Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [54]
After moving out of intensive care, he remained hospitalized for several months before being transferred to a rehab center in Waterloo, Iowa. And there he began the long, arduous process of learning how to live as a quadriplegic. Most quads are paralyzed from the neck down and don’t even have the use of their arms. But a tiny bit of fortune smiled on Titus that terrible night. Although technically a quad, he could freely move his arms. Not his fingers—they were curled and lifeless. But he had his arms. And his brain.
Still reeling from the shock of this harsh new reality, we slogged on with our lives week to week. Dad and Mom spent a lot of days with Titus. Especially Mom. She stayed at his bedside for days on end, both at the hospital and later in rehab. Once or twice I stayed with him for a couple of days. We struggled as we spoke. It was beyond strange to see my brother, chopped at the core, felled like a maturing oak before its time, and forced to enter a new existence, a new world. It was one I could observe but never, never comprehend. We talked of life as it had been, from our memories. We flinched and hedged from speaking of life as it was and as it was to be. But ultimately, we did even that. Awkwardly, almost lightheartedly, because that was the mask Titus wore.
Although well meaning and certainly helpful, many of the Bloomfield Amish people turned into annoying pests. Eager, hungry they were, for all the latest tidbits. So they could send them on down the gossip pipeline, as interpreted by themselves. They launched an incessant barrage of simple questions, with one repeated a thousand times: “Does he have a lot of pain?”
What does one say to that? “Well, let me think. He’s lying there with a metal frame screwed to his head. He can move his arms. And his head. Nothing else. What do you think? Would that be painful?” It got so we’d just mumble incoherently and turn away.
We had no medical insurance. Most Amish people don’t. Titus was twenty-three and technically on his own, so Dad wouldn’t have been responsible for the bills. He could have shrugged his shoulders, bemoaned his son’s plight, and feigned helplessness.
But he took it upon himself to look after the bills. To accept them as his own. The decision created a lot of problems. The bills continued to mount, and there was no way Dad could pay them all. He conferred with the Bloomfield church fathers. They counseled him to accept the bills. Somehow, the church would help get them paid. The church fathers also appealed to other Amish churches in surrounding communities. But it seemed hopeless. The bills were mounting inexorably, tens of thousands of dollars.
And then a strange and wonderful thing happened. It came out of Aylmer. Old Aylmer, the place where I had been born and raised. Aylmer, still the shining city on a hill. At least publicly.
The Aylmer people were quite shocked by the news of the accident, and they were sympathetic. In the next issue of Family Life, preacher Elmo Stoll, Aylmer’s powerful undisputed leader, wrote poignantly of our plight in his lead editorial. Briefly he wrote of Titus and of the tragedy that had struck that August night.
Titus, he concluded, would never walk again. And then Elmo smoothly switched into fund-raising mode, imploring those who had read Dad’s stuff for all those years, who appreciated his efforts and his work, to send what money they could spare to help with the mounting hospital and rehab bills. It would be a chance for them to express appreciation to my father for his years of tireless labor as a defender of the Amish faith.
We read Elmo’s words in that issue and