Inconceivable

Wake Up, wake up. The morning of November 24th; I feel the nightmare of death intrude my life once again. This unsuspecting nightmare began with a phone call from Chicago, Illinois. The voice of my daughter-in-law, Laurie, tells me that there has been an accident and my son Samuel was killed. I can hear myself scream. I can feel the scream in my body. If I stay here too long pain reverberates through the caverns of my brain and the headache returns. A moment longer and the steel strap will tighten around my chest. My heart will be squeezed, it will burst, and I will die.

I have had this pain before, this squeezing of my heart, and instinctively I know I must not go there. I must breathe and I must cry. I do whatever it is I have to do so I can survive. I must not die. My family needs me. My daughter-in-law needs me. My daughter and my grandchildren need me. My son’s children need me. I must do whatever it is that I need to do. In the next room, my daughter screams and that helps me. My granddaughter collapses and she helps me. I hear them praying; they pray for strength and courage and then my daughter goes upstairs to pack my suitcase. My friend Kim knocks on the door and she holds me and I sob into her loving bosom; “All of my baby boys are dead”

On Thanksgiving Day I fly to Illinois with my daughter, Martha; my granddaughter Betty, and her daughter, Alair, who is four years old. In Chicago it is freezing cold and there are no airplanes landing but we land. We do what we need to do. Together we bury our son, husband, father, brother, uncle and cousin. The year ends and begins and then by February I am in the hospital. The pain in my heart has serious consequences. Was it three months before I return to any degree of physical normalcy? I need to wake up from this nightmare. I must find a way to live. Samuel is preceded in death by his father and his two older brothers. It is just inconceivable that three of my five children have now preceded me, in death. I search for a thought, a word to help me. Like magic it came to me; ‘inconceivable’.

As I go about daily tasks, inconceivable works for me and it works for other people. We don’t have to think about what happened and we don’t have to talk about it. There is a great relief. I can see it in people’s faces when they say, “I do not know what to say”. There is nothing to say. There are no words to help anyone feel better, and yet we all keep looking for some words of consolation. People keep trying but it is too unbelievable. I looked the word up in the dictionary to help me understand why it makes me feel better; Inconceivable: that cannot be thought of, imagined, or believed; unthinkable. My loss is inconceivable.

For two years I have lived the word, ‘inconceivable’, in order to survive the deepest grief I have ever known. Then somewhere deep inside of me I know inconceivable isn’t working for me anymore. The voice inside of me was saying; “It may be OK for other people to continue to live with the word ‘inconceivable’ but for me it is now a denial of my own reality. It is time to move beyond survival”. I know this inner voice to be the voice of my soul. It has spoken to me before and will not rest. I did not want to listen. I want to stay in denial.

It seemed simple to have the thought when it came,” I will die. It will be so simple, just to die.” I remembered the long fight with cancer with one of my deceased sons. I did not want to be sick. I didn’t really want to die. I just did not want to live in this empty space anymore. I didn’t want to face the pain inside of me. To die, I would willfully bring more pain to my family. They have suffered too much from loss and grief. The cost of my imaginary freedom would be too high. I forced myself to go inward and face the inconceivable.

My first Ah-hah moment was when I crawled out of bed and looked in the mirror; the writing down of this inconceivable story was like my hair. Grief is not orderly. Grief is not predictable. There is no exact plan to tell me how to grieve. What is the matter with me? I want to move on with my life, but I am not ready nor want to leave the fear and pain behind. I think I want my life back. However, I imagined placing an advertisement, offering my life for sale and no one would bid. No one would want my life. I didn’t want my life. I didn’t think I was afraid of dying but I was afraid of what living might bring me. Maybe I would be sick; a long, painful battle with cancer which eventually kills me. I had no illusions I could fight such a battle, much less win.

The sight of my disarray of hair and thought of brushing it proved to be a positive force in my life. I began self-care. I exercised and fed myself, made regular visits to the doctor, medicated and for the most part focused on wellness. I would insist I was simply doing what I had to do. The image of simply staying in bed with the covers over my head was always there like a shadow waiting to pounce but somehow I consistently did not go there. Do not misunderstand me; I did not believe I had a choice. If this feeling of wanting death remained, the energy to fight against self-destruction would be too tremendous. At times, my mind would become exhausted, and I would want to give up: I was tempted to overdose on sleeping pills. I imagined driving my car off one of the bridges. I imagined flying into the Pacific from a cliff at Big Sur. When I let these dark times too close there were clear images keeping me from acting: I feared failure and that failure would create the very illness I wanted to avoid. I would not die but create a disability that I would have to live with for the rest of my life.

I am grateful for the trauma in my life because it helps. I did not cross into self-destruction. I hold an interesting gratitude to my father for teaching me how to survive. He was physical and sexual abusive. I remember at thirteen telling myself; “No one is in charge of me but me”. These words gave me constant strength to make the decisions I had to make if I was going face the inconceivable. I wrote the stories. I wrote how my first son died before 50 years of age on Highway 5, I wrote about my 2nd son’s losing battle with leukemia before he turned 50, I wrote about the sudden cardiac arrest which left my 63 year old husband on the bathroom floor alone and dead. This story of Samuel; giving, loving Samuel. Samuel, a Chaplin in the Illinois State Prison asked to minister to a family the day before Thanksgiving, and killed on his way to officiate a funeral. The stories were not orderly, as grief is not. The stories are real, they are true as much as I wanted to deny them. There were great peak moments and there were dark holes and through them all is a golden thread, continuously moving me to a fullness of life I would never have dreamed possible, but it was eventually conceived in my mind and I now live. Most importantly, I live well. Yes, I wrote my stories. I cried off and on but these tears were no longer tears of desperation, nor was I crying out for someone to fix me. My tears were a release and a flood of gratitude. “ I will heal this wound of mine and I will begin by telling you I am wounded!” As I now move deeper and deeper into my soul’s desire to heal I must trust you and others like you hear me. Yes, I can tell you about my nightmare and share my story so that you also might be able to dream again.