Local woman cares for first husband with new family after accident
A local woman cares for first husband with new family after accident
A local woman's unconventional commitment to her husband after a devastating car crash, transforming her life and career to care for him while finding unexpected love, resonates through her TikTok journey, shedding light on the challenges of ambiguous loss and unconditional love.
Houston - 'Til death do us part. Those are vows a local woman promises to keep in an unconventional way after her husband suffered a catastrophic car crash.
Kristen Armstrong even changed careers to learn how to communicate with him better and is taking TikTok by storm with her love story. She vividly remembers the early days with Brandon Smith when they were high school sweethearts.
"Brandon was 15, and I was 16, and we met through our church. We were in the same youth group and just kind of got to know each other, became friends, and started dating," explains Kristen.
Five years later, their love blossomed into marriage. "I had one more year of school at Texas A&M, so I was finishing school, and he was taking some classes, and you know, we were typical, broke college students married but enjoying life together. We had a dog and had a little place," reminisces Kristen.
Things were going great until she got a phone call from the Houston Police Department asking her to get to the hospital immediately. She didn't even know if her husband was alive. This was two years into their marriage in 2008 after Brandon suffered life-threatening injuries in a car crash.
Life Flight rushed him to Memorial Hermann. "He was in a coma state. He had a diffuse axonal injury and anoxic brain injury, so severe traumatic brain injury," says Kristen.
That affected everything from Brandon's memory to speech and movement and confined him to a wheelchair.
"He has spasticity where his muscles are tight, so he doesn't have good control of his muscles and good motor programming for his muscles, which affects him physically and cognitively altogether. He's not able to care for himself. He needs 24-hour care to help get through the day," says Kristen.
It was heartbreaking for her to realize they would never share the lives they'd dreamed of as a typical wife and husband.
"I was happy to care for and loved him very much and still do, but our roles had changed then! It became very clear when I brought him home, and I was changing him, feeding him, giving him medication, and transferring him that those roles had changed," says Kristen.
She was in her early twenties and would never be able to carry on another conversation with the love of her life or have children with him. She made the excruciating decision to file for divorce, yet become his legal guardian, wanting to fulfill her vows of "in sickness and in health" for life. The judge allowed her a test run.
"So, after a year, I went to the probate judge, we had a court date, and she was able to see that I had done everything I said I would do, and she asked me what happens someday if you get married and you have kids, you know what happens to Brandon, which is a fair question. But I knew in my heart that Brandon was a piece of me, and I would never leave him, so I told her how long he would be in my life. I'm going to care for him until the day that I die, so I've been his legal guardian for 15 years," states Kristen.
She says on days, he can say a few words. He sometimes calls her "little sis." She feels he does feel like a brother to her now. Kristen changed her career from an art historian to a medical worker after witnessing Brandon's tender, loving care at TIRR Memorial Hermann.
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"I realized I needed to find meaning in all of this sadness, loss, and grief, and I decided I wanted to go into the field of brain injury and help other people who had brain injuries, so I went back to graduate school and became a speech pathologist, and I worked at the same hospital that Brandon was at," states Kristen.
What she learned in grad school helped her with Brandon, and what she learned from Brandon helped her patients. Kristen knew if she moved forward with another romantic relationship, it would have to be "the right one."
In 2014, she realized James Armstrong answered her prayers during one of their first dates at church with Brandon!
"James loves Brandon very much! If you ask him who is a part of our family, he names our kids, me and Brandon, so he sees him very much as a part of our family, and I'm very grateful for that. I think it's easy to take for granted at times because he's so good in that way. But yeah, James is very, very unique in the way that he loves him," says Kristen.
James helps care for Brandon, even changing and feeding him.
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"We see him weekly, if not more often than in our home. My kids know him. They call him Uncle Brandon. My husband has a relationship with him. He continues to be an essential part of our family, and I am so grateful for that," states Kristen.
She shares their journey on TikTok. While she has received a lot of positive remarks, there are also many negative ones that she and James defend.
"So, deciding to move forward with a divorce (from Brandon) was challenging because I felt like a widow. I felt like I lost my husband, and we don't talk enough about that. I'm just going to put a plug-in for people dealing with ambiguous loss. Whether it's someone with a brain injury, someone who's had a stroke or dementia, or even somebody you love who has a severe addiction, you still experience such great loss, and we don't talk about it. There's not a space for those of us experiencing that loss to go," explains Kristen.
She has experienced unconditional love, and she hopes to continue spreading their love through social media. You can find her on TikTok: @followmetothemouse