The ‘M’ Word
The scythe is a clean instrument — lean of possibility, vast of effect. Violent death or grave injury via lurid accident are always very simple and completely devastating. No need to complicate them with that most unnatural pollutant of strong emotion — words.
In those first few days, there were too many words. Too, too many words swirling around me and my brain, and not enough relief. Relief from the anger and more anger, bushels and barns and fields of anger; relief from the fear that what had happened would be fixed for the rest of our lives.
* * *
When, in addition to my aunt’s midnight-blue shearling coat, shredded into a tassel by trauma shears, my mother was given a crocheted clump of crusty purple by an ER nurse, it took her a few stumped seconds to realize that this thing had once been Marina’s sky-blue wool hat. It turns out that blue and blood make purple. Who knew?
Earlier that day, on the gray, gutless morning of March 6, 2015, my aunt Marina was struck by a box truck swinging into a left turn from 54th Street onto Madison Avenue, rushing to make the light. Marina was in the crosswalk. Three eyewitnesses would later describe how she became airborne — traveling, already unconscious, parallel to the ground and landing on the back of her head. The police officer who was first to arrive on the scene later told me that Marina had half gotten up and responded to a request to see her ID. I didn’t believe him. If he wasn’t NYPD, I would’ve called him a liar right then. I certainly spoke to him as if he were one.
When I got his name from the police report and called him two days after it happened, my aunt was in a coma, with a traumatic injury to her head that formed a fissure in the left side of her skull, sparing the otic capsule but effacing enough blood vessels to flood her brainbox with 8 ounces of blood. The resultant jelly pressed her brain down into the stem and the spinal cord, to the point that when she was brought, unconscious, to Weill-Cornell Hospital, 18 blocks away, she scored a 3, the minimal score, on the Glasgow Coma Scale. There was no verbal response, no response to pain, no pupillary response. She was essentially braindead and likely to remain so. How could a person, even if dazed, be speaking to someone and be completely out of this world 20 minutes later?!
The neurosurgeon on duty, who had shaved the hair on the top of Marina’s head, made an incision from ear to ear, and taken out large pieces of her cranium on the left and right sides to extract the hematomas and give the concussed brain breathing space, would later tell me about “a grave insult to the brain”, the sort from which it would not recover. It had taken him three days to return my calls; he spoke to me in the cadences of a demigod squinting at antlike figures in the valley far below; and the comeback that immediately suggested itself was that it was he who was a grave insult to the medical profession.
I held my tongue; after all, he had saved her physical life, even if she was still entirely dependent on machines and medication for its prolonging. A more human-like fellow in the neurosurgical ICU told me that the statistical chances of her recovering enough to be a recognizable human being — though one wracked with disabilities — were about 1 in 75000. He was the first doctor I did not want to punch in the face that day. What he said was also the best news we would get over the next week.
When it happened, I was in Israel, where I had moved the previous spring. My first reaction was to rush to the Western Wall, where, still unaware of what precisely had happened — because, as is the way with such things, I was being purposefully kept in the dark — I said all the relevant prayers and psalms I could find in my Tehilim app while leaning into the ancient stones. I was in an alley leading from the Old City to the Jaffa Gate when, in response to my WhatsApp text asking for news, my mom wrote to me about the truck and the coma. I stopped and dialed her and, as gleeful young tourists went around me, their joy in Jerusalem bouncing off of the twilight hush, I sank onto a blackened step before some narrow doorway, grabbed a handful of my hair, and howled.
* * *
Ukrainian Airlines gave me the first flight out, at 5 am. On the plane from Kyiv to JFK, whenever I closed my eyes in order to get at least some fitful rest, I could feel scalding, viscous tears streaming incessantly down my cheekbones. I knew it would look strange to the tired grandma to my left, with whom we chatted every hour or so. There was nothing I could do. Eyes open, I could distract myself with the surrounding reality. Eyes closed, my brain replayed, hundreds and hundreds of times, the beautiful woman flying, falling, helpless, body slammed by a huge truck.
