A photo of us found amongst all the debris, the books, the journals, the boxes of stuff, things that were put in to unit 74 haphazardly at the end of 2004 when we moved back to the beach. We'd moved away for 5 months to try living with Paul's mother Janet, she moved here from Boston and after 2 months proclaimed: "You lied to me. Paul is in worse shape than I'd expected and he can't drive me anywhere. Plus all your friends are weak California bourgeoisie!" She moved home after six months and once the landlord allowed her to break the lease.
But that's a whole other story I'm yet to tell...At any rate this is a photo of me and Paul at my parents in May 2001. I was about 5 months pregnant and living in Venice Beach, still working for Lookout Mgmt in Santa Monica, delivering shoes and stuff to Neil Young and picking up David Crosby at the airport. A few months later I moved back in with Paul at our place in Encinitas.
* * *
This past weekend I met one of the directors for the San Diego Brain Injury Foundation, an organization that helps brain injury survivors and their families. They were having their monthly meeting at a hospital near us and when I passed by I saw their sign and stopped in. I had a wonderful conversation with one of their directors which lead to us talking about me doing a lecture on my experience with my husbands traumatic brain injury, his recovery, the subsequent fall into dementia (too young/his 50s), and then the hard work of getting him care when I could no longer do the job.
Sheesh, this is gonna be a whole lot of talk. I'm gonna have to find a way to do the Readers Digest-condensed version of many years of hope then hopelessness, acceptance of his state of decline, care-giving and advocacy. My talk will be some time in early August of 2013.
The San Diego Brain Injury Foundation can be found here:
http://www.sdbif.org/http://www.sdbif.org/
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