To Begin Again

The title of a nice tune by an old friend. There is another old tune he covered called "A House is Not a Home". Such was the feeling on my two initial trips back to Dolores. The first, a week before Christmas, gave me the chance to reground myself at work. Each night I would come home to a house, so well taken care of by friends in our absence but still woefully vacant with remnants of our vacation departure scattered about. Marilyn's silent belongings, untouched and unmoved by her in so long pondered the fine line between a box in the attic and the hand of their owner.

The second trip followed Marilyn's discharge from inpatient and transition to outpatient at Craig. My parent's home allowed her a "soft launch" into the real world as she refined her healing with yet another team of superb therapists. This time the dogs came back and we roamed the house as a trio, unsettled and incomplete.

At last we are all here and the house is becoming a home again. Marilyn has "settled in" with a vengeance. On her first day home she tore apart bookshelves, delved deeply into her "very-hard-to-walk-in" closet, took a shower, made lunch, played with the dogs, threw on her Sorels and walked to the end of the block and finally went to bed at 11pm. All this from someone who by all TBI professional accounts should have been overwhelmed and exhausted by the return home.

There are many times that the weight of all that has happened and all that lies ahead threatens to crush me. More often than not that is when Marilyn rescues me. She tells me she is eager to see everyone again, she will dance again, she will see single vision again, her mind and wit will be sharp as a diamond again, she will return to her patients again, she will hike for miles again and stand atop a high peak smiling (after insisting that she could never make it) - again. I don't mind waiting.