…But wag’d with death a lasting strife,
supported by despair of life.
—William Cowper, “The Castaway”
CHAPTER 24
BROTHERS
In June 2009, on a safari trip to Tanzania, Marshall had a severe coughing fit. “I barely slept,” he tells me when he and Molly return to California. “I thought I was going to cough my guts out. We were in a tent in the middle of nowhere and had no medicine or any way to stop the coughing.”
Five days later, while playing golf, he starts seeing double and can’t judge where to swing. Over the weekend he tries to sleep off a headache and waves of nausea. By Monday he is feeling so bad that he drives himself to see a doctor, who immediately orders an ambulance.
Molly phones me from the hospital later that day in a panic. “I don’t know what’s happening to your brother,” she says. “He’s no longer making sense. He has trouble walking. They suspect a stroke and are giving him blood thinners.”
She puts Marshall on the phone, and I ask him a few questions. Each time he replies in utter gibberish, not a single recognizable word. “What are they telling you?” I ask. He manages one intelligible sentence before slipping back into gibberish: “They don’t tell me shit!”
Doctors soon diagnose a rare kind of stroke, a dissection of the carotid artery. In Tanzania he coughed so hard that the force crushed the major artery in his neck against his spinal column, tearing the inside of the blood vessel. The torn flap then blocked most blood supply to the brain. For a week, his oxygen-starved brain has been shutting down functions—“much like the pilot of a jet switching off systems to conserve fuel,” explains the doctor. Now the blockage is affecting vital processes such as speech and mobility.
The doctor arranges a transfer to nearby Stanford Hospital, where Marshall will be evaluated for possible brain surgery.
I cancel a planned trip to visit our elderly mother in Georgia and instead book a flight to California. Molly meets me at the airport, and we drive straight to Stanford, where my brother is in the intensive-care unit, awaiting surgery. What I find there makes my legs go weak and my skin go cold. Marshall is laid out in a hospital gown with a skein of at least fifteen tubes and wires coiling from his body. Lying on his back, comatose, he stares straight ahead. His dilated eyes register nothing as we approach the bed.
“He’s showing no reflexes,” the nurse informs us, “none at all.” To demonstrate, she claps her hands in front of his face, and he doesn’t blink.
I look down at his motionless body. An arterial line hangs from his arm, and the strong right hand that has tuned and rebuilt pianos is now limp, its fingers curling inward. A feeding tube pumps nourishment through his nose and an IV bag drips a cocktail of drugs into a port in his neck. Blood spots mark the gauze wherever needles have entered.
Janet gave me one last bit of advice as I left for the airport: “Be sure to keep talking to him.” A hospice chaplain, she knows that comatose patients can hear, even when they show no reaction.
That first day, I bend down to Marshall’s ear and whisper a prayer. “Marshall, I know you think God hates you. It’s not true. God’s not like we heard about growing up. God loves you, and wants you restored. I’ve sent out emails and have heard back from dozens of people who are praying for you daily.”
When I open my eyes, a jolt like an electric shock shoots through me. From Marshall’s unblinking left eye, a single glistening tear is making a track down the side of his cheek. My own eyes are stinging. Over the next few days, I see the same phenomenon again and again—every time I pray—the only sign that something of my brother remains inside that still, insensible body.
All that week Molly and I sit in the waiting area outside the ICU, permitted into Marshall’s room for only five minutes every two hours. The doctors say his only hope is an extreme surgical procedure called ECIC (extracranial-intracranial), which they must delay because of the blood thinners. Fortunately, Stanford has a neurosurgeon who specializes in the delicate operation. He describes it: “I’ll open the skull and dissect out an artery that feeds scalp tissue. Then I’ll tunnel that artery deep into the brain. In effect, we’ll create a bypass route around the blockage in his carotid, restoring the brain’s blood supply.”
The surgery lasts almost seven hours, leaving Marshall with a long s-shaped scar on the side of his shaved head. When Molly and I are admitted to see him, I notice one change right away. His eyes lock on us at the door and follow us to his bedside. He cannot speak and can barely move one leg, yet when I ask a question, he sometimes squeezes my hand.
* * *
—
I visit California each month for the rest of that year, checking on his progress. The stroke has paralyzed his right side and damaged portions of the brain controlling reasoning and speech. “Is your name Marshall?” the speech therapist asks. Yes. “Is your name Frank?” Yes. “Complete this sentence for me, Marshall: ‘She unlocks a door with a _____.’ ” He thinks for a moment and answers confidently, hat. “Does that sound right, Marshall? She unlocks a door with a hat?” Yes. Right.
Over time I watch my brother progressively return to life. First he learns to maneuver a wheelchair with his left hand and foot. Six months after the surgery he calls to report with childish pride, “I stand! I stand!” Molly coaches him in the background, “No, Marshall, tell him you can walk. You took two steps with a cane.” More than a year passes before he feels brave enough to give up the wheelchair and walk with a cane, swinging wide his stiff right leg in an unnatural gait.
