Shameless Survivors

That final week he stalked me; followed me when I took the kids out as I’d tried to keep them away from the house in the evenings. He showed up where I was meeting friends, sitting across from us and just STARING. He was reading my emails, my Facebook, looking at my phone calls. He accused me of having an affair with my therapist.

He had taken the ring his mother had given me for our daughter out of my jewelry box while I slept, replacing it with his mother’s will and a note that she never left it to me. I’d worn it the twelve years since her death. He threatened over and over he was going to tell the children I was leaving them.

It was a few days before the shooting. On that day I was getting ready for a business meeting. I showered. When I opened my eyes he was right there. I knew the way he was looking at me. I knew his intentions from his cold leer. I asked him to leave. He refused. I tried to reason with him, implored him to have some dignity. Finally I was begging him to stop.

I found a place somewhere inside to keep it. I went on to dress and go to my meeting as though nothing had happened. I was determined to keep on level emotional ground. It steeled my resolve to get out however I could, as soon as I could.

Today I tell my therapist that I cry every morning in the shower. Concerned for me, he suggests we reconsider an anti-depressant.

Has he forgotten? I have not. I have been open in therapy because I want to move forward, open publicly because I am bold enough to say it where others must remain in silence for their safety. But this…this part I don’t like to talk about.

In a quiet moment I see the metaphor in the bullet that nicked my heart and a feeling that day he killed a small part of it.

Sometimes now, when I close my eyes in the shower, I am back there and feel his presence, the inescapability. I feel them as unwelcome visitors. It hits me like a wave and whatever serenity and peace I have recovered in my life are swept away in a tsunami of a brief few seconds. I cannot run fast enough to escape the force of it.

One such day, shrouded in that same feeling again…an eeriness of his presence, I wondered would I ever be free and contemplated the question some ask me … do I believe he went to heaven or hell.

If there is a heaven
I wonder…when I die
will I tremble when I see you?
Not like the beginning, when we were first together
in your winsome smile, your gaze,
the way I used to tremble anticipating your touch,
in that palpable electricity that intersected with our desire

No. I mean in the fear, the loathing of your final touch
I mean will I tremble as I cower to shield myself
run to hide from you again, be invisible,
cease to exist, to draw even a single breath,
that I might take it and you will find me here.
As I try to escape your grip…will I tremble?

After I have tasted this freedom, breathed, lived,
will the walls once more close around me, suffocate me,
hold me prisoner in a place where even death cannot provide respite then?
I tremble now at the thought of an eternity with you
Preferring to dwell in hell
than in a heaven shared with you.
If there is a heaven.

His presence is just a memory and I have nothing to fear now. What remains are simply images stored as part of the replay of the final days. I know this. I know I am safe now. I resolve I must simply stay alive.

I say I am waiting for the happy ending to complete my book. Maybe this is the happy ending. Peace. The fighting over. The vivid nightmares which used to paralyze me for days transformed to bad dreams from which I awake relieved they are no longer possible in my waking hours. Being in a place where I can go about life and not feel as though it will take me under; this new life without the constant torment.

Maybe the happy ending is not in a relationship with someone as my dreamy romantic self fantasizes. A chance to get it right with a person who I can come to with an open heart, the longing to have my parent’s solid relationship, to provide my children with some semblance of the family that shaped me. One of the three of us precariously teetering at any given time; stabilized with a fourth.

Maybe letting go of that dream isn’t the failure, the defeat, the falling short it feels like. Maybe simply having survived the shooting and these last few years is enough that I might stop looking beyond for something more.

This all ran through my mind as I drove to pick up the children from a weekend at Comfort Zone Camp, their third camp to process grief. They were highly resistant to attending, but I insisted. The mourning is never really over. I feel providing the resources for them to continue to navigate the loss in these different phases of their life is imperative to their emotional growth and health. It is multi-faceted and rears its head in the most unexpected ways and at the most inappropriate times.

