Sylvia's Journal

On Sunday morning July 22nd I wrote my very first post on Caringbridge and started what has become a habit, or maybe even an addiction. There have been 404 entries, which include the posts from Sita, Tessa and Joe in the first months after the accident. After that it became my blog, first on Caringbridge and on December 23rd on WordPress, a gift from Sita and Tessa. I have missed only a few days, mostly because I found myself in a place without internet connections or because I skipped a few time zones.

Aside from all the other things that this year has been, it has also become a year in words, several thousand of them. The only other time in my life of which I have such a detailed record is when my first marriage fell apart in the spring of 1978 in Beirut and Axel came into my life; ever since I have kept a written journal. I wrote mostly during my travels and assignments overseas, two- or three-week bursts of prose, or when I was having a hard time dealing with things that happened closer to home. These words are hand written, in several spiral bound notebooks and decorated with dried flowers from hotel gardens and other scrapbook material. They helped me reconstruct my trips in and out of the US when the INS asked for this information on one of the many forms I had to fill in to become an American citizen.

From the 14th of July on each day has a counterpart a year ago. I can check memories and facts and look things up on my computer and get a blow by blow account of what shape we were in, physically and emotionally, on each day that has gone by since.

The journey of recovery is not yet over and may never be. Pain, stiffness and interminable regrets have become the backdrop of our life, counterbalanced by our experience of true community, the joy of being alive, the knowledge that we raised our kids well and the beauty of the place we live in; not to mention health insurance and a regular income.

This whole past week has been among the more intense weeks I can remember because of all of the above, the ups and downs, the tears and laughter and the friends and family who remembered, whether they told us or not.

As we reflected last night on the week Axel felt it was as if we had stuffed into it all the summer things we were not able to do last year: we swam, we rowed, we kayaked, we hunted for mussels and sat on the beach with a gin tonic, mixing in chores and projects for good measure. Much of this time we were alone, just the two of us; a sharp contrast with last summer and fall in particular but even the rest of the year when we were either in the company of our kids or I was away on a trip. It was a treat to be on vacation together at our home, getting up when we wanted, going to bed when we wanted, having dinner at odd times and leaving the dirty dishes in the sink. It was a full and busy week that has left me both thoroughly tired and thoroughly rested. The latter more pronounced than it has been for a long time and I feel ready to tackle the tasks that are on my plate starting today.

This includes teaching the class at BU that I did not teach last year because I could not; a course that was a huge success; a success I had nothing to do with; wonderfully sobering, humbling, and disappointing all at the same time.

The night brought the much needed rain amidst thunder and lightning. This morning all the colors are brighter and everything looks fresh and healthy. We are eating breakfast in bed, which includes cereal with raspberries that still have dew drops on them. We are harvesting about a pint every other day and the end is not yet in sight. The blueberries are keeping us in suspense; they appears to be stuck in their current green-turning-blue state with an occasional one succeeding into blue; that one is, of course, eaten on the spot.

When Axel came down yesterday morning he mentioned there was a kayak adrift in the cove. He said it with the same worried face with which he had announced that a whale had drifted into our cove just over a year ago. That turned out to be a dead 47-foot Sei whale which was good for a day long spectacle in the cove of watching the dismantling of the behemoth by an army of peppy young volunteers armed with sharp kitchen knives under the supervision of the state’s chief endangered species biologist.

Yesterday’s event was less spectacular and more worrisome as it turned out to be my kayak which was adrift. Someone had taken it out for a joy-paddle in the night until something happened. It had been a wonderful night with a full moon over a mirror-flat sea and Axel had contemplated going out for a paddle but we were too tired. Someone else had had the same idea.

I walked out towards the kayak which was stranded on the other side of the cove and brought a spare paddle along, not seeing my own paddle. As I was walking towards the kayak I was mentally preparing myself for lots of empty liquor bottles and puke; instead I found the kayak full of water with a bottle of diet ginger ale of a cheap brand, and three teabags tied together, and indeed, no paddle. Later Axel walked around the cove trying to find the missing paddle. Instead he found a bag with a soaked pick nick lunch, uneaten. We tried to piece the story together: someone planned to have a midnight moonlight pick nick out on one of the islands, had found my kayak conveniently close to the water, with paddle inside it, took it out, then capsized right in the cove, panicked and ran off. The tea bags and ginger ale made me think it was a girl, not a boy, who was the perpetrator. I tried to think like Hercule or any of the chief inspectors I watch on TV who are so clever at deducing things from just a few clues. I’d make a lousy detective. We reported the incident, just for the record.

