All the people who showed up to support me – or Jose and me – are people I will be eternally grateful to.

This list starts and continues with Jose. As I told someone the other day, the biggest silver lining of this whole experience was really, I think for the first time, knowing in my flesh and heart what real, true, lasting love feels like. There was more than once that I wondered if this thing would drive him away, if the burden of brain injured me would be too much. My personality vanished, my emotional contribution was: a drain or tears or anger or fear. My monetary contributions to our home economy not only gone, but in the red: my very existence depended on lots of money being spent on me constantly.

But he cried with me, held me, gave me very gentle eye massages, helped with other at-home therapies, found ways to buoy my mood, became the principal ironer and cook, moved across the world and started working in his second language for me, drove me to appointments, and so, so much more.

The nice, beautiful love songs about “following you into the dark” or “crossing mountains and seas” for another person are sometimes actually true, not just aspirational, when you find someone like Jose.

My second person is Antonietta. She’s a wonderful person, a polyglot soccer friend who bikes around town and has a cat. We’d become friends in Seville. She’d witnessed the downward spiral of a family member in the recent past, and she noticed my increasingly desperate need for understanding and company during my first few months in a new region, Almería, where Jose and I had moved immediately after returning to Spain after my accident. She came to visit and was with me for a weekend, and she also suggested and helped organize our soccer friends’ visit another weekend during Jose’s and my time there in Almería.

Her care and proactive support meant the world.

My third people are my aunt and uncle. Later on, before I’d found any meaningful recovery, and I was starting to really lose a grip on my mental stability, I called them to ask for help. This was about 5 months after my dad had passed away, and I was still in the throes of that grief, along with the grief and confusion over my health and the professional and personal losses that were resulting from it. Add to that PTSD from the health and relational losses I was experiencing. And of course, having a brain that wasn’t strong enough to process or work through most of these things meaningfully.

My uncle came and spent a month with me/us. He’d recently had a heart operation and was taking lots of medications daily, but still, he made that trip. He accompanied me to accupuncture appointments, we did what we could to ensure that he got to see a little of the area (a few beaches, some amazing restaurants, graffiti days to beautify crass or ugly graffiti by spraying over it with flowers/Mt. Hood, an afternoon in a butterfly house, a trip to a bio-village with a guy who crafted with agave wood, etc.). In general, though, he listened to me and began to heal my emotions slowly during day-to-day life while Jose was at work.

He listened and he brought a sense of love and of humor to my lonely life. When he left, I knew I couldn’t stay in Almería and continue on, and I asked if I could move back to Oregon and live with him and my aunt, if necessary. They said yes. That gave me the space, freedom, and support I needed to begin finding recovery.

Which leads to my fourth person, Marta. Marta is originally from Mexico, an anthropologist, mother, and amazingly creative and kind person. She is cultured and down-to-earth. I’d met her through my neighbor, and I knew Marta would have been a wonderful, fun, super smart mother-like figure for me had things gone well in Almería. She still did act in a kind and honest motherly way to me, especially when she told me, “Tienes que tomar las riendas de tu propia vida.” (You need to take hold of the reigns of your own life.)

You see, in choosing to move to Spain 6 years prior, I had understood that I was “hitching my wagon” to Jose’s, somewhat at the expense of my own career. Of course, I had been working in Spain, teaching English and translating, and I’d been advancing, but my income was low, his was high. My profession had a relatively low ceiling, his did not. So, while I had felt happy to have made this decision, a decision which meant having a fulfilling personal life at the expense of the professional, I was – while talking with Marta – terrified to make a new decision that might tear apart my personal life, leaving me with nothing, along with a severely underperforming brain.

So her words were exactly what I needed to hear. I might lose my emotional/personal/economic support, but I needed to be in a place where I had access to resources and medical professionals who could help me recover. The reality of my health had to be #1, not dependent on what was best for Jose. Having had that visit from my uncle, the assurance that I could live with him and my aunt when I would return to the US – that made it all possible.

