Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (19 page)

Mother Courage

By Linda Kramer Jenning

June 2009

E
very morning,
Becky Ziegel gets anxious. Just before ten, sitting at her kitchen counter with a cup of coffee, she tries to concentrate on the day ahead. But her eyes keep drifting to the cell phone at her elbow. Where is the text message from Ty?

“If I don't hear from him,” she says, “it's panic time. I'll call him, and if he doesn't answer, I'm in my car. I'll drive over to his house with my heart pounding so hard, I can feel it in my neck.”

Now a chiming sound signals a new message, and Becky's shoulders relax as she reads it: “Brain and bodily functions seem to be working as ‘normally' as possible.” She can head upstairs to her sewing room knowing that her son made it through another night.

“I'd be dead if my parents weren't within driving distance,” says Tyler Ziegel, who is 26 and lives in his own place about ten miles from his family's home in Metamora, Illinois. Ty, a former Marine, is officially retired from the military, with disability compensation for the massive injuries he sustained in a suicide bombing in western Iraq. He lost part of his left arm and right hand, most of his face, and a piece of his brain. Today, he has recovered enough to function without constant care, but seizures and other health problems have sent him to the ER four times in recent months.

In 2006, two years after he was wounded, Ty wed his hometown sweetheart, Renee Kline, to whom he had proposed between his two deployments to Iraq. The event drew worldwide media attention. But the marriage unraveled, and the couple divorced after a year. (“We grew apart, went our own ways,” says Ty, with practical detachment.) Since then, Becky, like thousands of mothers of disabled vets, has been her son's main caregiver. While Ty credits his whole family and his friends for rallying around him, he singles her out. “My mom has been awesome,” he says. “She's been there for me through everything.”

“I unloaded him, and now he's back,” Becky says, laughing. She drives him to appointments at the Veterans Affairs clinic in nearby Peoria and the VA hospital more than two hours away in Danville. She makes sure he eats well and takes his medications. She helps him with the housecleaning and bill paying. And, of course, she checks every morning that her son is still breathing.

“I'm the mom,” she says. “This is what I do.”

Becky is
49 and the mother of two Marines, both of whom joined up after high school. Ty shipped out to Iraq for his second tour in the summer of 2004, shortly after his little brother, Zach, left for boot camp. With both boys gone, Becky admits, she “did the happy dance.” She and her husband, Jeff, 56, a heavy-equipment operator, finally had an empty nest. “I was thinking, They're grown; they don't need me anymore. Who do I want to be?” She considered taking some college classes; she planned to visit friends she hadn't seen in years.

One day in December, Ty was on patrol in Anbar province when an Iraqi insurgent detonated a carload of explosives beside the convoy's troop truck. Of the seven men on board, Ty took the hardest hit. A buddy pulled him out and smothered the flames. Ty was evacuated to a military hospital at Balad Air Base, where surgeons worked to save his life.

Becky was getting ready to wrap Christmas presents when a Marine officer called with the news. When Jeff handed her the phone, she didn't cry but pumped the officer for information. He could offer little more than a sketchy description of the attack and Ty's injuries. The house soon filled with relatives and friends.

From Balad, Ty was flown 17 hours to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. The Fisher House Foundation—a national nonprofit that aids and temporarily houses the families of wounded soldiers—arranged for plane tickets for Becky and Jeff, along with Ty's fiancée, Renee, and Zach, who was just home on leave. They got to Brooke on Christmas Eve.

A neurologist filled them in on Ty's condition. Surgeons at Balad had removed the shrapnel-pierced part of his left frontal lobe. It was too soon to know if his mental capability or his personality would be altered, if he would be paralyzed, if he'd even wake up at all. Everything above his waist was severely burned. “They really didn't expect him to make it,” says Becky.

When the family entered Ty's room, they found him wrapped in bandages with a tube protruding from his head. “We couldn't see his face,” Becky recalls. “But his legs poked out, and I could see the crossed-rifles tattoo. That's how I knew it was Ty.”

Ty endured multiple surgeries. His left forearm and three fingers on his right hand were amputated—the thumb, index, and middle. He was kept sedated most of the time. Then, after several weeks, the doctors removed the bandages. “Bits of his face looked like him, only burnt,” Becky says. “I can't describe the color—charcoal, brown. No ears, no nose.”

Later operations, including one that used a muscle from Ty's back to cover the exposed part of his brain, changed his appearance even more. For a few months, he wore a lacrosse helmet to protect the area, until a molded prosthetic was inserted and his skull stitched closed. “He went through so many stages of healing that I just grew into how he looked,” says Becky, who says she was more concerned with Ty's emotional well-being than his physical appearance.

After Ty survived the first critical weeks, his father and brother flew back to Metamora. Becky and Renee stayed behind, moving into a suite at the local Fisher House. The women rotated shifts at Ty's bedside. They fed him and helped him shower. They stretched his remaining two fingers—both badly burned—to increase their range of motion. “I remember days I'd think, I can't walk in that room and put on a happy face,” Becky says. “I don't know how I did it. I just did. My kid.”

Ty, his perception fogged by sedatives and painkillers, only gradually became aware of his disfigurement. Following the doctors' advice, Becky didn't volunteer details but waited for him to ask. One day, when he wanted to blow his nose, Ty remarked, “As bad as I was burned, I'm surprised I still have a nose.” Then he saw the look in his mother's eyes. “No nose?” he said. “I must really look like an alien.”

