Love, sadness and being grateful

Life is a journey that can be long or short, it’s about the perspective you have about it. Sometimes, people don’t live as long as what we would like them to and we lament their passing. Usually, after some time has passed, we are able to look back on the time that we were blessed to spend with them and in those moments of reflection, we sometimes see that their time here on this earth was only short to us. At least in the reflections I have done recently, that is the case. Today, my emotions are fraught with sadness, gratefulness and love. So, I figured this was probably a good time for me to sit down and put some things to paper that probably should have been done a long time ago.

My life today is a blessed one. I am blessed with amazing friends that are scattered all across the globe. I have one child with some special needs, that is an adult now, and who has far exceeded any of my expectations. She doesn’t talk to me and has made it clear that she wants nothing to do with me. There is a lot more behind the scenes stuff, but I feel angry, bitter, sad and happy where she is concerned. My hope is that one day we can at least be on speaking terms. For now, it is what it is. My youngest daughter has her own issues, but she is a great kid. She wears her heart on her sleeve and is super quick to jump to a defensive position for others that are being treated unfairly or unjust. I have two stepdaughters who have been raised in a way that is FAR different than I have raised my own. They’ll have hard lessons to learn and our hope is that one day, they’ll see the truth and see how things really are compared to how they’ve been told they are. We’ve seen one make that turn after having to learn an extremely hard lesson. Our other hope is that the other one won’t have to walk the same sort of path to learn the truth. The only wish that we have for each of them, regardless whether we talk to them regularly or not, is that they all have happiness, success and love in their lives. I think that is the primary goal most parents have.

I’ve discussed previously about the abuses I have suffered and survived. Survived is the key word. It took me a great many years and many hard lessons learned to show me that my happiness is for me to find and it should not hinge upon another living being. I learned and applied that to my life shortly before I met Pat. People have asked how we met and I make no secret that it started with a conversation online. We were friends long before we began “dating”. Although our kids had us labeled way before we ever got to that point. I think that’s one of the reasons we work so well together. We have a firm foundation that we built our lives together on. I miss him every day, even on the days when he is stateside and just at the office. I’ve commented before that I don’t necessarily need him in my life, but I choose each morning that I wake up to want him in my life. And every day, I love him more than I did the day before. I’m so blessed to have a partner that understands how relationships should be and he works with me to nurture and cultivate what we have. Because it wasn’t always so for either of us.

We both have previous spouses (spousi?) and both of our prior marriages ended on a sour note (and I’m being nice). Arguments were more common than laughter. There was a lot of alone time. Our children witnessed things that they shouldn’t have. Life was not fun and it was not happy. The only bright spot we had were our children. We’ve both decided that it does neither of us any good to speak ill of our former spouses. All it serves is to allow them rent free space in our heads, which gives them control over our lives. So we kicked them out. Oh, sure…I could go on for days on end about the atrocities perpetuated by the other parties…I could, but I am choosing not to. The experiences that we had with our previous marriages set the stage for what we wouldn’t tolerate in the future. For those reasons, I can sit here and say that I can only think of 3 arguments that we’ve ever had. Even now when I think about those times, I wouldn’t undo any of them, because we learned something and then formed a plan on how we would move forward and prevent it in the future. So, even though we have both been divorced, I can’t say that the lessons we took away from the experience has caused us to become bitter about relationships. Cautious? Oh, yes…absolutely!

For me, the other life experience that forced me to learn a hard lesson, was the death of my fiancé, James. I was extremely protective of the girls after my divorce from their father and it was with a large amount of trepidation that I finally introduced James to them. It was a hit from the moment they all met. He was putty in their little hands and he would have killed for them. It made it a lot easier for me to let my walls down to see the unabashed love they all had for each other. My youngest would call him Queen Daddy James…because momma was a queen and she was a princess, so since she was surrounded by women…she didn’t know there was a King to speak of…so I was Queen momma and he was Queen daddy. It made sense in the eyes of a 3 year old. He moved us in with him and while the quarters were tight, we were all together and that is what mattered. That was in February 2003. James taught us how to love life again after something bad happens. We would laugh and play as a family. He taught me how to ride a motorcycle and then we would ride as a family. Life was pretty close to perfect.

Then life happened.

