For 14 years Corina Turcinovic rarely left her home in Beverly. She worried that her bedridden, quadriplegic husband, Maro, would need her, or that the nurses who helped care for him wouldn’t show up. When she did venture out she was never gone for long, and she always thought about what she could bring back for him–a blues CD, some shower gel. “I was there like his shadow,” she says.
Her husband, Marin Turcinovic, was born on January 13, 1962, in Dubrovnik, then in the Croatian republic within Yugoslavia. His father was a farmer, his mother a housewife. Called Maro by his friends and family, he was passionate about music, painting, and sculpture, though not academics, and after high school he enrolled in a two-year technical school to become a metalworker. He also played drums and started a band with some of his friends.
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No one was sure exactly how it happened, but Corina, who was in Paris at the time, believes Maro was in the street because the sidewalk was too narrow for all five band members to walk side by side. “It was dark,” she says. “The driver panicked. People say it looked like he accelerated instead of hitting the brakes. The impact was on both legs–they shattered. As he fell back down he hurt his neck. There was a nice lady–who I wish I could find one day–who put a blanket over him.”
Corina was at work when her roommate came to tell her about the accident. “I felt like one of those cartoon characters running on top of the mountain who suddenly realized there was nothing underneath,” she says. “Immediately I thought, ‘I’m going to go there.’”
Unable to sit up, Maro was dependent on a respirator and had to be fed through a tube in his stomach. Corina learned how to feed him, how to suction his throat because he couldn’t cough, change the tubes of his ventilator, and frequently reposition him to prevent bedsores. For months he communicated by blinking–one blink meant yes, two blinks no. Only after over a year of physical and speech therapy was he finally able to speak and swallow.
The only way Corina’s status could be secure was if she were married to an American citizen. In 1998 Maro was granted legal residency under a “suspension of deportation” provision because he would have suffered “extreme hardship” if he left the U.S., and in September 2003 he was finally allowed to apply to become a naturalized citizen.
