^{CLICK ON THE INTERACTIVE ABOVE TO HEAR MEMBERS AND LEARN MORE. VISIT THE BEACON HOUSE.}

For Matt Buckley, the moment fell somewhere between 6 and 10 a.m.,
April 21, 2004, in an operating room at Sentara Bayside Hospital.

For Larry Bain, it was 1 a.m., Nov. 8, 1987, on a highway in Chesapeake.

And for Carl Brockett, it was 1 a.m., June 19, 1980, on the exit ramp
off Fourth Street in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Moments that changed their lives – an instant they can mark with a pen and wonder about all the little decisions and twists and turns beforehand that could have made a difference.

And all the ways their lives changed afterward.

Friends. Jobs. The way they talk. Their store of memories.

Their lives turned in a matter of minutes – mere seconds for some. They’ll show you clips of the stories that ran in the paper, now yellowed with time.

Those moments have brought them together at the Beacon House, a building sandwiched between the bustle of a day care center and a string of business offices on Virginia Beach Boulevard.

It’s a clubhouse with a password no one wants: brain injury.

First, Larry Bain, because it’s hard not to start with the life of the clubhouse. He has sandy hair, blue eyes, a jovial manner.

“What’s your name? I’m sorry, I’m not good at names. I see the face, I hear the voice, but I’m no good with names. I joke around, so don’t get mad.”

The 45-year-old from Virginia Beach started coming to the clubhouse when it opened in October last year.

There are 45 members; about a dozen show up each day, and they set the agenda. They plan and cook their weekly luncheon. Write a newsletter. Plant a garden out back. Learn to use a computer. Answer the phones.

Take out the trash. Socialize.

“You come here and it’s like a workday, like a real job,” Larry says. “You have to be on time, and you do what they say, and then you leave.”

Mostly, though, it’s a place away from the homes of parents and relatives who care for them. Insurance, or the bounds of science, has run out on repairing their injuries – some too subtle to see. A few members work toward jobs; many can’t manage them or be left alone.

“You know, I can’t see right. I have tunnel vision,” Larry continues. “I had a stroke on my right side. Look, I wear a brace. I used to walk and drag. When I am walking, my brain isn’t thinking ‘heel-toe.’ Sometimes I drag it. So when I walk now I say ‘heel-toe.’ I know what I want to say, but the words don’t come out.”

It was different before.

He was 22 that night in 1987. He had a construction job and his own apartment. He and his girlfriend decided to have a few beers and go for a ride.

“We were jamming on the tunes, getting down. We got down so far, we couldn’t get up.”

They were on a highway not far from an exit to what was then Chesapeake General Hospital. An ambulance driver saw the car swerving and followed them, sounding his horn, but the car hit a median and went down into a culvert, flipping over several times.

It was a moment that would change his life, but two decades later, Larry paints it in a positive light.

“The ambulance driver and God said, ‘It’s not time for you go to heaven.’”

The girlfriend wasn’t seriously injured, but Sentara Nightingale Air Ambulance flew Larry to Norfolk General, where he spent three months before transferring to a rehab hospital in Washington. He spent a year there, then three more at a residential rehab facility that cost his parents $20,000 a year.

He can walk now and speak clearly, but he has tunnel vision and is colorblind. His memory fails him, and he lacks impulse control.

“It messed up all my friends. When they saw me, they said goodbye. I don’t blame them. They have to go on with their lives. I had a job at Farm Fresh bagging groceries. I got laid off because I had sticky fingers. Don’t tell anyone, but I was shoplifting.”

One of the clubhouse coordinators, Venus Mitchell, stops him to explain about impulsivity, a common brain-injury symptom. He used to take candy from the aisle rack while bagging groceries.

“I had the money,” Larry says. “The thing in my brain that says, ‘Hey, go pay for that stuff’ wasn’t there.”

His brain was working pretty well a couple of years ago when he came up with the idea of talking to high school students about his injuries.

He goes to schools throughout Virginia Beach with two other club members: Adam Moravec, who nodded off at the wheel after going without sleep for two days around the time of his girlfriend’s prom, and David Bennett, who was in a fender bender and gave in to road rage.

“Me and David and Adam, we go to the high schools and talk to the kids about drinking and driving and what can happen,” Larry says. “I don’t want to see anyone else have to be going, ‘What’s your name? What day is today?’ It’s not fun at all.”

