After loss, every sound becomes important

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By COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star

FIRTH — Look at this.

Look at this, Mom.

Mom, look.

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Rehabilitation Counselor Larry Mackey (left) offers encouragement and a guiding voice from the hallway as Christie Brazier searches for the door to a classroom at the Nebraska Commission for the Blind. (Gwyneth Roberts)

Christie Brazier hears her little girl say this a lot. Sarah is 6. Sarah forgets what happened. She thinks her mom is the same as before, except for the short hair and the long white cane.

“I tell her, ‘Close your eyes and look around. That’s what I see.’ I know it’s really hard for her to understand. That’s what I tell Sarah to do — ‘Close your eyes and look around.’”

Christie smiles. Her face is turned to the voice of a visitor who sits in the living room of her parents’ home. Christie’s mom, seated in another chair, brought her home from an Omaha care center a few days ago.

Christie’s hazel eyes are dilated. They look oddly dark.

The visitor tells Christie that she’s sorry, that she can’t imagine being blind and that it’s one of her biggest fears. Christie tells the visitor, a newspaper reporter, to close her eyes and look around, and she does, and every sound becomes significant:

Sarah and her 7-year-old brother Stephen in the kitchen, talking with their cousin who lives here, too.

Baby Joshua shouting into the fan on the kitchen floor.

“Ya ya ya!”

Christie’s soft voice explaining that her baby likes how the fan makes his voice vibrate.

A parakeet chirping somewhere in the house. No. Two parakeets.

The tap of the long white cane against something hard. The bookcase?

The ceiling fan humming.

Christie breathing.

Her voice, again, saying she sees a purpose in what happened, but she just doesn’t know what it is yet.

“I survived two deaths. The Lord saved me twice.”

The first death almost came one early afternoon in April.

Josh, her husband, was driving their forest-green Ford extended-cab pickup north on 40th Street. She sat on the passenger side. Baby Joshua was strapped into his car seat in back.

They were driving to the Hy-Vee grocery store at 40th and Old Cheney Road.

Christie’s grocery list was in her purse. Her mom found the list there later, then threw it away: milk, lettuce, salad fixings, a few other things that were on sale.

At 40th and Yankee Hill Road, a delivery truck heading east ran a stop sign, according to the police report. It slammed into the pickup, wadding the front like paper.

The second death almost came a week later in the Bryan/LGH Medical Center West ICU, when her brain began to swell.

Her mother, Mary Brasfield, had a choice — agree to let doctors take off a piece of skull to relieve the swelling, or try medicine. Mary is a nurse at Bryan West. She chose the medicine. It worked.

Now Christie is working on getting her thinking process back to normal.

“For a long time, I didn’t realize that I was married. I thought my last name should be Brasfield. I didn’t realize I was married, then it just hit me one day — that Josh is part of me. He’s my husband, and we have kids.”

She can’t tell nuances yet, like when someone tells a joke.

But she was like that before, her mother says, so she’s not sure if it’s related to the accident.

“Were you ever scared?” Mary asks, for the visitor’s benefit. “Were you ever scared about the things you couldn’t remember?”

“No. Not at all. God provides answers when needed.”

She was polite and spoke softly before, Mary says, and accepted life’s challenges. And she’s the same now.

Except for her eyes.

She has put together most of the jigsaw puzzle of her memory.

That she has three kids: Stephen and Sarah and Baby Joshua, and their birth dates.

That the baby ended up with just bruises from the crash.

That he likes juice boxes, and that’s a good way to get him to crawl into her lap after three months away.

That she is 28. That Josh is 28, too.

That she played clarinet in the high school band in west Texas. That she got in big trouble just once when she was 16 and drove two hours to Dallas with a girlfriend to see a Yanni concert. That she’d lied to her parents and said the friend’s mom was going, too.

That she met a tall, blond man at the Baptist Church named Josh when she was 19 and he was 19 and she thought she was too plain to attract such a handsome guy.

That she went to the church Valentine’s Day party alone anyway, knowing he’d be there, and they played a game where they had to use 10 candy hearts, the kind with words, to build a sentence, though she still can’t remember the sentence.

That they married the next Valentine’s Day.

That when he was deployed to Afghanistan, she sent him caseloads of candy hearts.

That she and Josh and the kids had stopped in Firth on their way from Fort Lewis in Washington to Georgia, where Josh, a staff sergeant in the Army, was to attend computer school.

That his brain was smart like that.

That she hadn’t been going to church in Washington like she knew she should have because she didn’t own a nice enough dress.

That her favorite colors are purple and pink.

That she saw every episode of “Law and Order” and “CSI.”

That she and the kids were to have stayed a few months with her parents until Josh finished computer school and then they would have joined him in Georgia.

That she’d been online a lot, looking for a new home.

That her parents’ two-bedroom home is their home now, the kids and their cousin in one bunk bed.

That she must keep praying for Josh, who’s still at the Omaha care center, eating through a feeding tube. She’s not sure he even knows her voice. “I just know he doesn’t speak to me.”

That a delivery-truck driver didn’t see that red stop sign.

Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.