Once upon a time, I was a 27 year old girl. I look back on her now, her hopes and dreams, her unwavering belief that she would marry that wonderful man she met , the tall and incredibly loving fellow who she pinned her life's wishes to. Wishes and daring belief that they would dance at their wedding and live a long and desperately romantic life, where they would work hard together to raise three little boys and watch them all grow up to be handsome, kindly adults , where she and her beloved husband would delight in their old age as the three sons themselves would someday get married and produce numerous grandchildren that would soften the blow of their geriatric world as they aged, a dream of most couples who, after taking their vows, whisper kindly to each other that life will be so easy and filled with love and a procession of consistently joyous moments as their hair turned grey and each son would provide them with such delight, from the moment they were babies til they were released into the world and made their way gladly into love and affection from their own families they created. The dreams, oh the dreams she had, for you see, she had grown weary of being alone and now finally, finally, she could relax and be a wife, a mother, but really a mother was her utmost and certain calling, for she loved that role more than any role she played out in her short lifetime. Her love for her children superceded all other loves.
Her love so deep for them, three little boys so filled with vigorous laughter and she fell into such a state of blissful childishness as she played and danced and sang with them, read them so many silly tales of fat caterpillars and talking frogs, pirates and rabbits , frolicking stories that they ate up like the cookies she baked for them, all the while her face flushed with an assured naivete that all would be well, and that she was ever so safe and that this glorious and delightful world she and her husband created would never end, never, as she daydreamed she would someday do the same with her childrens' children, and how brave she was to imagine such an enviable future, as I think of her now, how innocent she was, how she truly held on to so much hope and how her perfect life she longed for was her life raft, her reason for breathing, her destiny. Or so she thought.
I want to slap her now, not cruelly, but with the insight of what really happened to her, a slap of kind awakening that would set her straight and force her to recognize the abyss of what was coming her way. A motherly smack upon her childish head, to awaken her enough to realize all was not well in her boisterous and ill conceived joy.
Yet, she had no clue, and would find out soon enough that very thing she refused to acknowledge, yes, would NEVER even imagine, at her tender age, would throw her wishes and hopefulness into a desert , a loathful , dry, unending place where no oasis could be found as she crawled , begging the entire universe for a drop of water, and clawing her way to whatever shade she could find as each hope, each dream, each wish she had so youthfully believed in, were struck down one by one, until she realized what a foolish child she had been , and she grew old, her hopes smashed on rocks , her head bleeding with all the sorrows befitting a boisterous child who wanted so much , and finds out that her calm assurance as that young woman had turned into a nightmare from which she prayed to awaken, and as long as I watched her playfulness and gentle awestruck hope, I too now pray for her and wish I could have warned her that dreams and hope would soon turn into a blackened terror from which she herself would encounter as the months and years brought her nothing but sorrow. She was so young. She was so foolish.
She was me, once, and she prided herself on her exhilirating work as a mother and wife. Her husband fed well done meals, her children laughing as they played and delighted in their endless days where she fixed their wounds, bathed them, laughed with them, read them so many stories, watched them grow into wild little pumpkins whose only job was to play and draw and dance and run as a band of merry little men through her house, so clean, so filled with uproarious laughter and she joined them in their games and smothered them like a motherbear if danger dare impose itself in their fabulous wake of boyhood fervor.
It was all just too perfect. I tip my hat to her now. She meant well. God bless her innocence.
It really all started when she received a phone call at 2 am . Her darlings were all kindly tucked into bed, having giggled themselves to sleep as she kissed and tickled them, all three just babies of 11, 9, and 6 years old. Bobby was the oldest , and slept soundly as the others, in their own joy and toy filled rooms, Bobby's room being full of plastic dinosaurs lined artfully on his shelf above his dresser. Mikey, or as he preferred, "Mike", when he became 8, and let his mother know it, slept gently in his large bedroom, holding on to his two bears he named Oldie and New Oldie, both of which looked almost identical as he had artfully chewed the face off of one of them. The youngest of her children, Joey, slept downstairs in a bedroom filled with all manner of 6 year old trains, tiny cars, stuffed animals and wild things that she artfully cleared away each night lest he fall out of bed and encounter a fall. Her little boys, all tucked away, sleeping and dreaming themselves, of all sorts of wonderful things their own lives would lead them to. Gentle children, beloved by both mother and father, in a quiet home on a fine little street in a small town where children rode their bikes to candy stores and played baseball in vacant lots.