Speech comes hardest. His brain thinks one thing, but often nonsense comes out of his mouth, causing him endless frustration. Before the stroke he would try learning something of the language of a country before visiting it. In preparation for his trips with Molly, he studied basic Spanish, French, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, and Swahili. All that is gone now. He struggles mightily to speak a child’s English.
From Colorado I connect to his computer twice a week, and together we go through a series of exercises designed for stroke patients. “Which item does not belong in this list: hammer, rabbit, dog, horse.” He thinks for a minute and decides on horse. “Why did you choose horse, Marshall?” Big, too big! “Yes, that’s true. But can you think of anything these words—rabbit, dog, horse—have in common that’s different from a hammer?” After a long pause he says, No. It’s horse.
At my suggestion, Molly buys him a book of piano music written for the left hand, but he gives up after a few frustrating attempts. The stroke has taken his language, his independence, his ability to form rational thoughts, and now it has robbed him of his greatest love.
* * *
—
When I first heard about Marshall’s symptoms, I emailed Mother a quick note, warning her that I might not make it to Georgia after all. Later, I called her with more details. She commented, “Interesting, isn’t it—he once wanted to be a missionary to Africa. He finally went there as a tourist, and now this…”
The distressing thought crosses my mind that perhaps she views the debilitating stroke as the answer to her prayers. Yet, after the brain surgery, she sends him a card in which she writes words she has never before uttered—“I’ve always loved you”—and adds a Bible verse about God being “able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” That stops me for a moment. Is she beginning to soften?
Molly wastes no time in phoning me to vent her fury. “What the hell does your mother mean with this card? Did you tell her about his stroke? How can you still relate to that evil woman?”
I try to explain that no matter what has happened, Marshall’s mother has a right to know her own son is in mortal danger. “Surely you understand that, as a mother yourself.”
“She has no rights. Your mother wished my husband dead or mindless. She forfeited every right to be his mother long ago. If she was on fire, I wouldn’t walk acr
oss the road to spit on her.”
Once again I feel caught between two giants, both separated by the chasm of an unresolved past.
* * *
—
I make one more attempt to break through to Mother in 2014, the year she turns ninety. She has always loved the ocean, and so I rent a South Carolina beach house, equipped with an elevator that can accommodate her aluminum walker. She enjoys sitting on the balcony, watching the waves and the children playing in the sand.
“You’ve just turned ninety years old,” I say one afternoon as we sit there together. “That’s quite an achievement. As you look back on your life, do you have any regrets?” She thinks awhile and finally says, “No.”
I press her. “What about with Marshall. Any regrets there?”
She mentions the last time she saw him, back in Atlanta more than four decades ago. She was recovering from minor surgery, shortly after my wedding, when Marshall “and some woman” visited her in the hospital. “Let’s put the past behind us and start over,” she told him. In her mind, that constituted an apology, and he should have accepted it as such.
I stay silent for a time. Obviously, Marshall didn’t receive those few words as an apology, let alone a step toward healing their relationship, because he never saw her again.
“It’s sad, Mother, that neither Marshall nor I ever felt we had your approval, your blessing,” I say at last.
“Yes, it is,” she replies quickly. Nothing more.
“And it’s sad, too, that you never felt approval from your own mother.” She nods, expressionless.
“Did you ever consider remarriage?”
She sits up in her chair, suddenly energized. “No, Marshall never would have stood for that!”
“Mother, he was only three years old. Millions of people remarry. He could have adapted to a stepfather.”
We talk for almost an hour, guardedly, with old wounds and resentments lurking behind every exchange. I express appreciation for all she did for us, while also letting her know she has said some very hurtful things.
“Sometimes your deep anger flares up,” I tell her. “Promising to pray that Marshall would die or be paralyzed or lose his mind—think how that must feel to him now, in his disabled state. And creating that scene at my wedding reception. And saying to me, ‘Maybe I should have had that abortion after all.’ ”
She doesn’t interrupt, so I plow ahead. “I know that Marshall and I have hurt you—Marshall through his life choices, and I through some things I’ve written. You made a vow to God over us, and we’ve disappointed you. I get that. But when you respond, there’s a big difference between ‘You hurt me,’ and ‘I wish you were dead’—as you said to Marshall—or ‘had never been born,’ as you said to me.”
Still she doesn’t interrupt or even look away. “You know what, Mother? Everyone loses control at times, and we all say things we’d like to take back. That’s what grace is all about. That’s why Marshall and I both see your perfection theology as a kind of prison cage. If only you could face up to mistakes, acknowledge them, say you’re sorry, and move on…”
She offers no response, and I give up. I leave that weekend feeling empty, doubting that anything has sunk in.
One month later, on a quick visit to Atlanta, I meet Mother for dinner. She hands me a five-page letter that she has laboriously typed on her computer, despite her deteriorating eyesight. “If I send this to Marshall, he won’t read it,” she says. “Would you be willing to read it to him the next time you see him?” I assure her that I will.
As it happens, Marshall has been planning his very first plane trip since the stroke. Molly drives him to the airport in California and checks him in. Airport escorts wheel him to the gate to catch the flight to Denver.
