Love sustains the Shacker family

This is a love story steeped in horror, heartbreak, hardship, healing and hope. It’s the on-going saga of a brilliant family of three lead by an army of one — a renaissance man who imploded almost five years ago on the eve of his greatest success; a man the medical community declared doomed, deemed a brilliant mind trapped inside a broken, unmendible body; a diagnosis which indomitable determination on the part of all three, would, these years later, prove untrue.

At the dawn of this century Michael Shacker was at work on numerous books, a few of them for 20 years or more. He was a science writer, an environmentalist, a philosophical historian, and at the bottom of it all — a humanist who believed that no problem caused by man was not also solvable by man. Like Buckminster Fuller, Shacker was an ever-critical optimist, a gadfly seeking to sting the rump of complacent humanity out of its deadly stupor and into action. A large, joyful man of vast vision, he was not disposed to break off a single piece of a bigger problem; rather he was at work on a global curriculum for all citizens of earth, one which synthesized wisdom of the ages in order to take on the never-more-important concerns of our one world right now. Oddly enough, his 2002 Lyons Press publication A Spring Without Bees: How Colony Collapse Has Endangered Our Food Supply, was, by his standards, rather humble in scope.

The lecture tour was poised to begin when on the night of April 2, 2008 Michael suffered a massive stroke and was air-lifted to Albany Medical Center. The particular type of aortic dissection for which he was genetically predisposed would prove unequivocably fatal without an extremely high risk operation. His body packed in ice for seven hours, heart and lungs shut down, Michael survived the implantation of an artificial aorta. But he suffered a second stroke mid-operation and to relieve the pressure on his brain, approximately 8 square inches of his skull was removed and placed in deepfreeze. His wife and daughter, awake for 48 hours, viewed his gray, corpse-like body and were told the operation was a success even as the news that the second stroke had crippled his entire left side, fast followed.

As the days ticked by a CAT-scan revealed the damage to the left side of his brain was, as Barbara would eventually reveal in her strokefamily.org blog, “15 to 20 times the area it would have taken to wipe out all speech.” Barbara was already fully aware of the terminologies and their meaning. At 13 her father was rendered mute by a profound stroke. The doctors said he would never speak again. At the age of 22 she developed a therapy proving them wrong. At that time she had yet to meet Michael Shacker, although she would — in the middle of a first marriage — fall in love with a tall dark stranger in a powerful dream, a stranger who, seven years later, she would identify as the man who, now her husband, lay all but lifeless before her. For some unknowable reason the same tragedy struck the most important man in her life —twice. She had no choice but to gear up for battle once again, take on the nay-sayers once again. But this time the challenge was…even by own enlightened understandings, all but insurmountable.