glasses, whatnot – out of the van, hoping but not sure if we’d see it again, and headed up the hill when the bus came. (It turned out that we ran a red light, which was a surprise to me, and, unfortunately, David later ended up having to pay a $500 fine.)
It turned out that my mother was having a difficult time and was in the nursing facility. As unfortunate as this was, it turned out to be for the best, because there was a lot to deal with, which we realized as Dad served up lunch. First and foremost, how was I going to get anywhere, even back to the hotel, without a wheelchair-accessible van? Then, should I just go home, or should I go ahead and go to the meeting?
Again, my dad surprised me – twice. First, he agreed that we should try to get to the meeting, and, secondly, it turned out he and David made a good pair. They got on the phones to find a wheelchair-accessible van to rent, which turned out to be a real challenge, even in the disability-friendly bay area. They finally found one about an hour and a half south. So, after we finished lunch, Dad and David left me to while away the next few hours until they returned with the rental, and then David and I went back to our hotel in El Cerrito and then to dinner with my sister and her boyfriend (now husband) in Oakland.
Getting the rental was especially important to me, because we were giving my friend Carl, who uses a wheelchair, a ride to yearly meeting. I was so glad we could come through for him, and picking him up at the train station (Carl is something of an expert at riding the rails – and also flying – with a wheelchair) in Martinez the next morning was all the more exciting. An extra treat was seeing John Muir’s house in the small town, as David and I had an hour or so to kill before Carl’s train arrived.
We arrived, intact and happy, at Walker Creek Ranch, a most cherished spot of mine in the beautiful, serene, golden rolling hills of rural Marin County, and were thrilled to be sharing a room. But there were things that were not settled and that had to be worked out. Little did we know what wonders this would lead to.
For one thing, the van had to be returned, as it was quite costly. After getting me and Carl settled, David took the van back to San Rafael. From there, he and my dad took the van back to the rental place, and Dad then drove David back to Walker Creek Ranch. This all took at least four hours, during which they also had dinner and, from what I heard, developed quite a nice relationship, with my dad, retired math professor that he is, encouraging David to pursue his studies (which he has to this day).
There was also the fact that we, including Carl, didn’t know how we were going to get back to the Bay Area, much less home (Carl lived near Grass Valley), after the meeting was over. As I told several people, I felt, very appropriately for a religious setting, that I was truly in God’s hands. I had to trust, to let go, to let God. I had often experienced heightened spiritual awareness at this gathering over the years but nothing like this.
I was thinking about this when, perhaps on the second morning of the five-day meeting, I noticed a woman or girl in a wheelchair. She hadn’t been present earlier, and she didn’t look familiar. I wasn’t sure, but she may have been mentally as well as physically disabled; in any case, she was quite severely disabled.
Later, at lunch, I noticed her with two women. I went over, and, after conversing a bit with the two women who were her attendants, it became clear that this was Leslie, who I had known in college 30 years earlier. We looked at each other in shock and all but screamed, causing others in the dining hall to wonder what was going on.
As thrilled and in awe as I was by this chance encounter, I was shocked and alarmed by how much more disabled Leslie, who had been disabled very similarly to me with Cerebral Palsy, now was, including in her speech. It turned out she had been quite ill with meningitis five years earlier. I also learned that Leslie had been a well-known marriage/relationship counselor and disability activist in Berkeley, was married to a man for 7 years and then came out as a lesbian. She wasn’t taking part in the meeting – she was Jewish – but was there with one of her attendants, a German woman named Ingrid, and her intellectually disabled, teenaged son, Tom, who were attending for a couple days. They, along with another of Leslie’s attendants, had borrowed a van from the independent living center in Berkeley, since Leslie was a member of the center. (While I was off at other activities in the afternoon, David assisted Leslie a bit and got to know her and Ingrid and Tom and was charmed and amused by their relationship. To this day, he affectionately imitates Ingrid’s heavy German accent.)
This turned out to be quite fortunate – and not just because Leslie said I could stay at her place in Berkeley when I was in the Bay Area. Leslie and Ingrid et al left the meeting before it was over, but Ingrid offered to borrow the van again and return on the last day, when she took Carl to the nearest train station and returned to take David and me back to my parents in San Rafael.
Ingrid walked right into my parents’ apartment, sat down on the couch and began talking to my dad, telling him about our encounter at the meeting. Once again, I was surprised at how easy-going my dad was. Also, my mother was there in a wheelchair. I tried to talk to her, but she was a bit confused about Ingrid and was having some discomfort. Once again, David took things in hand and wheeled her back to the nursing unit.
At this point, my memory is a bit unclear, but, somehow, there was another rented van which David and I took to return to the hotel in El Cerrito where we had stayed the previous week. I’m also unclear about how another attendant, Virsil, entered the picture that evening or the next day. I think David remained in the Bay Area to spend time with his family in Fremont, and Virsil and I got onto a train headed to Los Angeles. I don’t remember what happened with the rented van.
I do remember that the train ride was very long, that I could get a nice chef’s salad on a nice plate and that I cried at one point, overwhelmed by everything that had happened – the accident, spending time with Carl, running into Leslie after 30 years, getting a ride back from the meeting, seeing my mom in the state she was in. I also had a cold after being out in the chilly, foggy morning on the last morning of Pacific Yearly Morning.
Virsil and I got off the train at Union Station in Los Angeles, and then I’m pretty sure we got on a Metrolink train and got off in Claremont and walked the last few blocks to my house.