Once, as they entered a treatment room, Becky wasn't able to block her son from a full-length mirror. It was the first time he got a good look at himself. Remarkably, he seemed more curious than horrified. As Ty healed, he and Becky made forays into San Antonio to shop and eat, and Becky would stare down gawkers. If Ty was bothered by the attention, he rarely let it show.

That May, Jeff came to visit and brought Becky a ring with three diamonds—past, present, and future—to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. They strolled on San Antonio's River Walk and took in the sights. Becky had been living at Fisher House for five months. One more anniversary would come and go before she got back home.

She'd never
spent much time away from the patch of country outside Peoria where she was raised. The eldest of seven children whose parents separated when she was a teenager, Becky learned to be independent and hardworking and to put others first. She waited on tables during high school and later took a courier job at the hospital where her mother was a registered nurse. She married Jeff at 20, and they bought her grandparents' old house, which is still her home.

“I never could have imagined living somewhere else and not having family and friends around,” she says. But her 19 months in San Antonio opened up “the little box” of her world. “Now I can go anywhere and make friends and find family.”

Terri Fulkerson, whose daughter was also in the burn unit at Brooke, would sit with Becky in the gazebo outside Fisher House after long days at the hospital and “talk mom.” “That girl could find humor in a rock,” says Terri. “She has a way of pulling laughter out of someone even if their dreams are crashing down around them.”

Becky also became expert at dealing with medical personnel. “I would never have dreamed of arguing with a neurosurgeon before,” she says. She supported the decision to transplant Ty's big toe to his right hand to create a thumb, though doctors warned it might not work (it did), and stood by when they fitted him with a prosthesis for his left forearm and hand. When he became an outpatient and moved in with Becky and Renee at Fisher House, Becky watched therapists retrain him in skills such as making a bed and loading a dishwasher.

Becky was delighted to see Ty moving toward independence. Aside from headaches, he showed no signs of lasting brain damage. He was as blunt and stubborn as ever and had inherited his mother's wry humor: He regularly rattled young medics by pointing to himself and warning, “Don't smoke while shining your boots.”

With Ty making progress, Becky took some time for herself. She walked for miles on a track near the hospital. On the “your-son-getting-blown-up diet,” she shed 60 pounds. She let her short blond perm grow shoulder-length and dyed it auburn.

“I was finding me,” Becky recalls. “I felt better about myself.” She even began doing public speaking to raise support for Fisher House. Then finally, in July 2006, Ty and Becky headed home.

After Ty
got married, his mother enrolled in the college courses she'd looked forward to for so long. Even after Ty and Renee separated, Becky held on to her new freedom. Ty stayed in the white clapboard bungalow he'd lived in with his wife. He'd been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but medication helped lessen his anxiety. He spent his time roughhousing with his boxer pup, tinkering with his truck and noodling on his guitar (he'd learned to drive again and to pick out tunes). At night, he'd hit the local bars with friends and even dated a bit.

Then he was struck with a severe sinus infection, which led to two ER visits. The second time, it was the day after Becky had had surgery for a tear in her shoulder. She called Ty and got no answer; Jeff went to check on him and found him dangerously dehydrated. Ty was rushed to the hospital. Jeff suffered a suspected heart attack and landed in the ER himself.

Zach sent an e-mail to Becky from Iraq, where he'd been deployed the previous fall: “What was God thinking? Why does all this stuff have to be happening to us?”

Becky typed back, “Because we can handle it.”

There'd be more to handle. Becky and Jeff couldn't wake Ty up at his home one evening; at the hospital, he was diagnosed with seizures—a previously undetected result of his brain injury—and prescribed pills to keep them at bay. Yet a few months later, a neighbor found Ty lying semiconscious in his driveway; there was another trip to the ER, where his medication was adjusted.

Becky surfed the Internet researching seizures and has now learned to recognize the warning signals. When Ty began to nod off—a red flag—over breakfast at his grandmother's recently, Becky persuaded him to come home with her. Hours later, he woke up and asked, “Would you feel comfortable taking me to my place?”

“Honestly, I wouldn't,” she replied.

Ty complained to Jeff, in mock irritation, “She's holding me hostage.” Still, later that night, he allowed, “When I'm at your house, Mom, I know everything will be fine.”

At dinnertime,
Becky and Jeff are hanging out, waiting for a pizza delivery. The phone rings: Ty asking how to defrost a hot dog bun. Chuckling, Becky imparts some motherly wisdom.

Sometimes—not often—she feels almost overwhelmed by the hand life has dealt her, and she worries. “What if something happens? What if I don't get there in time? It scares the hell out of me.” She finds comfort, though, in her circle of loved ones and her “second family” of wounded vets and their parents. She tries not to dwell on what she can't change.

“Ty asked me once if I was angry about what happened to him,” Becky says. “But who would I be angry at? The bomber? He's dead. Ty? I'm proud of him. I couldn't pick anybody to be angry at, so I wasn't angry.”

Her studies on hold, job offers let go, Becky fully expects to pick up where she left off sometime in the future. She imagines the day when Ty will need her less, even marry again. “The woman who ends up with him is going to be lucky,” she says. “I can't wait till he has his own kids.

“I don't expect to be at Ty's beck and call for the rest of my life,” she adds, curling up on the sofa where her son often sleeps. “But you're never done being the mom.”