Sylvia's Journal

The leaves fall-we all fall-/And still there is One who with infinite tenderness/Holds this falling in His hands (R.M Rilke)

Today is the day, so anticipated and so dreaded; it is finally here. A thick fog hangs over the cove and the yard, enveloping everything – just the kind of fog we were in at the end of the day a year ago; a day that started out so beautiful and full of promise but ended in calamity.

When I went to bed last night I brought my computer upstairs into the bedroom and placed it next to my bed. I wanted to re-create the early morning journaling experience that kept me in good spirits for many months last summer and fall. We are now pretty much normal; a normal that we so badly wanted to become last year: we can live on our own, even though we haven’t had to, walk up and down stairs, fly to distant and not so distant places, do laundry, mow the lawn, dig up potatoes, move furniture, and make love.

Yesterday we had the cookout with the BU students, like we had planned to have one year ago but which never happened. The 2007 summer session included a whole class I never really bonded with, as my teaching was to have started on the 16th of July. With some hesitation I had offered our place for a cookout again and it was accepted. Eight students and one faculty showed up, plus one student from last year. We did not talk at all about last year and enjoyed ourselves enormously.

The date of the 14th of July has been hovering on the edges of my consciousness for a long time, maybe back as early as when the doctors predicted that our recovery would take a year. Earlier, I had looked forward to this date with the idea that then I would be able to put everything behind me. Now I realize this may not happen, ever. Axel and I have been moving slowly to this date, along our different paths, as uneasy partners on a first encounter. With Sita off to London (Europe), Tessa has wondering whether she should be there with us or return to (her Canadian) London, as planned, over the weekend; should we be left unsupervised? We did not know what to tell her and so she stayed.

There is reason for celebration as our being here one year later, in fairly good shape, is a survival miracle. Much joy and happiness has come to pass since then. But there is also much that remains unfinished and that continues to be a source of pain, discomfort, dread, and disappointment.

Last night, before going to sleep we kissed each other on the places that were broken, cut or damaged: Axel’s long scar from his eyebrow, disappearing somewhere in the hair on the back of his head has healed beyond belief. I kissed his forehead that covers the frontal lobe, which is still rebuilding itself with help from Spaulding staff. I moved my lips to his left upper arm, tracing the length of his radial nerve down to his hand and fingers. They are not yet at full strength but he could squeeze my hand in a way we had not thought ever possible again. Next came the large muscle groups on his back, his hips and his lower vertebrae. They are all healed but there’s still much work to do to improve strength and flexibility.

My turn started with the scar on my right forehead that is mostly invisible but with skin that remains tender; then to my neck and upper shoulders: looking over each shoulder is still painful and the muscles and tendons are full of knots. He kissed the ribs on the right side, they are fine and were the first to heal last summer. he then put his lips on my right shoulder and arm, which had the color of a ripe plum for most of August; the shoulder pain lingered for months and was finally ended with a cortisone shot earlier this year. Next he kissed the long scar on my belly, which has healed nicely and only bothers me when I do certain yoga positions that stretch it. He kissed the small flap of skin, peeled from my right hand that was so expertly sewn back in place. Although it remains tender, its former state is hardly recognizable. Then it was the turn of my sacrum, moved out of alignment during the recovery, it is still not entirely OK but the physical therapist and I are working on it. And then, a final kiss on my right ankle and the bottom of right foot. The ankle is still swollen and not quite OK. The neuropathy at the bottom of my right foot is also persisting. The foot doctor will have a look again in two weeks.

The emotional and psychological scars were not quite kissable in the same way. We are still figuring out where/what they are. But Axel believes he has learned things about himself he did not know and is a better person as a result. I am more compassionate and more patient. And we both know, from a very deep place inside us, that the relationships we have with those who circled around us in the months that followed July 14, 2007, and still are, are the most precious of all our possessions.

Today we are only two more months away from the anniversary of the crash. I repeat the monthly ritual of reading the previous (now nine) entries in my blog tagged as ‘the 14th.’ It makes me a bit philosophical. The 14th of July may well become our new collective birthday, or should I say, re-birth or survival day?

Sita sent us a note and picture from Frankfurt. Guess what they make there? She is flying to Egypt in style (business class). We don’t feel sorry for her. When we said goodbye yesterday I remarked how one of us seems to be always coming into the US when the other is going out. “I learned it by watching you, mom!” she answered. Watch out what you do in front of your kids!

Tessa’s arrival cancelled out Sita’s departure; we still have two kids at the dinner table, Tessa and Jim, and of course there is Chicha the puppy who greeted me with great yelps of something (curiosity, pleasure, fear?).

It was nearly warm enough to sit outside in the late afternoon sun. With a cup of steaming hot tea in our hands we could do it for a lilttle while. But when the sun goes down we are reminded that it is not summer yet.

Back at work I slid back into a work routine as if I had not left. There people are used to me flitting in and out. And when I have an internet connection on the road I keep up with mails, requests, etc. as if I were physically present. We actuallly do have many colleagues with whom we work just fine even though they live and work far away.

We are at the end of our annual workplanning cycle with several trips lined up for me in the second half of the year. I always worry a bit about scheduling but then, each year, things fall more or less into place.

For the next few months there are no trips scheduled which is a new experience this year, having made one trip each month. Not that I can sit back, relax and twiddle my thumbs. Next week is our project’s worldwide meeting where staff from all over comes together for a stock taking and celebratory event; after that an annual conference on international health in DC for people who are in my trade, followed by the organizational behavior teaching conference in Boston in mid June. In between there is jury duty; my first as an American citizen. Until September 21, 2005 I was able to ignore these calls for jury duty, as an alien. But now I am tagged for real. More about that later.

