Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [55]
We didn’t have to wonder long. Within days the letters started arriving and continued for days and weeks after that. And weeks after that. Stacks and stacks, as many as fifty to one hundred letters and cards in a single day. Short scrawled notes, expressing sympathy and support. Little cheerful homemade cards, sometimes roughly colored by a child’s hands. And always, a bit of money. In some, as little as a dollar bill. Most others held more. Checks of fifty, a hundred dollars. A few for as much as a thousand or more.
We were astounded and grateful. Traumatized by all that had just happened, we marveled at the blessings that literally poured in. And that’s how the eighty thousand dollars was paid. Eighty thousand dollars, the total for Titus’s hospital and rehab bills.
It was remarkable, the way it all worked out. An incident like that is probably almost unique to the Amish culture. Not exclusively, but almost.
* * *
Before the accident, Titus and Ruth Yutzy, Marvin’s older sister, had been planning to get married. To settle in as a Bloomfield family. And as the reality sank in for us, it sank in for Ruth, too. The man she loved, the man she planned to marry, would never walk again. Not only that, he would require a lot of care. Every day. For the rest of his life. For her, it was a brutal time, a time of testing the true measure of her love for Titus.
Amazingly, or maybe not, Ruth never wavered. She was by his side as he was rushed to the hospital the night it happened. She stayed by his side throughout his long journey from hospital to home. And their relationship survived even those treacherous, rocky waters. I don’t know what he would have done, or how he would have made it, had she left him. But she didn’t.
And for Titus, too, it was almost beyond endurance, the thing he was now forced to bear. The desolate landscape in which he found himself. The rest of us were still back in the world he had just left. A world to which he desperately wanted to return.
In both our worlds, we knew he never would. We couldn’t grasp it. But we knew.
Titus had always been active, always excited about life, and always busily pursuing his next grand project, his next shining city just beyond the bend. Titus was always optimistic. Always strong, always striding forward. And now all that was gone. All he had ever known. Snuffed out in an instant. He would never walk again. It’s tough to get your mind around a thing like that.
The months passed, despite the fact that each day seemed like a week. Titus gradually gained enough strength to balance himself on a wheelchair. Learned to feed himself. Learned to gain as much freedom as a person in his position could attain. And then the day arrived, in late November, that he came home. We had prepared the house, widening doorways, pouring a new concrete walkway that snaked back and forth up the grade of the hill to the house.
We rolled him up on his wheelchair, wan and white and weak from the long ordeal. He smiled and smiled. He was home for the first time since that August night so long ago. We soon adapted to the reality of having him there. It affected all of us deeply.
We had a special buggy built for him. A top buggy, with a standard seat up front for the driver. But the back part was empty and bare. The rear wall of the buggy was hinged and latched so it could be dropped down and used as a ramp. We pushed Titus up in his wheelchair, lowered and attached the safety bar, and strapped his chair down. It would be a death trap in an accident, but it worked. Fortunately, there has never been an accident with the rig. Not to this day.
As for me, I worked halfheartedly on the farm. There was no one else to do it, now that Titus was unable to. Stephen had married Wilma Yutzy, Rudy’s older sister, a few years before, a few months after Rachel’s wedding. He and his bride moved to an eighty-acre farm a mile south of ours. Of course, his little farm blossomed. Whatever Stephen