A Year and A Day

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers. As you all know by now, yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the accident that changed our lives forever. As I anticipated writing today’s post I kept struggling with how to still be relevant while also not being too redundant. Especially since Joy completed her core PT, OT, and Speech therapies, I’ve often reflected on our memories of the year, the pains, the losses, the miracles, the joys, victories, thanksgiving, and gratefulness, but yet again, I want to honor this milestone of remembrance in a hopefully relevant and non-redundant way.

Joy did a wonderful and precious job sharing her feelings with the anniversary post she published yesterday in Joy’s Corner. She beautifully captured the essence of her/our new life, our “new normal,” and her emotional, spiritual, and physical journey over the past twelve months.

As I considered the myriad of experiences and memories from this last year, two things seemed to dominate my thoughts. The inexplicable sense of peace that sustained me during even the worst of the “gut punch” events and the overwhelming gratitude and celebration of the life we now experience day to day, an appreciation for life that I never comprehended before the accident.

I shared in some detail the peace I felt in the midst of the horrors of Joy's multiple injuries and long recovery, in my reflections post on Dallas Willard’s book, “Life Without Lack,” and the role it played in allowing me to access the amazing grace and mercy of God in unimaginable circumstances. There was the gut punch of turning to see Joy bleeding profusely on the street, unresponsive as I held her battered head in my hands, the gut punch of first seeing her in the ICU, head shaved and bruised, tubes and wires protruding from her head and body, being confronted with the news of her permanent brain damage, the progressive paralysis that engulfed her entire right side for a time, the CT results that kept showing persistent swelling which prevented her cranioplasty from proceeding, once the cranioplasty was performed, the many ups and downs in the battle to get Joy back to Minnesota, the flight to Minnesota that almost didn’t happen because of the struggle to get the hospital in Florida to cooperate with the MedFlight team and the receiving in-patient rehabilitation hospital in Minneapolis, the tearful moment Joy realized her blindness to the upper right side was permanent, the final CT in Minneapolis that showed the extent of Joy’s brain damage and actual loss of brain tissue, and the many times of Joy’s utter dejection in her struggles with speech, reading, and comprehension, struggling to say and/or read her own name, my name, the names of our children, grandsons and other family and friends.

As I reflect on these gut punches and more, I can honestly say that each was accompanied with a supernatural sense of calm or peace, not free from pain and concern, but free of anxiety and despair. And, so now, being redundant, I'll again point to my reflection on “Life Without Lack” which explores my coming to trust in the sufficiency of God to meet all our needs in all circumstances.

But also, as I noted above, while the year has had its share of gut punches, it has also been a year of thankfulness, gratitude, and a literal celebration of life for me and Joy. I’ve written before that my personality type is one that “lives” in the future. At the point of each gut punch named above, I vividly lived in my mind, the reality of that being our permanent situation for the rest of life. So with each victory, with each of Joy’s heroic and hard won gains in healing, recovery, and therapy, hope grew more and more and I was joyfully overwhelmed with the reality of the life we were coming to have versus the life imagined. The wonders of the life we have compared to a brain dead Joy, a paralyzed bedridden Joy, a completely blind Joy, a mute Joy, a Joy with permanent vertical diplopia, a wheel chair bound Joy, a Joy unable to understand words, a Joy without memories and more. It is a wonder that we share with each other daily in our thankfulness for the life we have and the wonders of God’s mercy and grace shown.

In in book, “Ruthless Trust,” Brennan Manning shares the following, and I will conclude with it, because it so beautifully sums up the wonders and awe of the life we have been blessed with on this one year and a day…

“I shall never forget reading Jacques Maritain’s Seven Essays on Metaphysics during my undergraduate days at St. Francis seminary in Loretto, Pennsylvania. In one of those essays, Maritain tells of one day finding himself—a world-renowned, seventy-seven-year-old philosopher—skipping across a hilltop in Toulouse, France, and shouting to the heavens, ‘I’m alive; I’m alive!’ Having experienced sudden and utterly surprising rapture at the gift of life, the joy of being invested with existence, the privilege of being rather than not being, Maritain sank to his knees whispering words of praise and thanksgiving. The rediscovery of the precious gift of life and existence, often taken for granted, gives birth to the spirit of gratefulness; the awareness of contingency, forcefully presented by the evening news, prods the decision to accept the invitation to celebrate the feast of life one day at a time. Coupled with an intermittent awareness of the divine Indwelling, Jesus’ words “I have come so that you may have life and have it to the full” (John 10:10) sparkle with the sense that life is to be cherished infinitely.”