PROVO -- Thanksgiving was an anniversary of sorts for Todd Larson.
The bespectacled Brigham Young University sophomore doesn't remember much about last year's traditional American celebration -- but it's not one he'll soon forget, either.Last Thursday marked a year since Larson hopped into a blue compact car with his older sibling, Robert, for a weekend campout in Goblin Valley after the annual family feast.
It was the last time he saw his brother alive. And it kicked off a chain of events that left jagged physical, psychological and spiritual scars that may take a lifetime to heal.
About 15 minutes from the planned destination, Larson and his brother, driving south on I-15, smashed into a cow meandering across the cold freeway. The car careened across the frozen asphalt.
Inside the twisted metal carcass, the two Highland brothers lay unconscious in the frigid November night air. Robert, 25, never woke from his injuries. Todd sank deep into a coma.
Todd Larson, who smacked into the windshield, crushed the right side of his face and head. He strains to clear the impenetrable fog hanging over his memory about that night.
He can't recall if he was in the driver's seat when the 1990 Volkswagen Golf jolted to a sudden stop. He vaguely remembers leaving his Provo apartment after packing an overnight bag, much to his mother's chagrin.
"She didn't want us to leave because it was getting dark," he said. "But it was just another trip. Me and my brother would go and camp out all the time."
The rest is an unsolvable mystery. His neurons and synapses rebel, refusing to connect, leaving Larson, at 23, pondering the missing time between rising from the Thanksgiving table and opening his eyes in a Provo hospital room three months later.
Without a brother. Without the use of his right arm and leg. Without knowing why.
"I can't remember if I was awake or asleep or what. I can't remember anything at all," he said. "I've tried but it's just gone. That'll be one of the questions I ask when I die."
About 10 p.m., medical help was summoned by passing motorists who stopped at the crash site. A helicopter ambulance was dispatched but could not lift off in the rising storm clouds.
An ambulance from Grand Junction, Colo., made its way on the icy roads to the accident scene.
Despite the wintry conditions, it took just a few more minutes at arrive at St. Mary's Regional Medical Center in Grand Junction. After the rescue crew arrived, doctors and nurses, while wheeling Larson into surgery for a blood clot in his brain, did not believe he would recover from his extensive injuries.
"They said if he makes it," recalled his mother, Cynthia Larson,"he'd be a vegetable."
Her heart crumpled when she was told of the accident that claimed one son and seriously injured another. Local police officers had been dispatched about 11 p.m. with the unenviable task of informing the family.
Todd's parents, Leo and Cynthia, phoned family members for moral support and started the six-hour drive to Grand Junction. As they started on the road, bracing for what news awaited them, the Highland couple knew their family was no longer, and never would be, the same.
One child no longer breathed life. The other, recently returned from an LDS mission, now lay in an operating room in front of sterile surgeons.
"All we had was our faith," Cynthia Larson said. "It was, Do you believe what you say you believe? We could only say in our prayers, 'Thy will be done.' When they knocked us down medically, that's all we had."
As they drove the same stretches of roads their sons took just hours before, the Highland couple, wrapped in bitter tears and scraps of faith, spent hours "speaking" to their sons.
"We talked about Robbie. We talked a lot to Robbie," Cynthia said, tears welling in her eyes. "We felt close to him. We told him we didn't blame him for the accident."
Fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opened their hearts and homes to the Larson family. A nurse at St. Mary's was president of a local Relief Society and checked daily on their well-being. A local restaurateur fed Leo and Cynthia for a week for free.
Cynthia refused to bury Robert until Todd's condition bettered. After two weeks -- during which Todd underwent a tracheotomy and surgery to repair a pulverized sinus -- she relented and asked for a formal eulogy for Robert.
"I had decided if I had to do a funeral," she says, "I was not going to do two."
Did the accident rock their faith in a fair, loving and kind God? "I think that's a fair statement," said Leo Larson.
Keeping Todd in Grand Junction was too much for the Larsons, who were exhausted physically and emotionally from repeatedly making the trek. Plans were made to fly him by airplane to Utah Valley Regional Medical Center.
Strangely, the airplane flight to the Provo Airport is the first thing Todd can recall.
"That's the only thing I remember in the month of December," he said. "I remember thinking, This is quite the dream."
Todd Larson, near death, remained in a coma for two more months. His parents would talk to him for hours, asking him questions, hoping their words would force his eyes to flicker open.
They insisted that nurses talk to him positively. Mention of Robert's death was outlawed. They read him Louis L'Amour books to stimulate his brain.
"We didn't have a lot of options. We could make the best of it, or we could make the worst of it. We decided to make the best of it, no matter the outcome," said Cynthia Larson, who kept a running log of "small miracles" she saw in her son's condition.
Most worrisome was the extent of damage to Todd's brain. A human brain consists of billions of microscopic fibers, suspended in fluid. While the exterior skull is smooth, the inner surface contains ribbing and pronounced bony structures. Impact with these inner surfaces of the skull causes tearing and bruising that results in brain damage.
As of Feb. 1, after two scares with clots in his lungs and a doctor's diagnosis that he wouldn't live, Todd hadn't uttered a coherent word. Then, slowly, he began to wake.
