A Million Years with You (25 page)

What about Steve's pack? It weighed about fifty pounds, and mine weighed forty. I thought we should cancel the trip, but Stephanie said she'd take the extra pack. I told her that the packs were too heavy, but she tried mine and said she could do it. So her brother took her pack, she took my pack, I took Steve's pack, and we went camping after all, no worries. She was only nine years old, and weighed not much more than the pack she carried, but she carried it all the way without stopping to rest and of course without complaining.

I thought I was proud of her then, but more was to come—much more—so we skip forward eight years—right after she graduated from the same boarding school I had attended—to the day that she was paralyzed for life. The accident involved a man who, with the help of Stephanie and her friend Jana Schweitzer, was doing some work for Tom with a tractor.

We had been staying with Tom in Peterborough and I was in the kitchen when the tractor departed with Stephanie and Jana standing in the bucket attachment on the front. I didn't know they were riding in the bucket, which I would have considered unsafe. A few minutes later the phone rang. It was our neighbor's son, Andy Peterson. He told me that Stephanie had been hurt. I rushed to Andy's house. Stephanie was lying on her back in the road, looking somewhat apologetic for the trouble she was causing. Evidently she fell forward out of the bucket and the tractor ran over her.

Andy called the ambulance. The ambulance people pricked her legs with a pin to see if she could feel it. She couldn't. Then they loaded her in and took her to the local hospital. No one at that small community hospital could do anything to help her except arrange for the ambulance to take her to a larger hospital in Boston. I made a frantic phone call to Steve, who at the time was at work in Washington, D.C. His assistant told me he was in a meeting. I screamed, “I need him now!” and the next thing I knew, he was saying he was on his way. I also called my parents. They said they'd meet me at the hospital. When Stephanie was moved back into the ambulance, I got in with her and we went.

The trip from New Hampshire took almost two hours, so by the time we got there not much could be done. Waiting for me was Dr. Sensitivity in a white jacket. As I came into the waiting room he yelled, “She's paralyzed for life.” Then he added that her life wouldn't be that long anyway, because paralysis would shorten it by one third. “Most of them die of kidney failure,” he added. Would I like to talk to a clergyman? There was one in the next room, he said. But I didn't want a clergyman. Just then a door opened and Stephanie came through on a gurney.

She was on her way to the operating room. I grabbed her hands and told her I'd stay with her no matter what and that she'd be okay, although at the time that seemed unlikely. She looked a bit scared but was very brave anyway. She told me not to be afraid.

My parents were in the waiting room. Other relatives began to gather. I felt as hard as granite. I couldn't cry. I could laugh, though—my name wasn't Kothonjoro for nothing. I know what I was like from a photo taken a few days later, with Stephanie again on a gurney, one of my brother's girlfriends leaning over her sadly and sweetly, and me standing by, wearing sunglasses and grinning a hard-ass grin that shows all my teeth except the rear molars.

My sister-in-law Pamela was with me in this—she doesn't cry either. When she joined us in the waiting room, we joked along the lines of “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?” And ever after this I've had great sympathy for the unfortunate victims of television news to whom something terrible has happened that they don't cry about. The newscaster finds fault with them for not crying. Their failure to cry casts doubt on their story. But I know why they don't cry—they don't because they can't, because some things, many things, are far beyond crying.

 

Steve arrived while Stephanie was in the recovery room. We couldn't see her until she was taken to the intensive care unit in a Stryker frame, a device in which she was like the filling in a sandwich. This was her second experience in a hospital. The first was the night we had looked toward the Bronx where her future husband slept. The doctors had stabilized her spine but told us that her spinal cord was cut between the twelfth thoracic and first lumbar vertebrae. Her upper body was okay but her lower body was gone. Or that's how they put it. She would have to wait for her bones to mend before she could transfer to a rehabilitation unit.

When we first saw her she was facing the ceiling, but soon an attendant came in and turned the frame with her inside it so that she faced the floor. We lay on our backs on the floor and looked up at her, scaring the hospital people, as they thought we had fainted side by side. No, we were just visiting our daughter with a severed spine.

 

Interestingly, an event of this kind sorts out your friends. Most of them, of course, were very present for us, offering us places to stay and help of any kind if needed. But several of them dropped us. We never heard from them again. I didn't care that a few of our erstwhile friends did this to us, but I cared plenty when one of Stephanie's friends did it to her. That friend, a former teacher whom Stephanie adored, promised to visit her on a certain day. Stephanie asked me to buy a potted plant, the most beautiful one I could find, and bring it to the hospital so she could present it to her teacher during the expected visit. I bought a gorgeous azalea and Stephanie waited and waited. She waited all day, but the woman didn't come. She didn't call either. We thought perhaps we had the day wrong, but we didn't. The woman never came and never called to say she'd changed her mind. A few months later I saw this woman at the airport on a bus. She said she had just been thinking about me. “So that's what happened,” I said in a voice that wasn't too friendly. “A moment ago I was in my kitchen, then
whoof!
I'm here on a bus.”
You're a witch
was my message, and she got it. She looked down at her hands.

 

On balance, I'd say that the people who avoided us had problems with injuries, or else they didn't know what to say when they heard our news and then felt guilty because they hadn't responded—all of which I could understand because I'd done such things myself, before I knew what really bad things felt like or how to react to them.

But oh, the people who stood by us! One friend, Alan Forbes, went to the hospital to visit Stephanie. He was a scholar of ancient Greece, doing research for a paper on images of Hercules portrayed as a lion on Greek vases, and he knew that Stephanie was interested in mythology. She had been accepted at Harvard, where she planned to major in mythology. So Alan offered her a job as his assistant and she took it. He brought her a huge pile of books and other publications with photographs of Greek vases and she began a search for images of a lionlike Hercules.

