The Near-End of the Beginning
On September 8, 1990, at 3:53 a.m., my then-twenty-year-old mother became everything she ever wanted to be. Even at that tender age, she felt in her bones that motherhood was her destiny. As newlyweds, she and my dad (exactly one year older) welcomed me into the world with fierce, unconditional love and a chaotic, overbearing village behind them. Although married and working full time, they were just kids themselves and had no idea what terror was coming just two weeks after one of the happiest moments of their young lives.
In the days following my birth, my mom felt understandably fatigued but without major alarms. There were no red flags warning that her body was slowly turning against her. She was tired, pale, and struggling for stamina, but as her motherly instincts kicked in, her focus was on building a bond with me, the tiny bundle who relied on her for survival. Her attention was homed in on each noise and movement I made, too busy with the newness of motherhood to question how her body was healing from giving birth (without drugs, I might add: total badass). She easily dismissed her waning pallor and energy as benign, reminding herself she had just delivered an infant and her condition was to be expected. She believed everything was normal because she wasn’t
7
AND SHE WAS NEVER THE SAME AGAIN
bleeding and her physician voiced no concerns. Many assume the white coat surrounding doctors’ human bodies protects them from mistakes, as if the achromatic pureness erodes the aptitude they all possess for error. She simply did not know; no one did.
My dad and the rest of the family noticed her skin tone slowly becoming more transparent and the additional effort she put toward moving about. They, too, chalked it up to typical post-partum symptoms anyone would experience after being a human incubator for nine months. They never questioned whether her appearance could be a forewarning of a life-changing crisis. Their incognizance made the sudden nature of her near-death experience all the more gut-wrenching. Heart-stopping, even, especially for her.
The evening of September 24, 1990, did not start out unusually. In fact, there is no memory of mundane nor illustrious events that would, in hindsight, indicate how our lives would change forever. We spent the day with family: my mom’s brother and sister (Tom and Tammy) visiting from Palm Desert, California, and Denver, Colorado, respectively. A picture of the family was captured that day, with no trace in their smiles of the foreboding pain and suffering to which they would soon bear witness. Everything was fine. Everyone was fine. My parents went to bed close to midnight, having just said goodbye to Tom and Tammy, who would spend the next two hours driving back to Denver from Laramie, Wyoming, our hometown. My mom checked on me, and I was quiet, comfortably swaddled next to my parents’ bed in a bassinet for the time being, totally oblivious to the imminent stress and injury lingering in the shadows of our #rst family home. As she lay in bed waiting for sleep, she felt herself bleeding. She thought about the peculiarity of what she was feeling. She knew it was too soon to have a period and hadn’t experienced any bleeding since my birth, thus confusion clouded her mind.
She got up to investigate further and heard me start to fuss. Given no blood-curdling screams, she appropriately assessed that there was no urgent need for intervention and walked the few steps from their 1980s king-size waterbed to the bathroom. She entered the bathroom from the hallway and quickly sat on the toilet. She saw blood filling the toilet as if a valve in her had been turned on but then broken off.
She began to feel shock. Her body was dispelling blood at an uncontrollable rate. She anxiously flushed the toilet three times in a matter of minutes, scared the blood could overflow onto the gray tile that lined the bathroom floor. She questioned what was going on and became embarrassed by the amount of blood she was losing. She tried to remain quiet as her fear grew louder, not wanting to wake up my dad and have to explain her body turning against her. She was determined to stop the bleeding herself, so she sat a minute longer until she felt confident she was okay to move. She took a deep breath and prayed she could return to bed without incident. As she talked herself through the courage needed to get up, she heard me whimpering. Focused on consoling whatever affliction I had, she entered the hallway and began to walk into the bedroom. She looked over at my father, sleeping soundly (or so she thought), and experienced a lightheadedness that frightened her. She thought she might pass out and yelled at my dad as her bewilderment and dizziness both grew at rapid speeds. He got up, discombobulated but activated by her scream, and ran over to her as he oriented himself back to consciousness. He grabbed her around the waist and led her through the bedroom and onto the waterbed. She calmly said that she wasn’t feeling well, but they both knew it was much more serious as he saw the growing stains of blood on her clothes and puddles on the floor that they were unable to contain merely seconds after leaving the bathroom.
