It’s been over three weeks since Helene did her dirty work, leaving indescribable heartache and destruction in her path.
Cheetos for Breakfast
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Three Weeks After
People ask me how I’m doing.
I am exhausted.
There’s mental exhaustion that leaves me virtually incapable of complex thought, problem solving, or reading a book.
There’s emotional exhaustion that leaves me feeling everything and nothing, all at the same time.
I am angry.
I am angry that our tragedy has been used in service of a political agenda.
I am angry that the world out there has gone on spinning while we are here…with all this.
I am angry at the lack of information, leading to both intentional and unintentional misinformation, as people fill in the gaps the best they can.
I am angry at the failure of the emergency alerts, which were too little, too late, and inaccessible to those that needed them most.
I am angry at the insurance industry which seems to play a game at their benefit and the expense of those they supposedly serve.
I am angry that the cell phone provider that has always promised the best service has failed us terribly when we needed it most.
I am angry that people still don’t understand how to navigate an intersection where the traffic light is out. (Four way stop, people! Four.way.stop!)
I feel guilt. So much guilt.
Guilt that I haven’t lost more.
Guilt that I haven’t done more.
Guilt that I am physically incapable of doing more, due to my ls spinal limitations and lack of big, beefy muscles with which to hoist cases of water and piles of debris.
Guilt that I lack skill with a chainsaw or earth moving equipment.
Guilt that I didn’t warn my daughter’s neighbors to evacuate and wasn’t there to rescue them from their roofs with a canoe.
Guilt that it seems like I have given so little, mostly receiving from people’s kindness.
I am grateful.
Grateful that my daughter and granddaughter got to safety before the flood water engulfed their house.
Grateful for the hoards of volunteers and that people can actually pronounce Swannanoa now.
Grateful for the kindness of so many family, friends, and strangers in donations of money and food and water and goods and offers of help.
I am overwhelmed.
I am overwhelmed with all of the offers of all the good things.
I am heartbroken.
I am heartbroken that those that lost the most were, for the most part, those who had the least to lose and also have the fewest resources to rebuild.
But right now, right now I am afraid.
Afraid of what will happen to the local businesses.
Afraid that the world will go back to normal and not learn and not change.
Afraid that we will be expected to go on living as if none of this ever happened.
Afraid that we will be forgotten.
Afraid that we will forget each other.
Afraid that we will lose the connection and sense of community that have been our oxygen, our water, our source of life for 21 days.
And yet, I do have hope. I hope for so many things. But that is another post for another day.
Why Didn't They Leave?
(On September 27, 2024, the remnants of Hurricane Helene, now a tropical storm, passed over the mountains of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, dumping upwards of 30 inches of rain and resulting in massive flooding, landslides, washed out roads, and downed trees and power lines. The death toll in North Carolina is currently at 96 but many are still missing. This is Western North Caroina's Katrina.)
"Why didn't they leave?"
I see this question constantly when I do the stupid thing of reading the comments on videos and posts about the flood and destruction wrought by Helene. They ask that question as if everyone here is stupid. As if we just didn't know any better. As if all of this trauma and loss wouldn't have happened if we had just heeded the advice of the professionals.
Why didn't they leave?
The Rainfall
Days before they started telling us that we would get the remnants of Hurricane Helene. They said that we would likely get 6-10" of rain. They did say that this could be a catastrophic storm. When they said the same thing in 2018 with Hurricane Irene, we got drizzle. Most people in WNC are "I'll believe it when I see it" people because predicting the weather around here can be extremely tricky.
Instead of 6-10" of rain, we got around 14-15" at our house in Swannanoa. The areas around Mount Mitchell (highest point east of the Mississippi at 6684ft) got 24-30" of rain. All that rain has to go somewhere.
The Flooding
They said that the flooding could be bad. When I hunted and pecked I found that the rivers were expected to crest at higher that what we had with Frances in 2004, but lower than the historic Flood of 1916. They said that the rivers would crest on Saturday afternoon.
The flooding happened Friday morning. The Swannanoa River in Biltmore Village crested at 5.4 feet above the 1916 level.
