Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience
Allison Pataki
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. ELIOT
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Foreword
LEE WOODRUFF
For better or worse.
Such a simple phrase that most of us don’t truly contemplate as we stand at the altar, giddy with love and surrounded by family and friends. Why would we ever choose to play out the worst-case scenario in our heads?
As Allison Pataki and her husband, David Levy, buckled their seatbelts on a flight to Hawaii, excited for their “babymoon,” the last thing they could have imagined was that in a few short hours their plane would make an emergency landing in Fargo, North Dakota. Dave, an outgoing, athletic thirty-year-old, would suffer a rare and near-fatal stroke.
The Levys would never make it to their destination. Life had just dealt them a cruel and unexpected blow. Instead of celebrating the last vestiges of coupledom before parenthood rearranged their world, Allison would be sitting in a hospital room, five months pregnant, holding one of her husband’s cold, empty shoes while he fought to survive.
A friend once remarked that life’s complications do not end at the altar, but for many of us, it is where they begin. While that may sound somewhat macabre, from my older road-tested perch, it speaks to all of the things we cannot know as we stand, wide-eyed and innocent, pledging to entwine our life with another’s. In those moments we feel the unbridled anticipation of possibility, the choices to be made, the thrill of life’s blank page, waiting to be colored in together.
But there are other surprises in store, both sorrowful and beautiful. Life never moves in a straight line, constantly reminding us that we don’t get to write the script. Therein lies its beauty, even in the moments when we feel uncertain, afraid, and broken.
I’m twenty-plus years older than Allison, and we first met as I exited a restroom stall at ABC News (true story). I felt an instant connection. She has a personality that you want to bottle for a gray day: crackling with energy, naturally upbeat and bright, intelligent, and empathetic. As our friendship grew, we discovered many connection points, from her younger years in Albany (I’m an Albany girl too), to our summers spent in the Adirondacks (she had visited our tiny lakeside community). We were both writers and she’d worked at ABC News, where my husband, Bob Woodruff, is a reporter.
After that initial meeting, Allison left the news business and published her first novel. We became email friends, occasionally chatted on the phone, complained when the writing wasn’t coming (I complained, she kept writing). I have the most wonderful picture of Allison, Bob, and me at her book launch for The Accidental Empress. She is resplendent in a gorgeous dress, and, unbeknownst to us at the time, newly pregnant.
I proudly thought of Alli and Dave as younger versions of me and Bob; devoted to each other, adventuresome and supportive of one another’s careers. They were in it for the long haul. Alli and I shared a love of words and writing, and yet we were social animals too, we got oxygen from spending time with friends. Each of us had always been fiercely independent, which worked well with the demanding and often unexpected hours of our husbands’ chosen careers. Also, like we had been, they were determined to have a family. I was thrilled to hear about Alli’s pregnancy, excited to watch such a couple experience one of life’s truest gifts.
So it was with shock and disbelief that I opened an email from Allison explaining that Dave had had a stroke and they were at a rehabilitation hospital in Chicago. It was devastating to think about anyone I knew setting out on this horrible journey. This was not a curse I would wish on my enemy, let alone a young couple on the cusp of becoming parents. It seemed so unfair, both of us twinned in this horrible fate, husbands cut down in their prime—Dave, before he had finished his medical residency; Bob, before he could truly enjoy the privileged anchor chair. Meeting that day by the sink years earlier—when I was just transitioning out of my caregiving role after my life was upended by Bob’s injury—neither Allison nor I could have predicted that she would join my club. The one I refer to as “the Club of the Bad Thing”—a club in which no one wants to be a member. I ached for them both.
Knowing too much about this injury, I worried how Dave would recover and what life would look like for them. Would their child ever know her father? When our own tragedy struck, Bob and I had eighteen years of marriage under our belt, four children, and a strong foundation that had already weathered disappointment and loss. I could not stop thinking about the next stage of their journey. I knew the statistics—my husband was that rare miracle in the world of TBI (traumatic brain injury) recovery. Even with such amazing progress and success, our own relationship had been strained at the seams, rearranged at times, and frayed by the roller-coaster ride of recovery that Alli describes so well.
TBI is one of the very worst tragedies that can befall a loved one. Yes, of course, there is death and cancer, dementia and ALS, an entire roster of other horrible clubs that loved ones inadvertently join. It’s the “in an instant” nature of a brain injury, the alacrity with which it permanently changes and upends lives, relationships, and marriages, that is so stunning. The immediate line between “before” and “after” creates a sense of emotional whiplash. Like Allison, I was reeling for weeks and months simply trying to process the fact that my husband had been hit by a roadside bomb. I knew the risks of being married to a war correspondent, but there is an ocean’s distance between possibility and reality. In 2003 when Bob was embedded with the Marines during the Iraq invasion, and for the entire decade he reported from war zones, I had contemplated death but never disability. Not at his age, not in the prime of our lives. Silly me.