Beauty in the Broken Places

by Allison Pataki

  Beauty in the Broken Places is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2018 by Allison Pataki

  Foreword copyright © 2018 by Lee Woodruff

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Pataki, Allison, author.

  Title: Beauty in the broken places : a memoir of love, faith, and resilience / by Allison Pataki, foreword by Lee Woodruff.

  Description: New York : Random House, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017058576 | ISBN 9780399591655 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399591662 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Pataki, Allison. | Cerebrovascular disease—Patients—Biography. | Cerebral ischemia. | Young adults—Diseases—Biography. | Cerebrovascular disease—Patients—Family relationships. | Husband and wife—Biography. | Caregivers—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | MEDICAL / Caregiving.

  Classification: LCC RC388.5 .P35 2018 | DDC 616.8/10092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017058576

  Ebook ISBN 9780399591662

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Diane Luger

  Cover image: Alison Burford / Arcangel

  v5.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  By Allison Pataki

  About the Author

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  Foreword

  LEE WOODRUFF

  For better or worse.

  Such a simple phrase that most of us don’t truly contemplate as we stand at the altar, giddy with love and surrounded by family and friends. Why would we ever choose to play out the worst-case scenario in our heads?

  As Allison Pataki and her husband, David Levy, buckled their seatbelts on a flight to Hawaii, excited for their “babymoon,” the last thing they could have imagined was that in a few short hours their plane would make an emergency landing in Fargo, North Dakota. Dave, an outgoing, athletic thirty-year-old, would suffer a rare and near-fatal stroke.

  The Levys would never make it to their destination. Life had just dealt them a cruel and unexpected blow. Instead of celebrating the last vestiges of coupledom before parenthood rearranged their world, Allison would be sitting in a hospital room, five months pregnant, holding one of her husband’s cold, empty shoes while he fought to survive.

  A friend once remarked that life’s complications do not end at the altar, but for many of us, it is where they begin. While that may sound somewhat macabre, from my older road-tested perch, it speaks to all of the things we cannot know as we stand, wide-eyed and innocent, pledging to entwine our life with another’s. In those moments we feel the unbridled anticipation of possibility, the choices to be made, the thrill of life’s blank page, waiting to be colored in together.

  But there are other surprises in store, both sorrowful and beautiful. Life never moves in a straight line, constantly reminding us that we don’t get to write the script. Therein lies its beauty, even in the moments when we feel uncertain, afraid, and broken.

  I’m twenty-plus years older than Allison, and we first met as I exited a restroom stall at ABC News (true story). I felt an instant connection. She has a personality that you want to bottle for a gray day: crackling with energy, naturally upbeat and bright, intelligent, and empathetic. As our friendship grew, we discovered many connection points, from her younger years in Albany (I’m an Albany girl too), to our summers spent in the Adirondacks (she had visited our tiny lakeside community). We were both writers and she’d worked at ABC News, where my husband, Bob Woodruff, is a reporter.

  After that initial meeting, Allison left the news business and published her first novel. We became email friends, occasionally chatted on the phone, complained when the writing wasn’t coming (I complained, she kept writing). I have the most wonderful picture of Allison, Bob, and me at her book launch for The Accidental Empress. She is resplendent in a gorgeous dress, and, unbeknownst to us at the time, newly pregnant.

  I proudly thought of Alli and Dave as younger versions of me and Bob; devoted to each other, adventuresome and supportive of one another’s careers. They were in it for the long haul. Alli and I shared a love of words and writing, and yet we were social animals too, we got oxygen from spending time with friends. Each of us had always been fiercely independent, which worked well with the demanding and often unexpected hours of our husbands’ chosen careers. Also, like we had been, they were determined to have a family. I was thrilled to hear about Alli’s pregnancy, excited to watch such a couple experience one of life’s truest gifts.

  So it was with shock and disbelief that I opened an email from Allison explaining that Dave had had a stroke and they were at a rehabilitation hospital in Chicago. It was devastating to think about anyone I knew setting out on this horrible journey. This was not a curse I would wish on my enemy, let alone a young couple on the cusp of becoming parents. It seemed so unfair, both of us twinned in this horrible fate, husbands cut down in their prime—Dave, before he had finished his medical residency; Bob, before he could truly enjoy the privileged anchor chair. Meeting that day by the sink years earlier—when I was just transitioning out of my caregiving role after my life was upended by Bob’s injury—neither Allison nor I could have predicted that she would join my club. The one I refer to as “the Club of the Bad Thing”—a club in which no one wants to be a member. I ached for them both.