We were expecting a lot of rain. We expected some flooding. Nobody was expecting this.
The Emergency Alerts
Well, some of us got emergency alerts. I say some of us because my husband, sleeping beside me, his phone on his bedside table, did not get those alerts. My phone did. But the alerts didn't say exactly WHO should evacuate (our house is high on a hill). And when I tried to read more information, assuming that this alert was in my text messages, the alert would disappear into some unknown alert stratosphere. Or sometimes the alert would say "For more information, go to buncombeready.gov" which you cannot do if you no longer have cell service or internet. I have heard other people saying that they never got an alert.
The Timing
The flooding started in the wee hours. Even when our daughter texted and then called us around 6-6:30am, it was still dark. Who can see where the water is in the dark? Who wants to venture out into flooding roads when they can't see anything?
The original plan with our daughter was to wait until a bit of daylight for her to try to evacuate or for us to try to go get her and our granddaughter. We didn't wait and, as we discovered, daylight would have been too late. By the time there was any daylight, her road was impassable. Her neighbors were trapped. Within 3 hours they were on their roofs, the water to the eaves.
So why didn't they evacuate? Because nobody expected this. Nobody expected the 2-2.5 FEET of water to pour down over our watershed, fill our reservoirs to the point that the spillways activated, flooding our rivers which overflowed their banks well beyond the 100 and the 500 year floodplains.
Nobody expected houses that had never seen water to be wiped off their foundations. Nobody expected roads to washed away. Nobody expected mountainsides to come crashing down. Nobody expected that the terms "unprecedented" and "Biblical" to be used with regard to our weather event. Nobody expected the words "decimated" and "apocalyptic" to be used to describe their town, their neighborhoods, their homes.
So please, PLEASE have compassion on those most impacted. Please don't question their judgment.
We expected something. None of us expected THIS.
Thursday, August 8, 2024
Feelings About Feelings
“Having feelings about our feelings creates unnecessary suffering.” Debra Benfield
A while back there was a Very Important Day. It was one I had anticipated for the longest of times.
One that I had looked forward to with eagerness and joy.
And yet when it came to be it was one of the most intense days of my life.
So many things, some very good and some very hard, led up to thatVery Important Day and I was a jumble of emotions. I felt them all,
sometimes in sequence and sometimes concurrently. At a point or two
I was in tears. Tears of happiness and relief. But also tears of just all the
intense emotions: excitement, fear, heartbreak, uncertainty, gratefulness,
grief, and pure exhaustion. In addition, there were the yucky feelings of
incompetence and invisibility and worthlessness.
But on top of all of that was this overriding feeling of shame. I felt that
I SHOULD have felt differently. It was the should that almost did me in.
I closed the Very Important Day beating myself up, believing myself to
be the most dysfunctional of humans…all because of the emotions I had
that day. Emotions that surprised me. Emotions that did not fit inside the
Very Important Day box. Emotions that I could not control and bend to
my will.
When I talked with my therapist, not only did she validate all of those
emotions, but she asked me what I had done to show myself compassion.
Show what???
Showing myself compassion was definitely not on my self-care bingo card that day.
It wasn’t until I read the above quote that it really clicked with what I know but often…usually….well, almost always forget. That emotions are morally neutral. They aren’t right or wrong, they just are.
We can be curious about them and learn from them. We can ride them out. We can learn ways to manage them. But we can’t change them. And we can’t, we mustn’t, condemn them. That only leads to suffering.
But on top of all of that was this overriding feeling: shame. I SHOULD have felt differently. I closed the biggest day of my daughter’s life beating myself up for being the most dysfunctional mother on the planet because of the emotions I had that day. Emotions I could not control and bend to my will. When I talked with Heidi, my therapist, not only did she validate all of those emotions, but she asked me what I had done to show myself compassion. Showing myself compassion was definitely not on my bingo card that day. It wasn’t until I read the above quote that it really clicked with what I know but often…usually….well, almost always forget. That emotions are morally neutral. They aren’t right or wrong, they just are. We can be curious about them and learn from them. We can ride them out. We can learn ways to manage them. But we can’t change them. And we can’t, we mustn’t, condemn them. It does only lead to suffering.Sunday, January 14, 2024
Two Hands, Two Truths
Two days ago, in a text conversation with a dear friend, I said these words: “It is so hard to be there for a child when it is taking everything in you to hold yourself together.”
