“What had happened was…”

Part One

It’s taken me almost six years to talk about what happened to my body. It’s taken me much longer to talk about what happened to my life but here I am, unable to write fiction or further articles until I release all of it. I can’t hide behind characters in a short story or academic research articles to distract myself. Instead, I had to take some sobering looks at my life and what led to the point of my back breaking and ultimately, my body.

I’ve had pain since I can remember my first stomach aches at the age of eight and headaches at the age of nine. By that age, I developed a severe illness of which they never figured out exactly but I was told meningitis. I almost died, with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital saving my life. I was sick often and easily after that but mainly, I struggled with severe worrying — consistent, intrusive thoughts where I would obsessively pray for my family once I began religion class in my new Catholic school. I thought if I could be perfect, if I could be the best I would be enough. I was obsessed with pleasing my parents seeing as they were usually stressed, plus I had an ill mother. The first time she went away for treatment and proper diagnosis I was eight. By the time I was 12, I was told she would soon be in a wheelchair and that her other illness was called lupus. I didn’t understand that the musculoskeletal issues which plagued both her and my grandmother would also be my burden.

My mother passed away when I was 21 and we all handled it terribly. She was the matriarch, the life force of our entire family, especially extended, and none of us believed we would lose her. I had been told she would be in a wheelchair and may not see me graduate highschool so when she walked into my graduation, I somehow omitted her illness as being a death sentence. I believed she was indestructible, no matter how much I saw her deteriorate. That is what denial does but also, normalization. By 17, I was accompanying her to the ER where I watched the male doctors ignore her pain and treat her coldly, lacking empathy for my mother, swollen and overweight from steroids and hormones, desperately trying to simply stay alive and to have her pain believed.

Pain is real. But pain is also carried and eventually becomes part of you, part of your cells and blood and tears. Her pain was hard for me to process but pain was common in my family as she’d been in some sort of pain since I’d been born. I knew my mother was physically abused in her first marriage but that was all I knew. In actuality, my mother was also attacked by my half-brother when she was eight months pregnant with me, grabbed by her neck and choked, lifted off the floor and slammed into a wall as he was in a supposed drug fueled rage. My father had to grab my brother off of her , resulting in him throwing my brother across the garage, with only that part of the story ever told. Her neck would plague her after that and at the age of six, I can remember gently rubbing it, ever so softly to help her pain as she would lay on the floor and let me stay up late to watch Johnny Carson. Comedy was my salvation.

Before her death in 2002, I spent part of the summer at home to help pack up our house as my father was insistent on downsizing and selling the home they built. Our home was her crowning achievement as she had been an interior decorator before we moved to St. Croix. She designed everything, all of the details with no expense spared, lovingly crafted by a German immigrant her custom home. She was so proud of her achievement but healthcare is expensive and we had lost our health insurance for my mother’s care many years prior. That was when insurance could drop you for pre-existing conditions and my father was constantly worried about money because he was worried about her care and always finding the newest thing on the market. He had also begged her to let him move back to St. Croix for a period since my sister and I were in college. It was a complicated summer, her not ready to go, with him pushing the opposite way. He had managed to save the house after Hurricane Hugo decimated his business and the insurance policy and I think the home became an albatross to him. But I have such fond memories of going with them to pick all the pieces out as I was five at the time they built it. Every selection of fabric and tile and each tiny choice she designed and so it was something she was quite proud of, especially as the home won awards.

That summer she must have known her time was coming to a close as she told me things that shocked me — family secrets and some of her own. I look back at the summer with such fondness, glad that I could stay home for two months to spend time with her. Yet, I would leave her to start an internship at a newspaper on the island after prolonging it to spend more time with her that summer. She would eventually join us in St. Croix, using wheelchair services to get there where my sister also was. We would have less than two weeks together with the four of us there before she died in our new condominium — the same condo complex we had grown up in an area she loved on the east end of St. Croix in Green Cay.

But her death would be anything but peaceful. That day she’d been sick and not feeling well which wasn’t unusual. I left work to take her medicine and to pick my sister up for lunch. Her fiance would join us there the next day and we were all excited as we got the rental car. My sister was older so she took the rental car home and I picked my father up from work. I left my mother mere hours earlier where I took her some new pain medication. It made her nausea worse than usual so I brought her ginger ale and saltines on a tea plate and told her I’d see her later and to call me if she needed anything else. I think I told her I loved her but I also remember being frustrated. She would never tell me what she needed, I had to infer and it was difficult when you’re frightened. But it seemed like so many other times I had done the same thing: medicine, saltines, ginger ale, comfort. But that day I had to return to work, to a job I’d fallen in absolute love with and knew what I wanted to do forever by telling stories and reporting.

