The first time I saw the power of the perspective shift from victim to survivor in action was as a clinical intern at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center, in the mid-1970s. One day I was assigned two new patients, both Vietnam veterans, both paraplegics with injuries of the lower spinal cord, both unlikely to walk again. They had the same diagnosis, the same prognosis. The first spent hours curled up in the fetal position on his bed, full of rage, cursing God and country. The other preferred to be out of bed, sitting up in his wheelchair. “I’m seeing everything differently now,” he told me. “My children came to visit me yesterday, and now that I’m in this wheelchair, I’m so much closer to their eyes.” He wasn’t happy to be disabled, to have compromised sexual function, to wonder if he’d ever be able to run a race with his daughter or dance at his son’s wedding. But he could see that his injury had afforded him a new perspective. And he could choose to see his injury as limiting and incapacitating—or as a new source of growth.
More than forty years later, in the spring of 2018, I saw my daughter Marianne make a similar choice. While traveling in Italy with her husband, Rob, she tripped on a set of stone steps and fell on her head, suffering a traumatic brain injury. For two weeks, we didn’t know if she would survive. Or, if she survived, who she would be. Would she be able to speak? Would she remember her children, her three beautiful grandsons, Rob, her siblings, me? Throughout those insufferable days when her life hung in the balance, I reached again and again to touch the bracelet Béla gave me when she was born, a thick braid made from three kinds of gold. When we’d fled Czechoslovakia in 1949, I smuggled it out in Marianne’s diaper. I’ve worn it every day since, a talisman of the life and love that emerge even from destruction and death, a reminder that there’s such a thing as survival against the odds.
For me, there is no more difficult feeling than fear mixed with powerlessness. I was gutted by Marianne’s suffering, terrified that we’d lose her—and there was nothing concrete to do about it, to heal her, to prevent the worst from happening. The fear would rise, and I’d say her Hungarian nickname, “Marchuka, Marchuka,” the syllables a kind of prayer. I realized it’s what I’d done in Auschwitz when I danced for Josef Mengele. Gone inward. Created a sanctuary inside myself, a place to keep my spirit safe within the turmoil of threat and uncertainty.
Miraculously, Marianne survived. She doesn’t remember the first weeks after the fall. Perhaps she went inward, too. Somehow—through excellent medical care, the constant support and presence of her husband and family, her own inner resources—she was able, bit by bit, to regain physical and cognitive function, to remember her children’s names. At first, it was difficult for her to swallow, and her sense of taste was distorted. I cooked for her nonstop, determined to try all of the foods she used to love. One day she asked me to make trepanka, a potato dish served with sauerkraut and brinza, a Czech farmer’s cheese. It was the food I most craved when I was pregnant with her! When I watched her try a first bite and smile, I felt deep in my bones that she was going to be okay.
In just a year and a half, she’s made a stunning recovery and is living and working as she did before the injury, with strength, brilliance, creativity, and passion.
Though many aspects of her recovery are out of her control, not easily explained, a matter of sheer luck, she’s also made choices that I know have helped her heal. When you’re in a vulnerable position, with limited energy, it is especially crucial to choose how to spend your time. Marianne has chosen to think like a survivor, focusing on what she needs to do to keep improving, listening to her body to know when it’s time to rest, and feeling and expressing gratitude for her health and all the people who are supporting her recovery. When she wakes up in the morning, she asks herself, “What am I going to do today? When will I do my therapy exercises? What projects do I want to work on? What do I need to do to take care of myself?”
Attitude isn’t everything. We can’t erase hardships or make ourselves well with our outlook alone. But how we spend our time and mental energy does affect our health. If we resist and rail against what we’re experiencing, we take away from our growth and healing. Instead, we can acknowledge the awful thing that is happening and find the best way to live with it.
This is especially true when we come up against setbacks or complications in our healing process. Brain injuries generally mean that patients are not as good at many of the things they used to do with ease or skill. Marianne is still working hard to reestablish all the neural networks that were damaged by the fall. She tires easily with too much standing or walking, and struggles with language retrieval. Except for the initial weeks of recovery, her memories are intact, but sometimes she can’t find the words for things—the name of a country she’s visited or a vegetable she wants to buy at the farmers market. She’s had to learn new methods for doing what
