Rising From the Ashes

In response to David McMahon's weekend wandering question, "What's the most important thing you've ever lost?"

Friday night at church, I watched a grief play by Paula D'Arcy. The play was, "On My Way Home." In it Paula told how in 1975, when she was 27 (and 3 months pregnant), she and her husband, while coming home from a trip, were in a horrible accident. A drunk driver crashed into them at 97 mph destroying their car and killing her husband and their 22 month old daughter. Paula and the baby she was carrying survived, but she was barely able to comprehend how she had managed to live when all that she valued had been taken from her.

The story was played out as a conversation between Paula and God. It told how her faith had carried her through the struggles to reconnect with life. With exquisite sensitivity and humor it showed how God nudged her through connections with others and the life she needed to live for. We weren't spared the grief she felt. Nor were we spared the humor of life as seen through God's eyes. One amazing thing is that Paula played herself. That experience must have been so traumatic that one wonders how she could have faced talking about it to an audience of people many of whom she didn't know. But Paula is a psychotherapist as well as a grief counselor and this story, told 33 years later, is part of her way of helping others come to terms with their own losses.

My ticket to the show was a gift from JS. She was going to be out of town this weekend visiting the best of the local seminaries with her family. It was a loving gift and lovingly received. But I had no idea that when I saw the play it would touch me so deeply. That play took me back to the day and weeks after my husband left me. Nothing I've ever experienced in life hurt me so badly as his leaving. Everybody has had losses of one kind or another. Family and friends have both passed on. But the loss that hurt the deepest, showing up when he left, and has had the longest lasting effect was the loss of myself.

It's not as hard to lose a life as you might think, or as sudden. Over the course of 7 years of marriage, I gave way in almost every choice that mattered to me. It started by giving up little things that didn't seem that important. He picked the deserts. No more cherry pie, which I love and he didn't. No sitting together watching quality shows on TV. Instead we channel surfed, flipping every 5 or 10 minutes, till I didn't know what we were watching. Then moved on to more important things. His method of relaxation required me not having an outlet for that for myself. So I stopped playing my guitar, the noise disturbed his channel surfing. The clean house became a mess because he didn't value cleanliness and didn't want to feel guilty about my need for clean. We didn't make friends with any of his coworkers. I handed him control of the finances when I found out he'd never managed a budget before. Even the way the pets were treated was determined by him. I'd have had them in most of the time and treated them like family. For him they were just owned animals and to be kept outdoors. Eventually, my whole world seemed to revolve around him. "Well," I thought (remembering my mother's example), "wasn't that the way it was supposed to be?" Now days I know better. People don't value you unless you value yourself. But back then I was literally clueless. So, when my husband left me 7 years later, I had no idea who I was anymore.

That was just the beginning of a string of heart aches. My best friends let him rent their spare bedroom. Suddenly they couldn't have me over anymore; it would make him uncomfortable. My job was cut from the company payroll 30 days later. I'd been with the same company for 18.5 years. My parents didn't understand why I was hurting so, I guess they hadn't liked him much. Every major role I had was suddenly going down the drain. I wasn't a loved wife, a valued employee, or a cherished friend. After all of that there wasn't much left. No surprise that my decline into situational depression was sudden and severe. Fortunately, I'm a fighter and I wanted to live. So when it had all sunk in and I took a look around at the shambles that was my life, and my view of myself, I realized I had a lot of rebuilding to do.

You might be able to just pick up the bits and pieces of you that dropped along the path of life and regain all that you lost, but that didn't happen to me. Eight years later, I'm still trying to regain bits I lost during those years. My personal mantra became, "I'm going to rebuild a me that I love so much that I won't give her up for anyone or anything." For all that I'm not the person I imagined I'd be after rebuilding, it has actually started coming true.

The me that's growing out of the ashes of that old life is a better and richer person. I have more and better friends. My relationships with them are deeper because I realize the value of them. I'm developing skills I didn't know I had. And glory be, somewhere along the road, I've developed a spine. It doesn't always show up when I need it; I loath conflict. But get on my wrong side and baby watch the fur fly!

After the play, Paula held a question and answer session. I kept wanting to ask her, "Once you reached the end of this play, what did you do next? How long was it before you felt whole again?" I didn't do that. I think I knew that her walk was as unique as my own is going to be. Life will happen when it happens. I'll be ready for it when the time comes and no one, except for God, can give me a time line for that. I just have to have faith. And that was the entire point of Paula's play. That you have to have faith to make life out of loss. You have to believe that the life you build will be worth living. And so it is.