Bobby always the true warrior, protecting every small creature he encountered, bringing home birds or turtles or any animal he deemed to be in distress, including his brother Mike, whose gentleness was almost translucent, who was always sitting in a corner with a book, shocking his kindergarten teachers that he could read at a prolific level once he entered their classroom. Mike, who was a quiet child, who looked up to Bobby as a hero of sorts, someone who would help him wage a war with any bully who crossed paths with them. Mike, who lined up matchbox cars ever so carefully on the carpet, but still found great glee in running through the house with his two brothers who ran in and out the front door or back door, looking for the adventures awaiting them all in the backyard .
And Joey, ragtag child, always one step behind his brothers, hurrying to catch up with them, a wild streak of excited joyeux, a little dynamo , a tiny tornado who carried his blankie, the green one his grandma had made him, with a turtle on it , the same blankie with him when he was cremated at the age of 23. But I am getting ahead of myself.
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Purgatory.
The phone rang at 2 am, an odd time that always means something is wrong. The 37 year old she was then, was awakened by the serious ring, she knew it was not good the minute she heard it, as sleepy as she was, having fed her husband earlier a fine meal of jumbo shrimp and rice, and her children dreamed peacefully, their bellies also full, and she had kissed her husband as he left that evening for work. A supervisor on the night shift, a tall, handsome, wildly humorous man, who had been working long hours at a Chemical plant that had exploded only a few months earlier, where management lengthened the hours on all the workers to please hurry up and fix the damned place , get it up and running as quickly as possible.
Her husband Bob, whom she , only a few nights before, lay sleeping next to her in bed, and she put her nose near his neck and breathed in his fragrance she knew so well, and as she did so she prayed a little prayer that she never lose this tall, incredible man who loved her more dearly than she could have ever imagine being loved. He had been so odd, only a week earlier, this tall gangly man, as she had found him weeping , and , as he NEVER had weeped or cried before, she was a bit shaken by his utterance.
Why are you crying? she asked him. His odd response to her was that he was afraid of death.
She bellowed with incredible doubt "But you are 36 yrs old you have many years left!"
I see now how her sincere but obvious ignorance had raised it's silly head again.
The call was short. This is the Morris Hospital. There has been an accident. Please come immediately.
Unbelieving that she was, still, she asked about the state of her husband's health. Surely he may have been harmed, but what was the damage?
The answer was Please come to the Hospital.
So, only 3 blocks to drive to the hospital, she hurriedly changed into her jeans and sweatshirt, a purple shirt with the words "MotherBear" on it, and, as she knew the children were deeply asleep, she drove her purple car into the dark night where the Illinois cicadas sang their mournful night songs around her.
The quiet night , until she arrived at the hospital where she saw , still in denial and sleepy headed, loud voices and helicopters and ambulances and people rushing into and out of the emergency doors. Again, she refused any belief that she would soon encounter, She hoped to run into her husband's arms.
When she walked through the doors of the hospital , all manner of madness and people askew surrounded her, hopelessly terrified looks of families sitting in chairs, in hallways, and she could only muster a few words to the attendant at the desk.
"I am Marianne Brown, is my husband alright? You called me, please take me to my husband."
The attendant, wide eyed, and shaky, called a nurse over. The nurse took the arm of the still confused girl of 37, and took her to a small room.
"Please wait here".
Alone, in the small room, no one giving her any information, she sat angrily wondering why no one would take her to her husband. I look at that girl now, so much shock beginning to set in, a denial that was growing steadily as she sat there. The beginning of so many denials and shocks that would plague her for years to come, until she became the old woman that she is now.
Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity of sitting in a plastic chair, where she shook ungracefully and hands wringing artfully, the door opened. A besieged and beaten physician stood at the doorway, his mask hanging haphazardly on his face, his eyes full of tears and the words spilling out of his mouth a bitter truth that would forever change her life, and eventually destroy completely the lives of 2 of her beloved children.
"I am so sorry , Mrs. Brown, but your husband has passed away. We tried so hard to save him, but we could not."
I wish I could tell her this was the end of the horror she would encounter in her short and simple life, but those words, that moment in time, would be the catalyst that would define her from that point on, the words that would send her on a journey of discovery, more discovery, and finally even define the lives of her 3 sons, two of whom would , when they became adults, would not survive this earthly world and the wound that she felt in that moment as the doctor spoke, was merely a scratch compared to what she would someday encounter.
