Karen Reeves
Learning How to Love
Learning
how to love… it seems simple; it’s something that most people grow up doing
naturally. When we are babies and small children we have that unconditional
love towards those whom take care and watch over us. How about when we get
older? What about expressing the love that we feel towards others? Expressing
love doesn’t come easy to some people, myself included. I come from a family
where we love each other; we see each other every holiday, we used to get
together every few months, sometimes we’d go on vacation together. But it was
just an unspoken feeling, none of us were really good at expressing it. Recent
events however have caused us all to reevaluate how we express love and
affection for each other. This story is about the journey that my family took
and led us to where we are now. It’s a sad story, it was a stressful time, but
it’s also a happy story, it will show you what families are supposed to do in
times of tragedy and immense stress. Let’s go back to September 13, 2012.
September 13, 2012 was a Thursday
morning; I woke up really not wanting to go to work. I was working at Tacoma
South that morning in a different Group Health clinic then what I’m used to.
It’s in the middle of North Tacoma, kind of ghetto, think run down clinic,
security guards everywhere, cranky patients, and broken appliances. Definitely
not where I wanted to spend my day. I still live at home in order to pay off my
car and some remaining student loans, so my mom and I were both going through
the daily motions while really not wanting to go to work. Mornings in the
Reeves household are almost always the same, we are all cranky but by the time
we take our showers and are out the door we usually have smiles on our faces.
It was about 6:45 when I heard my
mom’s iPhone start to ring. I was immediately sent into panic mode, people
don’t typically make routine phone calls that early in the morning. So I’m
standing in the hallway awkwardly trying to listen as my mom starts speaking to
someone who turns out to be my sister in law. My brother, sister in law, and
adorable nephew live in Auburn. My brother (Mark) works in Seattle and my
sister in law (Valerie) stays at home with their one and a half year old
Bennett.
As it turns out Mark was walking to the
train station in the morning from their home in order to get to work on time
without having to deal with the messy commute. He had just started a new higher
paying job within his company that week and didn’t want to be late. He was
walking through a crosswalk on Auburn Way when someone ran a red light and hit
him; flipping him up over the top of the car and landing him on his back in the
middle of the road. Later on we learned that Mark had tried to pull himself out
of the road in order to avoid getting hit again. After the phone call my mom
and I decide that we need to catch the ferry and meet my dad in Seattle to go
over to Harborview where Mark was being taken.
It was a
very slow ferry ride to get there that morning, my mom and I just wanted to see
Mark and know that he was going to be okay.
After what felt like forever we arrived at Harborview and were ushered
into a family room. Once in the family room we sat around and waited for my
Valerie to come in and talk to us. She was in the back main part of the
emergency room where Mark was getting his legs set.
Mark
ended up suffering two shattered legs (both bones and muscles torn and broken
from the knees down), broken ribs on the right side, and a right torn rotator
cuff. My mom and I were finally able to go back to see him while he was still
waiting for a surgery room to open up… which is a good thing. If there’s
anything I’ve learned working in the medical field it’s the longer you have to
wait to have surgery, the more stable you are, and the more likely you are to
live. He was going to have surgery to put rods in his legs to hold them
together again. So my mom and I walk in there and we were able to talk to him
for a bit, hold his hand, and make sure he knew that everything was going to be
fine.
Mark had
surgery to set, repair, and rebuild his legs and was able to leave the hospital
four days later to go to a skilled nursing center. AKA: a nursing home. Not
really the place you want to hang out in if you’re a 31-year-old guy with a
wife and son at home. What we learned at the nursing home though was priceless.
Every time we left him we would exchange “I love yous,” and hugs and made a
promise to come see him again as soon as we possibly could. It ended up being
every other day for the first few weeks. We saw how often the other visitors in
the home were visited, which wasn’t very often and we didn’t want Mark to think
that for a second that we didn’t love him enough to come see him. He learned
how to get in and out of a wheelchair and we learned to be patient with him
when he became frustrated. We had a big family dinner the Sunday before Mark
was able to come home and the nursing staff was shocked at how many people
showed up for a dinner at the center. Mark was able to go home on October 14th,
back where he belongs.
The
lessons learned from this experience are still being learned, it’s not over and
I’m sure that we all have many more lessons to learn still. If there’s one main
lesson I took away it’s the importance of telling people how much you love them.
It’s about taking the time to see those people that you love and care about. My
narrative is not meant to scare you into submission, but it’s meant to make you
think about what really truly matters in life. Because oftentimes, especially
in this day and age it’s easy to forget the things which are truly important. “If life and its rushed pace
and many stresses have made it difficult for you to feel like rejoicing, then
perhaps now is a good time to refocus on what matters most.” – Dieter F.
Uchtdorf
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