Crash (16 page)

My mother recovered well from that stroke but suffered several more over the years. The last one was devastating, leaving her lingering in a not-quite-vegetative state for weeks. She underwent CAT scan after CAT scan, baffling the doctors, who saw no lesion on her scans that accounted for the state she was in. She was intubated but breathing on her own much of the time. But every time the doctors tried to extubate her, to let her breathe on her own, she failed.

My siblings and I watched our mother endure one invasive procedure after another. But with the doctors not being able to see any reason for her state, we all held out hope that she might turn around, open her eyes, speak.

It never happened. Weeks passed. We went from constant bedside vigilance to gradually returning to work, visiting her in the evenings like other visitors: like she’d just had her appendix out.

The staff began to talk about nursing homes, long-term care facilities. My brother and sister were the first ones to broach the subject of taking her off life support.

“Mom wouldn’t want this,” they told me.

I was the holdout. As much as I championed patients’ right to die, as much as I believed in families deciding the fates of their loved ones, this was one decision I felt incapable of making.

I eventually succumbed. So did my mother. We siblings made a plan. We would all be with her. We would not leave her alone. We called our children. Everyone came. The nurses removed my mother’s breathing tube, gave her a little morphine, then left us alone as a family. The grandchildren were taking it pretty hard, crying in turns. My mother continued breathing. She got congested from time to time. When she coughed or grimaced, the nurses gently cleared her airway and gave her more morphine. The day passed. We took turns going to the cafeteria for lunch, then dinner. We chatted with one another, catching up on family news. Nursing shifts changed: seven to three, then three to eleven, and finally eleven to seven. Around midnight it became clear my mother wasn’t going anywhere. Our plan to all be at her side when she died now morphed into one in which one of us would stay with her at all times. She would never be alone.

“I’ll take the first shift,” I volunteered.

We all began saying our good-byes to one another, slipping into our coats, moving out into the hall.

Suddenly the steady rhythmic beeping of my mother’s cardiac monitor slowed. We all turned in unison to watch her heart rate drop. Sixty . . . fifty . . . thirty. We rushed back to her side, held her hands, looked at each other in wonder. It was as if she were aware all along. As if she had just been sleeping, or even playing possum, happily listening to the chatter of her brood, happy to be in the middle of it. It was as if faced with the prospect of dying with us all around her versus carrying on longer with just me, she had chosen the former.

With both my parents, we were there. That is one thing I feel good about. Family supporting family. Being there when it matters. It is the same with Neil now. Dan flying back from Mexico to be with him. Me taking work leave to take care of him. Never any question of where our priorities lie. Never any question of where we belong.

37

“& Sons”

While Neil always wanted to be a teacher, Dan always wanted to be a comedian. He made that decision in the sixth grade and never looked back. We tried to be supportive. We took him to comedy clubs all over the Boston area starting when he was about twelve. Sometimes we’d be embarrassed at the foul language and the raunchiness of the routines. Often, in midsentence, the comedian would notice there was a kid in the crowd. The jokes invariably ensued.

“Hey, who’s carding at the door?”

“Hey, kid. Your parents know you’re here?”

We’d sheepishly raise our hands. A few more gags would follow, but once they got over the initial shock of Dan, the show eventually went on.

When Dan was in high school, he signed up for Talent Night. So did Neil. But while Neil performed a more traditional musical number, Dan wrote jokes. He rehearsed in his room. Nobody from the school ever previewed his work. Maybe we should have been suspicious when he wouldn’t allow us to go to opening night, but I figured he was just self-conscious, that having his parents in the audience would make him nervous. If Neil knew what Dan had written in his routines, he didn’t let on.

He came home late the night of the performance. He made a grand entrance, flinging the door open wide, launching his arms straight up into the air, throwing his head back and announcing in a booming voice, “I was made for the stage!” I had never seen him so happy.

He didn’t tell us much about his actual act, but he had clearly enjoyed himself. We were so proud of him. Dan at that stage was pretty awkward. He was still the new kid in town, having only moved here a few years before. A bit overweight, unlike gregarious Neil he didn’t make friends that easily. When we would take the boys to the beach for the day when they were small, Neil would come back to our blanket telling us the name of each child he’d befriended that day. Dan was more or less oblivious to them. This success on stage was great for his self-esteem.