So it must be for them, as for me, layers of mourning the loss. The death of my marriage, even more so the death of our family; mourning the man I loved, the father of my children, his inability to be the father to his children mine was to my sisters and me. Mourning the loss of my children’s innocence, all our innocence; the absence of a strong male adult role model in their lives. Mourning losses that are unrecoverable on many levels.

Camp counselor feedback indicated my daughter participated and shared her experiences with her healing circle, but my son refused to share about his dad at all, instead focusing on last year’s death of his uncle, my sister’s husband.

Perhaps he has some wisdom about his father beyond his years which I am not able to access personally. He seems to be able to find a place where he can center himself and not feel the acuity of the absence in his life, or perhaps it is such complicated grief he tries to steel himself by shutting down all discussions of his dad in any form. Perhaps he is of the mindset no dad is actually better than that man. I cannot say as he isn’t sharing.

As he asks about my weekend I share I had a pleasant day with a male friend. Unlike my daughter who shrugs it off and continues to complain about being forced against her will to attend camp, as though I have sent her to a slave labor camp, my son wants to know how important the friend is to me. He tries to access if it is someone who I might care for, or who will care for me, reading me for clues which might differ from what I am saying.

It is difficult to know if he would like to be relieved of his perceived role of being the central male of the family, or simply considering if it is someone who might care for him as a parent, or a combination of both. My failure to provide stability and relieve him of the onus of the lone male for his sister and I elicits a great deal of sadness from me. I am truthful to say I don’t know the answers to his questions, and downplay the interaction so as not to plant any ideas about that sort of future, all the while feeling terribly inadequate as the lone parent.

I am left wrestling with my hopefulness, which I generally gleefully share without consideration of the possibility of disappointment, set against the backdrop of what our emotional life is actually like day to day. In this moment, I feel my hopefulness is misplaced, wrongly pinned onto an unknown future which minimizes gratitude for how far we have come. I question if maybe this is the happy ending.

I dreamed Germany had invaded Richmond. I knew the trains running down near the river across from Rockets Landing were carrying people to prison camps,possibly to their deaths. He came to pick me up, demanding the children, who were toddlers in the dream, and I get in the car to escape the train. I refused, choosing instead to take my chances on the train and subsequently trying to escape the prison camp. That seemed, in the dream, the lesser of the two evils, to go to a prison camp.

Shake them off though I try, they linger, these sorts of dreams. I know now I am free, and I don’t have to make those difficult choices. I am both grateful and haunted.

Maybe my sense of inescapabilty was once again triggered by a recent local ‘incident’. Everyone likes to call these things ‘incidents’ but I, of all people, should just call the spade. It was a murder where he taunted her relentlessly, the woman he professed to love. He hunted her down, drove her off the road into a ditch, got into her car and murdered her using the same gun with which he then killed himself. It was not quick and clean. It was a long drawn out cat and mouse game in which he finally prevailed despite her best efforts to stay safe, despite the police and victim service’s best efforts to keep her safe.

I will not sugar coat that he ‘fatally wounded’ her because that is too easy to flip to the next screen, the next story after saying poor, dear woman. Such a shame. Her poor family. He must have been sick. He must have had PTSD. He must have snapped one day.

What about her? No one asks what must she have gone through? What fear must she have felt? What struggle must she have had trying desperately to break free and build a new life for herself, freed from the prison of his control, only to be tracked down like a fugitive to her death.

Mercifully left here, I have taken it on to give her death, and all of those silenced, a voice. I will not, cannot, lay down quietly and put my hands over my eyes and ears and say I know something and I’m not telling !!! I am telling. Perhaps at my own emotional peril, but I am telling it.

I didn’t know her. I only know it needs to feel very uncomfortable for all of us because neutrality favors the abuser. What can you or I do? Really do? We can take a stand. We can make it harder. We can cut off the oxygen by calling them on it if it’s someone we know perpetuating the abuse. We can support (women) by not judging their circumstances, especially when they have to make hard decisions to stay in abusive relationships. We can help them monitor their safety. We can educate ourselves on the dynamics and not falsely believe no one we know is experiencing abuse. If you don’t know someone, you will. You will.