As she lay in bed and became increasingly honest with herself about the severity of the situation, she tried not to pass out while instructing my dad to call her mom (Grandma Pryde), a registered nurse, who was working a night shift at the local hospital on the pediatrics unit. Pryde directed him to call 911 and informed him that my mom was likely hemorrhaging. She said her plan was to go down to the emergency room to prep them for my mom’s arrival. Once they hung up, my dad, confused and becoming more terri!ed by the second, left my mom in bed and went to my bassinet to brie"y try to console my restlessness. He did not stay with me long and stepped away to grab a couple of towels to lay around the ever-growing pool of blood. The blood was too plentiful and too red for his mind not to question whether she would live. He shivered, then batted away the notion as quickly as he could. He knew he couldn’t handle whatever was to come on his own.
As he left my mom, now cushioned with towels in bed, he ran to the phone and dialed his old home phone number. It was late at night, but he knew he needed to wake his mother (Grandma Becca) and get her to the house stat. His brother (Uncle Tim), a carefree seventeen-year-old at the time, was still awake, watching TV and winding down from a shift at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. When Tim heard my dad’s voice, he immediately knew something was di"erent and felt a chilling sensation travel from the base of his head all the way down his back. My dad was not the kind to behave erratically or display fear or unsteadiness (his embodiment of machismo1 ever-present, ugh). He told Tim that something was wrong with my mom and he needed them to get there right away because he thought she might be dead. Now afraid, Tim rushed to their mom’s bedside and shook her awake. After a few moments on the phone, all Becca knew was that my mom was bleeding, my dad thought she was going to die, and she was needed. Without allowing Tim any notice to even put shoes on, she yelled that they had to leave right away and sprinted out to his 1987 red Nissan pickup truck. He drove the approximate two miles from their house to ours in record time.
As this phone call was occurring, my mom was #ghting for her life ardently but unknowingly. With tenacity and a steadfast commitment to me, her self-talk became both aggressive and survivalist. She thought she may be feeling better and told herself she could not just lie there. She felt more blood escaping her and was fervent on making it to the bathroom again, morti#ed at the mess she was making. My dad ended his phone call just in time to help her get up, using his surprisingly reliable strength for the slim young man he was to steady her. The whole way to the bathroom, she continued to lose blood in a solid $ow they could not decelerate. They made it only as far as the entry to the hallway, a few steps at most. She stopped abruptly and tried to turn herself to the right to enter the bathroom but was unable to move any longer. With incredible force, a blood clot the size of a cantaloupe erupted from between her legs. With it came her underwear, ripped completely o" her body. The clot broke like a water balloon when it made contact with the floor. As the dark red, gelatin-like substance succumbed to gravity, the blood splashed onto the floor, walls, ceiling, and both of them. Operating on pure horror and adrenaline, my dad screamed as he tried to get her a few steps closer to the toilet, but her body became limp and unresponsive. He had no choice but to lay her on the bathroom floor as gently as he could.
While my mom danced to an unpolished beat with consciousness, my dad initiated the call with 911, sprinting up the stairs at lightning speed to ensure the door was unlocked and wide open. As he did so, he exhaled a pronounced sigh of relief as he saw Becca and Tim arrive. He first noticed Tim as he burst inside, running with focused hurry down the stairs with only socks on. Tim was immediately drawn to the crying emitting from my bassinet. Perhaps I could sense the fear in my protectors, or maybe I realized on some level the trauma of the evening would shift my life forever. Before he tended to me, he watched Becca, who had immediately run toward my mother’s lifeless body. Becca heard my dad’s amplified voice on the phone and saw him "digesting above my mom but not actually doing anything. “She’s going to die; she’s dying as we speak!” he pleaded with the dispatcher, each phrase an octave higher, trying to explain the blood loss, as if his escalating pitch would propel the ambulance faster. Tim only brie!y got a glimpse of the blood-filled bathroom before Becca directed him to soothe me. Tim noted his mom’s incredible ease. Her calm takeover of the situation helped him hold back an overbearing feeling of nausea and do as he was told, trying to make sense of the confusion and fear in my dad’s eyes at the same time. His mind was warped as he attempted to process my dad yelling that his wife was going to die, begging a stranger to help save our family.
