Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki

Author:Allison Pataki [Pataki, Allison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The thing that nearly broke me was that, several weeks into RIC, I had to move apartments. Our lease was up, and the plan had always been to move a week after our babymoon, at the end of June; we just hadn’t planned on the stroke. The logistics of any move are tough, but when you are spending twelve hours a day in the hospital and you are forbidden by your doctor from lifting heavy objects at six months pregnant, it becomes even more problematic. I did not know how I could possibly make it happen. Not to mention that packing would mean reckoning with item after item from Dave’s and my former life, pouring saltwater into a fresh wound with each one.

All I can say is this: thank God for women. Women show up. And the women in my life showed up for me at that time, in every way. My friend Marya flew out to help me pack up our old place. Marya was exactly the right person to arrive in that moment because she, more so than any other friend, has known Dave since the earliest days of our courtship. She first introduced me to him, on that night when he asked me where I went to college at a Yale bar. She was in that same art history class. She witnessed me sliding in next to Dave to learn about Gothic cathedrals. She stood beside us at the altar when we got married. I could be entirely raw and vulnerable—broken—in front of her. And Marya missed Dave, too. Not just for me, but because of her own long friendship with him.

When I answered the door, I saw Marya and immediately collapsed into her outstretched arms. She held me and wept with me. This was no small mercy, to have someone simply allow me to cry. She did not look for a positive piece of loving wisdom. She did not try to cheer me up. She just held me and she let me cry, and she cried with me.

“I just miss him so much,” I said, as we drove together one morning to see Dave in rehab. Tears in her eyes, she nodded. “I know you do,” she said. “But he’s still here,” she offered. I knew her point was: He’s not dead. It was true. He very well might have been dead. In spite of the hideousness of the current situation, there was still reason to give thanks.

“It’s a cruel, sick joke,” she agreed with me. “You couldn’t have made it up: you were on your way to your babymoon and your husband almost dies from a stroke.”

Marya was there with me that weekend, overseeing the logistics of our life going into boxes. Our friends Peter and Russell came over and spackled the walls, took the TV screens out of their mounts, helped with packing, canceled our cable subscription.

Also during that time, Marya walked Penny over to RIC, and Dave and I went down to the street so he could see our dog for the first time since the stroke.

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