It was Wednesday night, March 7, 2013, about 7 pm. We were heading home in the morning. I had completed my part in “Dad’s death process,” honorably. But at the moment, he was being a real bastard to the young hospice nurse, and we needed to calm him down. So we headed back to the hospice facility.
How long’s this gonna take?
He had early dementia and was dying of stomach cancer. His care had become too much for Mom to keep him at home anymore, and his end was getting close. So, my husband and I had traveled to their home in Pennsylvania to help my Mother move him into a local hospice there.
The Maria Hall Hospice facility was a peaceful place, located on the grounds of the Motherhouse for the Catholic order of nuns there — the Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in Danville, PA. My Mother’s sister had belonged to that order before she died years earlier in a tragic car accident. For the last several years, my parents had been living nearby in a retirement community run by that same order of nuns.
In his typical fashion, he was being difficult to the end. When we moved him in on Monday, he glared at me from his chair and said,
“Well, what do I do now?”
I suggested rest.
On Tuesday, as he lay there, he looked up at me and asked,
“So, how long’s this gonna take?”
As kindly as I could, I simply said, “Well, Dad, I don’t know. That’s between you and God.”
Self-portrait by the author, shortly before the illnesses and deaths of her parents
For most of my adult life, I was the warrior. Strong against him because I needed to be. I tried to get him to go for help. He wouldn’t. I was forced to draw a line in the sand to protect our kids.
But emotions are never so clear-cut, and life was always a pendulum between walking away and maintaining some kind of extended family relationship for our son’s sake, and… let’s be honest, mine, too. Because unless someone has no redeeming qualities — in which case it’s easy to walk away and never look back — if that person has also “done good things at times,” and used the powers of intermittent love and trauma bonding on you since infancy, it’s a lot more complicated.
I tried for “middle path” – allowing love, but standing guard. I was determined to be strong, and never again be that “trapped, weak, passive victim from the past,” nor let any one else be put in that same position. And yes, at that point I judged my younger self harshly and with no love.
But it all grew exhausting. As I got older and life had battered me over the decades, my husband noted that my self-portrait above bore a resemblance to a battle-weary soldier’s thousand-yard stare. I kept pushing me, but at the same time, a question I kept shoving to the back of my brain haunted me:”What happens when I am no longer strong?”
In my first “baseline reading,” I spoke of emotional flashbacks. But, another fairly frequent “trauma companion” is nightmares. I’ll share more about them later, but as part of this “baseline,” I will give some background here.
While decades of therapy have healed much, nightmares still show up fairly often. Having dealt with them for years, I am *almost* used to them — at least most of the time. And generally, I shed their emotional upsets pretty quickly. In fact, in some of my recent ones, I even show up more as a fighter now than as that victim from the past. So, I guess that is progress.
But sometimes a nightmare will come along that can still blindside me with an emotional knock-out punch. That’s an indication that there is something I still need to work on because nightmares reveal where the heart is still bleeding.
The Trigger: Trip Planning
Yesterday I set up travel plans for us to go to visit our son in Savannah to celebrate my 70th birthday. Now it should be a short story — decide to go, settle the dates, make travel and hotel reservations, and then go and have a wonderful time. Yes. Maybe for many, that is the way it works. But…
For years I have struggled to “ask,” whether it be for help, for something I want, for some I need. It’s taken years but I am getting better at it. Yet even when I can now ask, I still struggle to feel I “deserve.”
So it was no small thing for me to say that I wanted this trip for my birthday. In fact, it was a major victory. I wasn’t interested in presents or big parties, just being with my immediate family — my treasure in life. But about that whole “I deserve” thing….
I’ve spent a bit of time in my posts talking about who I am, why I’m writing, how to do this book, why now, and what kind of tools I need.
Why have I “wasted” so much time on those things?
Maybe this post can answer that question. It will be the first entry in the book and sets the stage for the first chapter — Packing for the Journey, which will include the information I mentioned above.
Photo by author, of her lab manuals over the years
Before I could create my toolkit, I needed to have a handle on the full scope of the challenge.
Writing is the heavy lifter of excavating the wisdom….but what do you do when you can’t feel…when you can’t reach the emotions locked away…when you may not even realize the emotions are there?
And worst of all…even if and when you can get at them, what do you do when they so overwhelm you with pain and intensity that you are rendered mute in your trauma…you literally cannot find the words to fully express and release what is flooding through you?
That is where I started this journey. And so many times I just walked away because I didn’t know what to do. It felt almost impossible. I say “almost,” only because I had been here before in life and I knew there was a way to bring order to chaos – that whole “Pick a nipple” experience decades earlier.
Thumbing through that tan notebook from my son’s infancy, its pages starting to come loose, I felt hope that I could find the right way to do this, that an organic structure would suggest itself.
Certainly, this book couldn’t be like writing a nonfiction “how-to” book. Nor was it a “sit-at-the-computer-open-a-vein-and-it-would-all-neatly-come-pouring-out” process. It needed to run wild before it could show me how to proceed. But even “running wild,” needed some boundaries.
I wandered around the house and stopped in front of the ham radio receiver from the WWII tank that my Dad used for years. I stared at it on the shelf, played with the dials. Tactile memories stirred. And yes, there is the question: “Why do I have that WWII tank radio receiver in the first place?” That was no small clue.
The music on my laptop drifted in. Songs from 1965, 1966, and 1969 brought me right back into those years. One particular one came on. Several nerves twitched. Suddenly I was 12 on a violent Sunday afternoon, cowering in my bedroom.
A copy of Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World was on the next shelf — one of my treasured 1960s Scholastic Book Services purchases that I’d kept. Again…why did I hunt these books down — these very editions? Why did I need them?