When I walked into the condominium that night from picking up my father, we heard horrendous, horror movie like screams from my sister and then the worst sound of all was my father’s guttural response when he ran in to find my mother. I think he knew she was gone before we did, as all I could think of was what I’d seen on tv and my own common sense, telling my sister almost as a mantra that the paramedics would give her a shot of adrenaline and she’d wake up. I don’t know how I handled it all so well at that moment except I did well in crises. My sister was home alone with my mother and assumed she’d been sleeping while she was resting in the bedroom and peeked in to check on her but left her sleeping. It stuck with me that it should have been me because I didn’t want my sister to torture herself thinking she missed something when she hadn’t. This would greatly affect my sister.

I’d think back to all of these things because that night at the ER the nurse chided me as to why I didn’t bring my mother in sooner that day? She looked at me as if it was all my fault, that I had let my mother slip through my fingers even though I didn’t know this time was different than all of the other times I had taken care of her through the years. How could we have known? Our family physician and friend, the person who diagnosed her when her own physican stepfather missed it, met us at the ER where our father was hysterical. 911 on St. Croix is not great and the experience of needing to meet and lead the slow ambulance to our condominium was traumatic in itself especially as they didn’t seem to rush to get there. Everything felt like it happened in slow motion. We would then follow the ambulance, with me driving my father and sister as it weaved its way from the far east end of the island to the hospital mid island, the longest car ride of my life where the ambulance would periodically stop when they would think they had a heartbeat.

At one point, the ambulance van stopped in Bassin Triangle (before the bypass was built in Christiansted) and cars backed up behind us. It was about 8pm by this point and the cars began honking. But out of nowhere, a man appeared to direct traffic as we sat frozen in the road while we waited for the ambulance to proceed. Our father got out of the car, hanging on the ambulance door trying to find out what was happening. I’d never seen him fallen apart like that except after his car accident. He looked frightened, lost and confused, not sure how to proceed. I’d never seen my father in such a state and it was jarring.

I think back to the paramedics and it was nothing like television — there is no express lane in St. Croix and I had the distinct feeling the paramedics had an attitude with me as I was hyper, terrified the longer she went without breathing. Could them hustling faster have saved her? No, but it didn’t stop me from torturing myself through the years. We said goodbye to my mother in the ER where they examined her and decided with her history she ultimately had a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot finally taking her down after such a long, glorious fight and the long term use of steroids. Our friend’s daughter at the ER told me I needed to say goodbye but it didn’t make sense. Everything stopped in the world and I went outside to smoke a cigarette. (I was raised in the 90’s and people smoked.) Outside, the ambulance parking was nearby, people were outside talking and laughing but my world felt skewed and I threw up.

We drove home that night with my father stopping at the pharmacy to get some medicine to calm down. We had to go home and call people to let them know what happened as we were figuring out the logistics. I thought there would be support but instead my uncle, my mother’s brother, was a retired state police detective and implored my sister that my mother needed an autopsy. My father said absolutely not as it was unnecessary and neither of my parents wanted that done when they died. Thus, my uncle took that and ran with it. That night when I had just lost my mother, my mother’s family and my half brother accused my father of murdering my mother. Out of protection for my sister and my father, I channeled my rage and used that to protect myself as I watched both of the people I loved most in the world absolutely destroyed and now our own family was making it worse.

Can you imagine? My uncle wanted to make a case for murder when he never helped my mother or truly believed she was ill, never offering help or assistance as he was the little brother and she mothered him. And then my half-brother would join forces with him, even calling my mother’s physician in St. Croix, believing that clearly a NY doctor in St. Croix must be up to no good and must not be a “real” doctor although he was the one who originally sent my mother to John’s Hopkins all those years ago for her official diagnoses.

That next day I went to the funeral home and to the travel agent to make our plans to get our mother back home. In a an alternate universe I thought getting back to our home in Kentucky, the home that was all her, would somehow bring her back to life? As if she was there just puttering around the house, greeting us when we walked through the door. We ended up leaving the island without her body, it being delayed due to the death certificate and such. I was sick most of the way home on a funky flight path to get back to Kentucky. But when we entered the house, I wept all over — she was everywhere. In the wallpaper, her little shoes left out, pictures of her everywhere and the scent. But there was no Mom. I went from room to room, desperately trying to find her as if in a state of psychosis not accepting that her absence was permanent. It was like losing her a second time.

