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Christmas brings gift of life -- and gratitude
© St. Petersburg Times Certain expectations must be met on Christmas morning. We all have them. Elizabeth Belcher planned to go to Lakeland with her husband and eat and open their gifts with friends. Mrs. Belcher fell into that lump of us who have experienced what I call a bad Christmas, where you must stiff-upper-lip it. You get the flu, or somebody gets disappointed with the brightly wrapped bounty and says so, or there's an argument lingering in the air. Truth told, Mrs. Belcher's Christmas was worse. She spent her Christmas in the intensive care unit at Tampa General Hospital, watching incomprehensible machines bleep to the rhythm of her husband's life and thinking incomprehensible thoughts. What if? What if? Five days before, her husband, Herbert, 58, collided with a semitrailer truck. It was early in the morning and he was driving his old Mercury Topaz to Memorial Junior High, where he teaches seventh-grade geography. The accident occurred before Mrs. Belcher had left for work. By the time she got to TGH, her husband was in the intensive care unit. He had suffered significant chest injuries. Elizabeth Belcher doesn't remember much after that, just a blur of doctors and nurses. Some words from the head of the trauma unit. The days are getting clearer now. They are also getting clearer for the husband she married 27 years ago. He has a tube down his throat but he can communicate by blinking his eyes or nodding his head. Elizabeth Belcher was reaching for something when she e-mailed me about her husband's situation. She was trying to say thank you, but she didn't have enough space. She thought my column would be the biggest card she could find. She wanted to thank the fire rescue squad, the ER team, the ICU nurses, everybody who has been involved in caring for her husband at the hospital. She wanted to thank them especially because some days she had been so emotional she fears she's been a nuisance. She pointed out that most memorials are to the dead -- soldiers in Arlington, police in front of the Tampa Police Department. But she wants a memorial for the living, like the men and women who worked on her husband, people whose voices crackle on two-way radios, who follow the bleeps of those machines, who consult the charts. Dr. Lewis Flint, the head of the trauma team at Tampa General, worked on Herbert Belcher. He gets reactions like Mrs. Belcher's sometimes. Sometimes there's no gratitude. People get angry because they did something stupid, like drive drunk, and got hurt. They get angry because somebody else did something stupid, and they were in the way. I asked Dr. Flint about this because I thought Sept. 11 would bring us to our knees and break our hearts back to kindness. This has happened in New York at ground zero. But the rest of us are yet to be touched. We still shake our fists, cut in line, ignore the neighbor. Elizabeth Belcher is an IRS agent, and she sounded as though this embarrassed her a little bit when she got in touch with me. People have their impression of the tax man. It is not fond. But all offenses, real and imagined, are forgiven at a moment like this. She and her husband have been married for 27 years. The car, the blue Mercury Topaz, was in for the long haul, too. It was 12 years old. If it weren't for the accident, Herbert would still be driving the car. Why should anybody give up a perfectly good -- and paid-for -- 12-year-old car? Mr. Belcher's accident ended any attempts he could make to get Mrs. Belcher a present, so she didn't have one at Christmas. She had her husband hooked and entwined in those ribbons of tubes in the ICU. But she had him. She had him. Alive.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Jan Glidewell Elijah Gosier From the Times Metro desk |
