Families across Iowa and across our country will gatherer together around dining room tables and count their blessings this Thanksgiving. One such gathering, about thirty years ago, in Davenport, changed the meaning of Thanksgiving for me and for my brothers and sisters. After that Thanksgiving, we were grateful for the kindness extended to us by untold friends and neighbors; we became aware of the tremendous strength we never knew our mother had; and we are thankful for the blessing to have our father with us for another twenty years.
My parents were both born and raised on the south side of Chicago. My father, Ed Bracken, was one of three boys. His father was a business man. I never met him because he died when my dad was only sixteen. His mother, an immigrant from Ireland when she was a girl, worked as a nurse in a south side hospital. She raised her three sons and ran the household.
My father met my mother, Mary Sullivan, in 1957 after he returned home from the service. My mother was working as a student nurse, and her co-worker and future mother in law set her up on a blind date. My parents' first date was a St. Patrick's Day dance. They eventually married and started a family of their own in Chicago.
Two daughters arrived, about a year apart from each other, and I was the third child a year and a half after that. In 1962, when I was about four months old, my father accepted a transfer and my parents left the south side of Chicago and moved to their young family to Davenport, Iowa. They bought a modest three bedroom house with one bath across the street from Glen Armil Park and within walking distance of a Catholic elementary school and Assumption High School. Mom never had any need for a car in Chicago. She had to learn how to drive after moving to Iowa.
Dad worked as a personnel manager for a manufacturing company in Davenport. Mom had four more babies, three boys and one girl at nearby Mercy Hospital. An addition to the house added a fourth bedroom, a dining room for a larger kitchen table and a half bath. The children all attended Holy Family School. Mom and Dad were active at the church. Dad was on the parish council. We filled a pew when all nine of us attended mass together as a family. We certainly filled all three seats in the station wagon on family trips.
Dad was always a physically strong and active man. He often played catch and basketball with his kids. He had a regular tee time with colleagues at a local public golf course. He also dabbled with acrylic paints, often setting up an easel at one end of the living room after supper when the pack of us were sprawled out watching The Wonderful World of Disney or perhaps Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
Everything changed for us in 1977. My oldest sister was a freshman at UNI. The next was a senior at Assumption and I was a sophomore. One brother was a freshman and the other three siblings were in elementary school. Mom had just arranged to return to nursing. That fall, Dad had a dizzy spell at work. The initial assessment by his doctor was inconclusive. He was 46 and appeared to be as healthy as could be. He went back to his regular routine. Shortly after that, in October, he was disoriented and taken from our house in an ambulance. The doctors initially suspected a brain tumor, and they thought it might kill him. One emergency surgery and then another proved the initial diagnosis was mistaken. Instead, the problem ultimately was determined to be a blood vessel malformation that probably was present in his brain his entire life, but it was suddenly acting up. If the malformation caused symptoms like an aneurism or a tumor, the surgeries caused serious bleeding and damage to the brain tissue much like a serious stroke. He endured several intracranial operations, and spent several weeks in recovery and intensive care. He received the sacrament of last rites - more than once.
On Thanksgiving Day, we gathered together as a family around the dining room table, but Dad was still in the hospital, and still in intensive care. We prayed, and we thanked God that Dad was alive. As I sat at the table, it weighed on my mind that I was the same age that my dad was when he lost his father. In all of our Thanksgiving dinners, in years before, it never occurred to me that I should be grateful just to be in the company of my healthy parents. We prayed that Dad would survive, and that he would recover, and that he come home to us.
On the table in front of us were signs of some of the blessings that also never occurred to me before. Before then, we did not have any experience with the kindnesses of friends in times of need, but our Thanksgiving dinner that night was the product of a parade of neighbors and friends whose cars lined up earlier in the alley behind the house. On their own Thanksgiving Day, these friends took the time and effort to prepare an extra Thanksgiving dish, and they left their homes and families to deliver the food to us at our home.
Dad did survive, but he never did completely recover. By Christmas, he was no longer in intensive care, but he was still in the hospital. He came home for a brief visit on Christmas day before returning to the hospital. Months before, he was healthy and vigorous. That Christmas day, he was in a wheel chair, partially paralyzed and unable to walk. He had lost a tremendous amount of weight and looked like he had aged thirty years. He was largely unable to speak. His clear blue eyes seemed to look past us when we greeted him.
He did return home, eventually, and he spent the next twenty months or so in physical therapy and rehabilitation. He relearned how to speak. He relearned how to walk in spite of some residual damage to his brain that impaired the right side of his body. He learned how to write mostly by using two hands.
During his long recovery, Mom returned to nursing to earn an income and she managed somehow to keep the household together. She put her children through college and, when we were done, she returned to college herself.
This Thanksgiving, I will be about the same age my dad was when he spent the holiday in intensive care. My older child is at UNI, like my oldest sister was back then, and my younger child is about the same age that I was back then. I am grateful to be with them and their mother and the other members of our extended families. Dad lived another twenty years before cancer took his life in 1998. My brothers and sisters and I are thankful for the blessing of having him with us after he was so terribly stricken. We remain grateful for the opportunity to have known him. He was a good father before he was hospitalized. He was an inspiration afterwards in his recovery. We also are thankful to know our mother's tremendous strength and courage in such trying times, and we are thankful to know the kindness and generosity of neighbors and friends.
Drew Bracken