In moments of alertness, my mom’s brain was swirly, at best, and she was mostly unable to make sense of what was happening, only knowing with certainty that she was full of pure terror. She came to at one point with her head in Becca’s lap, and she reasoned that Becca and Tim must have arrived while she was passed out. Becca sat on her own lower legs and feet, trying to prop my mom’s head up while gently tapping both sides of her face with cold water. Steady and calm, she repeated, “Come on Lynn ... Lynn ... please wake up, Lynn, come on, jita!” only pausing to overhear how the 911 call was going. If there was
any comedic relief in this entire experience, it was Becca trying to help my dad communicate with the dispatcher what was happening. He was frantically screaming, “She’s hammering, she’s hammering so much!” When he paused for a breath, she gently relayed, “Jito, she’s hemorrhaging.” English is absolutely my dad’s !rst language, but there have been several times throughout my life where that has not been an apparent fact, a quirk that makes me both laugh and love him more at the same time. At the advice of the dispatcher, my dad instructed Becca to pack more towels around my mom as tightly as possible and to try to keep her awake until the ambulance arrived. Intermittently, he would yell my mom’s name in her direction to try to keep her conscious and to give Becca’s voice a break from doing the same thing.
My mom noticed an un"inching, matter-of-fact voice in her head, telling her she needed to get back to me. You need to take care of Natasha. You have to survive this. She had moments when she questioned if she were still alive and tried to cling to anything in the environment that would ground her to reality. At one point, her attention was diverted into the hallway, and she noticed my dad pacing. She could make sense of his panic given the frantic nature of his walk and tone and was somehow able to grasp that 911 was instructing him to bag the clot in order to determine how much blood volume she lost. She cringed as she thought about the clot as her cause of death. He began repeatedly yelling, “I need a bag for the blood, I need a damn bag!” Astonishingly (but so typical of my mom), she mustered what energy she could and directed him, “The bags are in the closet in the nursery upstairs.” She felt increased fear seeing my dad so beside himself. She had never seen him this way; his typical calm and steady demeanor had completely disappeared. As the terror overtook him, she succumbed to more blackness as her body shut down from the deluging blood loss.
Meanwhile, Tim picked me up, carried me into the living room while I wailed, and gently rocked me. After a few minutes, he heard the ambulance’s sirens and set me back down in my bassinet, having achieved no relief for my discomfort. He rushed up the stairs and caught the ambulance driving by our house. In spite of the fact that we lived on a dirt road and he had nothing protecting his feet but socks, he sprinted after the ambulance, yelling, “Stop! Turn around! Come back, please hurry!” Eventually, they noticed they were o! the mark and pulled a U- turn. He ran into the middle of the street, furiously waving his arms to direct them. When they pulled up, he could hear my screams from outside and was envious he couldn’t do the same. As the three male paramedics burst through the door and headed downstairs, he came back to my side and picked me up, trying unsuccessfully once more to console me, just rocking, back and forth. As he held me, he watched both of my parents leave the house as if it were a 3D movie. One lifeless and one riddled with agony about what it would mean to become, yet again, a family of just two.2
When Dusty (one of the paramedics) got the notification that he was being summoned to my parents’ house, he was surprised, concerned, and apprehensive. As he heard a brief summary, he homed in on the immense pressure he now faced. This was personal to him, given that he knew my mom and the rest of my family. He had respect and admiration for them. He also knew that a hemorrhage of this capacity was a critical situation, and there would be no room for error. He was early in his career as an EMT, having just joined the "re department not even a year before. He went to high school with my mom’s older siblings and lived down the street from them growing up. His confidence as a newer professional wasn’t where it should have been to call himself seasoned, but he knew the job he had in front of him needed to be done well. When he arrived at the scene, he descended to the basement and assessed her status for himself, recognizing the most pertinent steps included slowing down her bleeding, getting an IV started, and delivering her to the ER as quickly as possible.
