Taking My Life Back Read online

  As much as I helped Kylee, she also helped me. I believe there are few things that will speed your healing like helping someone else to heal. At the same time you are giving reinforcement to them, you are also demonstrating to yourself that you have enough energy to give to others. Even though you are still recovering, you are in a state of abundance sufficient to help others and reassure yourself that in time, you will heal too.

  It was shortly after the Boston explosions that my co-workers stepped in, out of the kindness of their hearts, and set up a GoFundMe account for me. Since I had no idea what expenses I was going to incur with insurance deductibles and co-pays, as well as mounting home expenses until I could work again, I was grateful that this was done by such kind people.

  When people donated money to the site, they sometimes left a little note of encouragement. Mom and I started making a habit of checking to see what people were saying in order to make a list and send them thank-you cards.

  But cards were going in both directions. I received a note from Amanda, who lived in Houston. She and her family had heard about my situation, and she had empathy for me. She told me that her ten-year-old little boy, Braden, was in the hospital at the time, fighting an aggressive form of cancer.

  It was heartbreaking to picture what it would be like for me, for our whole family, if that were Noah. Even though my little boy went through something so horrific, he was a miracle who more or less walked away. This poor mom couldn’t say that for her son. But in spite of her pain, she was soldiering on for him.

  Amanda briefly described Braden’s strong sense of his own spiritual life. He had confided to her that he experienced an encounter with God. During this encounter, he heard God tell him to give his birthday money to a bombing victim, to help them get a new leg. Braden’s parents were astonished to hear this from their ten-year-old. But they respected his wishes and began looking up victims to find the right one to give the money to.

  They came across me, a blast victim from their hometown. And while the obvious tie was that we lived in the same area, Amanda told me her heart went out to me because of my position as a single mom. She had been a single mom until she met her husband, who later adopted Braden.

  This little boy’s selflessness and personal maturity stunned me. There he was, facing down a terrible illness filled with miserable experiences, and his compassion was evident. It brought me back to my own experience years earlier, meeting that young girl in the hospital elevator who displayed such an example of gratitude and humility.

  I was anxious to meet Braden when I got out of the hospital. I wanted to hug him and thank him. The meeting itself was nothing short of an encounter with one of God’s gentle messengers in this world: a good boy with a heart to match.

  Now, three years later, I still have a strong friendship with Braden and his family, and I am so happy to say that he is in remission from his cancer.

  −13−

  It’s Not You, It’s Me

  It took a year and a half after the explosion to work through all the surgical interventions in the attempt to save my ruined left leg. Everything the surgeons did helped, but none of it was enough to restore that limb. My body was still trying to adapt to all the shrapnel I still carried, and my system just couldn’t seem to find enough strength and healing power to get my ruined leg back into usable shape. And in spite of all the complex surgeries, I still didn’t have enough of my leg left for it to function normally again.

  I had also grown about as weary as I could be with the process of going under general anesthesia and then sitting through another long healing process for the surgical wounds. At this point, they had slipped that gas mask over my face and sent me off to sleep seventeen times. I had come to dread the entire process.

  So now I was back in the hospital to have my eighteenth operation, but this time I intended for it to be the last of the series. I had accepted that amputation was the only alternative to the never-ending drag of surgeries and recovery. As disappointing as it was to make that decision, there was also real relief in it.

  The night before, the lovely Edd Hendee and his wife, Nina, hosted our family at a restaurant they own in Houston, and we held a family good-bye party for my leg. I had my “Boston Strong” manicure and pedicure, which meant I was going to go under the knife rocking the toenails I would keep as well as the ones I would be losing.

  I wrote my “breakup letter” to my leg and posted it online, then used a marker to write across my soon-to-be departed lower limb, “It’s not you, it’s me.” It was just time, that’s all. I joked that it was like a bad boyfriend and I needed to get it out of my life.

  By this time, I had been interviewed by media reporters on several occasions when they did articles that included interviews with Boston survivors and their families. Unfortunately, the articles were always accompanied by the gory photos. Whenever I saw them, my empathy for those people and my memory of the pain flashed through me like a wave of fire.

  Most people were sympathetic in their comments and feedback, and numerous celebrities were kind enough to have me on their shows and let me celebrate this long road of survival. But the inevitable haters went from claiming the whole attack was a hoax to leveling personal attacks at me for “faking” it.

  I suppose it was also inevitable that a portion of the hateful comments would include mockery over the media-fueled fairy-tale marriage. And since it was enough of a struggle to maintain a state of acceptance for this thing we were calling my new normal, I attempted to stay strong without wasting my vital energy in battling them.

  I did put up a challenge on social media to any and all internet trolls just before climbing into my hospital bed: anyone who didn’t believe me about my injuries or about this amputation could come to the hospital and observe the surgery for themselves. The public had the information now, and there was nothing stopping anyone from showing up and proving this was all “fake.”

