Rough Draft

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. What about when it comes to expressing that love? That doesn’t come easily to some people, especially me. I come from a family where we love each other, a lot, we make sure that we express it in our actions and we are always there for one another. But, none of us are good at saying it. Or should I say weren’t… recent events in my family have caused us all to reevaluate how much we express love and affection for one another. This story is all about that journey that my family took and led us to where we are now. Much of the story takes place in a nursing home… which, when you think about it is a place where half of the residents there don’t see the light of day, if they have dementia they don’t remember who their family is, and they don’t know who loves them. It’s a sad story, but a happy story, it will show you what families are supposed to do in times of tragedy and immense stress. Let us go, not very back to September 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, and 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. Valerie is telling all of this to my mom and she’s kind of freaking out. Which is understandable, there are only the two of us kids. My mom and I decide that we need to meet my dad in Seattle and 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. To make a long story short we arrive 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 leg set.

Mark ended up suffering two shattered legs, broken ribs, and a 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.

Long story short, Mark has surgery and is 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, at once, for a dinner at the center. Mark was able to go home on October 14^th, 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.