CAMANO ISLAND – It had been a hectic week for Stacy and Peter Najar.
By the time Thursday, May 18, rolled around, the Camano Island couple craved a laid-back night and a glass of red wine.
Soccer games, music practices and a bathroom remodeling project had prevented the Najars and their three kids from sharing a meal together since the previous Sunday. That’s when they celebrated Mother’s Day with oysters on the half shell.
Peter had been working long days pruning trees for his burgeoning company, Above All Tree Service. After years of scraping by – stumping for business by stuffing fliers in mailboxes with his kids – he was finally starting to taste real profits.
Stacy spent the week rushing between her Stanwood school bus route and their Camano Island home, where she was taking the lead on the bathroom remodel.
As they raced out of the house Thursday morning, Peter kissed his wife’s lips.
And he was gone.
The next time Stacy saw her husband, he was in Harborview Medical Center’s Intensive Care Unit.
He was not awake.
He lay in bed, his eyes closed, sleeping, like she had seen him thousands of times during their 18-year marriage.
This time it was different.
Dozens of wires and tubes snaked from his body. Computers monitored his breathing, pulse and brain activity. Half his thick brown hair had been shaved off – youthful locks that fooled waitresses into believing he was 18 instead of 41. He was Mr. Clean bald on the left side. Bolts and dozens of stitches held his head together.
Almost every bone in his face was broken, but his neatly aligned white teeth survived with one small chip. Though his face was swollen, it was still tan from a recent family vacation in Mexico.
Intravenous lines poked his muscular arms. His hands – as apt with a spatula as a chain saw, capable of sewing little girl Cinderella costumes and French braiding his daughters’ hair – lay motionless. The fingers were still that had teased love songs from guitars and pianos, music he’d written just for Stacy over the years of their marriage.
Doctors told Stacy her husband was slipping away.
***
“We are just waiting to get a purposeful response from him right now. We want a thumbs-up, or a toe wiggle. He has been off the sedation for approx. two days now, so we are praying he will wake.”
– Stacy’s journal, May 25
“There’s a light we hold within us. It keeps us going day by day. It’s like the sunrise every morning, just as stable as the day.”
– “Letter to Stacy,” a song by Peter Najar
***
No one’s sure exactly what happened to Peter Najar.
Late that Thursday afternoon, he phoned his wife to tell her he had to work late and wouldn’t be able to make their eldest daughter’s chorus concert. An hour and a half later, he was 30 to 40 feet in the air trimming a tree on Camano Island. He was standing in the bucket of a new boom truck. It was supposed to protect him from the falls and other hazards faced by tree trimmers.
Then he was on the ground, broken amid a pile of branches.
It’s unclear if a branch fell on the boom or if the truck malfunctioned, spitting him out. Either way, Peter catapulted through the air.
Stacy’s cell phone rang as she drove her eldest daughter, Kaila, 17, to the concert. It was her 15-year-old son, Peter.
Dad fell, he told her. He’s on the way to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center in a helicopter.
Stacy screamed.
***
“This experience has been such a roller coaster of emotions, it’s all about waiting, we just need time and faith.”
– Stacy’s journal, May 28
“Will I sing to you like I used to do and hold you once again? Is the last time the last time I see you again?
– “Last Time” by Peter Najar
***
Stacy huddled with her teenage children Kaila and Peter and Emily, 12, in the waiting room at Harborview. They were surrounded by family and friends. Everyone prayed for a miracle.
For a while, it seemed they would get one.
Peter fared well in surgery, Stacy was told. He had a decent shot at recovery. She thought her husband was coming back.
She wept with joy.
Five days later, doctors told her Peter might never wake up.
Blood had gathered between his brain’s outer membrane and his skull in what is known as an epidural hematoma. The left frontal lobe and left rear portions of his brain were injured during the fall.
“The left frontal lobe is like the conductor of an orchestra,” said Dr. Glen Johnson, a clinical neuropsychologist and author of the “Traumatic Brain Injury Survival Guide.”
“That’s definitely the area you least want to have an injury in because it does that executive processing that we all need to survive. If you have damage to those areas, your ability to work and have relationships is greatly impacted.”
Peter was in a coma. Even if he emerged, there was a good possibility he wouldn’t remember the details that made up his 41 years of life. Moreover, because personality resides in the brain, there was a good likelihood he would wake up a different man.
***
“When asking (the doctor) about prognosis he really could not tell me, it truly is a wait and see. He said there is no timeline and not to give up hope.”
– Stacy’s journal, June 9
“It’s a funny thing (this) life we’re living. It’s a funny thing walking next to you. Will you remember the time we’re spending? Will I ever have to say goodbye to you?”
– “Find Love” by Peter Najar
***
For 24 days, Stacy stayed by her husband’s side.