I have saved the letter for his visit, and I tell him about it on the drive to our home from the Denver airport. “It’s intense. You can decide when you want to hear it—anytime while you’re here.”
“Tonight!” he says. I’m taken aback by his forceful response.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “It could be a rough way to begin a vacation.”
“Yes, yes!” he insists.
After dinner we sit in the living room and I read the letter slowly, stopping after each paragraph to let his damaged mind absorb what she is saying. Mother has written vulnerably and tenderly. She does not deny her threat to pray curses on him, but insists that she never followed through on that threat:
Never did I pray that way; when you’re trying to make a point, you probably say things you do not necessarily mean, in order to let the other person know you are serious. Meanwhile, I am truly truly sorry for the way things turned out. I didn’t mean for them to be this way and can only ask for your forgiveness.
I don’t guess my asking your forgiveness will do anything for the relationship. But you have it anyway. You are my firstborn and I carried you under my heart for almost nine months. A Mother doesn’t forget that. You’ve had my prayers and best wishes through your life, even if you can’t think of me as your Mother. I did give the best years of my life to look after you and would do it all over again if I had a choice to make.
It takes me nearly half an hour to read through the letter. In all that time, Marshall is wiping away tears with his good hand and speaking up when he objects to something she has written. He has two verbal responses. “Bullshit!” he cries each time he disagrees with Mother’s version of events.
And, three times, when I read the most touching parts, he shouts, “Too late! Forty-five years too late!”
* * *
—
The next month, while on a book tour in Asia, I get an email from Molly. She writes that she came home from bridge club to find Marshall passed out unconscious on the floor with a half-empty gallon of whiskey in one hand and a bottle of vermouth nearby.
“I let him have the full fury of my wrath,” she writes. “He said he was trying to kill himself. Told him he needed to do a more thorough job such as driving his car off a cliff or shooting himself in the head, that he was worthless and an albatross around my neck—maybe I was too harsh but as I told him, I am this close to divorcing him…already divorced one alcoholic, why stay with another one.”
My heart sinks. I spend a sleepless night, waiting until the next day to call her because of the difference in time zones. By now she’s learned the full story: in addition to the alcohol, Marshall swallowed at least thirty Ambien tablets and thirty Valiums. He had researched on the internet what it would take to kill himself and planned to do just that. The concoction should have been deadly, except that Marshall had built up a tolerance to the drugs, which he had been taking daily for five years, ever since the stroke.
I call the airline to schedule a stopover in San Francisco on my return. My tour lasts another ten days, and I stand before audiences in Korea and Taiwan speaking on the problem of pain and the power of prayer, while my mind is six thousand miles away, wondering what will be left of my brother.
When I finally get to the United States, I find a broken, humbled man. In his halting speech he tells me he had intended to jump overboard while on a cruise with Molly on the St. Lawrence Seaway. Because of his disability, he couldn’t manage to climb over the railing. So he decided on the pills and alcohol.
“Never again,” he assures me. “Worst hangover ever.”
He still seems groggy as he describes the ordeal. He woke up with a pounding headache, shocked to be alive, and then waited six days to visit a doctor. Following protocol after a suicide attempt, the doctor put him on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold in the county hospital, a place where paranoid schizophrenics paced the floor, ducking as they passed each window to hide from imagined enemies outside.
“It was hell,” Marshall says. “Cuckoo’s nest. They took my cane—thought it weapon—so I couldn’t walk.” They removed his false te
eth, which meant he could barely eat. They confiscated his meds, too, leaving him with a roaring headache the entire time. At night they locked him in a room with another patient, a three-hundred-pound bodybuilder covered with tattoos. In the next room, a psychotic screamed obscenities all night. “No sleep,” my brother recalls with a shudder. “Zero!”
A short time later, Molly files for divorce. Thus begins the next phase of Marshall’s life, which continues to this day. In a flurry of visits, I locate a social worker, a divorce attorney, and a real estate agent. A network of Christian friends help Marshall move into a new apartment.
After all we’ve been through together—Blair Village, a trailer, broken bones and illnesses, Faith Baptist, Bible college, weddings, the sixties—I have now become my brother’s keeper.
* * *
—
Three years later, Marshall makes another trip to Denver. This time I have to make arrangements on both ends of the trip, finding a friend in San Jose who can drive him to the airport and check his baggage. He has managed to live alone, with the weekly help of a caregiver who assists him with cleaning and laundry. Having lost the lust for novelty, he keeps to a regular routine of bridge, physical therapy, and various online aphasia groups. He reads The New Yorker and a wide variety of books, though he retains very little.
Marshall is still working on social skills, and on this trip he comes equipped with a list of questions from his speech therapist to help him converse with Janet and me. I have my own list of questions for him. His long-term memory is sharp, and one reason for this visit is that I’ve begun this memoir. When I ask him about our past, he always gives honest, detailed answers.
Each time we’re together, Marshall insists that I play the piano for him. I find the task awkward and embarrassing. I think back to our days in a trailer, when he would shake his head in exasperation as I fumbled my way through a piece that he could sight-read effortlessly.
Where the Light Fell Page 29