Those words I wrote stopped me in my tracks and took my breath away.
I knew what I was talking about. I had been there myself.
And then I realized: so had my mother.
I have wrestled since 1977 with the effects of my parents’ divorce. While I have probably been more open about the loss of my father as a presence in my life, I have been less open about my mother.
The reality is that when I lost my father that day, I lost my mother as well.
At 14, I was on my own, emotionally, at least.
I’ve spent the years since trying to process the fallout of these losses and the ways I was sucked into being the emotional caretaker for a mother who was stuck in grief. Who didn’t have the tools (or use what tools were available) to understand and process her own pain, much less care for a teenager. Much, much less care for a teenager dealing with demons of her own.
For years I blamed my mother for so much. Why wouldn’t she seek help? Why wouldn’t she take antidepressants? Why wouldn’t she ever, ever apologize? Why couldn’t she see I could never fill that void in her life?
Fast forward a few decades and I was there myself. A mother so devastated by circumstances beyond my control.. A mother absolutely paralyzed by my apparent failure that I was afraid and totally unable to parent my own teenage children.
I got it. And getting it crushed me. And I was angry at the teenage me for needing my own mother. And I was angry at the adult me for blaming my mother for my pain.
Fast forward another decade.
“It is so hard to be there for a child when it is taking everything in you to hold yourself together.”
And I realize that it can be both.
A mother can be totally so maxed out and flattened by life that she cannot be what she needs to be for her child.
And a child can be devastated by that loss.
And I can have compassion for both.
This isn’t a blame game. It is just reality in this pathetically broken world of ours.
Just because a mother can’t be all she needs or wants to be for her child does not negate the impact of this on the child.
And just because a child suffers in this way does not mean we cannot have compassion for a mother who is totally maxed out and may have no resources to draw on.
I used to think that having compassion for my mother would totally minimize my own pain. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
I’ve heard over and over again that part of maturity, part of walking through grief, is being able to hold two often opposing truths at the same time. One truth does not negate the other.
I learned a lot from my experience, and I have been dead set on doing so many things differently: taking antidepressants, engaging in therapy to heal from my own trauma, seeking honest conversations with my own children, apologizing out the wazoo for the many ways I failed them. Yet I now “get” just how hard it must have been for my mother.
I have two hands. I can hold both her pain and mine.
It is a strange but good place to be.
Sunday, January 7, 2024
Whatever Is Mentionable Is Manageable
"Whatever is mentionable is manageable."
These are the words Margaret McFarland spoke to Fred Rogers that stuck with him and served as a foundation for his work with children. She knew, he knew, that it is the secrets that eat us alive.
I know this, too.
I have been accused, over the years, of being too honest and too open. That I don't need to share everything I think or feel (I can assure you, I don't...seriously, if you only knew). I have wrestled with this. Do I share too much? I realize that in sharing uncomfortable things, I have lost the respect of many and lost the friendship of others.
Why do I share? Because whatever is mentionable is manageable. I don't always know who to share with so I just throw my words into the wind. And in this world of photoshop and aspirational lifestyle posts, I truly believe that someone else may need to see real people dealing with real issues in real life.
Somebody somewhere, but I may not know who, needs to feel so not alone. So I mention. I mention to manage the hard things in my own life. But I do so that somebody else may have the words or the camaraderie or the connection to be able to mention the hard things in theirs as well.
It is so often the silence that slays us.
Monday, January 1, 2024
Ode to 2023
Being the more reflective type, I generally like to sit down at the end of the year and process all that has gone before. This past week was nothing short of a round robin of activity with a house full of people and I just didn’t have the quiet that I need to sit and think. So that which normally comes at the end of one year is, this time, coming at the beginning of another. This post could get long.
