WASHINGTON - Maria Pattakos doesn't remember the walk she took that morning in October. She cannot recall crossing the street or seeing the pickup truck that seemed to loom from out of nowhere.
She doesn't recollect pushing the baby stroller from the truck's path at the last second, and has no memory of being flung into the air, losing her hat and sunglasses, and smashing down to the macadam, splintering her ribs and collarbone and fracturing her skull.
Four months later, she has trouble remembering what day of the week it is.
So her husband has been writing it all down.
The first days were a blur of pain, tears and prayer as his wife lay unconscious in intensive care. On the fifth day after the accident, Arion Pattakos, 71, started writing.
"This is day five," he begins on Sunday, Oct. 17. "I decided to keep a log starting today to, well, record your status and mine. ... I am proud of your deed but devastated emotionally, given what happened to you."
Arion Pattakos' "log" is an account of his wife's accident, and all that has happened since, with the hope that someday she might know what she has missed, and what both of them have endured.
As he writes, seasons change, holidays and birthdays come and go, world events unfold. "We are all waiting for you to join us," he notes.
It is a chronicle of one couple's encounter with a catastrophe: "Sweetheart, I am scared," he writes on a bleak day in late October. "Why have our lives turned to such a horrible path? ... I sometimes see myself curled into a little ball in our bedroom on the rug. I ... wither away and decompose into a pile of dust. A puff of wind comes and just ... blows me away."
And it is a love letter, written over more than 120 days, by a retired Army colonel to his wife of 23 years. "Mary ... you are everything to me and my ability to survive without you is not very good. So, help me live by coming back to me."
Maria Pattakos, 60, known as Mary, now is in the brain injury program of National Rehabilitation Hospital.
She has made what her husband calls a "miraculous" return from the twilight state in which she lived for weeks - attached to life-support systems, unable to walk, or talk, or even squeeze his hand.
She walks on her own, if unsteadily at times. She breathes and eats on her own, engages in conversation and shows sparks of humor. Yet she has trouble focusing, remembering people's names and recalling where she is.
Her brain struggles to handle the avalanche of data that a healthy brain can process daily, and it might be many months before her recovery is finished.
Almost every morning, her husband arrives at the hospital by 7. He hails nurses, doctors, therapists and aides en route to the third-floor room where "panapola mou@" - "my everything" in Greek - is getting ready for breakfast.
They kiss, they pray, and she begins another day on her road back, which includes physical therapy, speech therapy and occupational therapy. When she does well, he will gently say, "Bravo, baby, bravo."
- - -
Arion Pattakos was a U.S. Army officer sent to study in his father's homeland at the Greek War College in 1962.
Just before heading there, his then-wife, Thalia, received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
A 17-year-old girl from a poor farming family named Maria Koukounari looked after his wife and children, Nadine, then 3, and Nicholas, a few months old, in Greece.
Back in the United States after two years, Thalia Pattakos' illness worsened. She was confined to a wheelchair and had brain surgery.
"She just disintegrated before my eyes," Arion Pattakos said.
The family asked Maria to come from Greece.
She arrived in 1972, then 27 years old. She cooked and essentially "raised the kids," Arion Pattakos said. And she cared for Thalia until her death in February 1981.
"She saved my life," Arion Pattakos said.
They were married in St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral on July 26, 1981.
- - -
Last Oct. 12, Maria Pattakos was out for a sunny morning walk with her neighbor, Pauline Londeree, in Rock Creek Park, near their Kensington, Md., home.
Maria pushed Londeree's granddaughter, Jenna Sauber, not quite 2, in a stroller.
At Beach Drive and Cedar Lane, Londeree pressed the pedestrian crossing button.
When the "walk" signal came on, the women began to cross. Maria and the baby were a few steps ahead. A pickup, began to turn onto Cedar. The driver, John Paul Purcell, 54, told police the sun was in his eyes and he didn't see the women.
Maria must have seen him, because police said she shoved the stroller out of the way an instant before the truck hit her. The stroller overturned, but Jenna suffered only a few scrapes.
Police reported Purcell didn't seem to be going fast, but the impact tossed Maria into the air. She crashed to the street. She suffered broken ribs on both sides, two punctured lungs, a broken pelvis, eye and hip injuries, a broken collarbone and a fractured skull. Londeree told police it looked as if Maria's head had "opened up" on the pavement. "She put her life down for Jenna," Londeree said.
When Arion Pattakos reached the hospital, she was unconscious, in critical condition, and her survival was in doubt.
Doctors operated on her brain to remove blood clots and install a temporary catheter, her husband said. She had another operation on her ribs. Slowly, she emerged from danger.
