Alison Kaiser just can’t come back

Now she’s just hoping her traumatic brain injury won’t keep her suffering the rest of her life.

“I need to let the town move on. I need to let myself figure out how to move on,” she said last week in a lengthy conversation, her words edged with anger, sorrow and hopelessness.

“What Alison is going through now, through no fault of her own, is heartbreaking, and I pray that her recovery comes quickly,” wrote Heidi Scheuermann, Stowe’s state representative and a longtime friend of Kaiser’s.

On March 11, 2016, a car driven by Jessica Cantwell, now 21, of Morrisville slammed into Kaiser’s SUV on Route 100 in Stowe during the morning commute. Police charged Cantwell with felony gross negligent driving resulting in a serious injury, plus a misdemeanor charge of heroin possession.

According to police reports, Cantwell had a cocktail of drugs in her bloodstream and had one full bag of heroin in the car, plus at least eight other bags “littered across the passenger’s seat.”

In an interview this week, Cantwell denied using drugs that day, but admitted she had a drug problem. She also expressed remorse for injuring Kaiser.

“I’m truly sorry and it sucks that she got into a car accident that morning, not knowing what was going on,” Cantwell said. “If I could take it all back, I would.”

Kaiser isn’t sure what she would say to Cantwell, given the chance. She’s too angry.

“In July, it would have been 24 years at Stowe. That’s more than half my life, and it’s been taken away from me,” Kaiser said. “Not everybody is meant to be a town clerk, and I’m really proud of what I did, and it’s hard to walk away from it.”

Running the books

Kaiser was hired as a town employee in 1993, less than five years after graduating from Stowe High School.

Stowe Town Manager Charles Safford shared a letter from Kaiser’s personnel file, written to then-town administrator Greg Federspiel by his assistant Connie Bull after Kaiser’s initial training period. Bull described Kaiser as “unusually skillful with computing and working with figures to a high degree of accuracy.”

“Alison demonstrates an exceptional ability to transmit messages, problems and information to her supervisor, town administrator and department heads,” Bull wrote. “I’m confident that Alison can handle the day-to-day running of our office.”

And she did, for more than two decades. And she helped other people navigate the tangled webs of bureaucracy, both locally and statewide.

“Alison has dedicated much of her adult life to the town of Stowe, and has done so with excellence, and always with a smile,” Scheuermann said. “Not only is she a longtime friend, but through my years on the select board and as a legislator, she has always been there to help and guide me. She has been an incredible asset to our community and will be sorely missed.”

A town clerk and treasurer has to know her way around all kinds of data — tax bills, property deeds, meeting minutes, ballots and voter checklists, dog registrations, and more. That’s why Stowe is one of the few Vermont towns where the town clerk and treasurer are appointed officials, instead of elected.

Town Manager Charles Safford said the town changed its charter in 2013 to make that switch. It was Kaiser’s idea. She had previously been elected, and re-elected, to the position after taking over in 2000.

“She was proud of what she did in her job, and she felt it ought to be a department head. She looked at her position as a skill position,” Safford said, drawing a line between the elected officials who handle the lofty ideals and the professionals who keep the lights on.

Kaiser has high praise for Safford, too, saying “he’s on the list of one of the greats” in municipal government. In her resignation letter to him, she signed off with Safford’s well-known catchphrase: “Keep smiling.”

“I really looked up to him,” she said. “More than I guess I knew.”

Kaiser was recognized for her abilities both statewide and regionally. The Vermont Municipal Clerks and Treasurers Associated named her clerk of the year in 2006. And she had been serving as a vice president of the New England Association of City and Town Clerks.

Every year, the association picks a different New England state to host its conference, a huge draw for the host town that attracts thousands of municipal employees. Kaiser had been working to bring it to Stowe. Now, that conference will be held somewhere else.

For all the physical discomfort Kaiser still suffers from the head injury she sustained last March, perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the injury is that she seems perfectly normal to people who see her — dark-shaded glasses aside — when inside her head, things are just different.

Her son has been reading the Harry Potter books to her, but 10 minutes after he’s done, she can’t remember the storyline. She has started knitting again, a small victory, but a vital one.

“The old me could do seven things at once, and now it’s hard to even sort out my own thoughts and organize the house,” she said.

Head injury

The Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles pulled Kaiser driver’s license in November because she can’t see well enough to drive. In its place, she was handed an application for the Special Services Transportation Agency, which provides vans for the elderly and the disabled.

At 46 years old, Kaiser is by no means elderly. And she’s still coming to terms with being disabled.

“I just don’t leave my house,” she said. “It sucks.”

Friends come to visit her in Shelburne, where she now lives, and take her out for lunch or something. But the stimuli from being out and about are too much to bear after a while. Sunny days are particularly rough, with light piercing into her skull, giving her headaches, nausea and dizziness.

Her right eye has a tendency to wander off on its own, an affliction she never had before. She wears special glasses with prisms in the lenses that force her eyes to work together, and see a single object instead of double.

For Kaiser, living with a traumatic brain injury is being hypersensitive to everything — sights, smells, sounds, textures are all dialed up to uncomfortable, dizzying levels. Going to the grocery store is “overwhelming,” because of the bright fluorescents. She does her grocery shopping online now.

She can even feel changes in the weather, when the pressure in her head builds up and she knows there’s a front coming through.

“I feel like a walking barometer,” she said.

When her resignation becomes official March 15, she loses her health insurance through the town government, which means she’ll have to find her own insurance. For a veteran town clerk, that ought to be a cinch, right?

“As a visually-impaired person trying to navigate that process, it’s tough,” she said. “A year ago I would have been helping other people do it, pointing them in the right direction.”

After talking for about a half-hour, Kaiser’s frustration caught up with her, and she started crying. She said her close friends keep telling her “that happy horseshit about the rearview mirror being smaller than the windshield,” but on some days, that optimism is hard to come by.

“I feel like every bit of strength and courage I had before is completely shattered,” she said. She sniffed, took a deep breath, and calmed her voice.

“I’m a fighter,” she said. “But I just don’t know how to fight right now.”