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In early spring 1989, Bonnie had a meeting at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City and April joined her for an evening at the theater. It was 2 a.m. when the telephone call that every parent fears caught up with her.
Justin had been in an accident, hit by a car as he crossed a dark street in Providence. When Bonnie called the hospital, she was told little about his condition—only that she should hurry.
“It was horror. Total horror,’’ Bonnie recalled. “I couldn’t figure out how to call the airport, [much less how] to get to Rhode Island.”
In desperation, she called her friend Ricki Perry who figured out that there were no flights to Rhode Island. They drove through the night to the Providence hospital. All the way, Bonnie wondered whether they would make it in time.
Glen took an early morning flight from Detroit to Boston where he met Devon at the airport. They drove to Providence where, united with Bonnie and April, they found Justin in intensive care, motionless and plugged into medical machinery that was sustaining his life. Two other young men shared the ward with Justin; the two had head injuries from motorcycle and automobile accidents and neither would survive.
“For the first week, it was touch and go,” explained Neal Severance, RISD’s vice-president for Student Affairs and a Presbyterian minister. “The injury was to an area of Justin’s head crucial to the basic functions of the human body. He was on every sort of life support system and it was questionable whether he would live.”
“The first few days in the hospital,” recalled Glen, “was the worst experience of my life. It was a large trauma hospital and they would bring patients in from a wide area with very critical conditions. There were two or three in a room and we sat in a tiny lobby. Everyone in the lobby was in an emergency situation [and] in very bad shape.
“The lobby was never quiet. The double doors would fly open with a distraught parent who had just been called,” Glen said, “and for three weeks we sat in that lobby and watched this steady flow of the absolute worst human drama unfold.”
Glen and Bonnie alternated nights sleeping on a couch in the waiting room. One morning during that first week, Bonnie arrived and Glen instructed her to go see Justin. Worried that something worse had occurred, Bonnie went to find Justin unchanged. Alive but unchanged.
When she returned to Glen, he broke the news. Her brother Doug had been killed in a crop-dusting accident in Florida. She bore her sorrow privately, unable to leave her son to attend her brother’s funeral and unable to fully grasp the impact for weeks and months.
Later that same day, the family faced their most difficult decision of the crisis. Justin’s brain was swelling. The tender membranes of his injured head were pressing against his skull.
“The pressure was pinching the brain stem,” explained Glen. “He got to the point where one eye wasn’t dilating properly and they wanted to put him into a deeper coma. He was already dehydrated to the maximum to reduce swelling.”
The family had five minutes to make a decision whether or not to allow Justin to undergo a barbiturate-induced coma. By inducing a coma, Justin’s brain activity would be slowed, thus reducing both the rush of blood to his injury and the swelling. The risk was obvious; he might never recover from the coma.
“The whole family was in the room sobbing with this decision,” Bonnie remembered. This time-pressured decision was “the most horrifying experience in my life.”
At the end of a long stressful day, it was Bonnie’s turn to sit up with Justin and retreat to the waiting room couch if she grew weary.
Justin’s head was shaved and supported a pair of protruding bolts; a respirator was attached through his nose; his arm was punctured with an IV. Because of the involuntary spasticity, common with head injuries, splints forced both arms away from a curled, fetal-like reflex; tight plastic hosiery enveloped his legs to maintain circulation and to discourage atrophy or blood clots.
Bonnie sat up all night and, over the clinical beeping of monitors and the clicking of a respirator, she read her son the Psalms. All of them. Aloud.
Steven, the other young man in the room, lay motionless; his monitor continued although his respirator was turned off and he was clinically dead. In the presence of these two still bodies, so vibrant and full of promise only days before, Bonnie read the book of Psalms because, as she explained, she knew her son could hear her voice.
“Letting go came as a sense of peace,” she explained, remembering especially Psalm 139:11-14:
“It says ‘Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn to night. Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike. For you yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well. My body was not hidden from you, while I was being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth.’”
By the end of the night, Bonnie recalled “I knew Justin would be okay—whether he lived or died. Everything was still chaotic, but it was a peaceful chaos.”
“She was in there with him,” Glen recalled. “And she felt that death was in there, too. She was praying and she got this feeling that Justin was going to live. Immediately, the pressure [decreased]. At that moment, he started to improve and has been improving ever since.”
George Hunt, then-bishop of the Diocese of Rhode Island and in whose home the Andersons stayed during their final days in Providence, recalled the family and the incident of April 1989. “That is an incredible family,” he recounted. “I was struck by their depth of faith and the not stoic but steady way they accepted the possibility of recovery or not.”
