Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
A year ago, when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City, our son, William, was heavily sedated in St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan, never conscious of the storm outside or its aftermath.
Just over a week earlier, William had suffered storm damage of his own — cardiac arrest following an overdose of heroin. First responders restored his heartbeat and rushed him to the hospital. There, doctors and nurses deliberately lowered his body temperature and heavily sedated him in an attempt to prevent seizures.
While the windows rattled, the rain fell in sheets, and the city, too, was paralyzed, William was unaware that the nurses and doctors tending to him were working double shifts, sleeping on cots in the hospital, unable to get to their homes. Unaware that the hospital was filling beyond capacity with patients transferred from facilities ravaged by the tempest elsewhere in the city.
His mother, sister and I stayed by his side, trying to glean any positive signs we could, discovering how to track any changes in his condition from the battery of monitors attached to his head, hands and heart. We read him selections from George Carlin, played Stevie Ray Vaughan and sang to him, doing our best to stimulate and comfort him — if indeed such a thing was possible. It was our way of coping with catastrophe.
From time to time, one or the other of us would leave his bedside to grab something to eat or pace about in the family lounge. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave us a view of the hurricane at work, while high on the wall was another monitor, a television with every station detailing downed power lines, flooded subways, trees felled across roads. The disrupted network of a city. From time to time we also got a sense of the track of the storm. Our house in the Catskills was in line to get hit, but we didn't care.
While the clouds outside the windows started lifting, our lives only got darker. We kept a vigil for another five weeks. As the news carried reports of homes washed away, beaches destroyed, and the first early reports of rebuilding, we had to reconcile ourselves to the fact that the magnitude of damage to William's brain was too great. He was, in his own way, washed away. We removed him from life support, still singing, reading, playing music and talking to him — in the hope, until he drew his last breath in our arms, that he might comprehend anything at all. Our attempt to reach the unreachable.
William's last heartbeat was on Dec. 2. We stayed at our apartment in the city through the winter. Our grief kept us from going to our home in the Catskills. Many of the happiest parts of his life and our life were there. Too many reminders of the boy we loved and missed so sorely. Legos, Hess trucks, soccer balls, baseball gloves, old computers, artwork, books, recorders, CDs, DVDs, jackets, T-shirts, camp pictures.
We finally worked up the courage to return for the first time in the warmth of early April. We found a changed landscape: Sandy had uprooted trees, washed out a portion of the trail below our house, and blown out some storm windows, which were scattered in pieces about the lawn on the south side of the house.
That Sunday afternoon, I put on gloves and began picking up the shards, moving carefully and deliberately about the task. The grass was brown, still wintering. The glass sparkled in the sunlight, easy to spot. It pinged and jangled when I dropped it in the trash bucket. I worked my way down the slope of the lawn and across the back of the house, to where part of a window had smashed against the stonework. There, at the base of the wall, the grass was taller and thicker, unmown since late summer. As I finished the job, carefully pushing back the tall grass, there was a burst of purple, then a flash of white, and finally a tiny cluster of green. It was the first crocuses and the tips of daffodils, using the warmth of sunlight off the wall to work their way to the new spring, unaware of the fragments of the fall still lying around them.
Bill Williams is a theater teacher and freelance writer.
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