Still, he has a positive demeanor.

“I don’t have a good attitude, I have a great attitude,” he says. “They called Nightingale to save me. They brought me back so I can talk to you and tell my story. All I want to see is the sunshine and a beautiful day. I could have said, ‘To heck with it,’ but I have too much to live for. I’m always looking for what’s to come. These are all my friends here, especially David.”

That would be fellow clubhouse member David Bennett. The 45-year-old from Chesapeake comes to the Beacon House almost every day. He enjoys talking with the other members and taking the field trips to high schools.

“I tell them to think before they get out and run their mouth, because that is exactly why I am in this situation.”

His injury is more obvious to the eye than Larry’s. David is bent to one side, uses a walker and speaks slowly, in a labored way. You have to listen very closely.

And he wants you to.

“I am hard to understand. If you don’t understand me, ask me to repeat it.”

He was 21 when his moment came about 6 p.m. on June 3, 1985.

He wishes he’d just stayed in his car.

It was a simple fender bender on Indian River Road in Chesapeake. A bunch of people got out of their cars, and a couple of guys went at it. One of them ran off, and the other came back to where David stood with a group of bystanders.

“My lethal weapon was my mouth. I had been on the sidelines the whole time the fight was going on when out of my mouth came some kind of vile crap. He came after me. He hit me right square in the back of my beautiful head.”

The blow cracked his skull, rattling his brain so hard it was damaged all around. David was in the hospital for six months, then had nine years of therapy, until the insurance ran out.

He’s 80 percent paralyzed on the right side.

The striking thing about David and Larry is how young they look, almost as if time had frozen them in that instant in their 20s. David jokes, “I have been 21 for the past 24 years.”

The man who hit him served seven months in jail.

“Seven whole months,” David says with a wry smile.

David’s whip smart, but here’s the trick: You have to listen. Sometimes he can tell if someone is just nodding and pretending to understand, saying, “ummhmmm, umhmmm, I know.”

“That’s when I say, ‘You have a face that looks like a dog.’”

And laughs when the person says, “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

Carl Brockett likes to help out in what’s called the culinary department – that’s the kitchen, where they prepare a dinner for the whole membership once a week. The other days, members bring their lunches.

Carl, 76 and from Virginia Beach, dresses impeccably – today, a maroon sweater, pressed tan pants, a gold cross, a tan golfer’s hat. He seems to have a perpetual smile on his face, a pleasant look.

His moment came June 19, 1980. He was 46, married with children. Living in Brooklyn, working as a McDonald’s manager in Jersey.

“I had trouble with my car. I stopped on the way home. I lifted the hood. I had a new suit on and a tie. They must have thought I had a lot of money. Someone came up and hit me in the back of the head. They wanted my car.”

Police reports say he lay there 30 minutes in the middle of the night before a passing motorist stopped. Carl’s wallet, high school class ring and wristwatch were missing.

He wishes that were all.

“I don’t remember July.”

His wife, Velma, says much of what Carl tells you was relearned, after a monthlong coma, from what she and others have told him over the past three decades: “He was a very active person, a hard worker, loved his children, ideal husband, and just like that, it was taken away.”

He couldn’t talk for months, until a psychiatrist realized Carl could communicate through written notes. Rehab therapists used an approach new at the time, in which other parts of the brain were retrained to enable reading and talking.

His injuries still cause word mix-ups, along with anxiety, depression, impulsivity and anger.

“We’d sit at the table and he’d want the salt,” said Velma, “and he’d say, ‘Give me my shoe.’\u2009”

At the Beacon House he seems happy, and it gives his wife a reprieve from being full-time interpreter and caregiver.

“Thirty years goes by fast,” Carl says.

Not so much for Velma, who has struggled to find services for him.

Carl’s is one of the oldest brain injuries in the clubhouse; Kendra’s is one of the newest.

She doesn’t want her last name used, or her photo taken.

Kendra, 22, has dark, curly hair, olive skin, a tentative smile and a worried sort of look across her brow. Her right arm is in a sling.

Today she is learning to type on a keyboard with one hand. There’s a computer program just for that, and clubhouse coordinator Abby Keen is helping her figure it out.

Kendra’s moment: July 15, 2008, in her Virginia Beach bedroom.