Jerked awake yet again, my mom woke up with Dusty standing over her. Dusty was someone she considered a friend (not to mention someone she found hopelessly attractive, a fact she never excludes when bringing him up and one that gives us all a good laugh). Although relieved to see him, she was also ashamed that he was seeing her in such a vulnerable and sickly state. As she tried to orient herself, she noticed three paramedics now surrounding her. They swiftly lifted her body and set her on a stretcher on the floor in the hallway. They moved about with great exigency, traipsing all over the basement to secure her in place and carry her to the ambulance. At one point, the paramedics asked my dad to get out of their way so they could work more effectively. He was watching every one of their moves. He watched them open and utilize all sorts of medical equipment he had no language to identify. He saw needles, blood pressure cu!s, bags of fluid, and other items that served only to intensify his fear. As they carried her up the stairs and secured her in the ambulance, they shouted brief commands to him, “Sir, her vitals are not good, we will do all that we can to save her. You need to follow us to the hospital. Now.” They slammed the door and blasted the sirens, peeling out of the driveway without waiting for a response. Now alone with an unhappy baby, Becca and Tim couldn’t help but stare from the brand-new life in front of them to the bloody footprints that left dark red reminders of the upheaval. Their eyes traced the pathway from my parents’ bedroom to the bathroom, through the hallway, up the stairs and entryway, and into the driveway, where the ambulance had sat running just moments before.
Once en route to the hospital, Dusty stayed by my mom’s side and set to work starting an IV. Of all the EMT job responsibilities, he was most con#dent in his IV skills. He knew he needed to work on getting some volume into her and had to walk a delicate line of trying to catch up with fluids she had lost, while not flooding her system. His self-talk erupted. Okay, Dusty, if the IV flows too quickly, you’ll risk making her blood pressure too high, causing her to bleed out faster. You can’t go there. He chose to use a sixteen-gauge needle because he assumed a blood transfusion would be imperative based on his assessment of her blood loss. The sixteen-gauge needle would ensure that the red blood cells would not be damaged and would allow for whole blood transfer once she entered the operating room. Come on, Dusty, you need precision and ease in your stick. You got this. With his direct pep talk, he smoothly slid o! the plastic cathlon and used the steel needle to pierce the skin and go directly into the vein, then he secured it to her arm. As he pressed the needle into her vein, she noticed blood shoot straight up and land on the ceiling. Faintly, she whispered, “I’m so sorry” before again giving way to blackness. He tried to keep her conscious and calm as she waxed and waned between life and death.
As he worked to restore her vitals and remind her she was being tended to by someone who truly cared for her, his colleague engaged in a fundal massage to help stimulate contraction of her uterus to slow down and prevent further blood loss. Given that her bleeding was internal, they knew it was impossible to attempt a direct pressure route to stop it. Dusty placed an oxygen mask on her with the hopes of overloading the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin with extra oxygen. He knew that the !uid from the IV was helpful, but it did not carry oxygen into her body, given that it contained no red blood cells, thus no hemoglobin. In other words, the !uid was useful, but her body’s oxygen-carrying capacity had deteriorated. Not necessarily worthless, but like watering down the Kool-Aid, if you will. As they worked, they also tried to estimate the amount of blood lost. Blood volume of any person can be estimated based on an individual’s weight (body weight in kg x 70ml = total ml of blood). During pregnancy, a woman’s blood volume increases to accommodate the growing fetus. They knew my mom had given birth about two weeks prior, thus they were hoping that her body hadn’t completely returned to normal yet and she was still storing some additional blood volume, a potential key to survival.