And then the story gets even worse. When I said we all handled it poorly, it’s because of what happened after. Anger fueled me but a deep sadness I couldn’t even wrap my head around. And I was worried about my sister who would begin checking on us every night to make sure we were still breathing. I struggled with sleep and began taking sleeping pills where each day I would wake up and realize all over again she was gone. Death is part of my life but I kept trying to fight it, refusing to accept that I couldn’t save her. I didn’t even realize she was dying. That oversight haunted me for 20 years.

But what really haunted was what happened the night after her funeral, a funeral hastily planned as we didn’t know her final wishes except that she would be buried in a Catholic mass with our childhood priest overseeing it. My father picked out daisies because he used to pick them for her on his way home to the farm when we were little. I picked out a purple outfit for her to wear and she kept her emerald and diamond ring with her to the grave. I wasn’t taking care of myself and was subsisting off of little food, cigarettes, ginger ale and alcohol as folks would visit and we would talk and cry and it didn’t seem like it was unhealthy at the time.

A series of events would slowly unfold that I’d blame myself for for years. While we were sitting in our garage as my sister was leaving to go to her fiance’s house, someone asked her about my mother’s dog. She made the casual remark that it would make her feel better to have it and that was all I needed to hear. My sister is everything to me and I fixated on that. After she left, my boyfriend and a few other peple talked with my Dad and I asked someone to call my brother so we could pick up the dog. I thought maybe that would help my sister’s anxiety and soothe her. But I wasn’t thinking straight, just tunnel vision and not thinking that my niece would care. All I could think of was my poor sister alone with our unresponsive mother for over ten long minutes as she desperately tried to get through to 911 and my dad’s partner that night of Mom’s death.

My boyfriend drove me to my half-brother’s house who I had a decent relationship with especially since I adored his kids, particularly my niece. I didn’t think when I arrived that his wife would start a fight with me at the bottom of their driveway. I was surprised and unsettled as I begged for the dog. She began to tell me awful things she thought about me through the years and our family, how I was a brat and a horrible person and not a good daughter. I can’t remember all of it but I reacted, hollered back at her, stunned with the cruelty I didn’t see coming. My boyfriend stayed in the car parked across the street. And then as I wouldn’t retreat and she kept up the fight, my brother ran down the hill, so very fast. He was an ex-football player and twice my size, the extra velocity causing him to grab me by my neck with such force and then lifting all 5’10’’ of myself, lifiting me up as he choked me and took me across the street slamming me against the truck and shoving me inside.

I couldn’t speak. My boyfriend drove fast and I screamed because I didn’t even know what just happened — it was all so fast, so out of a movie. I couldn’t believe this was now my life. Either my boyfriend or I called my Dad and he told us to go to the hospital where my half-sister met me, angrily grabbing my halter shirt and knotting it around the neck that had just been strangled. The implication was immediate that it was all my fault. The xrays showed he pulled my neck and my father knew I would have lifetime damage just like my mother.

I pressed charges not for me, because I blamed myself for all of it, but because my half-brother had been repeatedly violent with girlfriends through the years and even his now wife. I’d witnessed his first bout of violence when I was only 4 or so and my mother had to drive to northern kentucky from the farm to break up a fight between he and his old girlfriend. From the hallway I saw him slam her and I was terrified. My mother tried to shield us from us but it wasn’t the last time we would see his rage. I was always on edge because of that around my brother, knowing his capacity to hurt especially as we’d seen him make our mother cry so often through the years, the cruelty of his words.

That’s how I lost my extended family: I pressed charges against the violence and got an emergency protective order while my half-brother told those who would listen that I was in the wrong, was out of control when he was the one who attacked me out of nowhere. I was devastate because I loved him so much and trusted him. But my body was in pain, especially my back from hitting the truck — it would never stop hurting from that moment. This resulted in needing to lay out a semester from school to return to St. Croix where I did painful physical therapy and my mother’s friend, a massage therapist, worked on my body to try to help me calm my nervous system. But it never ceased. I would go to PT and then come home where I would lay on ice, the guilt forcing me to believe I was being punished. That my body was a coffin for pain to die. My sister would sweetly lay with me while we would watch VHS episodes of old Sex and the City. I didn’t return to the paper while she began photographing for them. I was unable to return as I was in a weird shell shock and wanting to hide, terrified of being seen because who knew who I would anger and attack me.

