She was asleep in her bed, tucked in by her mother just hours before. She was three. A distant bang pulled her back from where she dreamed.
She clambered out of bed to follow the light filtering in through the cracked door. The light came from her parents’ bedroom. She didn’t see her mother so she walked around the bed to her father’s side, where he lay lifeless tangled in the bedsheets.
Why is Daddy sleeping on the floor?
She called his name and shook him with her tiny hands. “Daddy” she said. “Daddy, wake up”, again. He didn’t move.
She walked out of the room and into her Grandmother’s room. She shook her Gramma with those same two hands, “Gramma, something’s wrong with Daddy. I can’t wake him up.”
That’s the last I remember.
Over the years, I’ve pieced together the remainder by talking with family and reading letters my mother wrote to my uncle.
The fire department came along with an ambulance. I was present as they wheeled my father out the door.
My mother had not been present when I awoke, because she was in the kitchen on the phone, calling the police/fire departments. (It was 1968, before 911.)
I spoke to no one for three days. For decades, I was unwilling to use the word ‘goodbye’. My paternal grandmother said she never saw anyone look so sad.
My mother thought I was traumatized seeing my father being wheeled out to the ambulance. She never knew I tried to wake him. I never knew she didn’t know.
Life went on. My mother married her best friend’s brother 13 months later. He adopted me and a year later they adopted a baby. My biological father wasn’t a subject brought up in mixed company. He became like some sort of secret we pulled out of a box, off a shelf in the basement, once a year on his anniversary.
The smell of service stations hits me like warm chocolate chip cookies out of the oven. Daddy was a mechanic who owned a Mobil gas and service station in Chicago on Southport Ave (I believe).
People often told me you can’t miss what you never had, but I missed my dad every day of my life.
The fact, that I received a Bachelor’s of Social Work, worked for psychiatrists and have been through therapy, and NO ONE ever considered this event a life influencing trauma, befuddles me.
From an energetic standpoint, its no wonder my root chakra was shut down for most of my life. From psychological standpoint, there is no question how I developed abandonment issues.
Is this why ‘trauma informed’ had to become a ‘thing’? Did people really not understand how tragic events alter the trajectory of someone’s psychology?
I had to learn how to heal myself, because the industry I was trained in wasn’t equipped.
Even so, as a full grown adult, after years of devoting myself to my own healing, fate doubled down and that trauma I healed from would rise right up.
I met my now husband on the internet. We formed a strong bond before even seeing one another’s faces on Skype. Then after a month or so of daily Skype, we decided to meet in person. Two years later we decided that we didn’t want to waste time at our ages and I moved to his state to get married.
This man instinctively knew me. He healed those deep scars of abandonment through his kindness, his love and his intuition. Giving me just what I needed to let down walls I didn’t even know were there. I gave myself completely to him. No pretense. No facade. Just raw real vulnerability.
One morning, a year and a half after we married, I awoke to the dogs barking at an odd noise. I threw on my clothes and ran to find my husband lying on the living room floor unable to get up. He’d had a stroke.
My entire world was turned upside down and inside out in one fell swoop. Once again, I had the experience of going to sleep in one life and woke up in a completely different one.
I was never able to get back to that same trust place again. For a year I woke up holding my breath until I saw him alive and breathing. Even when I left a room and came back, I’d listen to see if I could hear him before entering. That ‘rug being pulled out from underneath you’ feeling didn’t subside for a long time.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I would even make the connection to the trauma of my father’s death. What were the odds of something so similar happening to someone twice in their lifetime?
Listen, when we heal our trauma, we don’t erase it - we mend it. Like a patched hole in a pair of pants, or a scar after a surgery. There are always scars left behind and that scar might always hurt or at the very least, be extra sensitive. It becomes part of us.
When a new trauma happens on that same spot it is magnified because there was already a scar there. For me it started with my father’s death - not just his death, but the specific details around it. It planted seeds of abandonment in me - even though he didn’t abandon me, I felt abandoned. The fact that nothing is permanent is a very large concept for a child to grasp. That led to me tolerating things I shouldn’t have in dating and a first marriage. A marriage that not only reinforced my abandonment issues, but had me abandoning my own self in the process.
Although I did suffer re-traumatization with his stroke, I did not completely regress. My abandonment issues did not resurface. The difference was I wasn’t three, I was a grown adult who had made her way through the world against many odds. I had found true love and yes, it can be taken from me at any moment; and WILL be taken from me at some point. However, he like my father, hadn’t abandoned me. It was just another life lesson.
I think what complicates trauma recovery is 1) the original expectation that it wouldn’t happen in the first place, and 2) the belief that because it happened, we deserved it or we were being punished.
The balance lies in the awareness that life events are unpredictable and can happen to anyone at any time. They don’t happen as a form of punishment. They happen. For reasons we may never know in this lifetime.
They happen. They hurt. And the only way to heal it is to feel it. The only way to feel it is to allow the emotions to come through and out - crying, yelling, screaming and talking. This is direct opposition to those who say ‘talking doesn’t help’. It most certainly does. Telling the story, over and over, is part of the healing process. But our society likes to give nasty little arbitrary timelines and yell ‘times up’ when they are uncomfortable being uncomfortable with your grief.
As long as we live we carry all our experiences with us. Healing trauma isn’t going back to the person you were before it happened. Healing trauma is becoming a version of yourself you never imagined because those things happened - and loving who she becomes.
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