Meanwhile, Becca and Tim began to problem-solve how to clean the blood-soaked chaos left behind and allay my discomfort. After seeing what he saw, Tim believed that my mom was going to die. Wrapping his head around that, he became frightened about what would happen to me. He did not think my dad was capable of taking care of me on his own and was worried about how we would live. He told himself he wasn’t even sure that my dad knew how to change a diaper or prepare a bottle on his own. Becca sat staring at the remnants left behind and equated the visual with a murder scene. She followed the bloody footprints with her eyes: up and down, up and down, and prepared herself to spend the next several hours cleaning relentlessly. Partially to help rid the home of the physical reminders of a life likely lost, and partially trying to cope with her own fear and certainty that her daughter-in-law was going to die.3 She sent Tim back to their house to get some supplies to begin the deep cleaning that would continue for weeks.
She was finally able to calm me down (an incredible gift she seems to have with all children). She silently cried and prayed the entire time Tim was gone. When he returned, she regained her composure and got to work right away. She told herself she was unfazed by the blood when she set the goal of erasing all traces of it from the home. She had to go over the same spots multiple times and was diligent in looking into all the cracks and crannies to get it all. On her hands and knees, it took all night and then some. With each !erce thrust of her arms on the heavy stains, her brain worked in overdrive to come to terms with the fact that she was likely going to have to help my father raise his daughter in a much more involved capacity than she initially anticipated.
It is unclear why my dad wasn’t allowed in the ambulance, but he was instructed to follow them. He quickly started his 1977, dark green Chevy Sierra and tailed the ambulance to the hospital. Going down Grand Avenue, the longest street in the entire town, the scenery on both sides was a complete blur. It was well past midnight because all of the streetlights were blinking yellow. He saw his odometer exceed one hundred miles per hour on a street where the speed limit was thirty. When he arrived at the hospital, he was not allowed inside the operating room and instead had to remain in the waiting room, alone. There was a brief moment of relief for him in seeing Pryde standing in the emergency room entrance. He trusted that she would know what to do and longed for her presence as she disappeared behind the scenes. He paced in a cold, lifeless waiting room with no distractions but his own catastrophic thoughts. Disbelief stunted his ability to express emotion at all, so although no tears made their way down his face, the threat of inevitable loss began chasing him. He thought his wife was going to die and was terrified at what it would take to raise me on his own. How the fuck am I going to raise a daughter without Lynn, and who will be there to help me? He was convinced by the sheer amount of blood that there was no way my mom would survive. He acknowledged his fear but felt paralyzed and could do nothing with it. His thoughts were a broken record on repeat with no solutions in sight.
According to the history and physical report from the hospital, when the paramedics arrived at our house, my mom’s blood pressure was 90/0. In the less than ten-minute drive from our house to the hospital, they had restored her blood pressure to 106/60 and her pulse to 82. At the hospital, she continued to drop in and out of our world and the other. When coherent, the first thing she noticed was that her mom was there, somehow standing patiently at the garage door where the ambulance parked. She was immediately wheeled into the operating room, where Dr. Kay entered the picture. Dr. Kay was periodically my mom’s physician throughout her pregnancy and was a friend of Pryde’s. Dr. Kay taught Pryde how to crochet baby hats while her hands still worked (osteoarthritis is a bitch), and the hats became a staple in the community for newborns. What remained from the clot my mom expelled was also transported into the operating room. It sat in the bag near her, on display for the surgery team to assess. Dr. Kay murmured something inaudible under her breath, likely expressing a sense of hopelessness that my mother could survive such overwhelming physical trauma. They prepped her for surgery and performed a dilation and curettage that she unfortunately felt. The discomfort was a combination of intense pressure and pain. The force was such that she envisioned them scraping her insides, making her completely hollow instead of actually repairing damage. A D&C, as it is called in shorthand, is a procedure done to remove tissue from inside a woman’s uterus. They hoped that this procedure would stop the heavy bleeding and clean the uterine lining that they learned was still littered with placenta from my delivery. A careless human error made by the delivering physician.