Last night I dragged all our boats up to their usual storage place, removed the paddles and life jackets and now I hope everything is still there. We have been robbed of one more illusion which is that we can leave everything out and no one will take anything that doesn’t belong to them. Katie-Blair who came for a swim, escaping the 90 degree hinterland, said, indignantly, “this is soooo not right!” And then we got over our indignation and swam some more, dried up, swam some more, while Katie-Blair regaled us with stories about traveling by car with two mad cats and an elderly dog to Maine.

Scattered around the swimming were more project activities, I am making good progress on both the varnishing and the dress, and preparing my teaching next week at BU as part of our month long MSH/BU course.

For dinner we drove to Katy-Blair and Andrew where we joined the Lashes for a summer meal of grilled swordfish, stir fried chard from our garden, corn (not yet local) and desert made of wonder bread, blueberries and whipped cream; a politically incorrect but cherished fifties recipe that came with lots of memories of people and places now gone.

A whole day without a computer! It’s nice to know I can still do that. Yesterday was a perfect Lobster Cove holiday. The Alden shell is nearly ready to get on the water again, just two more coats of varnish on the oars and putting the oar collars at the right distance.

I alternated the sanding and varnishing with my sewing project inside on which I am making good progress. It was my first sewing project since the crash and it took some hunting around the house to find everything that I needed. Although most things are back in their places, some things are not. Axel’s current office is what used to be my sewing/ironing room while his office was in the barn (studio) across the drive way. When Sita and Jim moved in last summer my upstairs project room was dismantled to make place for Axel’s stuff. And although Sita and Jim are moving out this month, Tessa and Steve are moving in as soon as the place is empty. Since last July everything in the house has moved and thus anything we tackle for the first time since the crash requires a bit of hunting. Some things we have not found.

While I was relaxing Axel worked hard on his own to do list, which is partially homework from the brain injury staff at Spaulding, who is working with him on retreading his executive functions and his working memory. He has to do the kind of exercises that I used to give in my very first job as a neuropsychological testing assistant at Leiden University hospital in the early 70s. The injuries must be very localized because he can do some of the exercises as well as the rest of the population while others throw him off completely.

It was again sweltering hot inland and we were once again blessed to be living on the ocean where it is always a few degrees cooler. After mowing a large part of our too-large lawn Axel went for a swim that wasn’t really a swim because the water was too cold for that. I interrupted all my projects and followed him in and out of the water. Sometime in July the winds shift and the warm water is replaced by the kind of cold water that hurts at first. A quick dip was all we could handle.

In the evening our friends Gary who is an architect and Christine who is a music therapist had invited us to a series of music performances. Fancy that, in the woods of East Manchester we listened to arias from a London-based artist, two moving piano pieces from a grey-haired Basque pianist, and to our hostess, a French Canadian, playing Telemann on the flute. The audience consisted of the Latin American offspring of the pianist and other friends who have in common that they are from various Latin American countries, and thus speak Spanish, have discovered Manchester and bought houses for the summer or the year. Although I did not have Spanish in common with the rest, we all appeared to travel a lot to various parts of the world and no one there spoke just one language.

Back home I served Axel and myself the raspberries which I picked in the afternoon from their abundant source. We ate them out of martini glasses with a splash of heavy cream, just before bedtime.

My dreams took me to some sort of Harry Potter land, a place full of enchantments; people and objects that weren’t what you though they were. This included a glass helmet, partially broken but still functional, that allowed you to see the truth by reading people’s minds and their real thoughts. That way we, myself and my unidentifiable travelling companions, were able to find out who was lying and who was truthful.

But before we got to play with magic there was the experience of being in a large plane that suddenly felt out of control and going down. I remember a feeling of dread and of déjà-vu, the knotted stomach and the body preparing for shock. And then suddenly we were flying amidst witches and bats in tight places and ended up at the place of the (broken) glass helmet where we got to play our serious play. Knowing truth is not for the faint-of-heart.

The dream was, among other things, about contrasts: between what you can see and what is hidden, what you present (to the world) and what you feel deep down; the contrast between the inner and outer world we inhabit. No matter how hard the sun shines, when you are depressed it doesn’t matter and the rays don’t get through, inside there is no warmth. I am not often depressed and thus not very experienced in how to handle myself in this state. Noticing the discrepancy between how I ought to feel and how I actually did was startling but not very useful since it had no handles to pull me up and out of the muck. What finally did pull me out was a good cry, actually two good cries, both long overdue and coming to me at an inconvenient time and place: at work. They were triggered by concerned inquiries from two people who are each in their own way, a huge source of comfort, support and perspective. As a direct result of these two tearful conversations I am home again today, to collect myself, a process that had not quite taken its natural course and that I was ordered to complete.

I did perform briefly at work by submitting various reports and do a presentation about our virtual leadership development programs to visitors from CDC who are seeking to work with us. After that I packed up and went for a row on the Charles in the sweltering heat. Rowing always has a calming effect on my mind as it is relegated to the background while the body works out.