&n
bsp; Knowing too much about this injury, I worried how Dave would recover and what life would look like for them. Would their child ever know her father? When our own tragedy struck, Bob and I had eighteen years of marriage under our belt, four children, and a strong foundation that had already weathered disappointment and loss. I could not stop thinking about the next stage of their journey. I knew the statistics—my husband was that rare miracle in the world of TBI (traumatic brain injury) recovery. Even with such amazing progress and success, our own relationship had been strained at the seams, rearranged at times, and frayed by the roller-coaster ride of recovery that Alli describes so well.

  TBI is one of the very worst tragedies that can befall a loved one. Yes, of course, there is death and cancer, dementia and ALS, an entire roster of other horrible clubs that loved ones inadvertently join. It’s the “in an instant” nature of a brain injury, the alacrity with which it permanently changes and upends lives, relationships, and marriages, that is so stunning. The immediate line between “before” and “after” creates a sense of emotional whiplash. Like Allison, I was reeling for weeks and months simply trying to process the fact that my husband had been hit by a roadside bomb. I knew the risks of being married to a war correspondent, but there is an ocean’s distance between possibility and reality. In 2003 when Bob was embedded with the Marines during the Iraq invasion, and for the entire decade he reported from war zones, I had contemplated death but never disability. Not at his age, not in the prime of our lives. Silly me.

  Three years later, as unopened bottles of champagne sat on the dining-room table, sent by friends and colleagues to celebrate Bob’s ABC World News Tonight co-anchor appointment, my husband lay in a medically induced coma, toggling between life and death. One morning he had kissed me goodbye, for what was meant to be a short trip to the Middle East. Days later I was being told he might not make it out of surgery, even as plans were underway to airlift him home from Baghdad. Like Allison, I would struggle to comprehend the fact that our world had been so swiftly and completely shattered.

  Why is TBI so devastating? When the injured person is your husband, there is a special element of heartbreak, an unusual tangle of emotions, sorrow, and gratitude—and so much damned uncertainty. There are no percentages to shoot for, no norms, no one can tell you exactly how much your loved one will recover or how much of “him” will return. In that first year, lying beside my sleeping husband, I understood that it was possible to feel completely alone right next to the person you loved most. He was there, but not there; physically present, but with pieces missing. It was as if he were an engine and someone had reached inside and fiddled with the wiring.

  Gone was “what had made Dave Dave,” Allison writes so compellingly in these pages. The loved one grieves for the intangibles, the inchoate part of coupledom that is as hard to define as a “great sense of humor with a good ear for music,” or “that silly thing in the movie that you saw that weekend when you were first dating.” Those shared experiences are what sticks a couple together, the gooey center between two halves of the Oreo.

  But above all there is grief, so much complicated, guilty, unarticulated grief over being thrust in this new, unwanted direction. And because your husband is alive, because he survived, you do not have permission for this most simple of human behaviors: the space to mourn the loss of your dreams and to honor the brokenness inside. You cannot speak of this; it would be too selfish. You got him back, isn’t that enough? Aren’t you lucky? That ripping, tearing sensation that only you can feel? That crack inside your rib cage? That is the sound of your heart breaking.

  This may seem hard to comprehend, but there were times when I wondered if it might have been better if Bob had died on the battlefield. Grieving a dead husband would take you to the very lowest place, and then you had no choice but to get back up and take a step forward. What if Bob never recovered, I wondered? What if he remained in a childlike state? What happened to love if your marriage was stalled in a middle gear, unable to move forward, incapable of going back? Those thoughts terrified me as I fought to stay hopeful, to try to live in the moment.

  Beauty in the Broken Places articulates so many of the things that I—and countless others—have experienced during our unexpected journeys. Allison describes the small, ordinary moments that break your heart in the aftermath of life’s challenges. I could relate to her looking out the hospital window at the clear blue sky and being amazed that the world continued to turn. I remember being jealous of all the clueless people just going about their lives, running errands and headed to work, attending their children’s soccer games, buying groceries. Oh, the things we took for granted!

