Brooke’s got a new date for coming home: December 1. If it holds, it’ll have been two years and two weeks in hospitals.
There’s an enormous snowstorm predicted for tonight in Salt Lake and so no way anybody could (safely) come to visit him. He’s just there at South Davis by himself, watching a film of something (I think The Winter’s Tale) on the TV. That’s like practically every other patient in this long-term-care skilled-nursing facility, alone with the TV. The nurses have always told us that Brooke has more visitors than any other patient in the hospital, sometimes they think more than all the other patients in the hospital put together. It’s astonishing how people can be just abandoned when something bad happens to them, or maybe they had no real connections to begin with. The nurses are great at trying to compensate for this isolation, but of course they have many patients and work to do. Thank you all in every way you have, even by just thinking about him, for making Brooke’s life for the past two years something different. Wish we could do this for every other patient in places like this.
2 comments:
It's tragic how easily people who are most vulnerable are so easily forgotten. There is perhaps something in Brooke's feisty spirit and determination that helps him to rise above all of this, not least hos personality, his writing and Peggy.
Hi Brooke, Peggy,
So great to hear of the date for moving home, so soon now (for you, I'm sure so long delayed), which confirms the real progress of your recent recovery, and hard work. Congratulations, a wonderful announcement for the Thanksgiving weekend, for which we all can be grateful, thinking of you and the preparations for the move, which is really only a week away.
Your recent writings have been rich - the thoughts on cognitive dissonance are particularly incisive, moving, as they give pause for many of us to reflect on all the turns experience has provided us, and you, regarding the unexpected twists that become patterns of life, one thing leading to another, offering promise as well as setbacks. Accepting, waiting, not unlike old Keats's thoughts on negative capability, which if I understand it, encourages us not to make our minds up too quickly as to a course of action, re a creative decision - inevitability comes -and we stick with it, and give it voice, reality, as you have done with your thinking, writing, both before and, more importantly, after the accident.
The two drives you mention earlier - just to keep going, honoring the life force, and that of engaging with others, relishing what you can give as well as receive, stick with me. Clearly the tribute of your many visitors affirm this, what you can offer us is ongoing, unpredictable, as is the future itself.
Thanks again Brooke,
love and best from all here,
Ed
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