Virginia Visit

     At the end of March my brother was riding his bicycle down a winding mountain road in Virginia, near his home, when his front wheel veered into a ditch and he was thrown over the handlebars, landed on his helmeted head, then lay over a log for half an hour, conscious but unable to move, until someone stopped to help.  (His was the fourth car to pass.)

    Fortunately, no bones were broken, but Lee was paralyzed from the neck down with traumatic spinal injury. I don't know the medical terminology, but the way I put it is that the impact severed the connection between brain and muscle. He was told that some amount of recovery was possible in the first eighteen months, but no one would predict how much. After that, further recovery would be unlikely. No one was talking 100% recovery in those eighteen months. 

    He couldn't even scratch his nose. When he was able to raise his arm, he couldn't aim a fork into his mouth. Brushing his teeth was impossible. Walking? Learn to stand, first. Then learn to shuffle one foot sideways and bring the next one to it. Slow, incremental progress.

    But Lee has a phenomenal support system in his wife and three daughters. He was in good physical shape before the accident and is athletic by inclination. And maybe most important, he has a fierce determination and a willingness to work hard for recovery. He loved his physical, occupational, and recreational therapists and gives them the part of the credit they deserve for his astonishingly rapid improvements.

    I wanted to visit him immediately after the accident, but he said to wait till he could interact with me better. My two sisters also wanted to visit, so we decided to have our "annual" siblings' reunion at Lee's house in Virginia the first week of June. (We missed a year because of COVID)

    By then Lee had been home for almost a month, having been released from ICU after three days ("unhead-of," said his doctors) and from the wonderful rehabilitation center he had been in after that, also sooner than expected. He had been walking for weeks and performing all normal activities. The doctors were now mumbling things about "97-98% recovery," given his rapid improvement in the first two months. 

    Lee himself picked us up at the airport. He was driving the Tesla he had bought before the accident. He looked great. He walked with a hitch in the right hip, but at pretty much a normal pace, and he picked up our bags and threw them in the trunk. He took us to his beautiful house near Charlottesville, and so began a wonderful time with him and his wife, Linda.

Left to right: Diana, Linda, Lee, Sharon, Laura

    We went to the Charlottesville food and crafts market, newly opened after COVID. We ate wonderful meals that Linda, amazing homemaker, had prepared. Lee walked with Sharon, Laura and me around his property: down the wooded hill to the large pasture, across the pasture to the river, along the river and back up to the house, where he demonstrated his hopping: a two-footed leap as far as he can hop. (The trick, with a spinal cord injury, is to land without falling over backwards.) We ate at some of Lee and Linda's favorite restaurants. We walked along the mall and talked about the Charlottesville demonstrations there while Trump was president. Lee hiked with us on an up-and-down, through-the-woods trail at the Ivy Creek Nature Center. Linda, Sharon, Laura, and I hiked twice in Walnut Creek Park, extending one hike longer than anticipated by getting slightly lost among the branching trails. I drove the Tesla. We had a siblings lunch at the beautiful Pippin Hill Winery with its grand vista of Appalachian Mountains.

One evening we sat around the table with Lee and Linda's neighbors, drinking margaritas and having a raucous discussion about books. (It takers a special kind of person to make a discussion about books raucous—or maybe just good margaritas.) It took several days, but Lee, Sharon, Laura, and I finished a jigsaw puzzle. We played anagrams, and the day before my sisters left, we had a very competitive game of canasta, which, I'm sorry to say, Lee and I lost, but barely. Lee could shuffle cards and pick up tiny puzzle pieces and bananagram tiles and put them in place.

The puzzle

    My sisters left on Monday; my plane flew out on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday morning I asked Lee if he could take me to a beautiful place where I could strew some of Mike's ashes. He said he knew just the spot. We could get there in the Tesla.

    What a beautiful ride we had through the Virginia hills. A road closure because of a rockslide took us on smaller, winding, interesting roads. Grand homes sat atop green-spreading fields. Vineyards curved with the contours of the hills. Occasional tight nooks of hills reminded me of my year in Eastern Kentucky, true Appalachia. And then at the top of a hill, just before the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway, was the vista Lee had promised, across a wide valley with tiny buildings and farms and green fields and pastures, and then to the blue ridges of the Appalachians in the distance. I did my ashes ceremony there: reading a poem, saying a few words to Mike; Lee also said some farewell words, and, at a lull in the wind, I threw the ashes onto that scene: another beautiful place where Mike's ashes lie.

Spreading ashes

    After that Lee and I took a hike along the Rivanna River. People were floating down the river in inner tubes. Kids were swinging on a rope swing and dropping into the river while their mothers talked on the shore. The trail was level and hard-surfaced, and Lee was hiking strongly. We walked to a put-in place for rafts, then turned and walked back to the car, three miles in all. About half a mile before the end, Lee was tiring and beginning to waver as though he were off balance. But his balance, centered in the inner ear, is fine. He stumbles and wavers because his muscles in one leg aren't strong enough, yet, to catch him when he wavers. 

    Lee has made such an amazing recovery in so short a time it's easy to forget how much he still needs to regain, how hard he still is working, how important the therapy sessions are, how difficult it is to keep going. He admitted, while I was there, that being injured, not being able to do everything he used to do, all the difficulty walking, the tiredness during the day—it's getting old. He is ready for it to be over, for him to be recovered already. But he doesn't flag in his determination.

    During the hard days of the first stages of recovery, Lee was writing a blog. (His daughter Christine did the typing until he was able to do it himself.) The blog is called "I Can't Yet." It's that "yet" that drives him on. He is already talking about bicycling the Nachez Trace in another year or so. He can do a lot already, but there's still a lot he can't do—yet. Rewatching the videos on his blog, I am amazed to see what a struggle he had, a month ago, just to stand up, with an aide on each side of him, and then to think that I walked three miles with him two weeks ago. (You can access his blog on leecoogle.wixsite.com. It is beautifully written.)

    Much love to and admiration for my brother. He is made of good stuff.