After three weeks in intensive care, and while still in a coma, Justin was flown by air ambulance to Ann Arbor where he began rehabilitation therapy at Beaumont and then St. Joseph’s hospitals. He did not move anything for four months. During the 16 months he was in Ann Arbor, the Andersons saw their son every day.
“I stayed with Justin from 8:30 a.m. until 6 p.m.,” recalled Bonnie. “Glen came at 6 and stayed until 11. Justin would sometimes come home on weekends.
“Every morning, I would get my feet on the floor and walk over to my mirror and read a quotation from Julian of Norwich:
“He did not say, ‘You shall not be tempest-tossed, you shall not be work-weary, you shall not be discomforted.’ But he said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’”
“It’s been really hard, but it’s been good. I thought my faith was always strong; it got stronger,“ she recounted. “I don’t believe in a God that designs these things, but God has the power to be with us when we deal with these things and gives us strength.”
It wasn’t until September 1990—16 months after the accident—that Justin returned home and only since his birthday, September 26, that he ate solid food. Before that, he was fed through an intravenous tube.
“The first thing Justin ate was Holy Communion,” Bonnie said.
“It never occurred to me that this sort of thing could happen to us,” explained Bonnie. “It has taken us two years to develop a new definition of normal.”
For the Andersons, normal is a 24-hour rotation of five carefully selected caregivers for Justin. He continues in physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. For recreational therapy, Justin swims on Friday nights. He goes to Mercy High School every Wednesday for art therapy where his art teacher is Marie Henderson, a Mercy sister and Justin’s art instructor during his senior year in high school.
For Justin, artistic expression has changed. Hands that were once sure with a pencil or paint and, in the weeks before his accident, sewed a tight hem on a gown his mother pulls from her closet, now struggle to find coordination. He pours energy and concentration into planting two dozen slender sticks into a peg board as if each is a flag shoved into the surface of the moon. He rings these poles with square blocks to create a pattern of urban skyscrapers, each different from week to week. Justin visibly marvels at his design.
His threshold for frustration seems limitless. If a square skitters across the table and faIls to the floor or a tower of blocks topples, a wry smiles creeps across Justin’s face suggesting that he dropped them on purpose.
He also lifts and presses a textured rubber stamp from pad to paper with a heavy, methodical motion, appearing to guide his cognitive request through a carefully plotted channel of nerves. It is a reflex a child learns at the age of two to swat a fly from his knee. For Justin, it requires great concentration and quickly exhausts him.
Justin carries himself in a confident but awkward manner. He suffers what is called left-side neglect and for months he would gaze only to the right or focus on the right side of his art paper. He still tilts his head in that direction and his arm and hand on his left side curl tightly against his chest as if to protect him from the car that has long since done its damage.
But changes have occurred in the months since his homecoming. He now feeds himself. He can stand for 20 minutes, with assistance. With a little more help, he can move his legs across the floor of a swimming pool.
For almost two years, Justin couldn’t communicate, unable to even point at what he wanted. These days he snaps his teeth together when he is hungry and calls the dog with a casual flex of his index finger.
“Justin voiced for five minutes today,” exclaimed Bonnie recently. Voicing is something Justin has discovered lately. On an inhale, mountainous groans emanate from his barrel-like chest. Justin gets tickled and laughs, which seems to invite another baritone rumble.
For the most part, it seems frivolous, yet it is the first utterance Justin has controlled in over two years. Since early May, he has turned these groans into discernible words.
“You know the feeling you have when your child stands or says ‘Daddy’ for the first time,” explains Glen. “With Justin, we are experiencing it a second time.”
Although he sits quietly in a wheelchair, Justin is not to be overlooked as one enters the room. He waves his right arm at anyone coming within sight and flashes an unabashed smile.
“I miss Justin a lot,” stated his mother, “but I enjoy him in a new way now. Justin has an irresistible positive attitude and tries everything the therapists ask.
“Don’t you understand why I can’t be sad?” Bonnie concluded. “He was great before the accident; he is great now.”
“With an experience of death,” Glen explained, “you have a grieving process to terminate the old relationship. With an injury like this, I know that the old Justin is gone; but you focus all your time and energy on getting Justin well.
“It’s a strange phenomenon that the person is different than before but is still your child. We can’t go back and change that reality; we can’t control these things. I try to look at what is the positive that can come from this tragedy.
“Justin is going to find ways to share his gifts and be happy,” Glen said. “And that’s the bottom line for all of us.”
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Detroit, MI