Perseverance: continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition.
Today is a date of remembrance for me and my children. It is a date that has lost power over the last 13 years but will remain, for the rest of our lives, as a date of life altering, horrific, and traumatic importance.
Thirteen years ago today my first husband committed suicide. Now, this day, I remember and am in awe of what I endured and the perseverance it took to not let the darkness swallow me.
Sometimes perseverance isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t happen with some inspirational song playing in the back, sweat pouring from your brow as you conquer the challenge before you. Sometimes, it is just sitting up in bed. It is taking a shower or eating something. It is just staying in one place and not letting the gravity of the situation pull you one inch backward. Sometimes, it is that quiet cry to God to help you sustain just one more minute. Those one more minutes add up to days, then weeks, then months, then years.
And you look at the path from which you came and are so very grateful.
After my first husband died several people said, “You won’t even remember this first year,” as if it was some sort of consolation I had been so traumatized my brain would block it out. So I wrote. I wrote everything down because I wanted to remember. I wanted to never forget all the gigantic and miniscule ways God was there. In every moment capturing every tear, He was there.
I share now some of my journal from that day. Incredible blessings, unexpected, have since come in the form of an old friend who became my husband. It also gut punched me with almost losing Wesley, our sweet son with special needs, during a month long stay in the ICU with all the drama of a television show. My father passed away and with that my protector and life will never be the same.
One of my favorite quotes is from Robert Frost:
In Three Words, I Can Sum Up Everything I’ve Learned About Life. It Goes On.
It does. And I go joyfully, gratefully with it. Yet on February 10, I remember…
Extraordinary Sacrifice
“God whispers in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” C.S. Lewis
I walked back downstairs into the basement and turned the corner into the theater room. My eyes were immediately drawn to the double door and I noticed it was unlocked. As if punched in the gut, I could hardly breathe and something in me just knew. To this day I still do not know why but I ran straight outside. With no socks or shoes, without a coat, I ran into the cold, heartless February air leaving the door behind me wide open. I ran as I have never run before. I did not know where I was going, only that I was going to find him. My determined feet carried me to the barren spot down the hill in the woods behind our home. There he was, my husband and father of my children, dead.
I screamed an expression I did not know my voice could make. It was a desperate cry that came from a place inside me I did not know existed nor had I ever fathomed to realize. Nothing but that exact combination of shock and desperation could replicate the sound my soul was making. It was not a groan nor was it a scream. It was a unique sound all together and I couldn’t believe it was coming from me.
His eyes stared blankly at the cloud filled, sad sky. His color had already changed to a hue of yellow I had never seen on a human body with legs tucked underneath as if he had fallen backward.
“What happened?!” I screamed and kept screaming as if someone was going to answer. “Oh, God, what happened?” Then I saw it. I saw the small hole through his chest, the same place I had laid my head countless times over the better part of 17 years.
It was not like the movies. There was no blood pouring out or even a puddle beneath him. I could hardly tell where the bullet had penetrated. There was only a pencil sized hole in his favorite blue sweatshirt. Although no more than ten minutes had passed from the time I left him to get dressed to the time I found him in the woods, something in me just knew it was too late.
I fumbled to get my phone out of my pocket. Sliding the screen to unlock it was nearly impossible with hands shaking violently. Finally, I concentrated as much as I could to dial three numbers in the correct order. 9. 1. 1.
“911, what is your emergency?” the male voice began
“My husband shot himself. He isn’t breathing. Please send an ambulance,” I screamed hoping beyond hope he could be resurrected.
“I need you to calm down so I can understand you,” the voice on the other end urged.
“Please. My husband. My husband is dead. Hurry. Send someone. Please,” I collapsed next to his lifeless body. “Is the ambulance coming?”
“It is. Where are you now?” he asked calmly.
“Beside my husband, in the woods,” I began hyperventilating.
“Ma’am, I need you to go to the driveway so the authorities will see you when they pull up,”
I found my way to the drive way.
“Oh God, what will I tell my children?” I cried.
“I am here, ma’am. Let me know when the authorities arrive,” the dispatcher whispered.
Moments later the first police officer arrived and the 911 dispatcher hung up. A very tall man with broad shoulders and dark hair walked calmly up to me.
“My husband. He is in the woods over there,” I said almost hyperventilating.
“Please stay here and wait for the ambulance,” he said with a serious tone as he walked with long and hurried steps to the back yard.