Carefully opening the book, I shoved my face right into the middle, right against the pages and inhaled deeply. I just love the smell of books from the 1960s — the ink, the paper, the age. They don’t smell like that anymore. But as I took in that sensory moment, I was back in 7th grade at Sacred Heart School on a fall afternoon, trying to sneak past the nun who told me to stay after school.
Each item on that shelf — smelling it, feeling it in my hands — generated a force that surged through me, as if these objects were Talismans infused with the power to take me back and reveal secrets I’d long forgotten or locked away. Talismans. That is exactly what they were. Objects of power to open a door.
To Tame the Chaos, Will “Pick a Nipple” Work This Time?
I made my peace with the decision to write, and answered the questions, “Why now?” and “For whom?” So all I needed to do was tell the story, right? But…which parts? In what order? To mean exactly what?
I started this process overwhelmed with chaos. Lists of questions, a lifetime of details, photos, and journals, many paintings from the last several years, objects from a lifetime…simply an abundance of material that seemed worse than herding cats.
The dilemma: HOW do I make a story out of this? A story that shows what happened, how I came back, and what I have discovered, all while telling it in a way that matters to readers. Because ultimately, this is a story for all of us.
In times of greatest stress, we fall back on what we know. For me, that is lists, maps, lab techniques, details, and art. Yes, an odd mix of left and right brain tools.
Let’s start with “lab techniques.” Probably one of the most stressed-out times of my life was as a new Mom trying to figure out how to “pick a nipple.”
“Why write…now?” Three simple words, but a vital question that demands an answer to the motive for my change of heart.
Dr. Edith Eva Eger, in her 2017 book, The Choice, about her experiences both as a Holocaust survivor and a psychotherapist, talks about the question, “Why now?” Whenever she was confronted with a new patient, her approach was always the same–questions. I loved her description:
“Why now?…This was my secret weapon. The question I always ask my patients on a first visit. I need to know why they are motivated to change. Why today, of all days…Why is today different from yesterday, or last week, or last year? Why is today different from tomorrow?”
So it’s a fair question.
But before I can even answer why I would write now, I need to answer the question that came before it: “Why write?”
The alarm hasn’t yet gone off, but I am awake. I’ve been so since about 5:30, like many mornings. The oblivion of sleep, its escape from reality, at least on the nights I have no nightmares, is over. While my regular blanket keeps me groggy and warm, the weight of the other blanket starts pressing me into the mattress. It is the heavy sensation of feeling scared, hopeless, and like I have done something wrong and will soon be in trouble. I neither want to stay in bed nor get up. I wish I could just sleep in oblivion all day. Getting up means facing another day of writing, struggling to live with the pain it releases, and holding the chaos I feel inside.
I get up anyway, because by now, in my 7th decade, I know that this is part of my life, my existence, at least for the time being. Even as I felt great last night, felt ready to take on the world, yet again, this morning, the black cloud was there to greet me when my eyes opened and consciousness returned. But life has taught me that, like the weather, everything eventually changes. You just have to wait long enough. So for now, I just focus on my “routine.”
The routine. It is something I had to create after I retired from teaching at Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. When I was working, I didn’t have time to feel all of this. I had to get up, get moving, battle traffic, and then revel in the last job of my life — which was my total joy.
So let’s get something straight right now – because I am a direct person, all my friends know that, and I prefer to be clear. This is not a book about a person’s journey from harm to forgiveness. If you are looking for a tome on the blessings of forgiving your abuser or how to achieve it, I recommend you look elsewhere.
My journey is about healing…restoring my soul from a lifetime of trauma and pain that was inflicted on me, and that I have carried way too long. And just to be clear, to me, forgiveness and healing are not the same things. They may both come about, or not, but they are not the same thing, and for me, both are not required. So first and foremost, I write to heal.
If I am to be totally honest, I don’t give a shit about forgiveness anymore…about whether it comes or not. In fact, the next person who tells me that I must forgive because it is the only way to happiness, or repeats that all-too-often quoted trope, that withholding forgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, I will tell you to just keep on walking. Unless I am in a bad mood, in which case I may say it slightly differently.
Cathartic maybe. Healing, insightful, yes. But easy? Never – And sometimes it takes you down unexpected roads…
Author photo of her mother – 1948Author photo of her mother – circa 2017
It has been a difficult time. I have been writing …well, I WAS writing the next pieces about my childhood, working to move the book forward. But I got sidetracked by Mom.
The festering splinter
I had done a side piece about Mom..her death, her life…her, as part of the prologue. A matching bookend to the prologue entry about my father’s death. Yet every time I tried to edit it I ended up rewriting it instead. First from one angle, then another, struggling to capture that “something” inside me that needed to speak. That “something” that was driving me to write about her, and it was unrelenting. While I felt like I got closer to “it” with each round of writing, still, I was missing the essence.
Whatever it was I was trying to excavate, it was buried deep in my soul. The effort felt like when you have to plunge into your flesh with a needle to remove a deeply embedded festering splinter only to have it keep slipping out of your grasp and sink deeper. I felt like I was failing because that “Mom piece” was taking too long, and I needed to get back on track and return to that piece from my childhood. I was determined to stick to the outline.
This continued until late yesterday afternoon when, in a flash of insight…then despair, I realized I WASN’T off-track at all…and that there was actually something much bigger emerging in all of this. In fact, I suddenly understood that the “Mom” piece wasn’t the “sidetrack” but THE track. I kept getting pulled back to her…her death…her life because there were so many questions that needed answers. Questions like why did it matter so much to me that we took care of her to the end…why was I so proud of how she navigated her death process? Why did I care so much after she had abandoned me for a lifetime?
