Shameless Survivors

I come from a family of volunteers. Altruism is in my DNA. My mother worked and always gave her time in a volunteer role and was especially passionate about mental health. I am a serial volunteer and she passed to me that passion for serving and helping others. Some people contribute money, my family contributes time.

I wanted to encourage a giving heart in my own daughter from the start so I contacted Christian Children’s Fund (now Childfund International) when she was a few months old to sponsor a child close to her age. I thought it would be great for her to ‘grow up’ with a child less advantaged, hoping to give her a compassion for those whose lives aren’t as fortunate, and teach her all of us are equal in God’s eyes. The youngest child they could match us with was a little two year old girl in Indonesia. Her name was Yulianti Muti.

I committed to the minimal twenty five dollars a month and sent extra money, twenty five to fifty dollars, at Christmas and birthdays, an amount inconsequential compared to the amount I spent on Starbucks and Chick FilA and gifts for my children and other’s.

We received regular correspondence detailing the games Yanti liked to play, her personality, her aspirations. She wanted to be a nurse. Her mother, Marguerite, told me Yanti’s father had died. We corresponded regularly through a CCF translator. I tried to find someone here to translate a letter into Indonesian so that I could write to her in my own handwriting in her language. Included with the translations were the original letters Marguerite wrote. She always wrote thank you notes telling me how they used the extra money; to buy five pigs, additional chickens, a special dress for Yanti. One year they even put a roof on their small home. We received pictures of their home, of Yanti at school, at play; little drawings and school work.

When Natalie was old enough to write she began corresponding directly with Yanti. She also began to contribute a little of her saved money along with the minimal amount I’d committed to. I imagined a day we could visit Indonesia and that the girls could meet or that she could visit us and maybe even attend school here. I imagined big things for the two of them.

It may seem like a small thing, but one of so many losses that continues to sadden me is remembering the day my husband informed me he had contacted CCF and told them I would no longer be contributing to Yanti’s support. He announced this on one of his two visits to me while I was in the hospital for depression. Very matter of factly he told me I had no business sending money to a child in another country given my financial situation, insisting I could not afford it and as a favor to me he had taken care of it all. There was no discussion.

During that hospitalization my best friend shared she just knew he ‘put me in there’. I didn’t understand my friend was saying the way he treated me put me in the hospital. I took her observation literally, thinking she was saying that he put me in the hospital against my will and assured her I went in voluntarily.

A deeper depression, an abyss of hopelessness, followed the night of my discharge after he followed me into and cornered me in the bathroom, poking at my chest with his index finger, screaming and demanding to know where I thought the money to pay the hospital (co-pay) would be coming from. Of course I had gone in voluntarily, it was then my responsibility to pay up. This, the man everyone remembers as being so friendly and nice. Though he did pay the bill, I was made aware of how grateful I should be to him for doing that ‘for me’.

By then I was too defeated, too weary to attempt contacting CCF. Yanti was then fourteen, Natalie pushing twelve. Twelve years our lives intertwined, dissolved in an instant.

A friend is currently in Indonesia on business, reporting the colorful cultural experiences she observes every day. I want to ask her to look for Yuliyanti Muti and Marguerite for us while she is there. The name Muti is like Smith here, so it would be all but impossible. And if by some miracle they were found, and surely it is only me who is lost, what would I say? I don’t know what words, what translation, what explanation could apologize for severing that relationship so abruptly and heartlessly. Nor do I know if the wound isn’t solely mine to heal, which keeps me from contacting Childfund.

Yanti is eighteen or nineteen. I still have the same hopes for her. I hope she is well and thriving and attending university. I hope her life has improved and whatever challenges have come her way have made her a strong woman like her mother was. A small part of me holds out hope, too, that by serendipity or happenstance, perhaps one day our lives will intersect again.

After taking my hair down from the French twist I wore for my wedding, I came into the bedroom wearing a gorgeous ivory nightgown, the lace applique which adorned the satin gave an elegance that made me feel princess-like and beautiful. But my new husband was not awaiting me, not anticipating his lover, his wife in bed. He was instead passed out from a long day and evening of drinking and partying, and had begun to snore. It was a lost cause to try to rally him.

I calmly switched on the TV. Sitting atop the covers while Johnny Carson did his opening monologue I smoothed my beautiful gown, as though to straighten out a tiny wrinkle, a slight imperfection, to smooth away the panic, that sinking feeling deep in my gut questioning “what have I done?” Twenty five years ago on my wedding night I lay in bed feeling very alone, with my husband next to me, watching The Tonight Show.

