January 28, 1982, I had a six month old baby, #7, had
a 1 ½ year old, a 2 ½ year old, a 4 year old, a twelve year old, a fourteen
year old, and a sixteen year old.I had
a headache that became the worst headache I had ever had.Here is an excerpt from my published
biography:
“Was it a brain bleed? Was it a rare migraine? I do
not know, neither did the doctors, but my last baby was 6 months old and I had
a headache. The headache became worse throughout the day. I took an outdated
headache pill. Could it have been that? I had never known such a headache. One
moment I was sewing and the next I asked the kid’s dad to take me to town for
something for it. He was headed to a basketball game. One moment it was two of
us in the car and suddenly someone else appeared. Then another blank space and
he was telling me not to turn the car off. It was January 26, 1982 and the snow
was falling lightly. I was to drive myself a few blocks from the basketball
game to the hospital. He was adamant, “Do not turn the car off.” I grew up in
and around Cardston. I knew my way but once I began driving, I had no idea
where the hospital was. I followed some lights, not having any clue where I
was. I just knew I had to get to the hospital. I drove in to a parking lot but
I was not sure it was a hospital. I was sure someone could help me. I had to be
sure not to turn the car off. I reached to open the door but it would not open.
I could not get out of the car. I tried using my right hand to open the door
and was embarrassed to find myself lying on the pavement outside the car door.
I stood up and wove my way in to what I guessed was the main door. I was
confused. I knew I was in trouble. I did not know where to go and heard sounds
off down a hallway to the right. I started bumping against walls and finally
made it. Someone came out to me and said I had best come in the room. I was
taken in by a stranger. There, I was told to sit up on a table. She then told
me to lie down. As I lay down, I felt and heard a pop. The headache left
immediately but so did a lot else. A long time seemed to pass before strangers
came in. They spoke in another language. I could not understand them. There was
garbled talk and then some of what these strangers said made sense, or
something like sense. “What day is it? Gargle. Garble. I had a day but I could
not tell them and I did not know exactly where my day was. I was feeling like
there was some sort of conspiracy. I was sure they were tricking me. Garble.
Garble. “What is your name?” I had one; I just didn’t know where I put it.
Garble. Garble. “Touch your nose.” I had a nose. I just did not know where it
was. A stranger showed me how to touch his something. I got it. he wanted me to
touch his something or mine. I did have one of those. I used my right hand and
touched my something. Garble. Garble in a language only they seemed to
understand. The stranger showed me what he wanted me to do. I lifted my left
hand to touch my something. It never moved. I looked down. 116 That is when I
panicked. I am blank until I am being rolled along in a stretcher. I am aware
not to turn the car off. I was concerned about not turning the car off. I think
I turned the car off. I was being rolled along. A couple came over to the stretcher.
I tried to tell them not to turn the car off. I also was practicing saying my
ABCs. But I was only getting ABC and nothing further. In fact, I was aware my
lips would not work right. Aw uh, uh. Time left me in a blank space again.
Suddenly I was in a room and people were sitting to my left. They were talking
about my face, about my left hand being dark colored, and I was aware that they
lifted the covers and said my leg was black. I should know these people. I
didn’t. Time warped again and now my son was standing at the bottom of the bed.
I could hear them talking and understood them. I tried to ESP messages to my
son. I can not turn my head. I can not speak. If he leaves me, I think I might
die. The doctor tells them he will call them if there is any change. He tells
them rest because this could be a long haul. They leave. It goes dark. I Grieve
It is there, No sorrow. No angst. Something curls within. Inside out. Outside
in as if giving birth to myself. A sudden wooshing, through, out, up. There is no
emotion. No cold. No pain. No strange language. I heard you say I did not know.
I heard you tell my family I was in a coma I heard you tell them they should
leave I heard you say it could be a long haul I heard you say they should get
some rest I heard you, doctor. No tunnel, just a surge upwards to some never
land place as if I was pushed a lovely gentle hum is all I hear. No voice,
though I sense some command. No time. An hour, a day, a month a year, eons may
have passed. There is no sense of angst or hurry. I am calm. I must see. I see
you though I should not I see a stranger, yet dear to me, lying on the bed.
Still. Empty. I sorrow for her, perhaps pity her 117 her duress. I see myself.
It is not stark white. It is a billowing. It is satin. It is a veil. It is a
mist that lifts me. Holds me. There is a parting in the warmth. Hand and wrist
of my father, long past. I recognize the square cut nails and brown speckled
wrist. He reaches. He offers. If you take my hand, I will take you with me If
you choose to come you can not look back I know what you are saying, without
words The temptation is great and grievous. I can not. I have often thought
Some deaths take forever and choice was not mine to make. Baby. Seven. Life. I
can not be finished. I must refuse. No acceptance mouthed. No refusal. A simple
plead to raise them. Promises. Oh how I grieve for this chance of goodbye,
turned away. I grieve a thousand yesterdays of sorrow. I grieved a thousand
times the loss. I grieved through return, blood vessels filling again with
excruciating pain. I grieved goodbye and a choice I had to make. I have seen
that other place. It is as close as the hand before my face. Another time lapse
and they move me to a Calgary Neurological Ward. We go by ambulance. Time
lapses. These people are feeding me, pouring broth down my neck. There is no
mirror. I want to pour broth down my own neck. I do but there seems more pride
in me doing it too myself. I will my left side to move. It does not. I am being
lifted, naked, strapped loosely into a chair to be let down into a type of
Jacuzzi. I am afraid. I can not tell them. I am floating. I will drown. I am
terrified. A lady in the next bed says she knows me. She says she is from home.
