Guest Blog by RJ Lavallee
Sitting with my family today (my mother-in-law and father-in-law, my wife and two boys) I pause to reflect on a life-changing anniversary. Ten years ago on this day I experienced my first Thanksgiving alonein a food court in a strange country, 10,000 miles away from my wife and eight-week-old son.
Ten years and two weeks ago I received a phone call from my mother: My father had been hit by a car half-way across the globe, in Dubai, where he was working as a consultant. My mother gave me all the information she had about what had happened to my fatherher husbandand we were trying to figure out what to do. He had suffered a broken back and a shattered pelvis.
The next day I was on a 767 from Boston to London and then on to Dubai, courtesy of my fathers employer in Dubai.
My father was in the hospitals intensive care unit when I arrived. He was stable, but he looked awfulthin, gaunt, and frail. He looked old.
While on the emergency room table he had received eight pints of blood. He had three broken vertebrae; one was shattered. He had a broken arm, broken bones in his face, and a broken leg. And a hunk of flesh had been torn from that leg, leaving the bone exposed.
Despite his condition, my father smiled at me when I walked into his room.
I sat with him for a long time, and when he wasnt dozing, we talked about all sorts of thingscatching up, kind of, because we hadnt seen each other in more than two years. At one point he asked me to go back to his office to try to close three of the deals he had been working on. There he was, waking up from a near-death experience, and he was thinking about his job.
My father needed surgery to stabilize his back, basically to fuse his shattered vertebrae so he could do simple things like sitting up. We had to decide whether to have the surgery performed in Dubai or bring him back to the States.
Eventually we decided to fly my father to New York, to have the surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital. We reached this decision after I asked the emergency room surgeon who worked on my father, a Dubai-national who received his medical training in the United States, what we should do. If he was my father, he said, Id bring him to the States.
Arranging the transportation took some time, so we wouldn’t be leaving Dubai until after Thanksgiving, which is just another day for the people of Dubai.
Thanksgiving morning came, and the morning call to prayers rang out at 4 am from the minarets, and the first hint of sunrise slipped over the dusty city at 6 am. I called my wife in Boston, which is nine hours behind Dubai, to check in on our son and to wish her goodnight on Thanksgiving eve.
At the hospital later that morning I alternated between sitting in a chair by the side of my fathers bed, where I held his hand, and standing at the foot of his bed, massaging his cold feet, which were already swelling from his paralysis. I hoped against hope that they would begin transmitting messages back to his brain that I was touching him.
My father continued to talk about the sales he had been working on and how I could help him close them. We never spoke about how bad his injuries were or what had happened to him. I knew only from the accounts of the emergency room staff and the police officers from whom I had retrieved my fathers personal belongings, which had evidently sprayed from his pockets like water from a sprinkler head. My father did not remember anything.
As had happened during all my visits, my father drifted in and out of sleep until he eventually fell sound asleep, often assisted by a morphine pump. Then, as I had done every other visit, I sat and just watched him for twenty minutes or so, thankful that he was still alive.
It was lunchtime now, on Thanksgiving, and I was hungry. I went to the local market, bought a pre-cooked chicken as a surrogate turkey dinner, and found a seat in the public sitting area beside the market. As I opened the box containing the chicken, I began praying, sort of. Im not particularly religious, so I think its more accurate to say I began contemplating.
I contemplated how my father had been living in this strange country for so long, separated from friends and family back in the States. I contemplated how I was a new father, with a nearly eight-week-old baby boy at home who was already 30 percent older than when I had left for Dubai. I contemplated the uncertainty that lay before my mother and the rest of the family. I contemplated my fathers impending surgery, understanding that the odds were against his ever being able to walk again. I contemplated how my son (and now sons) would never know the same man I knew growing up; they would never walk with him on a beach, or have him show them how to throw a curve ball. I contemplated all of my anger and sadness and fear surrounding all that had happened, and all that was about happen.
Finally, I contemplated how thankful I was that I was able to be here, on this day, with my father.
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RJ Lavallee is the editor and publisher of Bent Spoon, where he and other contributors muse on parenthood. He also is the author of IMHO (In My Humble Opinion): A guide to the benefits and dangers of todays communication tools. The book is available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and lulu.com.
