Beyond the Bear (11 page)

CHAPTER 9

The Vigil

The wait-and-see period ticked by one minute at a time as I lay
in limbo, attached to machines by an octopus of hoses, tubes, and wires, with a monitor tracking every heartbeat and a ventilator that channeled Darth Vader amplifying every breath. Although I was drugged into submission, those first critical days I was also in restraints, my wrists bound in white terrycloth bands tied to the rails on each side of my bed. As cruel as that sounds, I would later understand its importance to my survival. Nurses were lightening my sedation two or three times a day for neurological checks, to make sure I had just enough going on upstairs to wiggle my fingers and toes. If I’d become conscious enough during those checks to reach up to my face I could have undone Dr. Kallman’s work. If I’d become conscious enough to remember the bear, I could have thrashed so hard it could have killed me.

To drown out the cold, antiseptic sounds of medical technology, to help keep me tethered to the world, my brother rigged my room for music, setting up a minidisc player on a cabinet behind my head, speakers on each side, so my favorite bands could join my bedside vigil in five-hour loops: the Photonz, the Denali Cooks, the Grateful Dead, Thievery Corporation, Michael Hedges, Michael Franti, and Steve Kimock. Especially Steve Kimock. While ICU patients are usually kept more sequestered, Kallman as my primary physician gave my inner circle license to do what they could to keep me with them, to create their own version of a laying on of hands.

They sat with me in shifts, making sure at least one of them was with me twenty-four hours a day, not only so I’d never be alone, but also to stand watch
over my care as a procession of aides, nurses, doctors, surgeons, and specialists
came and went from my room. They leaned forward in their chairs, hands folded at their knees, staring at me. They stood at the window staring out at the Alaska summer. They held my hand, caressing its back with their thumbs. They talked to me, assuring me over and over that I was safe, that I was going to get through this, that everything was going to be all right. They read to me, Brian from
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
for its humor, and Jay from
The Book of the Dun Cow
for its epic struggle with victorious ending. Licensed in one of the world’s oldest healing arts, Jay would pull a chair to the foot of my bed and gently lift one of my feet, wrapping one hand around the bottom and the other around the top. Leaning into his work, focusing his energy, he’d massage one foot, then the other, slowly moving up each calf then down again, about the only part of my body he could work on without hurting me.

A tense situation got more so when three days after my mauling, with cerebrospinal fluid still leaking from my nose, my temperature spiked. My turn south, despite a bombardment of broad-spectrum antibiotics, had everyone in the room exchanging grim glances. An ICU doctor ordered a spinal tap to
check for the meningitis Dr. Kallman feared was coming. While awaiting results, Brian and Jay launched into research mode, hoping they might discover some way to help doctors help me since the foulness of a bear’s mouth had called into question what antibiotic might put up the best fight. They hit the Internet hard and talked to bear biologists, even to someone at the Alaska Zoo. It wasn’t so much naïve as it was desperate.

My results came back negative. My brother and friends did high-fives and fist pumps. My mom glanced toward the ceiling and mouthed a silent “Thank you” to no one in particular. My father Steve, who’d been praying for me, as had his church back in Salinas, thanked God specifically. But I still had a fever, a persistent one, a reminder that my hold on life was still precarious.

Had I not been out cold I would have been aware of the gaping absence among those gathered around me—Amber’s. She got in two visits before crossing paths with my mom. On her third trip to the ICU, my overwhelmed mother fixed her eyes upon her. She furled her brow and glanced at Brian with a who-the-heck-is-she look on her face. He shrugged; he didn’t really know why she kept coming. My mother wiggled the tip of her index finger in Amber’s direction: “Would you come out here with me a moment?”

Amber’s face dropped as she felt all eyes upon her. She swallowed hard, lifted her purse off her lap, set it on the floor beside her chair, and followed my mom out into the hallway.

“Excuse me, but who
are
you? And how did you get into Daniel’s room?”