Today is the 14^th which always brings back the memories of that fateful day in July and what happened afterwards, both good and bad. Nine months post-crash found Axel and me walking the Masconomo-Proctor Street loop, fairly upright, at a good clip, although still with pains in various large muscle groups. When we come home we should be doing stretches. Instead we ate cake and chocolates left over from our annual Easter celebration – a little late this year because of weather and travel schedules.

Easter remains a significant part of the year for us because that is the time we met and, some time later, fell in love, and, again some time later, married. Since 1985 we have made the arrival of spring and Easter time an excuse for a party to celebrate our love, the arrival of new life in our garden and new beginnings of any kind. It is always a joyous event; what else can it be when you have dear friends spending a good part of a day with you, bringing and eating good food and catching up on work, kids and other important things. The Easter bunny hit the egg bags, this year more on the ground and less in the trees than usual. Climbing trees is not as easy this year for the bunny.

This morning I booked Axel’s flight on April 25 to accompany me to Holland and two weeks later back again. While I am working in Ethiopia Axel will be vacationing in Holland. He was a bit nervous about it, not sure his body can handle the flight over and being away from his own bed and exercise routines. I think I have convinced him that things will work out and if they don’t, we can always find places for massage and physiotherapy. If I can arrange this in Nairobi and Kabul, I am sure we can arrange it in Holland.

He will be arriving at the height of the tulip season so the timing is perfect. We will also be able to participate in two significant events that will bookend the trip: a long overdue family reunion of my mother’s family (de Clercq) and my youngest brother’s 50^th birthday.

The fourteenth of every month still sets it apart from the others as we count backwards to July 14, 2007. We are now in month 8 post-crash and the experience is slowly splitting into three parts: the nightmare of the crash itself; the immediate response from family, friends and colleagues, combined with the effect of painkillers that make those early two months seem rather nice and then the slow up and down trajectory of healing, first in body, then in mind. We are still in part three and may continue to be for awhile.

Are we alright and our old selves again? Yes and no. Axel still walks with a slight stoop and is often in pain especially after a long walk, like the one we took yesterday. His hand is inflamed and, as he says, his head is still not quite right. Yesterday, for example, he discovered that he cannot read the newspaper and listen to the radio at the same time, something he did effortlessly 9 months ago. But from the outside he looks and acts like the old Axel and we could fool ourselves.

As for me, no one can tell from the outside that anything happened to me. The scars are hidden behind clothes and the neuropathy cannot be deduced form my gait; I sometimes forget about all this as scars and senseless toes have become so much part of my daily physical experience. But the sadness remains and has never quite gone away; sadness about things going wrong one day and tentacles that reach out from that time into the present, never quite relinquishing their grip. It is like a heavy weight on my shoulders that I can’t seem to take off and put down. That is my stoop, not visible like Axel’s but there nevertheless. We don’t talk about it all that much during the week. But last night, while Sita and Jim were out, we talked about the continuing aftermath and the lives that have been affected and the whole gamut of feelings that goes along with the pain, the regrets, and the gratitude.

It has become some sort of a ritual that each time the14^th comes around I read through all the previous entries on this milestone day. I have tagged these entries and I can select them as a set. In re-reading the entries I hopscotch through our recovery and the jumps of the early months. With the focus on recovery and our loving community of care-givers, the agony of pain and sleepless nights, and the interminable wait for all of us to get back to normal is not as visible (anymore?). The written story is far from complete, whole chunks are missing, but they come back into view when I read about what happened on the 14^th of every month since July.

It is Friday now and I turn my attention to the things I cannot do in the office because of multiple and constant interruptions. It is to be a day of long stretches of concentrated attention to reading, thinking, designing and writing. I have a vision for the end of the day, and that is checking off items from my to-do list and, with a sense of great satisfaction, closing my computer at cocktail time!

Today is Valentine’s Day. I received three kinds of flowers. One set consisted of two pots of primroses in bright primary colors. These are, every year, the harbingers of spring that precede the robin by a couple of months; they show up in stores when we are in the deepest and dreariest part of winter. Another set was a picture of the Nasturtiums that grew so prolific in our garden last summer, happily reseeding themselves every year. The picture was taken, blown up, photoshopped, matted and framed by the artist himself (Axel). Nasturtiums make me happy because they come with memories of childhood summers and sucking the nectar from the flower.

The third set was the most remarkable and unexpected: they appeared on my screen as tiny little flowers that grew, then disappeared and then re-grew over and over again in the chat space of my Skype window. With them was a message from Dr. Ali from Baghdad who was on a team I worked with in Jordan a few years ago. With all the drawbacks of how technology complicates our lives and fills up all our time, this is the magic that technology brings us as well. If it had not been for technology, I would never have met Dr. Ali and even if I had, we would probably have lost contact by now. He is doing well, leading well, producing results for the Ministry of Health, and his family is safe. This is no small achievement in Baghdad.

Work continues unrelentingly. Nevertheless we found time yesterday to go out for lunch with a few colleagues who were all close to our three colleagues who died three years ago in the plane crash in Afghanistan. Some people in this group are no longer at MSH and so, once again, this was a joyous reunion even though the occasion was somber and tearful.

MSH has entered a season of much bidding activity and many of us feel like jugglers, holding multiple balls in the air and doing our best not to drop any. Sometimes we do and these drops create stresses in the system and even acute personal pain at times. It is a fact of organizational life that cannot be ignored and that needs our full and ever so precious attention. On those days I am acutely aware of the complexity of human organization. It is one thing to look at this, dispassionately, as an outside observer, as I do when I am out on the road. But it is another thing altogether when I am intimately linked to the people and systems that make up the organization. At times like that I try to observe myself at work and discover, not for the first time, how difficult it is apply what we teach. It is probably a good thing to experience such organizational hiccups from time to time. I think it keeps us honest and humble.