I flew back to Kentucky for the court case against the assault and went to court without my father, with just a friend from high school. My uncle was there with my half-brother and the judge laughed at our case since it was over a dog. Boone County seems to think domestic violence is funny but they extended the restraining order and that was the end of it. He faced no punishment once again and instead, told anyone who would listen how he was the victim.

I returned to college the next semester and was not ready at all to be on my own with no one in Lexington. I lived near a hospital and everytime I heard the ambulances, I would start to panic. The panic attacked began that semester, the worst one happening when I was driving and a friend had to talk me down. My father was of the idea that I could simply push past all of this and so I tried. But nothing was the same in my life in college. Everyone seemed so vacant and superficial, especially my boyfriend. I broke up with him after a month or so and began lobbying at the Capital in Kentucky. On paper, I looked like I was doing well with a few internships and running a college group. But I wasn’t sleeping, I was deeply terrified around the clock, and had a debilitating depression that I used anger to fuel and remedied by drinking. No one seemed to understand what was going on with me and there was very little sympathy as I was expected to return to who I was before. But it was impossible and I became self destructive. I turned that anger inward toward myself, not realizing that I was the meanest one of all.

I never saw my half-brother’s children again. I’d been there when my niece was born, took her down to college the year prior where she spent the night in the dorm and we went roller skating. I was devastated thinking of what a monster she must have thought of me and the worst part wasn’t the physical pain but the pain of losing my family. But it had to happen.

A year after the assault, I would see my half-brother as I tried to make peace with my aunt overseeing but the whole instance destabilized me and all of the progress I made deteriorated. My father assumed you can just forget about trauma and move past it as he had done, but I carried it all with me, always afraid I’d make a man angry enough that he would strangle me again. These feelings trailed me for the next 20 plus years as I put my body through more pain, pushing it so I could work and take care of everyone else, just like my mother.

Until 2018. I developed shingles as my body had slowly gotten worse over the years as I pushed through while going to graduate school, attempting to get my PhD while working, raising my son on my own, dealing with my abusive ex-husband and helping to take care of my sick father. My professor warned me three years earlier I couldn’t do it all and take care of everyone but I had no choice. Doctors warned me of my weight but continued patholgizing my emotional pain instead of the physical pain, prescribing me medication for mood and sleep but not hearing me about my back.

The shingles episode was horrendous and the first doctor was a woman who treated me like a drug addict when I merely wanted testing done to see what was wrong and why it was getting worse. She had little empathy as she claimed she also had back pain yet she wore heels. I was deteriorating and no one cared. But my body was screaming about all the pain I was in and I couldn’t seem to listen and face it.

Finally in 2019 I had an MRI where they had proof my back was essentially broken. My spine was somewhat crumbling and my inflammation was off the charts. In 2020 they decided a spinal fusion was the best course of action where they could also operate on the spinal stenosis and perform the laminetomy of the cyst on my spinal cord I’d had for who knows how many years. I thought this would be the cure. Instead, the surgery didn’t go well and I needed another fusion where they would add actual screws to stabilize my spine.

In the four years I had five spine surgeries, one of which resulted in neuropathy in my right leg requiring me to use a cane. These are incredible traumas to your body and the trauma of cutting me open, cut everything in me open. I finally had to confront the violence in my life.

In 2022 I went to see my half-brother to apologize for my part in it and how I shouldn’t’ have been at his house. I should have left the dog but I was just a little sister terrified and I wasn’t looking for a fight with my brother. I shared one last cigarette with him (I had quit) as I sat in his office and he told me how much I looked like our mother. There is such sadness for losing him in my life but clarity knowing this is nonnegotiable. After seeing him that day in person and alone (my partner stayed at a restaurant down the street just in case), my body revolted and for a week I couldn’t move or walk. I was destroyed.

He isn’t the only one responsible for my injuries but he is responsible for some. I mention this not to shame him but to illuminate domestic violence and how common it is in families and how we refuse to address it. To talk about it brings shame to a lot of people but I refuse to carry that shame. Some folks in my family took my half-brother’s side, with my grandfather excusing it based on a mental illness he claimed my half-brother had. I believe that he had his own trauma and it came out that day but I am no man’s punching bag. To not talk about domestic violence by attempting to ignore it hurts all of us. I raised my son to respect women and to never, ever lay his hands on them, as I also warned him of the power of our temper.

I still say small prayers for my family always and I love them all but I do so far away. I live a quiet life where I have learned things just happen and it’s all an unfortunate circumstance. Life moves on and so should we.