Finding Comfort Through Trauma…
Before we get started, I want to address a question you may have. The title of this story is "Find me again," but it focuses on the journey my family has been on. It is within that story that I found myself getting lost. As you read, you see our story, you will see the trauma that we have endured, but you will also see how I seem to lose who I am, and then hopefully how I found my way back to someone who resembles me again. I owe all of this to Jesus.
When we last spoke, the story turned to the sadness of it all. The emotions of a moment like that are life-changing. We knew that we had to start talking about what we were feeling. As I said before, we had simply scheduled the day, put our heads down, and went to work. We understood that we had to accept that this thing had happened and that it wasn’t going to magically fix itself. We had to accept this new reality. To this point, we hadn’t changed anything. We were still using the stairs and carrying my wife up and down the stairs in her wheelchair. I mean, why not? It was only going to be 6 weeks. We had to admit that, at this point, it was going to take longer and that we had an issue. I am not sure why we hadn’t faced it at this point. I mean, it isn’t normal to be cleaning your wife’s wound twice a day, but cleaning, packing, and wrapping had become second nature. I still didn’t like it, but I could do it.
After that night, we decided things needed to change because we were in for a long recovery. We decided to call a company and have a ramp installed. This would allow us to be more mobile and get out of the house earlier. I felt guilty because my wife could only leave the house when I could carry her down the stairs with my father’s help. She had my mother still sitting with her each day, but being shut up in the house for so many days in a row was not good for her. Also, my parents only live here in the winter, and their time was coming to an end. At the time, I didn’t realize all that I was carrying, but looking back, I can tell that I felt so guilty/sad about everything she was having to deal with.
In these moments, it is hard to realize everything you are carrying. Both she and I were carrying so much frustration, anger, sadness, and questions of why. We would learn more and more that our faith and communication would become important if we were to make it out of this. Over the next couple of weeks, we will look at the emotional rollercoaster that comes with a traumatic situation, the weight one feels on either side of this, and the moment when I knew we were going to be ok.
Talk again soon…..
