Courtesy of the author
It had been two hours since I last heard from my partner, Anita. She'd called as she was getting ready to leave work. I offered to pick her up, but she told me that she preferred to walk home. It was typically a 30-minute walk from her office to our home, and she could use the exercise, she mentioned.
After the first hour had gone by, I called some friends asking if anyone had heard from Anita — no one had. After a dozen calls to her cell phone went unanswered, I assumed the battery had died. She probably stopped at the supermarket for some last-minute shopping, I told myself. It was Thanksgiving Eve, and there was still a lot left to prepare for the big feast.
This was my favorite holiday, and Anita was planning her usual culinary extravaganza. It turned out to be the worst holiday ever.
The sun was setting, and with the coming of dusk, the darkness inside my soul began settling all around. I took both the cell and portable phones and sat with my dread on our stoop, waiting.
Her call never came.
When the phone rang after another hour, I stood up at the sound of a woman's voice on the other end: she was a nurse at the Intensive Care Unit at Jersey City Medical Center. Then she gave me the worst possible news I had ever received: My Anita had been struck by a car and was being taken into the operating room for emergency surgery.
Less than a half hour later, I was pacing a lounge outside the ICU, waiting for any news of her condition. Mutual friends and family members joined me, and together, we waited until the surgeon came by after the three-hour operation to give us the sobering news.
In a reassuring tone, the doctor told us that during surgery, he had successfully removed a blood clot from her brain caused by the impact. Considering she'd gone into cardiac arrest a few minutes after arriving at the emergency room, he added, Anita's operation had gone really well. He mentioned that the next 24 hours would be critically important in her recovery.
I had been here before — a doctor delivering terrible news about a loved one gravely injured under similar circumstances. Roughly 20 years earlier, my dad had died in a car accident.
I spent the next 24 hours at that hospital lounge. Thanksgiving came and went, and all I remember was peering through the glass door into the post-op room where Anita was resting, being guarded that whole time by a nurse sitting by her bedside. My favorite movie, "It's A Wonderful Life," playing on a TV nearby, reminding me of our yearly tradition — watching the Macy's Parade during the day and the classic Jimmy Stewart movie at night, after dinner. Except this was no traditional day.
After many days in a coma and 21 days in the ICU, Anita came home the day before Christmas — her favorite holiday.
It was a slow but miraculous progress. There were weeks at the beginning of her recovery process when we visited a half-dozen doctors and therapists, and even walking once around the block was a major accomplishment.
Two years later, we were married, and five years later, our son Nicolas was born.
Two-and-a-half decades after that awful experience, my love of Thanksgiving remains, but the holiday now carries a deeper meaning. More than family traditions or prayers of gratitude once a year in November, I now have a daily gratitude practice — I write 10 things I am grateful for each day. My son now joins me in the ritual.
And we still watch "It's a Wonderful Life" as a family every year.