But she did not open her eyes until more than a week later. She was unresponsive for almost three weeks. She could not speak for 58 days.
"It is raining and will probably rain all day," her anguished husband wrote Nov. 4. "You seem so tired and still no hello to me."
He set up a small shrine, with a candle and an icon of their patron saint, Paraskevi. He kept the candle in the kitchen sink. This was the easternmost spot in their home - the closest to the Holy Land - and also would not catch the house on fire.
He tried to keep the house tidy. "I'm even shutting closet doors," he wrote. He brought in the plants when it got cold, but he couldn't find the watering can. He ate cereal and canned chili for dinner.
He wrote to her about the presidential election and the tsunami and Johnny Carson's death.
On Nov. 8, his wife kissed him on the cheek. "Wow," he wrote.
He washed her hair, rubbed lotion on her hands, played her CDs of Greek music and the Beatles. He bought her hiking boots at the military PX to support her feet. He bought himself cologne, and pretended it was from her.
His moods went up and down. Monday, Dec. 6, was a bad day.
"I continued to be depressed today," he wrote. "I need you to communicate with us. It hurts so much that you do not do that yet. I'm supposed to be patient and strong but I don't know if I can be strong. It is so painful. I had my bad thoughts this morning ... "
On Dec. 9, she finally spoke. He accidentally bumped her head while getting her ready for physical therapy. "Ow," she said. The next day, she laughed for the first time since the accident.
On Dec. 17, he asked whether she could say out loud that she loved him. It would "make my heart sing," he recorded. She nodded, and said, "I love you."
But five days later, he wrote that he was not sure she really knew who he was. "I told you my name and the fact that we were married for 23 years," he wrote. "Good," she responded.
Weeks passed. She could now write her name and talk to him on the phone.
On Jan. 6, he asked whether she knew his name. "Arion Pattakos," she said.
- - -
One recent day, he arrived, early as usual, and went to the third floor. She wore a pink shirt and black exercise pants but was still in bed and looked groggy.
Her bulletin board was filled with cards and letters. Large photographs of family members hung near her bed, to help her remember who was who. The hospital had set a possible discharge day for this month. But she still had work to do.
Breakfast arrived. Eat, he told her. "I'm eating," she replied.
He remembered they had not yet prayed. "Let's do that really quick," he said. He leaned over and held her hands. "Ready?"
"Our Father," he said, beginning the Lord's Prayer. She stumbled, and he prompted her. They made the sign of the cross together as he recited: "In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and ever unto ages and ages. Amen."
"Amen," she said.
Four months later, she has trouble remembering what day of the week it is.
So her husband has been writing it all down.
The first days were a blur of pain, tears and prayer as his wife lay unconscious in intensive care. On the fifth day after the accident, Arion Pattakos, 71, started writing.
"This is day five," he begins on Sunday, Oct. 17. "I decided to keep a log starting today to, well, record your status and mine. ... I am proud of your deed but devastated emotionally, given what happened to you."
Arion Pattakos' "log" is an account of his wife's accident, and all that has happened since, with the hope that someday she might know what she has missed, and what both of them have endured.
As he writes, seasons change, holidays and birthdays come and go, world events unfold. "We are all waiting for you to join us," he notes.
It is a chronicle of one couple's encounter with a catastrophe: "Sweetheart, I am scared," he writes on a bleak day in late October. "Why have our lives turned to such a horrible path? ... I sometimes see myself curled into a little ball in our bedroom on the rug. I ... wither away and decompose into a pile of dust. A puff of wind comes and just ... blows me away."
And it is a love letter, written over more than 120 days, by a retired Army colonel to his wife of 23 years. "Mary ... you are everything to me and my ability to survive without you is not very good. So, help me live by coming back to me."
Maria Pattakos, 60, known as Mary, now is in the brain injury program of National Rehabilitation Hospital.
She has made what her husband calls a "miraculous" return from the twilight state in which she lived for weeks - attached to life-support systems, unable to walk, or talk, or even squeeze his hand.
She walks on her own, if unsteadily at times. She breathes and eats on her own, engages in conversation and shows sparks of humor. Yet she has trouble focusing, remembering people's names and recalling where she is.
Her brain struggles to handle the avalanche of data that a healthy brain can process daily, and it might be many months before her recovery is finished.
Almost every morning, her husband arrives at the hospital by 7. He hails nurses, doctors, therapists and aides en route to the third-floor room where "panapola mou@" - "my everything" in Greek - is getting ready for breakfast.
They kiss, they pray, and she begins another day on her road back, which includes physical therapy, speech therapy and occupational therapy. When she does well, he will gently say, "Bravo, baby, bravo."
