Bless Its Heart

It’d been a particularly rough day. I dragged myself up the steps of the front porch rather melodramatically and pouted as I headed straight for Annie’s outstretched arms, while Ginny cooed, “Bless its heart.”

Annie’s a tiny woman, part Cherokee with a full head of red hair that she usually wears in a plait that reaches the small of her back. She lives in a beautiful old white house sitting on top of a hill in Vincent; it’s one of my favorite spots in Kentucky. The walls are layered with cream planks that are turning yellow with age, and the dark wooden doors are covered with intricately hand-carved molding. After my visits with her in the spring, one of my favorite things to do was to run across her back property with her dog Ginger on my heels. I’d reach its highest point and throw myself down in the tall, sweet-smelling grass, sending up a plume of jewel-colored butterflies against an achingly blue sky. A big wrap-around porch conducts the most beautiful breeze on balmy summer evenings when we sit with her family on the swing and wave at the passing cars. Annie considers me to be a daughter to her now, and I see her children and granddaughter as my own relatives. There are few things to which I look forward more at the end of a long day than unwinding with the whole lot of them in a cloud of cigarette smoke at their kitchen table.

Annie’s granddaughter Kelly is eight years old and cute as a button. So, when she asked me to buy something for her school’s fundraiser to assist her in her generation’s relentless pursuit of Silly Bandz, I had no choice but to succumb to the requests of the freckle-faced little sprite. I signed up for twenty issues of Time magazine (I know it goes against all of my “El Rushbo” upbringing, McCormacks, but I’d already bought a subscription to Southern Living from another kid, and People en Español just wasn’t that enticing). As I didn’t have the cash on me that afternoon, I arranged with Kelly and her mother Ginny to meet me at the elementary school at 7:30 the next day.

Ginny greeted me with a warm smile in the chilly gray morning light as I waited for them outside the cafeteria. At thirty-seven years old, her face is beginning to show the effects of years of sun and smoking, but her brown eyes lend a pretty softness to her expression. Kelly sleepily took the ten bucks I handed to her and let the corners of her mouth curl up ever-so-slightly in thanks.

I hugged Ginny and said, “See you at your mom’s house later?”
“Of course,” she chuckled. “We always wind up there one way or another.”

I drove up Annie’s hill at about 4:30, looking forward to listening to their family banter for an hour before returning to my own Kentucky family. I walked in to a very different scene, however. Annie, her son, and her daughter-in-law sat silently around their table, chain-smoking their cigarettes and silently staring straight ahead. Annie looked up at me, her deeply wrinkled face creased even further with worry. “Ginny and Kelly were in an accident over in McKee. Kelly was taken to Berea, but they flew Ginny to UK.”

I looked at them, startled, and sat down in the vacant chair at the end of the table. “How are they now?”

“No one’s telling us anything when we call,” Annie said helplessly. She pushed the phone into my hands. “You try.”

I got through to the emergency room and discovered that Ginny was responsive, but in bad shape. I asked if it would be helpful to have a family member there, to which the nurse replied, “Uh, yeah.”

The obvious dawned on me then: neither Annie nor her son have a car and therefore had no way of getting to UK. I asked Annie if it would be alright for me to represent her family at the hospital, and she eagerly agreed. Bringing her daughter-in-law with me, I jumped into my minivan and sped off for Lexington.

After spending a fair amount of time in the waiting room, we were allowed to make our way through the maze of gurneys and plastic curtains back to Ginny’s bed in the ER. Her tiny 108-pound frame lay twisted up in the sheets, her left foot visibly swollen and her face contorted in pain. I rushed to the side of the bed and began to sweep her dark brown hair away from her face. She tried to open up her swollen eyes to look at me without much success. “It’s Bridget, Ginny. I’m here. I’m here.” She tried to repeat my name, but the left side of her mouth remained stubbornly limp, and she looked alarmed at the realization that she was unable to speak normally.

She’d suffered a stroke while driving. Kelly later explained that her mother had been acting rather strangely upon leaving their appointment, and that she’d just “fallen asleep” on their drive back to Owsley. They’d careened into a ditch on a remote roadside (something that proves to be a constant threat around here). Once their vehicle had come to a stop, Kelly had crawled out of the car with a chipped collarbone, up the embankment, and to the first house she saw. When nobody answered her knock, she ran into the street and flagged down a coal truck, saving her mother’s life.

As doctors and medical students drifted in and out of the room, Ginny continued to writhe in pain; due to the fact that she hadn’t been given an MRI yet, she was unable to take any sort of pain-killers. When the doctors revealed that she’d not only broken her foot in three places, but had also crushed her pelvis, I really wasn’t sure how much longer Ginny could take it. It’d already been hours since the accident and, because of the lack of family presence and pertinent personal information, nothing had been done to her in that time except for the insertion of an IV of fluids.

The doctors saw the need to stabilize her heel before proceeding with an MRI. The fracture wasn’t compounded, but the nature of the break was such that every movement threatened to push the broken bone through the skin. Two medical students began to cast it, and Ginny cried for them to stop, trying to lift herself up. I gently held her shoulder down, stroking her hair and shushing her the way I imagined my mom would have if it were me laying on that bed.

“You’re doing a great job,” I whispered as she whimpered under my hand. “I’m so proud of you. And Kelly’s going to be so proud of her Mama.”

“For what?” she mumbled through her uncooperative lips as a tear slipped down her broken nose.

I smiled and loved her so much at that moment. “For being so brave.”

The plaster eventually hardened, and Ginny fell asleep out of pain and sheer exhaustion as I held her hand. It sounds ridiculous, but I felt a strong protective, maternal instinct as I hovered over her pain-stricken face and broken body. It felt like somebody else – someone much older and more confident – was answering the doctor’s questions, giving direction to Ginny’s sister-in-law on how to update the family, and filling in Ginny’s husband when he finally arrived at UK from Berea Hospital. I felt as if Ginny was my very own, and I wanted to stay by her side through everything the doctors did to her that night. This was impossible, I knew, but I was so grateful to have been able to be with her as she endured all of that suffering. There’s a certain intangible but extraordinarily resilient bond that forms between people where intense suffering is involved. It can’t be created amidst everyday circumstances, and it can’t really be explained. It’s a bond that transcends normal human contact because suffering, like true joy, taps into psychological and emotional wells that are only accessed rarely, when something so deeply affects an individual that the usual reactions just don’t suffice.

When the surgical team wheeled her away to put pins in her foot and to scan her brain, I kissed her forehead and told her I loved her. Her “I love you, too” was muffled, but it meant the world to me.