My life imploded with a phone call. While reporting from Iraq, my husband had been hit by a roadside bomb. \u201cCritically wounded … shrapnel to the brain … might not make it through surgery…\u201d I could barely absorb the meaning of the words. He was transferred to the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. When I got there, his room was meat-locker cold to minimize swelling. Bob lay naked on a bed, partially covered by a sheet\u2014his body white as marble, still as a sculpture. For a moment, I let myself believe he was asleep. But his head was pockmarked with shrapnel wounds, a ragged trail of staples closing his scalp over a horribly distorted brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Seventy-two hours later, he was flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he\u2019d be comatose for five weeks\u2014eyes open without seeing, moaning without speaking. My world shrank down to caring for our four children (all of them under the age of 14) and waiting for their father to wake up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One day, out of the blue, he did: Bob couldn\u2019t recall who was president of the United States, but he could say \u201cMahmoud Ahmadinejad.\u201d We were elated that he could talk at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a rehab hospital in New York, he began the grueling work of relearning how to string sentences together, read, and write. That\u2019s where my euphoria started to fade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat across from him as the therapist held up a plastic head of lettuce. \u201cWhat\u2019s this called?\u201d she chirped. \u201cSalad?\u201d Bob\u2019s eyes darted toward me apologetically. I smiled, trying not to mouth the right answer. After college, I\u2019d fallen in love with his inquisitive mind, the fact that he could speak Mandarin and easily explain things like the Six-Day War. Bob was here, and not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A month and a half later, thin and tired, he walked through our front door. The twins ran in to hug him, waving welcome home signs made with crayons and glitter. We were a family again, snuggling on the couch watching hours of TV, as the children touched the places on his face where shards of shrapnel were still working their way out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With the fear of Bob dying in full remission, tricky emotions filled the void. Just weeks before the explosion, he\u2019d taken over for Peter Jennings as co-anchor of ABC World News Tonight<\/em>. His recovery would be lengthy, the outcome uncertain. How would he cope with the death of that dream? And what of the hard work we\u2019d both invested in his career \u2014 constantly pulling up stakes and moving to yet another city as he made his way up the ladder? If he could no longer work, how would we raise four kids on my freelance copywriter income? I felt like a shrew even thinking about money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his early recovery, everyday moments felt like a series of paper cuts \u2014 the joke he didn\u2019t get, the conversation that ricocheted around the dinner table too fast for him to follow. The meeting with our lawyer, who\u2019d advised I take control of our assets until things stabilized. \u201cI don\u2019t understand,\u201d Bob said, looking up from a pile of papers as the lawyer awaited his signature. \u201cWhy is everything in my wife\u2019s name?\u201d His confusion was a gut punch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For months, I\u2019d been pumping out good vibes like a cheerleader, staying upbeat for the kids, arranging my supportive-wife facade for everyone else. \u201cYour husband looks so good!\u201d Cue the polite smile<\/em>. \u201cYou\u2019re so lucky.\u201d Beam the grateful look<\/em>. But the fact is, loss that falls short of death is complicated. A therapist told me about \u201cambiguous loss,\u201d something experienced by a quiet club that grieves in the shadows: women who\u2019ve miscarried, parents of disabled children or addicted children, people with a chronically ill spouse. The death of a thousand dreams. There are no rituals for that kind of grief \u2014 no poems or tributes. No mourning, no resolution. Life plays out in a purgatory of what-ifs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI actually envy you,\u201d I confided to my widowed friend one day (radical honesty being our bond). \u201cYou have nowhere to go but up. What if Bob never really comes back?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s been 13 years, and after a miraculous recovery, Bob\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0back. He\u2019s reporting, speaking Mandarin, traveling to the remote places that fascinate him. And he\u2019s heroically peaceful about what wasn\u2019t. \u201cHow do you know I wouldn\u2019t have failed as the anchor?\u201d he jokes \u2014 sense of humor restored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I sometimes wonder whether I\u2019ve been looking at this all wrong. Maybe instead of ambiguous loss, the trick is to be open to ambiguous gain<\/em>. Like when Bob went to our kids\u2019 back-to-school night for the first time in several years \u2014 something he\u2019d never have been able to do as an anchor. (\u201cSo this is what I\u2019ve been missing!\u201d he said, sitting in a third-grader\u2019s cramped desk, reading a note our daughter had left for us.) Or the way he started packing lunches, making the ham and cheese sandwiches and slicing apples. Our catastrophe allowed us to raise millions of dollars for injured veterans. And it allowed me to write \u2014 not just press kits for kitty litter and plantar wart cream, but essays and books from my heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Bob was in a coma, a friend gave me a string of lapis worry beads. I\u2019d clutch them when I couldn\u2019t sleep, putting a name to my many worries until I could finally drift off. At a certain point I renamed them gratitude beads: Now when I\u2019m stressed, I touch each one and name something I\u2019m grateful for\u2014my children\u2019s good health, a coven of incredible girlfriends, my able body to hike and garden, my intact husband…. And it works. Nothing ambiguous about it at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Lee McConaughy Woodruff \u201982 is a freelance writer, speaker, and co-author of the <\/em>New York Times best-selling book <\/em>In an Instant. This essay was originally published in the June issue of <\/em>O, The Oprah Magazine.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lee McConaughy Woodruff \u201982 writes of her husband’s recovery from a traumatic injury, and her shifting perspective on grief and gratitude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1221,"featured_media":2788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,23],"tags":[466,68,465,433],"coauthors":[464],"class_list":["post-2763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-essays","category-voices","tag-gratitude","tag-health","tag-injury","tag-journalism"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-Iz","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2019\/11\/LB-outdoors.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2763"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2961,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763\/revisions\/2961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2763"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}