* * *
I was never a nephew to Marina. To me she was the favorite adult, the lieutenant mother; to her, I was a living doll, one she got at 14, courtesy of her older sister. She gladly took me off my mom’s hands, to comb my hair and tickle me silly and call me her own. When I grew older, she would take me for walks and, when I was older still, would bring me with her wherever she went. A tall, striking brunette, she displayed me proudly, talked me up, beamed with pride at her quite literally fair-haired boy.
I would visit Marina often at the Red Door Salon on Fifth Avenue and 54th Street, where she was an Elizabeth Arden cosmetologist. All her co-workers knew me by name, all her clients knew me from the half-hour-long infomercials built around what a great and beautiful and sensitive young man her nephew was. Sometimes the advertising worked, and culminated in dates and even a relationship.
Now I was visiting her daily at the Neurological ICU, sleeping on my grandparents’ couch, wearing the same clothes, not shaving, hair uncut, a puffy royal blue Uniqlo vest, a recent gift from Marina, now my daily outerwear and talisman. The gray chinos I wore for the first three weeks, before my mother bought me a pair of jeans, had so absorbed the heart-stiffening sorrow of those first black days, that even after washing they still looked like crumpled water pipes and refused to fit me as they had before.
* * *
In the evening, woozy with an enveloping fatigue, I would realize how much I wanted it to be morning already, so I could see Marina again. I would drive from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn in a stupor.
Bay Ridge, especially in its upper 80s and 90s, is full of apartment buildings. A structure barely wider than a private house can easily house a dozen car owners, which means that finding a parking spot on the street is impossible. Every night, spent from the long day at the hospital, I would silently, practically subconsciously ask Marina for a little help, especially when turning onto her near-namesake, Marine Avenue. And help me she did. It never took me more than 10 minutes to find a spot near my grandparents’ house, and often no more than 5 — in a neighborhood where an hour of hunting routinely yields nothing except a few near-hits. As soon as she came out of the coma, the boon evaporated.
* * *
With all the stress, the under-sleeping, and the resultant paranoia, I was becoming volatile. Once, as, in order to retrieve something, I opened the traffic-side door of the car we had just parked, a mouse-gray Honda stopped needlessly and waited for me, even though the cars ahead of it had moved. I felt its presence and looked at the car askance; still it stood there, with a clearance of at least four feet, waiting for me to close the door. Then there was a honk. That did it. I walked at the mouse-mobile with out-of-state plates, looking straight at the prim middle-aged blonde in a Midwestern cardigan, her hands at 10 and 2 o’clock.
‘Whaddaya want?’ I demanded loudly. She had all the windows up, but could see my lips well enough. She stared at me with what seemed like attitude.
‘What the fuck do you want?!’ I burst out, murderous, slapping the A-pillar on the passenger side. Marina’s husband to be, who was with me, gave me a look not devoid of understanding. The blonde’s husband wisely stayed in the car. As I gained the sidewalk, my steam quickly dissipating at the realization of what had just happened, before the embarrassment took over, I noted how hyper-clichéd was the image these innocent visitors got: the short-fused New Yorker exploding for no reason.
My aunt had the traumatic brain injury, but I was the one who was sick in the head.
I hounded doctors to explain to me every single thing they were doing. I excoriated an attending electrophysiologist in front of his team after he suggested too confidently that Marina would live out the rest of her days in a nursing facility. Although the vitriol was meant for his boss, two days later, a third-year resident who had been at the meeting saw me rounding the corner of 68th and First, got a panicked look on his face and hurried to the opposite side of the street.
On the advice of a dear friend, I went to Monsey, in upstate New York, to pray at the grave of the Ribnitzer Rebbe, a great Hasidic sage. I read the Psalms of David from the beginning, building Marina up, telling her faculties to return. In my letter to the Rebbe, asking for intercession, I got specific: “May Marina see in all of its glory a sunrise over a valley and a sunset over the ocean. May she experience joy from the music of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin. May she know the joy of the touch of her beloved. May she recognize the delicate aroma of jasmine as it blooms on a gentle summer evening. May Marina know the taste of fresh strawberries when they are in season.”