Lastly, I would be remiss to not mention Marco, my loving dog and my primary source of company throughout the years of recovery. Marco’s presence, more than anything else, kept me going on the toughest of days. A rescue who was definitely most attached to me, he needed me, and I really needed him too. He was the reason I got as much exercise and fresh air as I did, walking at least 2x/day. When I was lonely, exhausted, spending hours on breathing exercises to try to lower my heart rate or on observing my new brain patterns in meditation, his little body laid out atop mine, that extra warmth and breathing presence kept me grounded. Like Jose’s, Marco’s love for me never diminished. His body is now ashes in a bag near the couch, and I am loathe to ever let him go.

Beyond these 4 people, many more would form part of a web of support, some of which I didn’t know existed. There were old friends who visited at one point or another: Court, Liz. There was a friend whose kids were little and offered to drop it all and fly to see me for the weekend at one point: Lucie. There was Jose’s friend, Miguel, who sent me messages of encouragement and hope most every week for about two years. There were Matt, Anna, and Maria, who befriended and included me even when I was in a ½-or-less-there state. There was my cousin, Peter, into whose house I also moved (he and my aunt and uncle lived together), and who supported me with his normalcy and game-playing. There was my U.U. church that accepted disabled me into its congregation, small group, and choir, and that listened, welcomed, loved, and was even willing to learn from me. There were new neighbors that did art with me, the Senior Center where I took classes and made generous friends, old neighbors who opened their hearts on long walks, fellow TBI strugglers (and some who had recovered) that shared their stories. There was Ginny who told me that I was a “badass” even on tough days and who helped me plan how to face tough times when I could see them coming. And there were the doctors who knew how to help. I am especially indebted to 2 medical professionals: one who cried when she read my written explanation of why I was coming to see her, and my therapist – specializing in people with brain injury, stroke, and other such problems – who has helped me work through the myriad emotional facets of this reality.

I’m know there were/are more people that I’m not including here – my apologies for the ommission. You are amazing.

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It wasn’t until sometime during year 2 that I would discover that “important” people disappearing from your life is a common trend in the world of people living with Moderate-to-Severe Concussion (Persistent Post Concussion Syndrome / TBI).

In my case, my condition was clearly too much for any of my family-of-origin members to pay much attention to, at least in the first year or two. At the very beginning, I wanted company but pleaded for silence (almost all noises brought pain and mostly high anxiety/heart rate as my brain struggled to process them), only to be met with constant chatter or isolation.

True, some of my sisters were in situations with kids, tiny support systems, and/or wobbly boundaries – meaning their only energy was given to those closest and loudest. I was clearly outside of their capacity. Another, upon whom I had depended emotionally for years – and I’d assumed our relationship was balanced – quickly began to distance herself. To be fair, in those first 2-3 weeks, she accompanied me to the hospital twice, stayed with me overnight once, prepared a room for me at the house where she was staying, and took me to the doctor. But before I left for Spain (home), her support had turned to outright disgust and avoidance. After I returned home to Spain, she called and unceremoniously unload years of pent-up frustrations against me, and then became virtually unreachable for my attempts at repair.

My mom’s alzheimer’s was getting worse, and so she now needed “grandma-sitting.” Her needs, as often happened in my family, took up the majority of everyone’s extra energy.

During those early weeks, when I asked for him, my dad was open to listening, and he was sympathetic, although his health was failing. Soon, we would learn that he had stage 4 cancer. He would pass away less than a year later.

The pain and abandonment of losing people who I’d thought I could depend on was absolutely terrifying: in the situation of having a brain that cannot adequately process emotions, thoughts, or even bodily processes, this abandonment feels particularly cruel.

I’ve come to forgive and/or understand these inabilities as others’ processes that were, unfortunately, occuring at the same time as my most intense need. Some relationships have been repaired; some are likely over; some are in-between. But I guess I’m grateful that, even after lots of time of neither feeling nor seeing a sure way forward, I’ve found that, when people show up, they help create a pathway where none existed.

…

Final thoughts: community matters, access to medical treatment matters. I am now back in the workforce, paying taxes, helping with others’ lives both professionally and personally. The idea of socialized medicine (which can and usually does co-exist with private medical systems) ensures others who aren’t as fortunate as me can also have access to recovery, along with the personal, communal, and economic benefits that recovery entails.