A very vulnerable story
When everything changed…
When I was ten, my maternal grandparents, my parents & I went on a family vacation to Disney World. This was something that we did often. I was raised in a large family and we had relatives all over the country so we traveled a lot. My parents seemed to love traveling and going on trips and having experiences together. Whether it was packing all the grandkids in the car to drive to a crater and feed chipmunks or all of us boarding a plane to Hawaii to visit our uncle who lived there. This was another part of childhood that just felt normal to me and a value system I would carry with me throughout adulthood. This might have been our second trip to Disney World but I can’t remember right now. I have quite a bit of memory loss, which I would come to learn later in life was a normal thing to experience after surviving traumatic events.
One night at some point during our trip my parents wanted to go for an evening walk. They tried with much effort to get me to join them but I refused. I didn’t feel like going for a walk, I wanted to lie down and watch some cartoons before bed. Looking back on this memory now is difficult. I often try not to look back and think of “what if” type scenarios around this evening but knowing what I know now I sometimes wonder, “What if I would’ve gone with them?” My mother set a timer on the microwave in the hotel room and instructed me to go to sleep when it went off; yeah, sure, okay, whatever you say Mom, bye!! I did not go to bed when the timer went off and I remember thinking so much time had passed and they hadn’t returned and I felt like that was so strange. Why would they be gone for this long? Then, I heard the phone ring. I promptly got up and answered it, hearing the voice of a hotel employee in my ear, “Is your Mom there?” puzzled, I answered “No”. Again, I remember thinking that this was strange, her tone was strange, her cadence was strange, and her questions were strange. I hung up the phone and went back to my cartoons. The phone rang again and I was quickly instructed by my grandfather that he would do the talking this time.
My memory is so fuzzy on this that I don’t exactly remember the course of events over the rest of this evening. There was a knock at the door…a uniformed officer was there. Next I remember being in the back of a police car and the officer telling us that there had been an accident but we didn’t need to worry because everyone was OK. My grandmother meanwhile was not okay. She was crying next to me worried and praying. Next piece of my memory was the hospital. I was separated from my family in a strange room sitting on a couch. Everything was a shade of brown. I have a vision of myself sitting in that room on that couch just looking out the small, partial window in the door of the room. Zoomed in to just an image of myself sitting on that brown couch, looking outside that window. Sometimes my father would walk by or my grandmother but the only person I remember coming to check on me, to see if I was okay was a stranger. I think she gave me something to drink. Maybe she was someone who worked in the hospital. A metaphor for all of my feelings, part of the family, there with them, but not really. Always at a distance. If it wasn’t clear already, everything was in fact not okay. Not even in the slightest. My mother was dead. I was never going to see her again. Never going to hear her voice or her comfort. She was there one moment and gone the next and that was that.
This is another strange human phenomenon to ponder, the idea of managing another persons emotional experience. Again, logically I can see why the officer didn’t tell us the truth. He didn’t want an emotional reaction he couldn’t handle, he needed us to get in the car and go with him and it might not have happened if he told us the truth. This is something though that I’ll never forget. It’s weird to look back and see all of that false hope, thinking things were okay but they never were. I have a memory of that night that is one of my most shameful, my little 10 year old brain in the back of the police car wondering how cool it would be if it was just me and my dad from now on. Thinking about this now, I wonder if this isn’t actually something to be ashamed of. (Not that I should even be ashamed of it in the first place) Maybe this thought was founded in what my body knew to be true in that moment: we were being lied to. My process of trying to come to terms with that lie had already started.
Her and my father had been struck by a vehicle while they were walking and the driver left the scene. The story I remember having in my brain from that moment on was that they had been struck by a “drunk driver” but that nobody could corroborate that because he turned himself in 24 hours later therefore not being intoxicated anymore. I believe it was my 29th birthday that my grandmother (my mothers mother) had given me a box of newspaper clippings and other items and one of the documents in the box was a statement written by an eyewitness to the who had unfortunately seen the accident first hand. The person was actually a retired police officer of some sort from another state and they had a family member with them. One of the two got in their own vehicle and chased after the driver, finding them shortly after at a gas station and calling the police. I remember reading this and being overcome with emotion to think about the selflessness of the actions of these two people. It was also a stark reminder of how many things, details, facts get lost in translation through the course of life and trauma.
I have never returned to Florida and I won’t ever be able to stomach setting foot there again.
Back to my little ten year old self sitting on that couch in that room in the hospital watching the scene like a movie outside the window. My grandmother was crying so much. She was so upset by what she was being told that she didn’t believe anything they were even saying. She literally didn’t believe them when they told her she was dead. Originally they had informed us that nobody could see her body due to the trauma it endured through the accident but my grandmother insisted. She needed that physical proof to be able to believe that she had lost her child.
The next morning we were all back in our hotel room and everyone was crying and sad and I wasn’t. I felt numb. I felt nothing. My body was surely trying to protect me from what had happened and there could’ve been some part of it that I just simply didn’t quite understand either. The adults around me were so caught up in their own emotional experiences related to what had happened that yet again, I was in a position where I wasn’t being considered. I will qualify this by saying that I understand why and how easy it would’ve been for my father and grandparents to not consider me in those moments. They had just suffered a tremendous loss themselves. So, I understand the why and at the same time I know how much that hurt me and quite literally set the tone for my expectations in relationships moving forward and how I would show up in them as well. Quiet. Meek. Uncertain. Soft. I vividly remember trying to calm everyone down, telling them that we’d all feel better tomorrow and to stop crying. I also wrote down on a piece of hotel stationary the following message: “Today is February 24th 2001 and my mother is dead.”
I still have that piece of paper.
Looking back on it now, I almost wonder if my lack of emotional response was simply a reaction to feeling like there just wasn’t any room for me to have one. Somebody in this family needs to stay centered and calm for the rest of their sake. We don’t find out how we’ll react to a situation until it's happening to us. The response we do end up having can also be surprising. It’s too bad that in this case it had to be the youngest member, the child, the daughter; the daughter who had now lost not one but two mothers.