On March 19th I received an unexpected message on Facebook from a passing acquaintance, a Russian writer of some note, based in Israel, who sent me a multi-megabyte pdf with the note: “I just sent this off to the printers. You should have this.” The warm, familiar tone and the gift of the galleys of his next book were unexpected: we barely knew each other; had only met twice. I opened the file, and the first thing I saw was the Table of Contents, which read:
SIGHT 9
HEARING 151
TOUCH 259
SMELL 329
TASTE 385
MEMORY 455
It was only two weeks later, when he happened to be passing through NYC on his way to California, and we crossed paths briefly and spoke about what happened to Marina, that I remembered receiving the text of this book, with these particular headings, as if enumerating the senses to be restored.
Two days before Marina finally opened her eyes, I loomed over her face, which had the expression of someone deep in a satisfying sleep, and said firmly and in a strict voice — it felt like I was in a Bollywood movie telling the story of an improbable recovery, or perhaps a Mexican telenovela starring my entire family — “I know… I know that you can hear me.” There was no discernible response, yet somehow, with the will to hope that only blood can muster, I knew. We were no longer praying for a miracle — that other word that began with ‘M’ — we now demanded it.
Two days before Marina — still a ragdoll without much muscle tone — was due to be taken to Helen Hayes, a rehabilitation center upstate, a petite Black woman, a clerk on the step-down neurological unit, rounded the counter behind which she normally sat, took both of my hands, looked up at me with burning eyes and said, “The Lord works in mysterious ways. Mommy over there said –”
“It’s actually my aunt –”
Without skipping a beat, “Auntie over there said, ‘Take my physical body, let my dear ones learn the lesson they need to learn through it!’ “
She held my wrists tightly for a long time, continuing to pour into me this unexpected, fascinating, wise exegesis of the life we had lived over the past month. Small and forceful, with cornrows, she looked a bit like Skeletor and was forward with her wisdom and her physicality, but there was an intimation of a profound understanding of things in her, and so, initially rigid, I relaxed and accepted what she had to give me.
Halfway into her first week at Helen Hayes, Marina, still newborn-weak and barely able to lift her right wrist, motioned for pen and paper. From under a finely ribbed Bic came the words ‘I love you’ in Russian — Я вас люблю — written unsteadily but recognizably, even elegantly, in a good old Soviet teenager’s cursive.
* * *
On a bright day in mid-April I took my grandparents to see Marina at Helen Hayes. The weather was finally warm enough for sakura buds to peek out of the gray woodwork and, as we wheeled her outside in lucky wheelchair Number 18 (as I would learn, one of seven) and sat, the five of us, including Marina’s daughter, on a terrace overlooking a sweeping crescent of the free-flowing Hudson, in the questions asked of her and the tone of voice of my grandparents and her daughter I witnessed Marina being pulled back into the family circle, re-initiated into the familial dynamic of co-dependency and abortive attempts to escape it, re-introduced to fears and preconceived notions exchanged among four — or has it been forty — generations, reminded of obligations voluntary and forced, reestablished as the receiving end of vectors upon vectors of family interaction, including, of course, whatever vectors connected the two of us.
On May 1, with the patchy sun still struggling to vanquish the chilly wind, we sat near a covered terrace at Helen Hayes, the Hudson wallowing bluely in the middle distance, and I looked at Marina, simply looked at her as she played games on her phone. It was the same Marina who would go on to make a full recovery — to dance, resplendent in a gauzy dress, her thick black mane having grown out, at her wedding a year and a half later; to be the great maker of toasts that she is; to light up the house with her infectious laughter; to travel, to go on diets; you name it — beating the odds, stumping materialist purists, fully embodying that ‘M’ word that for a very long time I had not allowed myself to think, much less pronounce, lest it upset some fragile balance. It was as if I had created her, had a hand in making the full-fledged human being that was the Marina sitting before me, and so, in a sense, she was now my child, as achingly dear as if she had been born to me.
My eyes still on her, I self-consciously realized that I was eating her up with the hungry look of a parent — the possessive stare of the creator at his handiwork — of one who has gained, one who knows all too well that the object of his consuming affection is his to lose.
This essay was published in Chicago Quarterly Review (№ 39) in March 2024.