  I mean, given their nasty passion, you would expect them to arrive in droves. You might expect them to have cameras and audio recorders ready to capture every twist in the story.

  Not one of the skeptics or deniers showed up.

  “Amp Day” was on a Monday. They prepped me, put me under, and finally did the amputation my family and I had struggled to avoid. For me, the time-jump thing happened again, and this time when I woke and looked down at the sheets, the troubled limb was missing, just below the knee. It sounds counterintuitive, but the impact of seeing my truncated leg was not particularly bad.

  Maybe I was inoculated from most of the shock because I had spent a lot of time reading up on the procedure. In addition, I was so thoroughly burned out from the struggle that the main thought that went through my head at the sight of my new leg stump was Finally.

  The leg was gone and there were no surgical complications. As for the rest of my recovery, I could stop trying to roll the boulder up the mountain.

  Two days after the operation, I was still in the hospital but my head had cleared after the anesthesia. The pain meds were light enough to allow me to be wide awake, so a bunch of family members and friends were all there to help me welcome phase two of my new normal. It was quite a crowd for that small room: Mom and Dad, my sisters, my fairy-tale husband, and my Boston nurses, Tracy and Naomi.

  Even with a group that large, my PTSD was pretty well contained by my comfort with these people. The sense of safety in their presence was a welcome relief to my anxious reactions at any other public gathering.

  I lay there in modest hospital attire, chatting away with one family member after another, while I casually opened the mail my husband had brought in from home. Even in the hospital, I handled paying our bills.

  So there I was, absently going through one bill after another, when I came to a medium-sized envelope with no return address. I assumed it was just a letter from someone out in the public who knew about my surgery. We had received several positive messages like that in the past.

  This handwritten note
didn’t tell me to get well soon.

  The “letter” was accompanied by a printout of someone’s text message trail. That someone had my husband’s name and contact information. When I ran my eyes down the page, the wording in the texts convinced me they were from him.

  The anonymous note openly accused my husband of cheating on our marriage. And it certainly seemed to me that I was holding a printout of his text conversations with his lover.

  There are moments, hopefully rare, when we experience such a powerful rush of dread throughout our bodies that it really does feel as if our blood has instantly turned to ice water. That happened to me, while the others in the room continued talking.

  But my husband saw the look on my face and realized something was going on. He snatched the printout away, but I was pretty fierce in demanding it back.

  I may have been a tad loud. All other conversation stopped. Everyone looked as if another bomb had gone off, this time right there in the room.

  I asked for a moment of privacy, and the next thing I knew the room was cleared and it was just the two of us. I looked back at the little care package from the anonymous stranger. What I saw there was a saga of betrayal.

  Of course, there was an alternate explanation energetically offered to me. And maybe, if this had been the first inkling that something was wrong, I could have gone into denial over it. But as soon as I saw his words to her, and her replies to him, it was as if the tumblers inside a dozen different locks all clicked into place at the same moment. I was sick inside and speechless. How awful for the family to come to my hospital room for the purpose of celebrating but go away with such a terrible pall over the afternoon.

  Naturally, the pall was darkest over the two of us. I emerged from the hospital a couple of days later minus one leg and plus one broken marriage. It would take a few more months to finalize the decision to divorce and try to prepare Noah for the disappointment of it, but that day the vessel cracked wide open. The sense of loss was like falling into an abyss. Worst of all, my heart broke for Noah and for his sense of family. I hated the thought of causing him to feel abandoned.

  The sense of failure felt as heavy as an iron suit. We tried couple’s counseling, but it failed. The kindly Edd Hendee even took him to lunch to talk things over, but when they were done, Mr. Hendee let me know that in his opinion, sadly, my marriage was over. What he thought meant a lot to me. He was the person who married us and also walked us through premarital counseling. If anyone wanted us to succeed, it was him.

  I hung on to what I wished was the truth, against my own better judgment, until New Year’s Eve, which was the day I was finally scheduled to take my first trial steps on the new artificial leg. Yes, it would be only the first of countless more steps, but this was a major turning point in my new normal. I knew my attitude would greatly affect how well it worked for me.

  I needed that moment to feel like my first baby steps in returning to upright motion again, and this could happen only if every point of physical discomfort or awkwardness that came from the experience was filed in my mind as merely being the way it felt to start walking again. If depression or negative thinking invaded the process, those same sensations could come in as symptoms of my loss and limitations, harbingers of all the limitations yet to come.

  The greatest challenge wasn’t the artificial leg but rather what existed right behind my eyeballs. The old saying “It is what it is” would have to be modified for this, to be more like, “It is how you insist on seeing it.” We certainly can’t always control our lives, but we can control how we meet challenges. I needed a partner in that hour to help me settle the way this thing was going to look and feel for the foreseeable future. He had social plans, though.

  This was when I knew I had to bite the bullet and tell Noah what was going on. Knowing the marriage was broken was not enough. Now my mom’s experience in her broken marriage became the experience base for my own. Like her, I had to do something.

