LIVING THROUGH A NIGHTMARE

Tragedies don’t happen to us, they just happen to other people, or so we thought until that dreadful October Saturday in l976 when we were faced with one beyond belief. Then we realized only too well that they do, indeed, happen to anyone, at anytime and anywhere, with no warning whatsoever.

After twenty-two years of marriage to a terrific husband, and four lovely children who had their share of battles but nevertheless retained a deep affection for one another, life seemed pretty wonderful to me.  We had a large, close-knit family who were together often, all in the best of health.  My husband Bob held an excellent federal position as chief of the Market News Service in the National Marine Fisheries, a position he thoroughly enjoyed.  After a long retirement while the children were growing up, I had recently returned to work as a secretary in a small engineering firm, not far from home, with the part-time hours that fit in comfortably with our family schedule.  We lived in a new home in a pleasant neighborhood, convenient to everything, and all six of us were involved in an assortment of activities that kept us busy and content.  Life was rich, full, and wonderful, and we were on top of the world.

My last personal loss had been thirty years earlier when my kindly father, a favorite with everyone, was suddenly taken from us.  His early death, leaving my mother with a young family to raise, was a cruel blow to all of us, one from which I never thought we’d recover.  Thanks to my spunky little mother, however, who showed a courage and determination beyond anything we dreamed possible, we all pulled through intact.  Gradually our lives took an upward swing and we were blessed with thirty years of continuous good luck, marred only by the accidents and broken bones prevalent in a family of boys.

When things go so completely right for such a long period of time, I suppose it’s easy to become smug and complacent and expect them to go on that way forever.  That must have been true in our case. Certainly we were ill-prepared for that black October Saturday in 1976 when our world fell apart forever.  Then we knew with dead certainty that our lives would never again be the same.  Bobby, our beloved eldest at twenty-one, was critically injured by a massive piece of machinery at the garage where he worked and the temporary loss of oxygen put him into a deep and lasting coma.  For over two years he tried hard to work his way back to us, fighting off one infection and setback after another.  But it was too much for him; the damage had been too extensive.  On Thanksgiving Day of l978, twenty-five months to the day after his accident, he left us forever.  We lost him to death as quickly as we had lost him to the coma.  He was gone before they could call from the hospital to tell us he had taken a bad turn.  Then abruptly we had to face what we had refused to face for so many long and agonizing months.  Bobby was gone, and all the hope and prayers we had for the miracle we so desperately needed would now never be answered.  Somehow we had to pick up the pieces and continue with our lives that had been put on hold for so long.  But we found it wasn’t easy.  Whereas living with the coma had been difficult, we found living without hope to be devastating.

This is the story of Bobby’s brief life and of the long and heartbreaking months leading up to his untimely death.