According to relatives, she was a registered nurse with two young children when she asked her husband for a divorce. He came into their Virginia Beach townhouse, locked the children in their bedroom and, according to police reports, shot Kendra in the head before turning the gun to his own head.

Three days later, Kendra’s brother came looking for her. He found the children at their window, took them to safety, then returned to find Kendra and her husband.

They both survived.

According to her mother, half the brain tissue on Kendra’s left side had to be removed, and a prosthetic skull implanted. Her husband was charged with malicious wounding, using a firearm in a felony and child abuse. He continues to recover in a state hospital.

Kendra is one of three women at the clubhouse who were shot in the head – two by their husbands. She can talk in short phrases, but only with great effort. She wants to tell her story, so Abby helps.

What does she like about the clubhouse?

“Friends. Come here. Job.”

Abby fills in the blanks: “She’s working toward learning the computer so she can go back to work.”

What kind of work does she  want to do?

Kendra looks at Abby, who urges her on. Kendra struggles, trying to find words, then says:

“Just like me.”

“You want to work with other women like you?” Abby asks.

Kendra nods.

What does she want to tell other women like her?

She pauses, as though the words were caught somewhere deep inside her head. Finally, she pushes out two words:

“Watch out.”

And then, again, eyes fired with intensity now that she’s gotten the words down:

“Watch out.”

Which brings us to Matt Buckley, the guy at the top of this story.

He’s a big bear of a man, with thick white hair and ruddy skin. He sits by himself in an office of the clubhouse, typing away on a computer, working the phones, trying to find money to supplement the state grant that keeps the place open.

Matt, 48, can speak fine. His gait is perfect, his memory all too sharp.

That’s because the Buckley brain injury was not in Matt’s head, but his wife’s.

He remembers leaving Mary in Room 3 at Bayside Hospital that April day in 2004, for a routine procedure to remove a bunion.

He kissed her goodbye at 6 a.m., and by 10 a.m., he had received the news: Mary’s heart had stopped briefly during the procedure, perhaps an allergic reaction to the anesthesia. When he was allowed to see her at 4 p.m, she was in the middle of a seizure – arms flailing, legs kicking, eyes rolled back in her head.

“That’s when I knew the Mary I dropped off in the morning was not coming back,” he says.

Doctors put her in a drug-induced coma to prevent further brain damage. In June 2004, she was moved from the hospital to a New Jersey nursing home, then back to a local one, where she lived in a vegetative state.

The state Board of Medicine would later reprimand and fine the anesthesiologist for failing to monitor Mary’s care during the operation.

After Mary’s injury, Matt tried to go back to his old job as a director for a teleservices company, but he couldn’t: “All I could do was talk all day about what happened.”

He resigned and started his own business, struggling daily with the bitterness about what had happened to his once-vibrant wife and the mother of their four sons, now 20, 19, 16 and 11.

Fortunately, another life-changing moment came before Mary died in October 2006.

In June of the previous year, Matt was driving through the desert of New Mexico, after taking one of his sons to camp in Colorado. He can still see the mile marker on Route 66 in his mind. Matt’s not the type to hear voices, but his wife had a distinctive one that fairly boomed. He hadn’t heard it since he left her at the hospital more than a year earlier, but there was no mistaking it out there in the desert:

“Quit feeling sorry for yourself and make something good out of this.”

Matt describes it as an epiphany: “It was like, ‘Click. We are going to help people out.’ How, I had no idea.”

He hooked up with the Brain Injury Association of Virginia and started the Mary Buckley Foundation. In October 2008, he, Joann Mancuso and a handful of other advocates for those with brain injuries opened the Beacon House.

Which is why Matt is here with Larry and David and Carl and Kendra and all the others.

None of their lives is what they planned. Some tell program coordinator Mancuso, “I want my old life back.”

And she tells them, “You can’t get it back. But you can make a new one.”

Matt knows that lesson.

“Every once in a while, I think: 'Why me … why Mary?’”
But then he pulls into the parking lot of the clubhouse where his wife’s name is emblazoned over the front door.

“I’ll hear someone say, 'Hey, Matt,’ or 'Hey, Phil,’ or 'What’s your name again?’”

He chuckles before turning serious again to describe a recent scene when David  came to him with tears in his eyes and said to him: “I just want to thank you for opening this place.”

For now, that’s a moment that keeps Matt going.

Visit the Beacon House's website at www.MaryFoundation.org.

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635,
elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com