My heart and mind ever so slowly began traversing into a surreal place. As if in slow motion, I saw my parents tan van turn the corner and proceed cautiously to the bottom of the drive way. They had come from Northern Virginia a couple of days before for a visit. Just three hours earlier morning my mother had made us a wonderful breakfast and we all sat at the table devouring it.
They had only gone to the bookstore but returned to caution tape and police cars. I saw my mother running full blast toward me as I cried, “Gary shot himself. He is dead. I can’t believe he left me…”
My mother fell to ground screaming “No, Gary, it wasn’t worth it.” My father’s face turned to rage as he punched the air and simply yelled, “NO!” as if he could command it to not be so.
“I can’t believe he left me,” I repeated. “I can’t believe he left me,” over and over and over for years to come.
As my mother cried and screamed in the grass I felt as if my soul was beginning to disconnect from my body. I touched her back and just stared at the world around me. I saw houses and tress. I saw the grey, overcast February sky as if God Himself chastised the sun and sent it away but nothing was registering. The wind was blowing, it was cold, my mother was screaming but it must all be happening to someone else. This was not, this could not be happening to me.
My father realized my demeanor was changing. My speech was becoming slurred. Like the nightmares I had as a child, I wanted to talk but the words were coming out unformed. He recognized the signs of shock and summoned the police officer. Since the ambulance arrived but no resuscitation effort was made they carried me in to be assessed by the EMTs.
“Stay with me, focus on me,” my father repeated. At times he had to yell to get my attention.
When I looked at him things were clearer and the full force of my grief was held at bay. As soon as my eyes diverted from my father everything became chaotic and uncertain. The world was literally spinning. Gravity was failing. I was disconnecting from my own realm. I was at the cusp of oblivion. There was an intense, real fear knowing that if I let go and floated into that unknown place I might not know how to get back. There was a knowledge that I could somehow control it. For a split second, though, I wondered if it would be more inviting than the reality I now faced. An enormous vacuum was sucking my soul away yet even in my altered mind I knew I had to try to stay. I was scared. I did not want to go there yet did not want to be in reality equally as strongly. What was transpiring was much too much for me to handle. The reality that my world was being ripped apart was both figurative and literal as I lay in the ambulance looking at my father’s loving, pleading eyes.
“Stay here, the boys need you to stay here,” my father begged.
Reminding me that my boys needed me changed everything. It was the exact switch that needed to be flipped. Indeed, from the moment of conception I loved them more than my own self. When I was pregnant with them I would care for myself. I would eat right and drink plenty of water. I quit smoking. I could not or would not do any of those things for just me, but when my body became a vessel to them I did anything to ensure they would safely arrive into the world. I needed to do anything to ensure they would stay safe in a rapidly changing world.
I fought back with all my might against the lure of being in the other world where, I believed, I could be numb but where my children would not be able to find me. They did not even yet know they had lost a parent, I was determined they would not lose both.
I lay on a stretcher wrapped in a blanket. I do not know how long I had been outside barefoot and no coat. I was shaking from cold and fear and death and uncertainty. I was shaking to the very soul of me.
I could physically feel and spiritually sense the presence of all that was to come: as if grief, anger, despair, anxiety, loneliness, and regret, all at levels I had never encountered, were floating above but had not yet pounced. They were swirling, circling, waiting to attack viciously. Indeed, they were eager to devour me. I felt strangely peaceful that they would wait. Instead, I looked at the young woman who was part of the response team.
“Do you read the Bible?” I asked.
“Yes, I am a woman of faith,” she answered.
I whispered with my eyes closed, “How is God possibly going to bring good out of this? My husband is dead. The father of my children is dead.” When I finished my question I looked up at her as if saying “my husband is dead” was safer if said with my eyes closed.
Tears began to roll down her eyes. “It is all right to be angry with God and tell Him you are angry,” she responded.
“I am not angry with Him,” I said, “I cannot face this without Him.”
My spirit made a decision when my mind could not. My brain and heart had suffered an injury of cataclysmic proportion yet my spirit knew I would not survive except by clinging to my Father’s robe. I was the woman in the crowd. I was not pushing through people but I would push through anger, fear, doubt, loneliness, excruciating pain, to reach the hem of my Savior. I would stop at nothing to touch Him. I knew my faith would heal me.
As I sit here 13 years later sharing this incredibly raw and vulnerable moment, I know it did and for that, I am exceedingly grateful.