I have felt, for some time now, a tremendous urge to create. The little chickadees are calling me to do that at all times of the day. They are the same small birds that cohabitated with us on the Audubon campground in Wellfleet on the Cape. That is where we used to camp when we attended the annual Cape Cod Institute classes on organization development or some related field, for years in a row. It was always a time of heightened intellectual and creative stimulation. I wrote many poems there and the chickadees were my audience. It is as if they flew over from across the bay and are singing to me: write, paint, create! Some of the creative juices have already been seeping out in the form of small water color paintings and the beginning of a plan for another flower garden. I bought fabric on the way home yesterday for a dress that is already completed in my mind and simply needs to be stitched together. I also expect some poems to emerge; the call to create is loud and no longer intermittent; no longer content with filling in the cracks between work. It demands my full attention and wants to be the work now!

We dropped off five videos that were lent to us a year ago by Paul and Debbie with a basket full of chocolates to assuage our guilt feelings of being so late in returning stuff that wasn’t ours. I had contemplated a paddle after that but Axel’s body was still recovering from the previous paddle and needed icing rather than more exercise. So instead, we sat by the water’s edge again and watched the sun go down below the Smith Point trees until the mosquitoes drove us inside. We had our dinner in front of the TV watching a peppy young globe trekker show us places in China we had visited ourselves, bringing back all sorts of wonderful memories.

What followed was a reminder of why I do the work I do: a moving documentary about midwives in Mozambique who are trained to be surgeons and save women’s lives in obstetrical emergencies in underserved rural areas. Given the state of these rural facilities (under-equipped, under-staffed, under-stocked), the job is already difficult beyond belief; it was made even more difficult by the attitudes of the medical doctors who were not happy with the intrusion of these uppity midwives into their select and exalted fraternity. I had not heard of this program and was thrilled to find out that someone has decided to act on what seemed such a logical next step in mobilizing a part of the population that is so very underestimated, underappreciated, and underutilized, women!

I took an entire day vacation yesterday. I never checked my email until it was time to go to bed. I worked some more on my Alden shell, finished three coats of varnish on the seat and footrests and started work on the oars. While the varnish was drying I worked in the garden.

I looked for, and found the missing asparagus spears; now all nine are showing their feathery foliage or the shoots that precede it. Next spring we will have our first harvest according to Ann who planted them for us in May with her sons and husband. She came by to check on progress a few days ago when no one was around and left a long message on the phone that we haven’t responded to. There are other phone calls to make or return that are piling up but we are both too overwhelmed, for different reasons, to respond to them.

I weeded around the tiny lettuce plants that have been kept from growing up by nightly bunny visits. Now the inch-tall month-old seedlings are protected from the bunny by a wire fence so we can stop buying stuff trucked in from California at considerable cost.

The raspberries are ripening fast and provide at least a handful for consumption each day; the blueberries are nearly changing from green to purple; soon we’ll see who gets them first: the birds, the chipmunks or us. There isn’t yet enough for everyone as the bushes as still very small and one has only produced five berries. We don’t expect to get any of these.

I played around some more with water color and when I got tired of that I read. All this kept me busy until Axel returned from his memory assessment at Spaulding and a bunch of errands that took him far afield; he was gone most of the sweltering day.

We sat on the low tide beach, sipping Pernod, with our feet in the ice cold water watching the sun move towards the tree line and realized there was enough time and sun shine for a short kayak trip. We paddled out of the cove along the coastline, across enormous swells that lifted us up then down. These were the distant ripples from hurricane Bertha who is losing her strength rapidly over the Atlantic.

It was a lovely short holiday from the intense work in Ghana and Haiti; but It was not much of a holiday from the crash aftermath which continues to haunt me as the anniversary has come and gone and put the whole thing squarely back into view. It is leaving me mildly depressed and even though the birds are greeting me and the day with enthusiasm, I feel like curling up into a ball and going back to sleep; there are other fantasies of escape from being ‘on’ today at work.

There is an expression in Dutch that translates more or less like ‘walking with your soul under you arm.’ That’s how I felt yesterday. Although it was supposed to be a happy day (thanksgiving, Sita called it) I also felt intensely sad, with an overlay of feelings of imminent doom. It was like the place in oceans where the cold water from one side comes to the surface filled with debris from deep down and bumps into warm water carrying much life coming from the other side. The Cape of Good Hope is such a place. Yesterday was my personal Cape of Thanksgiving then, a very turbulent place.