If he knew she was there, he didn’t show it.
Substitutes drove her bus route. Family and friends cooked her children dinner. Her sister’s boyfriend finished the bathroom.
At night she slept in a hospital apartment. By day she showered her husband with songs, prayers and scents from their life together.
Even in patients with brain injuries, sounds and scents can trigger memories. Stacy heard stories of people who emerged from comas when someone was singing or as a familiar scent wafted by.
There was nothing she wouldn’t try to save her husband.
She stuck a bag of microwavable popcorn – his nightly indulgence – under his nose.
Reiki practitioners laid their hands on him, trying to boost the life-force energy that the Japanese call ki.
A Christian, Stacy welcomed preachers from various churches to Peter’s bedside to pray.
A shaman told her to bury a rock in her back yard.
She did.
She desperately searched for a reflection of her love in Peter. He didn’t stir.
She drew on their 18 years together – 18 years of love songs Peter wrote and sang for her; 18 years of campfires and trips to wild mountain lakes; 18 years of love she wasn’t ready to lose.
Stacy first met Peter in 1988 at a Frisbee game with mutual friends at a park in Mountlake Terrace, near their childhood homes. Stacy had just graduated high school. Peter had been out for a couple of years.
She was immediately drawn to his carefree, friendly demeanor. When he broke his toe during the game, he laughed it off and kept playing.
Soon afterward, they started dating.
Three months later, they stood in front of a justice of the peace and pledged to love each other, in sickness and in health.
She took the vow seriously, but with a youthful optimism. They would reach their 80s together, still holding hands and singing love songs. She knew eventually one of them would get sick and fade away, but they’d be old by then with grandchildren, and decades of memories to fall back on. She always thought they’d have time to say goodbye.
***
“The past couple days I have been singing in his ear a song he had written and he moved his hand both days when I sang it, some of you may recognize ‘Won’t You Come with Me Little Darling.’”
– Stacy’s journal, June 4
“It’s a good thing I ran into you this evening. Before now things were going way too slow. I’m sorry you thought you always knew me. I’m sorry you were wrong. I have to go. Will you come with me Little Darling?”
– “Little Darling” by Peter Najar
***
Peter Najar didn’t wake suddenly, hug his wife and ask to go home.
Instead, he lifted an arm while sleeping. Another time, as friends circled around Peter in prayer, he moved his left hand.
Nurses warned that the movements were probably reflex.
On Saturday, June 10, Stacy and Peter’s cousin, Toni Kutz, ate dinner together in Harborview’s cafeteria. When they returned to Peter’s room they found him lying in bed, his brown eyes open. His gaze seemed to linger on his wife for several minutes, before his eyelids slowly shut.
On Father’s Day, Stacy and the kids held clam shells up to Peter’s nose. They had plucked the shells and sparkly crystal rocks the night before from Maple Grove, Peter’s favorite spot on Camano Island.
They hoped he would respond.
He didn’t.
***
“It is the most difficult thing, having your heart torn in two, trying to find this delicate balance of being with my children and also with Peter.”
– Stacy’s journal, June 18
“Do you remember when I would sing to you and then the times that you couldn’t hear the song? Well I’ve been singing all this time. The words ‘I love you’ slip right by. But this song I sing for you will never end.”
– “To the End” by Peter Najar
———
On June 22, an ambulance drove Peter to a nursing home in Arlington. Insurance policies prevented him from staying in Harborview.
With her husband closer to home, Stacy stayed by his bedside during the day and spent most nights with her children on Camano Island.
Before his accident, Peter had built the lower level of the house, added a deck and was planning to add a new staircase out front. The house wasn’t home without him.
Peter spent more and more time with his eyes open. He began to respond to simple commands.
Two months after his accident, he pointed to “yes” and “no” flashcards when prompted by his therapist.
He spelled “yes” and “hi” and “love” with magnetic letters.
He took five steps.
In mid-August, as Stacy sung “do, re, mi,” Peter uttered his first words.
“Re, mi,” he echoed.
“We just cried,” Stacy recalled. “Every little thing he did, it was unbelievable to watch. It was unbelievable to watch somebody be reborn.”
She didn’t know if her husband knew her. She didn’t know if the man coming to life in front of her still loved habanero peppers, the Sci Fi Channel and Johnny Cash.
Then in mid-August, Peter told her.
Alone in his room with his cousin Toni, Peter stared at the white board in front of him. Toni handed Peter a marker and asked him to write his name.
He complied. Then clutching the pen in his left hand, he slowly scrawled his first spontaneous words.
Stacy cried when she saw the board.
In Peter’s shaky handwriting were three words she had been aching for since May:
“Pete loves Stacy.”
Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@ heraldnet.com.
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