I do not know her but she is gentle speaking and I feel a draw to her. It is
hard to stay awake. 118 I hear a gasp at the door. It is my best friend, but I
am not sure I know her well. She cries, “Oh, look at her face.” No more. I
remember no more of the visit. I have my red socks. I have that gentle lady in
the next bed. I have to find a mirror. I ask. My face. I was vain and had kept
my skin looking good and now here it was, drooped down on one side. Numb. Eye
lid falling down. I try to open my mouth and show my teeth like they asked.
Only one side moves. I am heartbroken. I have to get better. “ABCabcABC.” Move.
Move that toe. Move that foot. Move that hand. I am in a pool. They are holding
me up. I am to try to move. I float and my body begins to turn and my face goes
under. I am going to drown. I am on a mat. They are going to teach me to crawl.
I am tired. I work so hard. I have to get home to my babies. My big toe moves,
barely perceptible, but I feel it twitch. There are no answers other than
perhaps it was a cluster migraine, a rare migraine, a brain bleed, a bump, old
head trauma. I knew what it was. They did not nor would I tell for many years.
I am home. I am lying on the couch and the babies are put in the crook of my
leg so I can hold them. My mother is there. My friend is there and taking over
for mother. I talk but it is not good yet. I have electric shock treatments on
my face and hand and leg. There is pain but I enjoy it. I feel it. I am afraid
of headaches. I am no longer afraid of death. I have changed. I will make
changes. I force myself to crawl up stairs on my own. I do not want help. I
will do this. I did. They were never sure what caused it. Doctor’s prognoses
differed. One finally found a small scar of a tear in the brain. Whatever it
was, it disabled me for months. It also changed me.” (Shhhhh:A Creation Story, p 107 – 112)
It took years of tests to finally find the small scar on my brain. Every year, around this same time, I can count on
something ‘happening’ in my life…something big.It seems to be one of the two intense times in my life.From Jan 28th to February 10
(adoption day) I always have something happen.I am careful, now, to make sure I have protection in place during this
time.
I request love and light for today, especially since
it is a Wolf Moon.
Courage doesn’t always roar, sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the
end of the day whispering ‘I will try again tomorrow’.” Mary Anne Radmacher
Throughout our lives, we struggle and we
experience joy and sorrow, laughter, tears, reasons to change, constantly, from
moment to moment and always, it takes a courageous heart.At University, I read a play called “A Doll’s
House”, by Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian/Danish
writer. I was fresh into the beginnings of a divorce...out of a nineteen year abusive
marriage, and single-parenting full custody of my four youngest children and
shared custody of two of the older children and my oldest away at school.My
life was as big a mess and as full of drama and chaos as it ever had been.I was not much interested in “Nora’s” “babied”
adored, sheltered life in her Doll House.But I was in the midst of my own
courage and hers did not seem such courage to me.
The play takes place
during a time when women were eye candy on a man’s arm.Nora goes through her own path to self-discovery
from being adored, and having the ‘sin’ of secretly borrowing money to take her
husband on a holiday to Italy to save his life.As well, secretly, she had been repaying
the debt little by little using her ‘pin” money.No,
I could not relate.Bit by bit, she
realizes that she had been nothing but a doll in her father’s life and in her
husband’s life, nothing more than a “silly girl”, whenever she spoke her mind. She decides to leave them all.She
was the ‘doll’ in the dollhouse, totally dependent on her husband and her
father’s world.She was unappreciated
and she was ‘playing’ the doll.She was
everything the males in her family and in her society, of the times, expected
her to be.She began by indulging in sweets
and lying about it.For her, this was
her little rebellion and was a thing unheard of in her world.As well, she cusses and then, ultimately, she
leaves her husband and children in an act that, in her time, took incredible
courage.I almost despised her because,
I, too, had been living in a dollhouse of sorts, accepting what I was expected
to take (“You made your bed, now lie in it” ideology of my own father when
hearing that his daughter was newly married to an abuser.)I was brought up by a man living on the cusp
of social norms that belonged, in part, to the Victorian age, for no fault of
his own.I was six generations after him
and an anomaly to him.I was raised by a
mother who had sacrificed her own happiness and life for her family and who
gave up being married and having children because she was expected to work and
financially care for her family through the dirty thirties.She married an older man when both late in
life.I was an anomaly to her as
well.And when I left my marriage, my
mother could not even begin to imagine why I did not just take it and learn to
accept life as it was.
How many of us, now late into our
senior years, lived at a time when we were to be seen and not heard?How many of us heard that we were “owned’ by
our husbands because it cost him $5.00 for the marriage incense?(God’s truth).We were still, in our late teens, owned by
the men in our lies and would always be some man’s daughter, or some Mr.’s Misses,
not a person of her own rights.We were
supposed to live lives of duty to the men in our lives, still, in the 60s as
women were taking back their rights and we lived in small areas way outside the
women’s equal rights amendment.Our communities
and our religion forbade us to do aught.But we began to waken to our own rights.
We began to break free and be safe
unto ourselves.We learned to have
compassion for our sisters in the world and we began to weep tears of frustration
and fear as we stepped out into this new way of being a woman in the 80s.We stepped into our own small acts of courage
that, at that time, were huge.It might
have taken us decades to finally get that were still “people pleasers”.We began to speak up about our own desires
and longings, our needs and dreams.We
were taking a stand to make them come true for ourselves.We no longer allowed men to define us.That, sister friends, who came after us, took
courage.
It took courage to step out into the
world and lie the lives we wished to live.We were willing to risk everything in order to do so.We began to stand up more and more for what
we believed in.And, so many of us
seldom speak of what society would have had us feel guilty about.How dare we?How dare we not!
Take courage sisterfriends.Those of us who came before you may not have
lives you respect or even understand.You may not even be able to relate to what kind of courage that took for
us to be strong, independent women of today.We did it for ourselves, but it opened doors for you when you came
along.
