the last three times my phone screen broke, charlie replaced the screen for me. it flew out of my hands onto the floor the other week, and the screen cracked again, so i bought a replacement and attempted the replacement myself.
welp, that didn’t go as planned. i think the directions i was following were not the greatest, because either it or missed a connection, which broke even at the slightest tug (i suppose when it’s been messed around with five times, it’s bound to break sometime). i think it was the earpiece, but we’ll see.
now i’ve put it together and i’m waiting for the battery to kick in. i’ve got it plugged in waiting to see what happens, but so far nothing.
might be phone shopping tomorrow 🙁
after charlie was in his accident and we weren’t sure if he was going to make it, something started unfolding on the interwebs.
for a couple people, those in the immediate know, it happened that same day. over the next couple days, the rest of his friends caught on, and it spread.
whenever i logged in to facebook, and it was a lot because i needed some sense of otherworldlyness and community, slowly but surely, many of cha’s family and friends changed their profile pictures to one they had with charlie. one after another, i started seeing charlie everywhere in profile pictures, and it was so comforting to know he had so many people rooting for him.
it almost makes me understand the france profile pictures, but with charlie, his friends actually did stand with him and not just put a good face on. they visited. they gave money. they sent things in the mail. they left him messages on his facebook wall even though he might not ever read them.
****
tonight i went to my cousin’t wake. she had been battling cancer for a long time; this was the third onset she’d had, and it had spread to so many difficult places that it was a relief that she was out of pain.
it was just my dad and me, and my dad goes to funerals to see people he hasn’t seen in a while. at the same time, i saw people who i knew from our austin days and from when i was very young. what was curious is that every single person we talked to that we knew, and even many people we didn’t know, came up to us and asked how charlie was. there were people who knew he was doing great and came up to dad patting him on the back saying it was great news; others asked him how he was doing; even more were completely surprised when we told him or her that he had been released to home. i even had people i didn’t know at all ask me how my brother was doing. i don’t think i talked to one person about my cousin whose wake we were attending.
****
coming together as a community was such a huge part of this experience. one thinks that you just have to handle this on your own. not true. more people care for him than you’d think, and that’s by and far the most humbling part of what happened these past 2-1/2 weeks.
coalescing for charlie.
today i was visiting charlie, and the RN came in just as i was about to leave and announced that he was going to be released tomorrow! woo!
here’s a list of things we’ll need to think about:
showers! bars and stools and where to put his clothes while he’s getting clean
keep that helmet on, boy!
his jaw still hurts when he chews. will this go away with time? will his face figure itself out when the doc does surgery to fix his face bones?
keep the cat away from the top of his head…
living with his parents again for a while
and in that vein, never being alone for a while
…and spending days with dad 🙂
…and then running to my house when he needs a break!
we’re taking a break from the charlie posts for a night because a) life update bullet time and b) i can’t think of anything charlie-related at the moment, and bedtime is fast approaching.
BULLET MONDAY…
thanksgiving is NEXT WEEK. how did that happen. this is my time to shine, and this year’s t-day may be a mess due to unforeseen circumstances (pregnancy, cancer, head injuries). at the same time, it all just might work out. and if we eat food on friday or saturday, that’s fine too. COME TO ME, SPATCHCOCK TURKEY.
i installed a ceiling fan in my bedroom. do you know how easy electrical work is as long as you have instructions? in fact, instructions make life projects in general a lot easier. because when stuff doesn’t come with instructions? well, let’s just say that nate and i call that stuff “rustic as f—“. in fact, i just made a RAF little crafty box and stained it tonight. i told nate that as long as it’s full of stuff, it doesn’t matter. (same reason my entry bench has some crooked inserts. NO ONE WILL KNOW.)
apparently i can’t print from photoshop with my new printer. i think that’s weird. photos print great from iphoto, but it has lines in it when i print from pshop. what gives, adobe/canon?
i have to get everything completely out of my garden tomorrow. i think it’s finally going to decide to be winter-ish around these parts. i still have some leeks, onions, and carrots hanging out in my backyard.
HALF MARATHON. yes. you heard that right. next may, liz and i will attempt a HALF MARATHON. i have 6 months. i think i can do this.
i’ve shared my story about the time my dad, charlie, cousin karl, and uncles greg and jon floated down the missouri river in 2003. i believe i focused on the bathroom aspect. (really, go read that. jane laughs every time.) what i didn’t focus on was how whiny charlie was! holy cow. he really did not want to go on this trip, and i feel like my dad thought this would be a great father-son bonding experience. instead, he got his oldest daughter to come on the trip and a whiny 15-year-old son. probably not what he was envisioning.
at one point, my dad told me his expectations for this trip were entirely different when it came to charlie 🙁 he complained; he was annoyed with the work; he didn’t want to be there. i felt really bad for my dad, as i knew i had sort of wedged myself into this trip and his son wasn’t really being a great participant. i think at one point, i actually pulled charlie aside and told him to shape up. cuz we couldn’t ship him out.
we spent three days floating on the missouri river. my dad and i paddled this weird almost-canoe that was great when the wind was at our backs. i got a pretty severe sunburn on my chin and an appreciation for porta-potties out of it. my dad was enamored by the white cliffs, and charlie told me more than once that every time he looked back at us, i was paddling and dad was sitting there (way to go, dad). we avoided the specified campsites and ended up camping for the night at weird locations – both islands in the river. the first night was an island full of yellow mustard weeds and a great latrine my cousin karl dug. if i remember correctly, this night our uncle jon passed around a flask of irish whiskey (i passed) and IPAs (i did NOT pass). this may have been charlie’s first sip of whiskey.
the second night was an island found while on the run from a thunderstorm, with no trees and barely a bush to dig a latrine behind. (this is where i gained my deep appreciation for any type of non-hole-in-the-ground bathroom facilities.) it thunderstormed all night, and the morning after, charlie told me he had been afraid the tent would blow away; i had been afraid the river was going to flood us out. neither happened, so we continued on our way.
