February 21, 2010

Today was a sobering day. I drove out of the Farms and headed into town. I like going down the farthest road west because it is so quiet and pretty. Everything was fine until I came to Indiantown Road. There had been an accident. It was a motorcycle/vehicle accident. I had to pull over because there was no way to get around all the cars. A motorcyclist was laying beside the road and people were working on him, doing CPR.

I realized I had a sheet in my car and grabbed it, thinking that if the man was in shock, he needed to be kept warm. As I walked up, I asked other people to step back so the men had room to do what they were doing. I covered the man with my sheet and stood back out of the way. Some people were directing traffic, others, concerned, were asking what they could do. Several 911 calls had been made and within five minutes a sheriff appeared. Right behind him, we could all hear the sirens coming.

When the paramedics arrived, there was nothing that could be done for the man. He was gone. All the people there were visibly and deeply upset.

The officers and firemen put up crime scene tape and the rest of us backed our vehicles up and moved out of the way, finding our way out on another street.

I felt so sad that on such a beautiful Sunday, this man had gone out to enjoy the day and was now dead. My husband Dan is a motorcyclist. It made me think about his safety. He has ridden most of his adult life and has been in every state, including Hawaii on a motorcycle. But it just doesn't seem safe here any more.

Back on Indiantown Road, I drove into town to pick up my mail and run some errands, still thinking about the accident scene I had just left. I also began to think about the letter that waited for me in my post office box.

For several months, I had been communicating with an adoption agency in Jacksonville, FL. I was adopted as an infant and my mother had given me my adoption papers a long time ago. She was always OK with the possibility that I might want to find out about my birth mother but, for some reason, I never did.

After my Mom died in October, I started thinking about looking into it and wrote an email to a wonderful lady who helped me by doing tons of research. Waiting at my post office box was a letter she had written me providing the "non-identifying" adoption information I had been waiting for.

I opened the envelope and read her cover letter. I decided I would go to one of my favorite breakfast places and, while waiting for my order, I read about the people who were related to me by blood.

It was a curious sensation. I read about my mother, my father, my grandmother, my older sister, aunt, uncle, grandfather and great grandparents. There were general descriptions of height, weight, eye and hair color and some of the things they liked or were important to them. It was like discovering a new planet.

When you are adopted, you always feel you don't really know who you are. I had great, loving parents, grandparents and a wonderful adopted brother. But there were deep personal questions, a haunting mystery I had always wanted to pursue. Today, I received the first clues to that mystery. I discovered I have family that I never knew. I want to find anyone I can locate. I want to meet them, talk to them, learn all about them and hug them. It is now my personal goal, my mission, my quest. Today was a sobering day.

Later, on my way home, my brother David called me. For more than four months, we have been living through all the complications and intricacies a parent's death involves. This has included attorneys, trustees, trusts, wills, putting our childhood home up for sale and all the minutiae that entails. It has been a long, difficult and emotional journey.

My brother was checking in, giving me an update on what was happening with the trustee while I updated him on the (non) sale of the house. As he said goodbye, he mentioned that today was the fifth anniversary of his accident. I felt embarrassed because I had not remembered. We always say "I love you," when we say goodbye on the phone. We are the only ones left now of our immediate family and we are close. After I hung up, I thought back  to what had happened five years ago. 

I remember driving for 13 hours to Winston-Salem, North Carolina's Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. My brother had been taken there after he fell three stories at a construction site. David's mother-in-law had called me to ask me to come to the hospital because the doctors didn't know if he would live or die.

On the second day after his accident, David was placed in an induced coma because, when he was conscious, he would thrash around and become agitated. His spinal column had been severed. The next day at noon, after I had seen David for the first time, the doctors told David's wife, Christy and I that they wouldn't know anything for sure for two days. We were only allowed to visit in ICU for 15 minutes every four hours. It was the most difficult two days I've ever experienced. Christy and my brother have a beautiful, two year-old daughter, Ellie. Christy's family and friends were at the hospital the entire time, supporting her or babysitting Ellie while Christy stayed near the hospital. Boone, their home, was more than an hour and a half from the hospital.

Christy and I stayed at the same hotel. We slept there and spent most of each day at the hospital for 9 days. At the end of the two days, the doctors told us they held some hope David would recover but he would be a paraplegic. We concentrated on the first part, the part about recovering. Later the reality of what being a paraplegic meant would eventually sink in for all of us.

On the tenth day, I had to go home. I never saw my brother conscious or was able to talk to him the entire time I was there. Christy kept me up to date by phone. We didn't tell my mother until we could give her the good news that David would most likely recover. It was difficult for me to tell her over the phone but she handled it well. She was not able to travel and it was very hard for her to sit at home in Florida wondering what was going on with her son.

My brother did recover. He learned to manage his handicap, drive again and helped take care of his daughter while Christy worked. My brother is a fine man who has accepted what life has given him and made it work. It has been tough on him, his marriage and his world but he gets up and lives every day the very best he can. I am immensely proud of him and privileged to be his sister.

Sobering is an appropriate word for a day in which I witnessed a death, gained new insight into who I am and remembered the anniversary of my brother's most devastating, life-changing event. Lots of prayers will be said tonight. Some of them will be for a man I don't even know and my new family people I have never met. But my fondest prayers will be for the bravest man I know, my brother David.