Dr. Kay quickly made her way out to speak with my dad. “Troy, the surgery was successful, but she will likely need a blood transfusion to fully recover.” She also explained what had gone wrong, but all he was able to make sense of was that Lynn was stable. To him, that meant maybe he wouldn’t have to raise me all alone, that maybe he had a second chance to have his wife back and live out the future they had planned together. So she was stable, but very, very ill. They admitted her overnight for observation. It was estimated that she lost approximately 1500cc of blood. To put that in context, it is about 3.17 pints of blood. An average adult has between eight to twelve pints of blood. My mom is a petite, small woman, about !ve foot two. She lost somewhere between 26 and 40 percent of all of the blood in her body. As a result, the next order of business was determining whether to do a blood transfusion to replenish her lost blood supply.
I was born in 1990, so context on a societal level is needed to better understand the potential rami!cations of this recommendation. The AIDS epidemic was in full swing by this point, and blood transfusions were an incredibly risky and, in some cases, a prohibited medical solution. Dr. Kay told my mom that they needed her consent before being able to move forward with a blood transfusion. At the time, for individuals who had planned surgeries, a protocol was in place where they could donate their own blood ahead of time to be kept for them should the need for a transfusion arise during their procedures. Since this event was catastrophic and not scheduled, this was not an option. However, due to the intense uncertainty caused by AIDS, my mom refused to consent to a blood transfusion. She informed the medical team that if that was necessary, she would ONLY accept blood from her sister, and she was even hesitant in her comfort with that option.
To back up just a bit, at some point during the chaos and with the alert of a likely blood transfusion, Pryde managed to call Tom and Tammy. “Lynn has hemorrhaged and is really sick. You need to get back to Laramie now. Tam, we may need your blood for a transfusion. Please hurry.” They hadn’t quite returned to Denver when they received the call, so it was easy enough for them to turn right around on the interstate. The ride back to Laramie felt like it took years. The car was filled with trepidation and unease. It was hard to breathe as they both choked on the words they wouldn’t allow themselves to say. A sense of powerlessness took over as they both knew they could do nothing but focus on safely arriving. They knew it was not helpful to pester their mom with calls for updates. They knew trying to make sense of it in the moment was pointless, given the abundance of questions that consume the waiting game. They silently considered, for the !rst time, what it might be like to bury a sibling, and they shuddered at the anticipatory grief and imagined new normals of a life without their baby sister. As the city lights became faint dots in the sky and the Wyoming wind grew stronger with each mile, neither could bring themselves to acknowledge the fear sucking the air out of the car. They could not speak the uncertainty running through their minds into an audible existence. It was not the time to make sense of what was occurring, but their brains were all-consumed anyhow, isolated in the depths of expectant dread.
When my mom woke up the next morning, she attempted to reach the bathroom on her own and passed out on the way, too weak to support herself. Once again, they advised her to give consent for a blood transfusion, but my mom declined, determined to heal on her own. Despite multiple fainting episodes, by the second day, miraculously, it was discovered that a blood transfusion was no longer necessary. By the end of that day, she was released, having regained enough strength to function independently. She felt enormous relief (as did everyone else) and was insistent on returning home as quickly as possible because, after all, she had me to take care of.
In the days and weeks following the near-tragedy, there was relief that my mom was alive, sure. However, a large and stubborn shadow was cast over my family. Uncertainty, unpredictability, confusion, and fear bled through the fabric of my family’s now-shattered sense of permanence and safety. Everyone worried more. Everyone tried to look for signs of trouble and spot them before another disaster unfolded without warning. These newfound processes were mostly unsaid, internal, and alone. As the flames of shock died down and turned to ashes, complex grief emerged as the individual nuances of each person’s experience silently competed with one another. They all wondered how to take care of others and also how to handle themselves. Questions about whether to honor their own needs versus ignoring them to focus on me plagued them. It seems as though focusing on the latter is what won out. There wasn’t much individual compassion to be had, as everyone seemed to internalize a need for grit. They observed one another and watched the reactions of each other, unsure of what was allowed or what was the “right” way to handle things, fighting inner turmoil about what to address and what to unmind.
