What Else Happened While I was Gone?

Have you seen the movie “While You Were Sleeping?” I have. I was reminded of it recently.

In the movie, while a man is in a coma, his family and friends undergo many life changes.

We were in the car one day when Murray and Sarah were talking about the time when Sarah put her hand on one of the posts in our basement, and it fell.

Whoa. Back up. What?

“It was when you were in the hospital,” Sarah said.

Five and a half years ago, I was in the hospital for six weeks after a fall which caused a brain injury. I don’t remember much about that time, and apparently, I don’t know some big things that went on with the family then either.

So the post in the basement fell?

Murray said they called his brother Myles, who’s done a lot of home repair, and Myles said the house wasn’t going to fall, if it hadn’t already. He said just to be safe, Ping-Hwei probably shouldn’t sleep in the basement.

“What!”

Ping-Hwei always sleeps in the basement.

“Until we got it fixed,” Murray said quickly to plow over what other crazy things I was going to spout.

They had it fixed right away.

And I’m just finding out about it five years later.

What else happened that summer?

Ping-Hwei went to work at Metal Fab every day like always. All I know about Benjamin for that summer is he had band practice. That’s where they had to get him the night I fell.

Caleb, Rebecca, and Sarah were between college years, working, busy.

Besides getting repairs done on the house and taking care of whatever else the family needed him to do, Murray spent much of every day with me. I know that made a big difference in my hospital experience.

But there were six weeks of my family’s lives, in the lives of my five almost grown children, that I missed out on, that I wasn’t a part of. Thinking of this can make that missing block of my life seem even larger.