I had left the town we lived in on Saturday morning heading to my hometown to pick up some items. About a half hour after dropping James off to pick up the motorcycle, I had to pull off the road and get sick. I felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer and slammed it straight down on the top of my skull. I got sick to my stomach, but finished the drive down. I hadn’t been in my hometown for 3 hours when the uneasiness and the feeling that something was wrong finally reached a point that I couldn’t ignore any longer, so I left. I kept calling his cell phone, but it was going straight to voice mail. I didn’t think anything of it, that’s why he took the bike out, he was heading to the cell provider to find out why his phone wasn’t working right. His mom and sister were out of town as well, so I knew I wouldn’t get them either. When I arrived at our house, I found a note written hastily on the back of a receipt that said, “Dee, James was in a motorcycle accident. He’s at University of Louisville hospital.” I had to read that three times before it hit me exactly what it said. I swapped vehicles and got to where he was. When I walked in, his sister ran up to me and said that he’d been asking for me since he got there. The nurse came and got me and took me to the room he was in in their emergency department. My knees almost buckled when I saw him. He had a 19 cm laceration on his scalp, his wrist was shattered and he had broken his back. He was wearing his helmet when the driver hit him almost head on and the impact was so great that it broke the strap which then exposed his head. He was hit at 8:30 that morning…approximately 30 minutes after I dropped him off to get the bike…the same time that I felt like someone had hit me in the head with a sledgehammer and I had to pull off the road to get sick. Coincidence? I don’t believe in them. He underwent surgery to repair his wrist and was then taken to ICU. He talked for three days and then slipped into a coma. James died on 4 September 2003, 20 days after the accident.

I’m told that I helped plan the funeral. I’m told I rode his other motorcycle with his club to the funeral home. I’m told that I interacted and spoke with people. I’m told a lot of things about that time. I remember things being fuzzy. Like life had all of a sudden just became nothing but white noise. I was on auto-pilot. What I do remember is holding his hand when he took his last breath, I remember watching his heart rate drop to 20 and then 0, I remember feeling his soul leave his body and it was hauntingly beautiful. I remember being led out of the room when they started CPR, I remember watching their efforts and it being all for naught. I remember hearing all the blood rushing through my ears and turning to walk out to the lobby where I could see my mom standing. I remember making it halfway past the elevators and my world crashing down upon my shoulders, my legs buckled and I fell to my knees crying. I was so empty, so numb. It felt like the universe had just kicked me as hard as it could in my gut and while I was bent over gasping, it reached in and pulled everything inside of me out, leaving nothing but a hollow shell. My mother says she held me and rocked me. I don’t know. I don’t remember. I know I drove home, but I can’t tell you how I got there.

14 months later, I met Pat and we became friends. I had a tattoo of James on my arm and I would rely upon people’s reaction to it to show me if we were going to be friends, enemies or acquaintances. I knew that things with Pat were progressing after about 18 months when he held my arm one day and just ran his hand over his tattoo. I remember asking him what he was doing and saying that some people had said the tattoo intimidated them in a way. It was what Pat said then, that I said to myself “I’m going to marry him one day.” Pat stood and said quietly, “It doesn’t frighten or intimidate me. It gives me hope. Hope that a person can love again even after a sudden and severe loss and the pain associated with it.” We married three years later after his return from Afghanistan. I knew then that I could make the relationship work even in his absence, because I had survived having to bury one, knowing that I would never again see them. The deployment is almost easy after something like that.

It’s been 10 years since I lost James and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t still think of him. I also thank him, in a strange way, because I know that if it wasn’t for him that I would never have met Pat.

It’s strange how life happens sometimes. I still mourn for James, but I’ve let him go because it wasn’t fair to myself to hold onto him in death. I learned that I can continue moving forward after such a loss. I learned that laughter may not heal the wound, but it takes your mind off of things. I learned that friends turn into family when you need them the most. I learned exactly what I was made of. I learned how to love, lose, and love again. I learned that I was never alone, even when I felt so very alone.

Life is about love and happiness. It’s about learning who you are and what you stand for. It’s about taking the wisdom that you have learned and passing it along. It’s about supporting others and being the best you that you can be. Don’t be content to sit on the sidelines and watch the game. Get into it and live your life to the fullest, every single day. Because you don’t want regrets when the day comes that you take your last breath. You may be old or you may be young, either way there are going to be people that lament your passing and say, “They left too young.”