Earlier that day the familiar unsettling feeling crept in as I stepped into my wedding gown. I asked over and over if he was there yet, at the church, as the hour of the wedding grew closer. I was secretly afraid he would not show up. Perhaps I would have been relieved if he hadn’t shown. Perhaps I hoped for some intervention, a reprieve, a substitute. But my father reassured me again and again he had seen him, that he was there.

The Thursday before we’d flown into Denver with his teen boys, picked up a rental car and drove to Aspen across Independence Pass. We roused the sleeping boys when we stopped on the snowy mountain top to take pictures at the Continental Divide. I smoked at the time. Maybe I took a cigarette break there too.

I don’t remember how it started, nor if the boys were awake or asleep, but there was an argument. Not a knockdown, drag out fight, but a disagreement. I’m not even sure what it was about, but it ended in him saying if I smoked another cigarette before we arrived into Aspen he was not stopping at the courthouse to pick up the marriage license.

He made lots of threats when he was angry, so I didn’t think much of that one until we entered Aspen in the late afternoon. I noted where we needed to turn to get the marriage license. He kept driving. I said it again, that he’d passed the courthouse complex. He continued driving. A then familiar, sinking, panicky feeling came in waves as I asked was he going to turn around. He calmly, matter of factly said ‘I told you if you lit another cigarette I wasn’t stopping.’

I did not want the boys to know what was happening. I pleaded it was the last day we could get the license and still be married Saturday. Our friends were in town for the wedding. My parents had spent a lot of money. Finally, when he could see I was on the brink of tears, he turned around. With fifteen minutes to spare we purchased our marriage license.

The next day my girlfriends and I spent the afternoon on a leisurely trail ride outside Snowmass before meeting everyone at the church for the rehearsal. Again, as we rode and chatted, somewhere in the back of my mind I felt unsteady and uncertain. When I’d visited my parents over Christmas I’d fallen in love with the historic brownstone Bleeker Street church dating back to the 1800’s. I’d fully intended to come back to Richmond and leave him as I had said I would before I left on the trip. Instead we talked on the phone and I told him how lovely the church was and we discussed getting married in it.

It was a small wedding with only my immediate family, a few good friends of mine and ours and his sons. No one else in his family came. Outside the sanctuary in the church, as the music played Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, my father and I awaited our cue. We watched as my maid of honor began to walk ahead of us. My father asked if I was okay and with a gentle whisper he gave me permission to ‘not go through with it’. There was no time for an answer as we stepped through the door, I grabbed his arm and we proceeded down the aisle with all eyes on us. I had chosen the song, chosen the vows, yet tears fell from my eyes as I listened to the minister talk about our future together.

Once outside, the breeze in the Cottonwood trees snowing downy flowers around us, it was done. Of course I was happy, excited to be married to the man I loved. I had waited for this day. Everything would be fine and my doubts were just nerves during an emotional day. We went on to the dinner reception which spilled into the night and the streets and clubs of Aspen.

The next morning our out of town friends came by our hotel. The events of the wild evening prior were the main subject of discussion. Everyone was hung over so my quiet mood went unnoticed as we sat by the pool. I remember feeling disconnected from the day and them, swimming in thought, drowning in a feeling of finality. Of course I had wanted to be married to him. And now I was, though I didn’t feel as happy and joyous after it was all over. I felt like I got what I wanted, I married the man I loved. It seemed, already, an empty promise. I felt I had made a mistake and wanted it to somehow be miraculously undone.

Resolving what was done was done, finis, I rejoined the conversation.

My children and I have some challenges ahead as a family while we begin to diffuse that huge secret we don’t like to acknowledge lives here. As the mom, I want to spare my children the pain of revisiting it, and question how important it is that they understand who their father was. Some say I should be sure to tell them about some of their father’s more positive attributes, who he was outside of his abusive nature. But that IS who he was and everything and everyone of us revolved around that, and as he intended, him.

What confusing image is it to say ‘Oh, he was a great guy and loved you a lot but he just wasn’t good at handling the pressure of being married, or having children’?  ‘That’s how some people deal with it – by belittling, berating, ridiculing, bullying, pushing and shoving, strangling, stalking and eventually shooting when they aren’t getting their way’. ‘He was really a nice guy and the shooting was just a big mistake’. What does that say to them? What does that teach them?

He absolutely could be nice, loving, fun and friendly. Anytime he wanted to he could be a great father and husband. He was clearly capable. He wasn’t mentally deranged or sick. To portray him to my children as other than he was seems to me to perpetuate the lie I led while trying to protect them from the truth while he was alive. The truth came out anyway. All that protection has led to them unable to remember him raising his voice, or his drinking, and many things I as his intimate partner experienced that they were too young to understand or were not privy to.