OH! and before we left for the canoe trip, we stayed at one of my dad’s friend’s brother darryl’s house in montana. this guy had a giant pulldown screen with a projector in his living room. we watched “ice age”. he also had a lot of cars, INCLUDING a delorean!
that was kind of fun!
but the morals of this story, kids, are: don’t be a whiny little bugger. wear sunscreen. appreciate elevated toilet places. and don’t make your dad regret he brought you along!
what great hair! the first time i saw charlie with great hair was at caitlin’s wedding, which was the day before jane’s graduation. he thought he looked creepy, but i said NO IT LOOKS GREAT!!
and he goes back and forth with the hair, short long short long.
before he was in the crash, his hair was long. it was only a couple days ago that he realized they had to shave his head for his surgery.
but it’ll grow back. it always does!
my mom likes to tell this story. i don’t remember much about it, but i know the retelling pretty well, so here we go.
my mom got a new job in willmar in 1993; we moved from austin to spicer, then after a year of renting a home on green lake, we bought a house in new london.
to understand how ecstatic my mom was about this house, you have to understand how pretty awful our house in austin was. it was an old farm house, and it was past the point that it should have been remodeled. like three times. the carpet in the living room didn’t reach the edges of the walls and was so flat, it almost could have just been the floor. the tile in the kitchen was broken and tearing up so you could see the floorboards underneath it. and it wasn’t nice hardwood floors, either. we had no shower – just a tub. a few of our light fixtures were just bulbs in the ceiling.
NOT that this was bad; it was still HOME. it was just that, after buying the house in new london, it was like we finally had a grown-up house. my mom was very happy with it.
shortly after moving in, my mom had to go to a conference in washington dc (i think) for work and was out of town. i couldn’t tell you where my dad was, just that he wasn’t home. i was in charge (why am i always in charge when these things happen??), and charlie was just going nutso. i’m not sure if he finally realized three sisters were too much; maybe jane pushed him to the edge of reason; perhaps he wasn’t able to watch the tv show he wanted to watch. whatever it was, i was like, that’s enough of that – go upstairs until you calm down.
which he did not.
instead, he sat on the bottom stairs, threw a fit, and kicked a hole in the door that closed off the stairway from the kitchen. my mom’s house that had nothing falling apart in it suddenly fell victim to falling apart at the foot of a seven-year-old.
so i called mom up and apparently told her cha was out of control, and he kicked a hole in the door! that just about did her in. she yelled at him, telling him that for the first time in her life she had a nice house and here he was ruining it.* (apparently she did all this with her employee in the hotel room with her. she apologized profusely after this, and i think to this day my mom still considers that woman one of her good friends.) the perpetrator standing in front of the door in question – 10 years later. they have reconciled.
but that still didn’t solve the door. my parents lived in that house up until 2013 – and the stinking hole NEVER got fixed.** they were there for almost 20 years, and somehow the hole was something that my dad never got around to fixing. i don’t even think they technically fixed it before they sold it; from what i hear, a piece of wood just went in the hole to make it look a little better. ***
* this was just the beginning. he also stood or sat on the dishwasher, and the thing never closed correctly again. my parents did eventually replace that, but it wasn’t until it completely died.
**to be fair, it wasn’t like they were staring at it every day. for the most part, the side with the hole in it was against the wall because that door was open a lot of the time. when it was closed, my mom was in the kitchen and didn’t have to look at the hole.
***the people that bought the house have pretty much flipped it! it was on the market last summer and the kitchen is completely renovated. i wonder if they fixed the holey door.
i feel the need to do a year in review a month and a half before it’s due, but i’ll restrain myself until dec. 31. we’ll see if this year can swing itself into middle ground (there’s no way it’ll get into favorable again. unless i win the lottery. then it might redeem itself.) it certainly is bipolar :/
charlie comes to rochester tomorrow. here’s a photo of ralf to celebrate.
eleven days later, and we’re looking to many more days with charlie in the future.
my heart is still in my throat, even though i know he’s going to live and be fine and he’ll soon have his great head of hair back. i don’t know how long it will be until that clutching sensation in my solar plexus goes away, but it probably just means i’m still on alert in case anything happens, and my emotions haven’t caught up with real life quite yet. it’s also hard knowing what else he needs to go through to get to where he was.
but what is utterly amazing is the number of people this kid has affected in some way, shape, or form. the first few days after he went into his coma, i came home from work and constantly checked caringbridge and facebook for updates and to see what people wrote in comments and on cha’s FB wall. i didn’t know what else to do, and it showed me what sort of community comes together during something like this. i’ve had messages from coworkers in portland, friends he’s been out of contact with for a while, friends he’s been in contact with, friends of friends, family members’ friends and coworkers. it’s unbelievable, and you all are unbelievable.
i know my family is strong, and we would have been able to do this on our own; charlie is worth it. but the support that everyone has shown has really made us even stronger, knowing how much bigger charlie’s life is. you are amazing.
like jane said in today’s caringbridge post: “who knew one life could touch so many?”
<3