All through the day I kept being drawn, hour by hour, to reliving the day a year ago. I kept thinking about what could have happened in an obsessive sort of way with my evolved brain knowing that such thoughts were to be thrown out and the lesser evolved parts of my brain dredging more of them out of the muck

Sita called early in the morning from London to say we were on her mind. Of course she was on ours. After breakfast Axel sat by the cove rather than behind his computer, unusual, writing and reflecting in his paper and pen journal. When Jim emerged from the barn he told him how grateful he was for what he had done for us. “Fancy how you got to know us in ways you would not have imagined before,” and with that Jim received a big bear hug. Everyone was searching for the right words but there were none. Jim and Steve have become like sons for us; as a result we now have four children, two delivered to us as adults.

I tried to take care of the kind of business that is part and parcel of returning home, such as unpacking, laundry, completing expense reports, trip reports, recording business cards, in addition to various thank you and follow up emails. It was hard to concentrate and I moved slowly through this otherwise familiar ritual. My heart wasn’t in it and my thoughts were elsewhere. I felt like escaping but I had no idea where to. Emails about work, new initiatives, plans, felt like they were coming from another planet. I let my mailbox fill up with messages, not able to make decisions whether to file, delete or act on them. Tomorrow, I kept thinking, all will be normal again. I gave up any attempt at working around lunch time and went back to the unkempt garden. Rooting around with my hands in the dirt was more therapeutic.

We had lunch with Tessa after Axel returned from an entire morning of doctor’s appointments and therapies and then she left for one last time for London. She expects to be back with Steve and a carload of stuff by the end of the month and move into the barn which will have been vacated by Sita and Jim by then. At least that is the plan we agreed on since we cannot possibly accommodate stuff from two households.

After lunch I got busy sanding and varnishing the foot rests and seat of my Alden shell. That too was therapeutic, still working with my hands, as it silenced my busy head. The final therapy of the day (after physical therapy) was sitting by the cove playing with watercolors. Axel had bought me a lovely book, the water color bible for flowers. It was a hint that called for more art and creativity in my increasingly workaholic life. I was grateful for that gift and sat by the cove trying out the painting of lilies and daisies, while Axel joined me later with his oil paints.

At the end of the day I decided I was not ready to go back to work. With no meetings planned I would not let anyone down. I felt emotionally and physically drained from the trip and the re-living of July the 14th. I am staying in bed while the day wakes up around me, writing in my jounral. And after that I will enjoy our magnificent surroundings and get on with life.

Before the ban on liquids, most people left Haiti with cardboard suitcases filled with five bottles of Haitian rum. It was a thriving little business at the departure lounge. Now, with the liquid laws enforced in the US only the people who don’t transfer to domestic flights in Miami can bring these; unless, of course, they are prepared to put the five bottles in their suitcase after clearing customs. I did that with the dozen mini bottles I bought with the thought that if they would break at least I wouldn’t have my stuff drenched in 5 liters of rum.

We arrived so early at the airport that nothing was open yet. There was a short line in front of the closed entrance to the airport. The porter I hired demonstratively put my suitcases in front of the line, right in front of the closed doors, bypassing about 30 people who had arrived before us. I felt uncomfortable about following him but did not want to be separated from my luggage for too long. From the twinkle in his eyes I could tell there was an expectation of a good tip. Malcolm, who carried his own luggage, followed me with some hesitance; both of us blatantly and shamelessly invoking white privilege, while acting hopelessly un-empowered (“the porter made us do it!”). In the end only a few people complained, maybe because it wasn’t even 6 AM yet. We tucked away our feelings of shame as the lines began to move.

After that we were at the front of each new line that formed before a closed door, an unoccupied counter or an empty office. When you travel with someone else, especially someone you haven’t seen for awhile, waiting in line is not that bad. Eventually all doors opened and uniformed people took their places behind counters and desks, opened doors and let us pass. My exit from Haiti couldn’t have been easier. Malcolm’s was even easier because he got an upgrade to business class; but by then I had already moved, on his Gold elite coattails, to a bulkhead seat right behind business class, intended to sit next to him until he moved further forward.

The rest of the day consisted of more waits, expensive bad meals from fast food chains I’d never patronize if I did not have to and another crowded plane to Boston. Our departure was delayed by about 2 hours, again, this time because of an electrical storm that kept ground crew inside the terminal until it was safe again to work next to large metal objects in the pouring rain. Malcolm and I finished our expense reports and then I played solitaire until my battery was empty. In the plane I got to sit next to a big Haitian mama whose oversized arms spilled over the armrests but by then I was too tired to care. Axel picked me up and whisked me off to a Japanese restaurant on the way home where we splurged and had the superdelux sushi and sashimi platters and two large beers. Back home I don’t even remember putting my head on the pillow.

There is nothing more spectacular than waking up at the edge of Lobster Cove with the sound of birds and gentle waves while the love of your life is sound asleep by your side. I may have been on a Caribbean island but my waking up experience consisted of the sound of the noisy old airco with the muffled voices of staff congregating outside my opaque louvered windows. There’s no place like home.