Michelle
10-01-2006, 11:11 PM
A devastating loss reshapes two lives (http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1159605847268330.xml&coll=2)
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Carole Goldberg
A leash breaks. A dog darts into busy Manhattan traffic. His owner chases him. And in seconds, two lives are changed utterly.
Rich Rogin didn't die when a car smashed into him, but life as his wife, Abigail Thomas, and he had known and loved it abruptly ended that spring night in 2000.
Catastrophic brain injury left the former reporter half-blind, hearing-impaired and profoundly changed emotionally and cognitively. An entity survived, but Rich, the kind, warm, funny guy, was gone, morphed into a man with no short-term memory who was wracked by rages and paranoia but capable - randomly and mysteriously - of poetic wisdom and touching expressions of love.
There is no shortage of books by writers who have seen a spouse die - instantly, as Joan Didion witnessed John Gregory Dunne's heart attack, or slowly, as Donald Hall watched his wife Jane Kenyon succumb to cancer. Both wrote magnificently about love and grief.
Thomas, a writer and teacher who is the daughter of the late biologist Lewis Thomas, faced a different challenge: writing about the loss of a personality, if not of a person. In her brief, deeply absorbing memoir, "A Three Dog Life," she takes on the task of chronicling her grief and guilt - she had talked Rich into adopting the dog and had bought the faulty leash - and the agony of learning a new way to live.
All the more powerful for the pared-down language, her essays describe how tragedy can remold a relationship. There is no blatant heart-tugging, although much of the story is heartbreaking. Thomas is no Pollyanna, yet she is inspirational. Rather, she shows us how Rich survives - barely - his injuries and how she handles, with the unlikely help of two beagles, an improbable dachshund-whippet crossbreed, knitting, cigarettes and the occasional cocktail, the sorrow and the challenge of moving forward.
"I can't make everything all right," this mother and grandmother realizes. "It's his body that is hurt, not mine. I can't make it never have happened. "
After brain surgery, Rich almost seems recovered - for about 10 days. Then the rage and restlessness consume him, and it becomes obvious he can no longer live in their Manhattan apartment. Eventually he is moved to a center for patients with brain damage, and she buys a house nearby. In the process, she makes new friends and new discoveries.
Thomas learns about "outsider art," work made by untutored or physically or emotionally disabled people that is stunning in its unfiltered immediacy.
Once a week, his condition permitting, she brings Rich to the house. He remembers almost nothing, trapped as he now is in the moment, but they can hold hands, take walks, snuggle in bed together. In a kind of holy silence, they are content, even thrilled, to simply be in each other's company.
And sometimes Rich says amazing things. He asks her youngest daughter if she "eats field mice." He doesn't recognize her, they assume. Then they realize the first three letters of her name are "C-a-t." Thomas thinks this is the mind trying to rewire itself.
Another time he says, "I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes." On the way to a CAT scan, he murmurs, "You always know you're in for it when you're going down a long hall with nobody in it." These observations are Rich's outsider art, she thinks.
Yes, everything is "changed, changed utterly." But, just as Yeats does in his poem, Thomas shows us sometimes, out of disaster, "a terrible beauty is born."
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Carole Goldberg
A leash breaks. A dog darts into busy Manhattan traffic. His owner chases him. And in seconds, two lives are changed utterly.
Rich Rogin didn't die when a car smashed into him, but life as his wife, Abigail Thomas, and he had known and loved it abruptly ended that spring night in 2000.
Catastrophic brain injury left the former reporter half-blind, hearing-impaired and profoundly changed emotionally and cognitively. An entity survived, but Rich, the kind, warm, funny guy, was gone, morphed into a man with no short-term memory who was wracked by rages and paranoia but capable - randomly and mysteriously - of poetic wisdom and touching expressions of love.
There is no shortage of books by writers who have seen a spouse die - instantly, as Joan Didion witnessed John Gregory Dunne's heart attack, or slowly, as Donald Hall watched his wife Jane Kenyon succumb to cancer. Both wrote magnificently about love and grief.
Thomas, a writer and teacher who is the daughter of the late biologist Lewis Thomas, faced a different challenge: writing about the loss of a personality, if not of a person. In her brief, deeply absorbing memoir, "A Three Dog Life," she takes on the task of chronicling her grief and guilt - she had talked Rich into adopting the dog and had bought the faulty leash - and the agony of learning a new way to live.
All the more powerful for the pared-down language, her essays describe how tragedy can remold a relationship. There is no blatant heart-tugging, although much of the story is heartbreaking. Thomas is no Pollyanna, yet she is inspirational. Rather, she shows us how Rich survives - barely - his injuries and how she handles, with the unlikely help of two beagles, an improbable dachshund-whippet crossbreed, knitting, cigarettes and the occasional cocktail, the sorrow and the challenge of moving forward.
"I can't make everything all right," this mother and grandmother realizes. "It's his body that is hurt, not mine. I can't make it never have happened. "
After brain surgery, Rich almost seems recovered - for about 10 days. Then the rage and restlessness consume him, and it becomes obvious he can no longer live in their Manhattan apartment. Eventually he is moved to a center for patients with brain damage, and she buys a house nearby. In the process, she makes new friends and new discoveries.
Thomas learns about "outsider art," work made by untutored or physically or emotionally disabled people that is stunning in its unfiltered immediacy.
Once a week, his condition permitting, she brings Rich to the house. He remembers almost nothing, trapped as he now is in the moment, but they can hold hands, take walks, snuggle in bed together. In a kind of holy silence, they are content, even thrilled, to simply be in each other's company.
And sometimes Rich says amazing things. He asks her youngest daughter if she "eats field mice." He doesn't recognize her, they assume. Then they realize the first three letters of her name are "C-a-t." Thomas thinks this is the mind trying to rewire itself.
Another time he says, "I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes." On the way to a CAT scan, he murmurs, "You always know you're in for it when you're going down a long hall with nobody in it." These observations are Rich's outsider art, she thinks.
Yes, everything is "changed, changed utterly." But, just as Yeats does in his poem, Thomas shows us sometimes, out of disaster, "a terrible beauty is born."