Until we got the call from the principal’s office the next day.

There had been complaints about some of Dan’s material. This was not long after the Columbine school shootings, and Dan had performed in a long black trench coat. One of his jokes involved guns.

Saul and I went together to the high school the next morning. The principal stuck a tape of the show into the VCR in his office.

“See for yourself,” he told us, pressing
Play
and leaving the room.

We were amazed. Dan was fantastic. He strutted back and forth across the stage, voice strong, material memorized, the audience eating out of his hand. The kids went wild, laughing uproariously, clapping like thunder. Sure there was the occasional scatological reference we could have done without. The joke the principal had complained about involved airport security and body searches. But Dan was just doing what comedians do: writing routines from their life experiences. We had just gone on a family vacation to Florida to Saul’s brother Louis’s graduation from acupuncture school. The trip had involved x-ray scanners and metal detectors. The worst part of his performance, as far as we were concerned, was an inappropriate dumb-blond joke. We would speak to him about that one later.

Dan even handled a heckler with aplomb.

“Soooo, this guy wants me to stop! Do
you
want me to stop?!!” Dan yelled to his fans.

“NO!!!” the crowd roared back at him.

When the principal returned, we had to admit to him: We thought our son was great. We would speak to him about some of the jokes. Luckily he left it at that. No suspension. No punishment at all.

When Dan and I were touring potential colleges during his senior year of high school, the presidents who came out to greet the applicants always wanted to talk to Dan. He stood out from the crowd.

“What does everyone want to be?” the presidents would ask.

“Doctor. Lawyer. Lawyer. Doctor.”

“Comedian.”

“Really?” they’d say and sit down next to Dan, fascinated.

He majored in English, figuring that would be his best bet for learning to write comedy routines. Every class he took, every piece he turned in, he aimed to amuse.

The faculty recognized Dan’s talent as a writer and tried to get him to see it too.

“Dan, I don’t want another comedic piece from you,” one of his professors finally told him. “The next piece you turn in has to be serious or I won’t accept it.”

Then the accident happened. Dan wrote a piece of creative nonfiction about the night he learned of Neil’s accident. Called
A Quiet Night in Mexico,
it got published in an anthology. Another short story got published in the online literary journal
VerbSap.com.
People were starting to take him seriously as a writer, and so he started to see himself as one too.

Dan has shared many of his stories with me over the years. His themes are often dark but emotionally evocative. He has moved me to tears with his words. I believed in him as a comedian, but I adored him as a writer.

But ever the pragmatist, Dan ultimately turned his minor in business into a double major. “In case the writing thing doesn’t work out,” he said.

Dan walked for his graduation from Goucher College but didn’t actually receive his diploma until the following semester. To qualify for a full degree in business, he needed to complete an internship. He went to work for Saul and turned in a project analyzing the failure of a seasonal kitchen shop we had tried to open in a New Hampshire mall.

When he got his degree, he astonished us all by announcing, “I want to take over the family business.”

So Dan was on board, his father’s apprentice. When Saul opened a second location in Portland, Maine, it became “Dan’s store.” He fell for the business hook, line, and sinker. He has a big personality, perfect for sales. He’s an adept conversationalist and a natural schmoozer. He spent every summer in college working for Bridges Brothers moving company, a real handy skill in the restaurant world. And he was smart, which helps too. There is so much to know.

After Neil’s second teaching job ended, he too joined the family business, first working with Saul in Portsmouth learning the ropes. He made a spreadsheet of the store’s entire inventory in preparation for a new equipment-tracking computer system. He eventually moved in with his brother to help him run the Portland store. They have a nice division of labor. Dan is definitely the boss. He makes sales calls and does the negotiating with customers. Neil is in charge of inventory. Dan doesn’t know where anything is or when to order new supplies without asking Neil.

But while restaurant supply may have been in Dan’s blood, for Neil the family business was always temporary. Neil’s plan remains to teach, though the strategy has changed—he’s started a graduate program in math education.