As for me, I have nothing else to do with my own survival but this. I will get up. I will do the next thing. I will thank God for the chance to experience this day, my children and friends for however long I am able. I will cry. I will begin again, receiving the gift of being here and accepting my mission. I will love, as God loved us.

After withdrawing these last twelve months to process residual trauma, navigate yet more loss in our family, and focus on helping my children work towards emotional stability, I have begun to reengage socially, dating. More settled, I feel ready to jump back in and explore new possibilities.

I was the flattered recipient of quite a few surprise holiday greetings from former dates; all who have moved on to find special someone, but who took the time to wish me Merry Christmas. To be remembered brought with it some awareness that I am thought of fondly yet life goes on, they’ve gone on, while I have remained somewhat stationary.

Perhaps the holidays punctuate desires to share that time with someone else, or maybe it is seeing another year come to a close without having found someone special, I don’t know, but there has been a notable uptick of interactions on my online dating site profile as the days have gotten shorter and colder.

I awake this frosty morning, the sun still hesitating below the horizon, perched and reigning high in my spacious four poster king bed (noting it is named for royalty and requires steps to get into it). Feeling like a queen swathed in fine linens and fluffed in the down of a comforter, it seems fitting to extend a smile of good morning to a snuggled in warm companion as we watch the birds at the feeder and leisurely meander through any manner of unimportant thoughts.

Once fully awake it is clearly evident the other side of my bed is only littered with books, five to be exact, plus Sur Le Table and Orvis catalogs, and my laptop. Careful not to disturb three sleeping cats, I have left its cozy warmth to patter down a cold hall and fix myself coffee whilst pondering if I am destined to be a reclusive cat lady. My king proveth an aberration in the sleepy haze of an early morning. Duly motivated, I push the books aside to unbury my laptop, convincing myself to venture into the wild frontier of prospecting for partners online, perusing potential candidates like turning the pages in the Sears Christmas Wish Book.

Our airs of being highly evolved fly out the door in the face of the basic instinct to find a mate. At my age we certainly have done our part in perpetuating the human race, yet it continues to drive us, which I find curious. I am comfortable in my life, content with having things my way, happy with the non-complication of being single, and (shhhhh) cherish my alone time. Yet not only are we willing to yield, to share, to move between giving and receiving, to embrace and adore another’s imperfections, we are driven by an urge that overrides our intellect. I revel in how we are created to connect and be with one another.

Spending the better part of my adult life in an enormously emotionally unbalanced relationship, I come with considerable work having been done on my part. With my ‘Man Plan’ in hand, a design of not how, but who he will be, I dive headlong into the awkward and seemingly artificial pursuit of searching a website for a suitable companion with whom to share my life and myself. Surely it is ego driving that; to think we have so much to offer we cannot keep us to ourselves!

It is sobering to appreciate all that I am includes some rather challenging and painful areas that, while healed on the surface, will remain. I am going to have difficult days when memories push to the surface, triggered by both invisible and known stimuli; days when I am raw and vulnerable and needy. It will be a unique man who is confident enough to step up, undaunted, and accept its presence as something that in part contributes to who I am today; who will see past it and be all in to create an ‘us’ that circumvents the past.

In a far different place than I could have ever imagined when I was in an unhappy, unhealthy relationship, I did not exchange that loneliness for being alone as I once imagined. I exchanged it for the pleasure of good company I have enjoyed, for a lot of laughs and lessons in living fully as I embrace the infinite possibilities while meeting new people and making new friends.

In the final scene my last words to my husband as he hounded me to know how I intended to live once I left him were “I don’t know but I am faithful”. Neither in this do I know…who my ‘he’ is, or how or when I will meet him…but I am faithful. Faithful I make a good life partner, faithful I am prepared for the emotional investment a relationship requires, faithful in God’s plans for me.