It was no secret that my mom had anxiety before. This experience unknowingly solidified a lifelong battle with uncertainty for her. She held anxiety about the future, a pursuit to know what cannot be known and to anticipate and protect her family at all costs. This discomfort catapulted her worry to exponential heights and has characterized components of her parenting and our relationship throughout my life. She developed fears over her own mortality and for the safety of her
family, but more than anything else, her need to protect me flew off the charts. She was protective even before this, but her brush with death drew her closer to a desire to control things and protect my life at all costs. I hadn’t been the one who got sick, I had actually been the cause of her illness, yet she healed with a vengeance to protect me, as a grave threat to me would be the loss of my young mother. In the aftermath, she told Tammy she felt she had died but needed to come back because it just wasn’t her time. This realization ignited death anxiety that, in many ways, prevented her from ever living fully again.4 Reckless young- adult behavior that characterized her early teen years was no more. Along with a sense of maturity and great responsibility came the loss of her ability to be carefree, to live in the moment without worry of future suffering and safety. A way of life was washed away with the incessant scrubbing of the blood she left in the basement. Perhaps even more detrimental, her already iffy self-image became riddled with more insecurities. Deepened embarrassment and shame about a medical trauma she had no control over intensified her already rocky connection with herself.
My dad’s former perception of the world slipped away following this experience. He was more attentive to me, more on edge in general, and became constantly worried about the future survival of our family. He became obsessed with considering how to plan for the future and ensure I would be okay at all costs. He was fixated on problem-solving and replaying what could have been over and over. All of this obsessing was done internally, of course, never providing an explanation for his anger or seeking support to manage the fear he worked so hard to keep hidden and at bay.5 Shutting o" any emotion is how he functioned throughout the majority of my childhood and well into my adulthood. In fact, it is only within the last few years (since I moved across the country to Indiana for graduate school) that we have seen any cracks in the surface of his soul through moments of vulnerability. As he reflected on his memories for the !rst time during the interviews with me for this book, it was notable how he had to pause, often mid-sentence, and stare into the distance. I saw his eyes narrow and his body tense in an attempt to ward o" the budding emotion. Fighting back tears, he said, “You just never come back from that.” He is exactly correct. He never did return to his former self and likely didn’t acknowledge it until that very moment.
The rest of my family was not immune to lasting changes from what they witnessed. This experience forever changed the fallacy of safety and shed light on the inevitable multitude of losses6 that accompany traumatic events. Uncle Tim, to this day, is always prepared with shoes on. He keeps them on in his house, only taking them o! when it is time to crawl into bed, and doesn’t leave them too far out of reach. Grandma Becca clings more to her faith, which she describes as spiritual growth that allows her to be more realistic.7 She talks about the uncertainty of life and is always careful not to make plans too permanent, since “you just never know,” as she so often says. She remains strong and steady, and I am never too certain exactly how things hit her. She is the rock, the person with whom others fall apart the moment her arms encircle them during hard times.
Despite the ongoing fear that was born from a near-fatal experience mostly internalized on all fronts, the event itself and my mom’s ongoing health were not talked about much once the crisis had subsided. It brought reality to the surface of what could happen, a good thing to acknowledge in moderation, and then life moved forward. No lawsuit was "led, even though malpractice was the direct cause of the tumultuous start of our family. Space was not made to process the impact, likely because no one knew how. What do you say? Are there even words to truly capture the emotion in such a trauma? Although my mom’s hemorrhage was and continues to be something they think about from time to time, rarely does it "nd its way into the spoken narrative of our lives in a meaningful way.8 Interestingly enough, it is fascinating to consider the details each person remembers the most, all of which I learned during the interviews. The most traumatic parts get center stage. The blood, the lifelessness of her body, the devastation they believed I’d experience growing up without a mother. But more than that, you could see the personalities of each person emerge as they focused on the components that most add up in the narratives of how they view themselves. For my mom, it was the "fierceness of motherly instincts and the equally untamed anxiety. For my dad, it was how quickly his truck went down Grand Avenue and his focus on being a provider. For Uncle Tim, it was the realization of how people change when things change. And for Grandma Becca, it was the neatnik homemaker inherent in her excessive scrubbing.9
Less than two weeks later my mom returned to work, and just like that, she had to figure out how to manage a full-time job alongside the role of wife and mother. And she was never the same again.