"The first time he spoke, he said, 'Could you move the pillows,' " Cynthia Larson recalled. "Once he said that, you know if he can put that together, something up there is working."
Later, his father, with some urging, got Todd to choose a red popsicle over other flavors.
Doctors pounced on his breakthrough, especially when Todd talked at length to his mother about some new pants she had bought for him. A touch-pad keyboard was placed near his bed.
This board, fashioned somewhat like a typewriter, could be used by Todd, who struggled to speak and open his eyes, to tell those in the room what he needed.
"I could never figure out what he was trying to say," Cynthia Larson said, chuckling.
By the middle of February, Todd had opened his eyes for good. The family can't say exactly when he woke up because his progress rolled about slowly, in stages, building strength.
Cynthia Larson recalls the struggle. Her son, once an incredibly active outdoorsman, couldn't sit up, couldn't hold his head up to face his visitors.
Todd Larson remembers posing his first question: "What happened to Robbie?"
After basking for a moment in his recovery, the Larsons braced for the unpleasant task of telling Todd his brother died in the crash. A videotape of the funeral was brought to the hospital, a sad start to Todd's recovery of the use of the right side of his body and thinking process.
Todd, whose emotions about that night are twisted tight, hasn't yet grieved his brother's passing. Until last month, he refused to visit the grave site in the American Fork City Cemetery or pray in public.
"Regardless of how much money I get (from the insurance and government), it's not worth the price of my brother," he said. "I cry a lot now because of who I am, and there's nothing that can be done. The fact that I was in an accident, that my leg doesn't work, I can't go to the bathroom when I want to. I've realized what happened -- and that makes me cry."
After some reconstructive surgery for the crushed bones in his face, Todd started physical therapy to regain the mobility in his right arm and leg. By May, to the surprise of doctors and his family, he was walking by his own volition.
"I think if you asked them they'd say I was the poster child of rehab therapy," he said, six months after leaving the hospital.
He walked out of the medical center May 22, determined to step back into the life he knew before the crash. It wasn't going to be easy, however.
Besides not being able to move the toes on his right foot, overcoming limited movement in his right hand and slower speech, Todd had to learn how to learn again.
Attention and concentration are things Todd doesn't take for granted. Studies show that people learn by blocking out distractions to focus on specific tasks. Survivors of traumatic brain injuries have difficulty wading through an idea or a sequence to completion.
Intent to finish his degree at Brigham Young University, Todd this summer moved out of his parents' house and into the dormitories on the sprawling Provo campus. He looked for help at the university's office for students with disabilities.
He needed to complete the classes he was taking when he was hospitalized. Four of the seven professors allowed him to receive the grades he posted at the time of the accident. The others granted him official withdrawals.
"I guess I'm not an 'A' student anymore," he said of his struggles with his current classes -- physics, chemistry and geology. "I really wasn't before, but back then I didn't have a reason."
A fellow student takes notes for him in class on carbon paper, largely because he can't write as fast as he can think. He also has difficulty reading and comprehending, even at a slower-than-normal speed.
A computer at the disabled-student office reads back his textbooks after he scans the pages into its memory bank. He learns by listening carefully. Again and again and again.
Like many college sophomores, he detests physics homework. He prefers to spend time with his new fiancee, a fellow student whom Todd believes bears resemblance to the Canadian chanteuse Celine Dion.
He says he loves her. And part of that affection, he offers, is because he knows she wants to be with the person he is now -- not who he was 12 months ago. Changes to his personality, he says, are "for the better."
Todd is quieter now, less gregarious. Sometimes, to his embarrassment, he laughs uncontrollably, often at the oddest things. Also, about once a month he goes through a day during which he can't do anything but cry.
"I act totally different," he said of such times. "I want to find out if it is normal. I think it is."
Todd plans to undergo reconstructive surgery in December. Small bumps and holes under his skin on his forehead will be smoothed out and filled in by a plastic surgeon. He wants to look good for a summer wedding, in time to celebrate a year since he walked, against all odds, out of the hospital.
As for the family, the Larsons are tired of watching TV shows about doctors. And what about the Sandra Bullock movie, "While You Were Sleeping," about a woman who pretends to be the fiancee of a man in a coma?
"Totally stupid," Cynthia said. "I used to like 'ER' too. But I've had enough ER in real life."
Leo and Cynthia Larson have consulted an attorney about their chances of winning a lawsuit against the rancher who allowed his cattle to roam about lands without fences. They also question the liability of the state for the 65 mph limit along that stretch of road.
They are unsure if they will pursue the legal venue, partly to put last year's events behind them. Thanksgiving, they know, will always be a bittersweet day. Giving thanks for life: the one given and the one taken away.
This holiday was, understandably, difficult to celebrate. Though often lighthearted in conversations, thoughts turned to Robert Larson's memory, especially during a family visit to his grave.
"I think that was a really hard time for us," Todd Larson said. "We did good. We only cried at the cemetery and when we talked about Rob."
Then the family received more heartbreaking news: Two vivacious teenage cousins from Henefer, Summit County, were killed in a car crash the day after Thanksgiving.
"I don't think that my family has accepted the fact that traveling at night is going to be something that members of my family are going to do," Todd Larson said, after hearing of the tragedy.
"I think that Thanksgiving days are going to hold something different for my family now."