I hear ‘but he was their father’, they are a part of him. I, just as much as the next person, want them to have wonderful loving memories of their father and them together. But I didn’t create the memories he left. He did. If they are not storybook I can’t make them so.

Once again I am forced to reconcile the events that defined and finally culminated our life together with the husband and father for them I, too, longed for. Though I wish to spare them, perhaps my children need to be allowed to do the same.

We have this ‘thing’ that lives in our house. We don’t talk about it, or acknowledge it. It is invisible, though huge and very much present. We have an unspoken agreement with it; we keep our distance from it, it keeps its distance from us. This ‘thing’ is what happened to us, what happened here, what ended here.

We move around it as though we are just the same as the family across the road, or like our friends. Though all of us are in therapy, neither our individual nor our cumulative experiences are ever discussed between us. It is amazing how we three chose to ignore it. We are all reluctant to disrupt the peace in our home and remember this is where chaos, anarchy, and chronic tension used to rule.

As we try our best to have uneventful lives when it does come up well-meaning people constantly offer “Don’t let it define you.” Five simple words offered as a solution to a problem they can neither fix or make sense of. Five simple words that seem preposterous the more I contemplate them. Invisible or not, it cannot be erased and most certainly has defined us, as every interaction in our lives defines us; who we are, what we become, how we navigate through the rest of our lives. How is it proposed, then, that a traumatic event will not, should not, somehow define us?

We have lived to tell about something defying most imaginations. We were immediately and forever defined. It would be impossible not to be. Whether a result of war, an accident, within an intentional crime or from a natural tragedy; trauma leaves the person who has experienced it changed. There is no going back, no way to extricate the event and go on as though it did not happen and to just be who you once were.

I believe there are only two types of trauma survivors. Those who speak about it. Those who do not. Make no mistake that the silent survivors have somehow mastered their trauma, or that vocal survivors can’t let it go. Neither is better or worse, they are simply using two different ways to process what has happened to them. Those who share their stories often provide a means for those suffering silently to deal with their own feelings. One becomes a voice for the other. Whether someone speaks about their experiences or not, it is ever-present. Appearances alone deceive.

Trauma takes a natural course to some degree of healing if allowed to and there is no one proven way to move through it. It takes the time it takes and goes through the stages it goes through, much like grief. Given much medical research points to internalized unprocessed trauma and grief as leading causes predisposing us to autoimmune diseases, substance abuse and other chronic health maladies, it may be that those who do speak openly, externalizing their experiences, fare better over the long haul.

The way I see it if I am defined by what happened, that is the best possible outcome of going through something so frightening and tragic. Only by accepting our lives are changed and redefined can we use our knowledge to help someone else. We certainly can’t help others silently or by maintaining our secrets.

So then I am challenged with how to expose and discuss the elephant in our room that everyone just wants to go away. This remains to be explored.

After sixty five years of marriage my uncle has not left her since she went into hospice. He sleeps in a chair next to her at night and sits at the side of the bed by day. He now watches as her chest struggles to rise and fall, her breaths labored and far between. Throughout the day I too watch, alternating looking across her to him, as we wait to see if she will take the next breath. His head is lowered at times. I think he is praying. His eyes well with tears at other times. Mostly he simply looks at her, perhaps contemplating their life together, all of their ups and downs, everything they experienced paired as one. I can’t say because he is quiet with her, as though I am not there.

My mind fans through the many memories of my aunt at so many important junctures in my life. Always close, the past few years since my mother died we had many conversations about life, love and marriage. Her compassion and understanding of the un-understandable stands out.

In the midst of this stabbing sadness as she struggles so in these final hours, praying for her peaceful transition while not wanting to let go, I have a moment of peace in this quiet room knowing that she and my uncle had something indelible. I reflect how different my marriage was, despite the wonderful examples in my family.

There is nothing else in the room, in the building, in the world but this. I watch her, I watch him. They are what love looks like. Remembering my own parents who were married forty seven years I am reminded that this is how it should be, someone at your side through it all. Unwavering. Immovable. Unquestionably dependable. Present. I appreciate this final chance to witness them.

Whereas once it seemed that I’d never be free, never experience the kind of love they know; now it suddenly seems possible for me, too. It is a final gift, paradoxically the gift of hope in the absence of it.

27May2013 Go swiftly about your journey, but remember us who mourn here.