38

Get Over It

Our local paper covered the accident from the beginning. So did the
Boston Globe.
At first there were updates on the conditions of Trista and Neil. Then came Trista’s obituary and biopic-type stories about Neil and how the two of them had met.

As the drunk driver and the teen who supplied him with alcohol were arrested and their cases moved through the courts, those stories too made the paper.

We followed these articles only sporadically from the hospital, logging onto the computer in the ICU’s waiting room whenever the nurses sent us away from Neil’s side. We sometimes read the comments readers posted, one friend or neighbor after another expressing sympathy for our two families and dismay or anger or disgust at the drunk driver.

But as time went on, when he was sentenced to two and a half years in the County House of Correction for motor vehicle homicide with one additional year for leaving the scene, and especially when he got five to seven years in state prison for violating his probation, there began to percolate up through the comments a tiny groundswell of support for his case. There was a small but distinct group of responders who thought he was being punished for “having a beer.”

The original sentencing judge had made it quite clear that abstaining from alcohol for five years was one of the terms of the drunk driver’s probation. The drunk driver also knew that the entire fifteen-year state prison sentence was still hanging over his head if he violated any one of those conditions set down by the judge. Yet he chose not only to drink, not only to drink publicly at a 99 Restaurant where a friend of Trista was his server, but to even order a “blockbuster”—a full twenty-four ounces of Sam Adams beer. To me he was flaunting it.

To the judge his decision “made a mockery of the harm done.” He believed the drunk driver showed not just a lack of remorse for Trista’s death and Neil’s injuries but that “he just doesn’t get it.” In court the judge said that if the drunk driver had understood his role and felt true remorse, “alcohol would never touch his lips.”

But somehow these commenters viewed our role in the sentencing, which was just showing up in court and reading our victim impact statements, as “seeking revenge.” We still just viewed it as seeking justice. Many of the responders wrote that the Zincks and the Bornsteins should just move on with our lives. Get over it. As if our diligence in speaking out in court, in making sure each judge knew just what we had lost, was somehow an obsession that would be better off let go.

I have seen this mind-set in other situations as well—this lack of sensitivity when a person has not directly experienced a victim’s particular trauma. I remember reading a report of a Catholic Youth rally in Austria that was being protested by child sexual abuse victims. The report quoted a church official as saying the protesters should not “wait crankily” for an apology. Such dismissiveness minimizes victims’ suffering.

This idea that victims can easily move on and that any discussion of their pain marks a stubborn willfulness to stay mired in the past is false. This idea of closure is fraudulent. The word itself feels made up, its attainability impossible and unrealistic.

I would love to move on. I would love to let go. But moving on is easier said than done. Neil had two operations a year apart to repair his broken leg bones. He spent his first Christmas break from college recovering from his second surgery and working through physical therapy He has no memory of the accident or his days in the ICU. He struggled with memory loss, depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. He was in therapy and on antidepressants for years. It’s hard to move on from that.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t hard for some of Neil’s friends to move on from him. His personality has changed. He will be the first to tell you he isn’t the same person he was before the crash. Some friends who initially stood by him ultimately didn’t know how to deal with this “new Neil.” Some of course remained. Neil took Trista’s best friend, Jess, to the senior prom. She, Max, Jeff, Ari, Greg, all keep in touch with Neil to this day and are a great support.

And he’s needed it. When he struggled with academics, we arranged for neuropsychological testing, which revealed deficiencies in attention to visual detail, verbal reasoning, and rapid sequencing. He showed inattention and encoding problems when there were competing distractions around him. He had difficulties with executive function, frontal lobe skills of organization and interpretation, lobes that were contused in the crash. We would love to let go of all of that.

We don’t obsess about the accident. We are not negatively focused. We celebrate with Neil each accomplishment: graduation from high school and college, first job, getting into graduate school. But each new accomplishment brings some new challenge as well. When Neil called to tell us he had gotten into grad school, he didn’t want to talk about it.

“Don’t congratulate me on it. I’m really, really nervous.”

Let it go? Move on? I wish someone could tell me how.