I never found the words to thank Alan for this. A job! When everyone else was in mourning, when everyone else believed that her life was as good as over because this terrible thing had happened to her. But Alan didn't bring a sympathy card or flowers. He told her that she had a future, that she had value, that she was needed, that her interests were important, that she could help. There was nothing in this world I would not have done for Alan. I would have aligned with the devil on his behalf, and in time I did. I heartlessly betrayed a trusting friend for his sake, a terrible, almost unspeakable deed which I did without regret. I won't say what it was because it involves other people, but I did it coldly and gladly for Alan. And I'd do it again.

That was not my only alignment with the devil. Someone sent me an article about stem cell research and how scientists had severed a rat's spinal cord, then injected him with cells from another rat's fetus. The experiment worked, and the spinal cord regenerated. At the time the concept of stem-cell research was new, so I took the article to my gynecologist. I told him that I was going to get pregnant and that he would remove the unborn child and inject his or her cells into my daughter. I told him that he was the only person who knew my plan and he had to help me.

He said we couldn't do it. I said we had to. He said we couldn't possibly do it, that even if it were to become an accepted medical practice, the research was just beginning and he had no way of knowing how to do it. Therefore we didn't, but I would have done it. A hunter-gatherer woman of the Old Way, a woman living with hunger and with a nursing baby who needed all her milk, would be required to commit infanticide if she bore a second child too soon after the first, thus losing just one of her infants but not both. Among the many Bushmen we knew, a few women—very few—had been forced to kill a newborn child to save a toddler, although they suffered terribly because of it. But the Ju/wasi were my lodestar. When the idea of the stem cells came to me, and of killing an unborn child to save another child, I was thinking of them.

 

Obviously, I had a negative view of spinal cord injury. And I was not alone. Just a few days after our daughter's accident I read a news story about a boy in Georgia who was the same age as our daughter and had been injured at the same time in the same way. He too faced life in a wheelchair, but that was not to be his fate. One night soon after his injury, as he was lying in his hospital bed, his father and some of his brothers came in and shot him. My efforts to help my daughter had taken a different turn, but the feeling behind these efforts was the same: paralysis is more terrible than death, and everything possible must be done to mitigate it.

But then I had an interesting conversation. The rehab unit where Stephanie was placed was mainly supported by workers' compensation. For a while Stephanie was the only woman. The others could be divided into two groups as to the cause of their injuries—the young men were injured by bullets or in vehicle accidents, and the older men were injured in the course of their work. A man employed by a power company had fallen out of the cherry-picker bucket that was lifting him up to the power lines, for example. All of the younger men were newly injured, but some of the older men were at the unit for checkups.

During my visits, I couldn't help but notice one of them, a middle-aged gentleman who was very handy with his wheelchair, spinning it around, whisking it through doorways, as if he had been using it for a long time. I decided to seek his advice and asked if I could talk with him. “Of course,” he said.

I looked around for a chair to sit in—he already had a chair—and when I found one he rolled up beside me. I told him that he seemed very experienced and asked him what lay ahead for my daughter. I don't know what I expected to hear—perhaps something tragic and dark. So I was hugely surprised, even shocked, by his answer. “It's a nuisance,” he said. “It takes longer to do things. But other than that, there isn't much change, so it's really not very important.”

Oh my God. Not a fate worse than death? Merely a nuisance? It was if a light came on. I saw it. And this wonderful man, my benefactor, proved it. There he was, going about his business, making phone calls, reading the paper, getting ready to go back to his job and his life beyond the rehab unit. He knew what he was talking about. I hadn't. I thanked him very much. He said I was welcome. “She's a nice girl,” he added. “She'll be fine.”

He was right. She was fine. I doubt that in those days Harvard would have accepted a paraplegic, but it was too late, she had already been accepted, so when classes began the following autumn, she was ready. She majored in folklore and mythology and graduated with honors, and in the meantime became something of an activist, working with Harvard to make some of its buildings and even some bathrooms accessible to people in wheelchairs. I once had occasion to visit the Harvard infirmary—I don't remember why—and when the doctor learned whose mother I was, he threw his arms around me. He told me stories about Stephanie—one of them about how a young man in her dormitory had overdosed on something late at night and she had taken him to the infirmary on her lap. That was her, though. Strong.

After her graduation, which Steve and I attended, all dressed up, me weeping, Stephanie and I went to Australia to visit my brother's ex-wife Heather and my niece Sonya. My mother gave us the money to go—it was her graduation present to Stephanie. After the visit we took a little tour on our own. I rented a small car in which we drove from Heather's home in Melbourne all the way to Darwin via Alice Springs, having adventures on the way that I wouldn't have minded not having.

One night, for instance, we arrived at the campground at Ayer's Rock, only to learn that a dingo had just carried off a baby. People were shouting and rushing around with flashlights. I assumed that the parents had killed the baby and made up the story about the dingo. Because child abuse is only too common in the United States, other Americans might make the same assumption. When I heard that the officials at Ayer's Rock intended to exterminate the local dingoes, I made a phone call to Heather's husband, a much-respected biologist who knew people in high places. He said he'd do his best to stop the slaughter, but I was told that the authorities killed a great many dingoes before the parents were considered. Soon enough the event became international news, and in time the baby's mother went to prison, but if we could have chosen a sensational, newsworthy event to attend, we would have chosen something less distressing.

After that, on our way through northern Australia, we found ourselves in the middle of a forest fire that was moving so fast it was on us almost before we saw it. It was a firestorm, really, with the eucalyptus trees around us exploding into flame. In the blink of an eye, the fire crossed the road behind us so there was no choice but to step on the gas and speed forward as fast as we could. It was our good luck that the trees ahead were just catching fire. We whizzed by them and lived to tell the story.