I envy the ones who can hear the words “car wreck”
Without an increase in heart rate
Without electricity going up their spines
Without rapid breathing
Without it all leading back to that one summer’s night
I envy the ones who can talk about trauma victims
Like they’re just patients
Like it’s work to be done
Compressions and breaths and shocks and meds
Hard work and important work, but still, work…
Like the family members shouldn’t be trying to come into the ER bay
They might not “get” it
…and I’m glad.
People talk about car wrecks or natural disasters and say
“Oh thank goodness it was only one fatality”
But that one person’s life may have been the world to many
One fatality is one too many
I called him “hubby”
Our chubby-cheeked toddler called him “dada”
I see his face in my mind when people talk of car wrecks
Remember feeling the void in the place that was our home
As our toddler looked for him those first two weeks
“Dada can’t come home,” I would tell her
“He’s in heaven with Jesus.”
She didn’t comprehend
I envy those who can watch movies without
Fear of the content bleeding into their real lives
Like a small child, I have to hide my eyes or cover my ears
I cannot watch a car impact on screen
I cannot watch an attempted resuscitation
I cannot
It’s too real
The imagined drama, trauma, there spirals me
Into the night of his very real death
I only go to the movie theater for children’s movies or comedies…
Anything else is better watched in the privacy of my home
In the event it may touch on real life
I’m a superhero fan.
I watched Superman die on the big screen
Later in a casket as Clark Kent
Martha and Lois standing there mourning him
But that’s not what my deceitful eyes showed me.
I saw my Chris lying there—
My mother-in-law and myself at his casket.
I sobbed through the movie Batman vs. Superman
I am broken.
Trauma has reshaped me
Unshaped me
I’m elastic that has been overstretched,
Lost from its original form
Parts of me will never bounce back
I was 28 when the trauma
Came to make its home inside me
I’m not as broken as I once was
I cannot say I’m completely whole either
I don’t know that a total healing is possible this side of heaven
It’s about learning to live with this
It’s about trying to live and make it as small an impairment as possible
It’s about learning to crawl from the ashes
Then learning to walk
Then one day beginning to run again
Post traumatic stress
Grief
Loss
Life beyond those companions—
Possible