God bless her, she had no idea what was coming. One dream smashed, many more dreams and hopes , she would later discover, completely annihilated.
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It is, and I never hesitate to remind people, a very short ride that is taken in this world we create , as this 37 year old girl was me, I am her, but she is no longer me now. I can look at her from afar, a child, really, a youngster so full of life and so ignorant and foolish, as she hoped with so much hope, that her small existence in this place would be only one of absolute gaiety and boundless gifts. I look at her now and shake my head, with love, really, just as I would at a small child who cannot imagine that there is a moment when they will not be children , laughing and playing and never growing up.
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She began to shake, that night, September 12, 1989, when she was suddenly thrust into the world of what all people call DEATH. She had never really encountered much of Him before, as I call DEATH a Him, a word merely to describe the complete destruction of the breathing human form. It is so delicate, really, DEATH, to look at the body one inhabits and see it stop. Just. stop. Like a broken clock. stop. No heaving breaths of air again, no rising of the chest, no movement. As tho one removes a coat, once in the coat a gesticulating event, coat removed, nothing. the end. the coat has no more to say or do. It becomes cold and all life has fled.
The poor girl was asked that night by the doctor if she would confirm the body of her husband. The body of her husband, she thought , the body of her husband that she had kissed only hours earlier. As if she could call it now, the body of her husband. NO no no, she swelled and shattered, NO. She could not do this. She would not do this. I watch her now, as the complete kindness of shock overwhelms her. Oh yes, let us thank Shock, it is a powerful force that is like a bubble that allows one to move, in a robotic state, glazed eyes, staring into a void, not feeling, a lightening strike that stops time itself. Shock. A gift, really, when one is ready to explode from what one refuses to believe or feel.
Her luck came in the form of a friend, who identified her husband's body. A body now, only, seared lungs that killed it, an explosion, they explained to her, that had thrown his body 300 feet through the air. The entire chemical plant on fire and 12 other people injured and burned badly.
It did not sink in, the 37 year old girl was listening to the very normal words being uttered by a social worker who had appeared in the room. The words sounding as tho they came from far far away, as the young wife attempted to make sense of it all, but it made no sense.
Dear DEATH: you made no sense to her. But soon enough, she would quickly learn who you are, she would spend the rest of her existence learning about you. She would encounter you again and again, as she watched you remove the breath of her beloved sons Mike and Joey. She would conquer you, she would wrestle with you until she had you by the throat and she would shake all of the truth out of you, and , eventually, she would long for you, as she grew old. She would also find out that you were a LIE. She would discover you do not exist. This beginning was just the beginning. From this point on, you were now her foe and she would snatch your name DEATH and make it her life's work to render you into a palpable Fool that you are, a fool that is full of lies told by so many who , as she , the 37 yr old child, had believed was the end of life, and not the beginning. She would conquer you and you would finally dissolve into nothingness. You would not kill her with your lies and deception . She would fall, many time, under your cruel tutelage, but she would always rise and expose you for the lie that you are.
It was and is the hardest work of her existence.
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Encounters of the first kind.
As that young woman felt herself descend into the new abyss that had no bottom, she was and still is utterly shocked by how quickly her beloved can simply disappear in a matter of seconds, like a cruel magic trick, just simply gone and everyone around her thinking the same thing.
She had to wake her children up that morning and tell each one of them that their daddy, that tall, kind, wonderful man, was no longer coming home at 5 pm, and had 'gone to heaven', as she struggled to be as gentle as possible with each one.
The words that escaped her mouth as she told her still sleepy three little sons , were words that would wound them and set their fate altogether. She did not realize at the time how truly damaging those words would be to her babies. So damaging that two of her babies would carry that terror and abandonment in their hearts throughout their short lives here. She thought she had seen the worst of it, but she was sadly mistaken.
I wonder now about her. Her madness that hit her, like a hammer blow to the head, she reeled for years. Yearning , desire, dreams, lost hopes and she watched her pretty little world collapse like a house of cards, each card holding an illusion of happily ever after. What a joke it was to her now, she had been tricked and deceived by all, all those pretty little promises she romantically attached her wagon to. She took her three children and left that place of sorrow and bewilderment, but first, she, I , realize now, was given her first gift in her new quest , that uninhabitable desert of a quest that would be her life's work.
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The Burned Man.