- - -
Arion Pattakos was a U.S. Army officer sent to study in his father's homeland at the Greek War College in 1962.
Just before heading there, his then-wife, Thalia, received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
A 17-year-old girl from a poor farming family named Maria Koukounari looked after his wife and children, Nadine, then 3, and Nicholas, a few months old, in Greece.
Back in the United States after two years, Thalia Pattakos' illness worsened. She was confined to a wheelchair and had brain surgery.
"She just disintegrated before my eyes," Arion Pattakos said.
The family asked Maria to come from Greece.
She arrived in 1972, then 27 years old. She cooked and essentially "raised the kids," Arion Pattakos said. And she cared for Thalia until her death in February 1981.
"She saved my life," Arion Pattakos said.
They were married in St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral on July 26, 1981.
- - -
Last Oct. 12, Maria Pattakos was out for a sunny morning walk with her neighbor, Pauline Londeree, in Rock Creek Park, near their Kensington, Md., home.
Maria pushed Londeree's granddaughter, Jenna Sauber, not quite 2, in a stroller.
At Beach Drive and Cedar Lane, Londeree pressed the pedestrian crossing button.
When the "walk" signal came on, the women began to cross. Maria and the baby were a few steps ahead. A pickup, began to turn onto Cedar. The driver, John Paul Purcell, 54, told police the sun was in his eyes and he didn't see the women.
Maria must have seen him, because police said she shoved the stroller out of the way an instant before the truck hit her. The stroller overturned, but Jenna suffered only a few scrapes.
Police reported Purcell didn't seem to be going fast, but the impact tossed Maria into the air. She crashed to the street. She suffered broken ribs on both sides, two punctured lungs, a broken pelvis, eye and hip injuries, a broken collarbone and a fractured skull. Londeree told police it looked as if Maria's head had "opened up" on the pavement. "She put her life down for Jenna," Londeree said.
When Arion Pattakos reached the hospital, she was unconscious, in critical condition, and her survival was in doubt.
Doctors operated on her brain to remove blood clots and install a temporary catheter, her husband said. She had another operation on her ribs. Slowly, she emerged from danger.
But she did not open her eyes until more than a week later. She was unresponsive for almost three weeks. She could not speak for 58 days.
"It is raining and will probably rain all day," her anguished husband wrote Nov. 4. "You seem so tired and still no hello to me."
He set up a small shrine, with a candle and an icon of their patron saint, Paraskevi. He kept the candle in the kitchen sink. This was the easternmost spot in their home - the closest to the Holy Land - and also would not catch the house on fire.
He tried to keep the house tidy. "I'm even shutting closet doors," he wrote. He brought in the plants when it got cold, but he couldn't find the watering can. He ate cereal and canned chili for dinner.
He wrote to her about the presidential election and the tsunami and Johnny Carson's death.
On Nov. 8, his wife kissed him on the cheek. "Wow," he wrote.
He washed her hair, rubbed lotion on her hands, played her CDs of Greek music and the Beatles. He bought her hiking boots at the military PX to support her feet. He bought himself cologne, and pretended it was from her.
His moods went up and down. Monday, Dec. 6, was a bad day.
"I continued to be depressed today," he wrote. "I need you to communicate with us. It hurts so much that you do not do that yet. I'm supposed to be patient and strong but I don't know if I can be strong. It is so painful. I had my bad thoughts this morning ... "
On Dec. 9, she finally spoke. He accidentally bumped her head while getting her ready for physical therapy. "Ow," she said. The next day, she laughed for the first time since the accident.
On Dec. 17, he asked whether she could say out loud that she loved him. It would "make my heart sing," he recorded. She nodded, and said, "I love you."
But five days later, he wrote that he was not sure she really knew who he was. "I told you my name and the fact that we were married for 23 years," he wrote. "Good," she responded.
Weeks passed. She could now write her name and talk to him on the phone.
On Jan. 6, he asked whether she knew his name. "Arion Pattakos," she said.
- - -
One recent day, he arrived, early as usual, and went to the third floor. She wore a pink shirt and black exercise pants but was still in bed and looked groggy.
Her bulletin board was filled with cards and letters. Large photographs of family members hung near her bed, to help her remember who was who. The hospital had set a possible discharge day for this month. But she still had work to do.
Breakfast arrived. Eat, he told her. "I'm eating," she replied.
He remembered they had not yet prayed. "Let's do that really quick," he said. He leaned over and held her hands. "Ready?"
"Our Father," he said, beginning the Lord's Prayer. She stumbled, and he prompted her. They made the sign of the cross together as he recited: "In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and ever unto ages and ages. Amen."
"Amen," she said.
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