Amber was momentarily speechless. She wasn’t sure who she was. She didn’t think she had the right to call herself my girlfriend. She explained as best she could.

“Well, we just started dating . . .”

“Oh, really? Then why haven’t I heard of you?”

Amber felt her face grow hot. “I understand. I really do,” she said, staring at the floor. “You and your family need space. I didn’t mean to intrude. I’ll stay away. But would it be okay if I called you now and then to see how he’s doing? Or maybe you’d be willing to call me?”

“That would be fine. Here’s the number for the hotel where we’re staying. I’ll take your number, too.”

Amber left the hospital feeling as if she’d swallowed barbed wire.

My family had no way of knowing her place in my life. Apparently a couple of my female friends had already played the girlfriend card as a way of getting in to see me. With her textbook case of Midwestern stoicism, Amber did the only thing she could do: She put one foot in front of the other and carried on the best that she could. For the first time in her life, sleep was not her friend, and she’d always been talented in that regard. As a toddler, she’d slept through a chimney fire, sirens and all, as her dad carried her out of their smoke-filled house. As a teenager, staying at a lakeside cabin with her family, she’d slept through a tornado that uprooted grandfather trees and ripped the roof off a neighboring cabin. As an adult, she typically set two alarms beside her bed since it often took that kind of teamwork to convince her it really was time to wake up.

Banished to the sidelines, she’d lie at night beneath her patchwork quilt, her head a swirl of images. Once she drifted off to sleep, the dreams would be waiting. She’d dream of me waking up from my coma and asking, “What are
you
doing here?” She’d dream of me asking her to marry me. She’d dream of me not remembering who she was and wanting nothing to do with her. The dreams wore her threadbare. And not just dreams, but the continuous loop of thoughts along the same vein that nagged her throughout the day. She began wondering if she’d just imagined the whole thing, that the connection she’d felt between us had been the beer talking or her wishful mind playing tricks. It was all so confusing.

While Amber stayed away, get-well cards and letters poured in—from friends and acquaintances, from strangers who’d heard of me through the news, from kids I worked with at Alaska Children’s Services, the younger ones illustrating their thoughts in crayon and colored pencil. Colonel Valentine, a couple of the guys who rode with me in the ambulance, and a few others who’d been at the river that night dropped by the hospital to see how I was doing. Church people brought casseroles and moose stew to my family. Folks set up donation jars at the Russian River ferry and on countertops of Cooper Landing businesses. Buddies organized fund-raisers, one at the Sunrise Inn in Cooper Landing with the Denali Cooks, another in Girdwood at Max’s with the Photonz. The generosity was overwhelming, from the owner of Girdwood’s Double Musky Inn writing a fat check, to children shaking out the contents of their piggy banks. A man from Talkeetna even offered to donate one of his eyes.

In Girdwood, my community of friends gathered at Jamie’s and my place, leaving a pile of shoes and sandals outside our front door, as is Alaska etiquette. They hugged and cried and shook their heads in disbelief. In a house stocked with outdoor gear I would no longer have much use for, my friends tried to fathom what had happened to me, the let’s-hike-to-the-top-of-Max’s-Mountain-at-midnight Dan, the Dan who loved to throw his head back and howl at the moon. Knowing I was blind, some wondered in whispers if it would have been kinder had I died at the river.

John called in sick the first couple of days, and then to say he wouldn’t be coming back. His graveyard shift at the ski resort’s front desk meant spending long hours
mostly by himself, and he was having a hard time being alone with his thoughts. Although his place was a two-minute stroll from mine, he took up residence on my couch. My mother worried about survivor’s guilt and offered to pay for counseling. John thanked her but said he didn’t need it.

Now and then, when they weren’t on hospital duty, Jay, Chris, and my brother would drive to Girdwood for respite among my friends. They’d raise a glass to me. Or two or three. Then the gatherings would turn from glum to Irish wake, and the stories would come tumbling out. From my Malaysia days, from my dreadlocked-with-attitude days, from my days of living out of a backpack so long I’d go feral. Like the time a buddy and I ditched our clothes, straddled a driftwood log, commandeered it down the Merced River high in the Sierras, then had to hike back up to get our things barefoot and naked.