  Then there are the painful reminders of “before” and “after.” For me, it was the navy sweater I kept in the kitchen to ward off a chill. The first time I entered my house after Bob’s injury, I spied it, casually draped over a chair where I’d left it during the “before” part of our lives. I burst into tears and threw it in a closet. For Allison, it was the suitcase she could not bring herself to unpack, still brimming with summer clothes for their Hawaiian vacation, or the sound of Dave’s voice on the cellphone.

  Like Allison, I was unaware of the trite phrases I myself had used with others in the midst of a crisis: “You’re so strong,” “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” and (my personal favorite) “Things happen for a reason.” These “thoughts and prayers,” as I began to call them, can feel like a thousand little paper cuts. I truly believe there is no wrong expression of sympathy, but some remarks can feel like pity. I liked it when people empathized, when they told me how much this “stunk” or that it was “unfair.” For some, you can sense that they almost believe your bad fortune is “catching.” There is a collective relief, a palpable sense of gratitude, that fate has passed over their household and visited someone else. It’s sometimes hard in these moments not to feel like a circus freak, to stay focused on the positive and leave the door open for hope and maybe even a little miracle.

  You discover many things about yourself in these situations, but you also learn much about your friends. Sometimes the people who show up are not necessarily the ones you expected. Tragedy holds up a mirror that reflects back all the things that can befall others. It’s a special person who can show up and repeatedly walk through that door to mentally meet you in the room you are in.

  And while Allison gives me a bit too much credit on these pages, I was honored to be her “voice of experience,” to offer a perspective from a few years down the road, assuring her that she would not only survive, but ultimately thrive. The truth is: it is their own grit, temerity, and perseverance that shine through in this memoir. That is what eventually saved her and Dave. Their story is a reminder that human beings are built to survive, even if the day to day doesn’t look too pretty.

  It was Alli’s need to make sense of the world around her as a writer that became part of her salvation, and the gift she gives us with this book. I had acted on that same instinct in the hospital, almost ten years before. In a world that had suddenly flipped upside down, writing was the only way I could create order. I needed to write to help me remember the life Bob and I had made, to transcribe the events for our family in case he didn’t survive. I also wrote because its very act gave me hope and reminded me of the many reasons my husband had to live and how many people loved us.

  * * *

  —

  And as her own husband lay comatose in the hospital, Allison wrote: “Dear Dave…I love you…I miss you…May we always remember how lucky we are.” My breath caught in my throat when I first read those words. Her ability to focus on the blessings and the love they shared sowed the first seeds of her resilience. And Dave’s singular determination to tackle the day-to-day hard work of recovery braided them back together as a couple—and a family.

  I also admire the way Allison speaks openly and honestly about faith, the places in the
journey where, in the absence of anything else, the prayers and good wishes of so many people were laced together like a quilt. Faith is a powerful weapon, and in the past twelve years, visiting with service members in hospitals, children with head injuries and concussions from sports, adults recovering from car accidents, babies who were shaken by sitters, I can tell you this: people who believe in something bigger than themselves simply have an easier road. Faith is the trampoline that may not always bounce us up, but in its most basic form, it can stop us from sinking any lower. Faith allows us to believe in miracles. And who among us doesn’t want that? Even for couples like Allison and David, who drew on reserves of love, faith, hope, and a network of devoted friends and family, the journey to come out the other side was still difficult. It is a journey they will always be on.

  Let me be very clear: this is not a sad story. This is not a story about worst-case scenarios or even miracles, although there is very much a miracle at work in these pages. This is the story of a marriage. It’s about the “for better or worse” part. It’s about falling in love and joining your life with another, like two ends of a buckle, while allowing yourself to believe that you will grow old with someone in lockstep, that you will face the world as a unified front and have the good fortune to die in your sleep.

  But here is the thing: all of us will have something, we will all face challenges. Tragedy and loss are the great unifiers, both horribly average and absolutely inevitable. They are the terrible club to which we will all eventually belong. We may not want to think about it, but part of life means facing struggles, confronting disappointments, and eventually losing people we love.