I go out walkin after midnight, not in the moonlight, but in my head..partly because I can not sleep due to my fibro and partly because so much has happened in the past 18 months, that walkin through those doors is the way I deal with everything.
I was diagnosed with my fibro quite sometime ago and actually have dealt with it fairly well, mostly because I have a strong faith and belief in the good Lord and partly because I learned long ago to deal with adversity and how to stay strong and steadfast.
I have had several surgeries over the past 15 years and most have not gone as they should have due to the fibro complications. But I made it and dealt with those too and carried on..
But on March 27th, 2009 (the day before my birthday) was hard nut to cope with..
I was watching my precious little grand daughter at my daughter's house and about 4pm my mother in law called to inform us that my father in law had passed away. They had been divorced for 40 years but remained in contact, so she delivered the news to us..Ross is like me and he deals well with bad news. He took the baby for a wagon ride and read her books.
Being that the next day was my birhtday and we most likely would not make the 45 mile trip back to Fayetteville, they had a cake for me and a couple of gifts. Shortly after that we headed home to Winslow..we chatted as normal on the way home about news in our area and even talked about a home that had burned and how the "foundation was saved"..a bit of a joke in these rural areas.
It had rained hard all day with lots of lightning and thunder..I even saw on the noon news a report of 100's of lightning strikes in the Boston Moutain/Winslow area. It was kind of foggy as we approached our area of the world..a world that was about to be shattered!
I saw it first and knew right away, but told myself it was fog. I just gasped, "Oh Ross"..he said, "I see it". The driveway was very muddy and slippery and he pulled my side of the car almost flush to the root cellar, he did not want me to get out of the car. But I will be damned if I was going to stay in that car and slid out the drivers side. My first thought was of my pets...all were safe except one who had just had a litter of kittens and we never saw her again. She was on the second floor of the house and she was a devoted mommy and I am sure she would not leave her kittens. A distant neighbor met Ross around what was our back yard and said she saw it around 2pm and called the fire department, but it was alrady a total loss by the time she saw it and the volunteers got here. She handed him a pizza..it was all she knew to do. That was a nice gesture from this young woman. We never saw or heard from another neighbor or anyone else in our tiny town for that matter. So much for that small town friendly feeling!
Ross had stopped smoking, but this made him have to have a smoke! We had a small camper that was my mothers and I went into that and let the cats come in with me. I about smothered them with my loving on them. When I knew Ross was gone to get cigarettes, I began to scream and cry and pound the walls and ask God, why, why, why?? In my tears and anger I looked up and saw what I call my mother's "Jesus fish" on the wall and above it a painting of a small old cabin out in the woods all snowbound. A peace of sorts came over me and Jeremiah 29:11 entered my head. I stopped crying and my next thought was I did not even have any clean underwear!!
Ross came back and all he could say was he was sorry, over and over, I told him it would all be okay, even if I did still have some nagging doubts and fears.
He found wire from the telephone and like in Green Acres he climbed the pole and reattached the phone wires and took an old phone from our little junk shed and told me to call my daughter to come get me..
He would not ever leave the property..he would not leave the pets or what little we had left in some storage containers and the camper. He had no clean clothes or running water or power, but there was no way he would leave for a minute. It kind of scared me to leave him alone. We held each other and cried and said goodbye and I left with my daughter. We lived apart for 4 months while we got something to live in again with the help of some good freinds of my daughters and some help from some good folks at the church. My daughter brought me out to see him often and he came into town to work and stopped every day to see me.
We had no insurance..they had stopped underwriting many houses in our area due to no fire hydrants and only a vlounteer fire department that was always in chaos. Everything we had was gone..all our belongings, our photos, our clothes, our wedding photos, all the things I had saved of my childrens, my sewing machines..all gone.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop and for me to go into shock, but that would not happen..I knew God would see us through, some how. So that first night alone, I began walkin after midnight through my home and I would and still do visualize just how everything was..what was on the walls, on the tables, on the floor... everything in the house, even the cobwebs I last saw and thought how they needed to be brushed off..I even wrote it all down in a journal.
Some may say tht is total denial, but not for me, to me it is a coping mechamism that God put in my head that first night and even now if I can not sleep I go walkin and everything feels okay..and you know what it actually is okay! I am blessed with the love of a powerful God and a good man and a loving family and the help, love and support of the good freinds I have met online thse past months. I praise God everyday I can breathe and feel, even if it is pain..yes it will always be a hard loss, but praise God we have each other.
PS..Please do not feel sorry for us..I just want to point out just how strong the human being can be in some really adverse situations..but prayers are always welcome!!
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