And the best prank ever: A group of us were backpacking in the shadow of Mount Whitney, and had just come upon a meadow brimming with wildflowers when we heard a helicopter approaching. Hiding at the sidelines, we watched as it landed in front of the remote park service cabin at the edge of the meadow.
The chopper settled onto the ground, powered down, and the pilot and two others got out and went inside. Our buddy “Monk” started belly-crawling toward it. The rest of us exchanged glances, then followed, slithering along on our bellies up to the chopper, where we grabbed a camera off the seat, snapped a picture of our bare butts, put the camera back where we found it, and crawled back across the meadow in hysterics at the thought of some park ranger finding a chorus line of moons sandwiched between his nature shots.

While my survival was still uncertain, the time came for John to deal with the fish he and I had caught that day. After the ambulance pulled out of the parking lot, two armed troopers had escorted him down the stairs to retrieve his gear, including his pack with our fish. The fillets had been on ice in his cooler ever since, haunting reminders of how quickly the day had gone from just about perfect to unfathomable.
John knew me well enough to know I would have hated for them to go to waste. So between the Russian reds and the ones we’d caught earlier that day down the Kenai, he wrapped some for the freezer and brined some for the smoker. Others he kept fresh, which he intended to grill with purpose.

John invited my family and a handful of my closest friends, including Amber, to this sacramental feast. Amber felt awkward and out of place around not just my mother, but all these people who had so much more history with me. Everyone remembers her being withdrawn and having little to say.

While a gastric tube fed nutrients into my stomach, the core people in my life loaded one of my mismatched Salvation Army plates with grilled salmon, a salad made of greens and stubby carrots
harvested from my garden, and various side-dish contributions. While I lay as still as a post, they found spots on the couch, on the floor, or in one of the red-and-green vinyl chairs that came with the place, pilfered, I’d always assumed, from the ski lodge by some previous renter. Amber went straight for the deck, where she settled into a camp chair and picked at the plate balanced on her knees. Down below, our
dogs played chase around the yard and splashed about in the creek. Amber kept her head down and poked at her food with a fork. She heard footsteps approaching and snapped her head up.

My father Steve knew that Amber had been shooed away. He’s a PhD psychologist; it was obvious to him she was hurting. He saw her out on the deck, sat down beside her, and introduced himself.

“Hi, I’m Steve Bigley, Dan’s father.”

“I’m Amber Takavitz.” Right away she noticed the resemblance.

“Nice to meet you, Amber. So, how do you know Dan?”

“Well . . .” she shifted in her seat. “I really haven’t known him all that long, but we’ve been, umm, spending time together lately. Actually, we had just started dating. We were together the night before this happened.”

“Really. You holding up okay?”

“I guess. It still doesn’t seem real.”

“It’s been such a shock for all of us, but I have faith that he’s going to pull through. About all any of us can do now is pray.”

The significance of he showing up at the hospital was monumental, although if Brian had known the full story, he wouldn’t have been so surprised that he had dropped everything to be at my bedside. Steve’s absence from our lives had nothing to do with lack of interest. He never stopped loving us. To not come would have been unthinkable.

Trouble in my family started soon after Steve came home from Vietnam a different man than the one my mom married. They grew apart, and when they divorced, things got so ugly over custody and child support that the poison between them created an unworkable situation. After my mom married my stepdad and our family moved to Ohio, Steve followed. This did not please her. By the time we moved to Malaysia, Steve was worn down enough to let go. One could argue that a father should never let go of his kids. One could also argue that when the effort to hang on is like pogo-sticking through a minefield, ultimately it’s the kids who suffer most.

Steve never gave up wanting to be a father. After he remarried, he and his wife, Margaret, adopted a son, and through the years took in so many foster children they stopped counting at a hundred.