Blue ribbons

A week before my college graduation, a member of my senior class, a girl I had never met, had a stroke while writing her final college paper, alone in her dorm room. Nobody found her for several hours. The local hospital she was first taken to was unable to diagnose her--unsurprising, given that strokes are very rare in young, healthy people. By the time the blood clot in her brain stem was found at a second, larger hospital, her brain had been deprived of oxygen for many hours. It was thought that she was in a permanent vegetative state. Now, nearly three years later and thanks mostly to her mother's tireless advocacy and some excellent doctors, it is known that she has at least a moderate level of consciousness, but is, at least for now, unable to talk or move or function on her own. Sometimes she can move her left eye up and down to answer yes-or-no questions, but not always.

I think of this woman, whose life touched mine so briefly and indirectly, quite frequently. Many of us do. There is so much sadness and also so much hope. So many questions.

Her mother. Her father. The rage. The impotence. The hoping against hope. The being right against doctors' advice to take her off life support and let her die. The knowing that she's locked in and not being able to do anything about it. The time and money that everything takes. The fact that you have to go on with the rest of your life despite it all. There is so much excitement some days, so much hope with the new technologies, the possibilities of controlling a computer with your thoughts, so many directions this could go in, so many ways that new avenues could open up for her. And yet it's all so slow, and no matter what, none of these things will do what you want more than anything, which is to return her to the happy, healthy, energetic woman that she was before.

The frustration for her, of being locked in. She can't open her eyes, but when someone else opens them for her, she can see. She knows that she had a stroke and she is aware of what's going on around her, even at times when she does not appear to be alert. And also, beyond frustration, boredom. She must be bored. Her family and friends make an incredible effort to bring her out and about, but they can't do so all the time, and she isn't strong enough for that anyway. And thus she spends a lot of time in a hospital bed, knowing what's going on but not able to participate. Or even stretch.

The boyfriend. Young, also in college, and having been together for years. Wanting to make a life together. What do you do? Do you stay committed to her, hoping that someday you'll be able to have some kind of life together? Do you give up the hopes and dreams that you had for yourself of a simple relationship with a healthy person, of kids and a back-and-forth dynamic? How do you get over the person you want to spend your life with, knowing they're alive but not accessible?

The way you leave things when something happens so suddenly. The fact that it could have been any of us. The boxes, the dorm room that someone else would have to pack up. The last thing that you wrote on your Facebook profile (in her case, "I'm feeling better about school now. I still am excited about graduating, but I think I'm really going to enjoy this year now that I've made some changes schedule wise").

The heartbreaking mundanity, because there are no final words, no big gestures because you don't know it's going to happen, you're young and healthy and graduating and the world is your oyster, the future is sparkling before you. And so you continue with a series of tiny gestures, little regular day-to-day things like everyone else, and then suddenly everything freezes, and that's the impression that the rest of the world has of you forever. And so the little things take on a sudden poignancy that they never had before.

I've never met her. I know very little about her. Although our college was not that large and I felt that I knew most people in my class, Facebook says we have only two friends in common. And yet, I and everyone else in our class wore a small blue ribbon on our gowns on graduation day.


Little blue ribbons, more than 800 tiny drops in what has become, for her and those who know and love and care for her, a vast and frightening sea.