  For me, much of the experience of the word handicap lies in the way I see it and interpret it. The only handicap is in aspects of loss we have no way to remedy. So I avoided fixating on things that appeared impossible, for now, and found that this selective form of vision was essential to maintaining concentration and focusing on difficult goals.

  When the larger picture loomed up and felt overwhelming, as it certainly did, my only answer was to get more focused. Do this. . . . Now do this. . . . Now do this. . . . like a brick mason using blocks the size of sugar cubes to build a cathedral.

  That brick mason surely knows one great truth about the task ahead: don’t look up, or the view will dismay you with the challenge it represents. Instead, pick up one block, move it into place, set it down, and then pick up the next block.

  No matter how small my gain on the overall architectural plan might appear, there was calming comfort in the routine itself, and comfort as well in each row of well-laid bricks. I set to work.

  As gently as I could, I sat Noah down and began to explain to my little boy that this marriage was in trouble. I told him it made me very sad to say this, but it would soon be just the two of us again. Noah floored me when he took my news right in stride and just responded, “Okay.” No emotion, no questions about what was going on. I was more than a little surprised by his calm demeanor, since he can raise his share of boyish drama. I asked him about it.

  Noah then told me a story of seeing my husband communicating on Facetime with a female. The way they were talking caused Noah to believe she was his girlfriend. He was old enough that it bothered him to see it, but he kept quiet because he had no idea how to approach me with what he saw. Without my knowledge, he had already sweated it out alone. He had been hoping it would just go away, because the idea of bringing it to me was overwhelming. It made him feel like he was helping to beat up his mom.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Noah told me. “He shouldn’t have been doing that.” He seemed genuinely relieved. It was just one more reminder to me that smart kids are often far more observant than we know. I made a mental note: Just because he can ignore me doesn’t mean he isn’t hearing me. All the time.

  I also made myself a firm promise that I would never again bring home a man who wasn’t someone my son could emotionally trust. I would never put him in the position where he felt he had to keep a toxic secret just to maintain peace in the house.

  Of course, it’s so easy to make a statement like that. And although I can now look back knowing I have been able to keep it, the gritty truth is that dealing with deception is a fundamental part of life in this world. I can’t promise Noah or anyone else that I will never be deceived again. We all know that liars lie and the good ones can get you to swear to it.

  I’m not trying to paint rainbows over a landfill. There’s no reason to pretend that the haters failed to notice the breakup of my fairy-tale marriage—in a big way.

  No one doubts that the opportunity to project anonymous online hatred offers an addictive rush of power to those who are tormented by frustration in their real lives. The bad news for them is that the rush is short and the need runs deep. The bad news for everyone else is that this means the haters are always hard at work getting a new fix.

  I didn’t need public shaming anyway. I had plenty of my own. The humiliation over losing this marriage was paralyzing. It had a deeper and more painful effect on me than the amputation itself. I hated hearing my father’s voice, broadcasting from a point about two inches behind my eyes and repeating on a loop, What a dope you are! Are you going to mess up everything you do, all your life? What a dope . . .

  I was lost and my life felt out of control. I was thankful for my parents and their loving generosity, but at the same time, my son needed his mom off of the injured list, and I had been thrown, to say the least.

  My prayers got back nothing that felt like an answer.

  This doesn’t mean no answer came. But when it did, the form it took was something new to me. The best way for me to describe it for you is that
the distinct feeling of being guided forward, one step at a time, came over me. It went on, step after quiet step. Nothing was solved for me, but I was strengthened and supported to find the solution myself.

  −14−

  Looking for the Helpers

  While I was still recovering from the amputation, FBI agents visited me again. (I don’t have many problems with boredom.) They were getting ready to begin prosecuting their case and wanted to advise me that I could expect to be subpoenaed to testify.

  I felt as if they had just leaned over my bed and stabbed me. The thought of facing that murdering coward again was revolting.

  What could I do? Ever since I had caught sight of his face on one of the early newscasts, I had seen him and his older brother again and again in nightmares. It was like dreaming of running from a train when you can’t jump off the tracks; I could never escape them when they haunted me. I could never find my little boy in those terrible dreams. I never knew if I should chase them and find out what they had done with him or run from them and perhaps live long enough to help him in another way.

  To hide, to attack them, to run away screaming—none of it ever did any good. I hated the helplessness of the nightmares they had left me with as much as I reviled the helplessness of lying out in that street with my body shot full of shrapnel and my little boy injured and terrified.

  Now the FBI wanted me to breathe the same air as this monster. I stiffened my back and got ready for a battle of wills with the government.

  Did you know FBI interviewers are very clever? Instead of getting tough about everything, which I must admit would have hardened my stance, they quietly explained the importance of offering some measure of justice to the dead and wounded. They very respectfully spoke to me about the number of loved ones they had to interview over this tragedy, all feeling the impact of those bombs.