In some ways this past year just sucked. It was hard. Hard in so many ways. But anytime things are hard, there is a lot of learning going on. I don’t always see the learning at the time. But later, after the bleeding has stopped and the wound is starting to crust over a bit but is still oh, so tender to the touch, I catch a glimpse of understanding that I didn’t have before.
So…what did I learn this year?
I learned to see the fact that I am a Highly Sensitive Person as a strength and an asset, rather than a weakness and a liability. This was a challenge in a world (and especially a profession) that rewards the driven and ambitious. The fast-paced self promoters. Where your value is measured by the quantity of your work over your quality. This is a challenge in a world that scorns emotion and minimizes concerns. Where I am more likely to be accused of making a mountain out of a molehill than be believed, even when I warn that that chunk of ice may very well be the tip of an iceberg that can do catastrophic damage. It is a challenge in a world that doesn’t value or respect those who sit and process, ponder, and even grieve. But I am learning that we Highly Sensitive People are so important to the world. We are the nerve endings, without which communities and societies would damage themselves to no end.
I learned that the trajectory of life can change in an instant: one decision, one conversation, one diagnosis and the world is turned upside down and the future can get lost in the rubble. I learned that it can take time, sometimes a long time, to find a way forward. I learned that all plans and hopes and dreams must be held loosely. That sometimes muddling through and figuring it out as you go is the best you can do.
I learned that there is a huge difference between public pain and private pain and which one is harder.
I learned that reading 52 books in one year didn’t impress anybody, not even me, and it certainly won’t get back the education I threw away.
Most importantly of all, I learned to grieve. Early in the year I listened to a podcast by Adam Young about the importance of grieving. Then I read Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow. And I followed that Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is. What these people taught me is that grieving is absolutely essential for a fuller life. And that doesn’t just mean grieving the loss of someone through death. Grieving encompasses so much more. I learned that I needed to grieve.
-I grieved the loss of youth. The loss of the body I knew for years. One pleasing to the eye and free of pain.
-I grieved my vocation. The fact that for 21 years I have been in a profession that often highlights my weaknesses and disregards my strengths. It has been a struggle and the older I got, the more I looked back on what I’ve done with my life, the harder it got. What about all the areas of life where there are workers needed? Where I could make a difference? But I am here, one in several thousand all scrambling for the same pool of clients, trying to eke out a living. I struggled with this.
-I grieved the loss of dreams. I will never go back to school and get that advanced degree. I don’t have the time, the energy, the focus. I don’t have any idea how I would make use of such a thing. I can set it down and say goodbye.
-I grieved the things I never had. Relationships that didn’t exist, leaving a hole in my soul.
-I grieved for my daughter. The loss of the life she knew. The loss of energy and vitality and just being able to drink a cup of coffee without feeling sick. The loss of a future free from medical concerns and potential recurrence or secondary cancers. The loss of a normal life expectancy.
-I grieved the loss of a vision for the future and my place in it. This time last year I thought I had an idea of the near future and even further down the road. I thought I was seeing how God planned on using my gifts and all that I have learned through the years. That train derailed and went up in smoke. I’m afraid to take a peek down the road. I’m not even sure there is a road. I’m taking one tentative step at a time.
-I grieved the loss of trust…in important relationships, in community, in God. This year sent me back into a hole, like a wounded animal, just trying to survive. This year took away my words, the one way I seem able to connect to others.
All this grieving, you might think, would make me more sad. More of a Debbie Downer than I already am. But it hasn’t. It has brought relief. I’ve found that grieving actually feels like home to me. It is the one area where I don’t have to hide or pretend. For most of my life I was told to cheer up. Think positive thoughts. Be thankful for what I had. “At least you don’t….” Grieving is the one place where I can be honest about who I am and what I feel.
And yet our culture doesn’t allow it. We hardly allow it for the most public and obvious of losses, expecting the family of the dead to snap back and move on in record time. We certainly don’t allow it for all of the other, less visible, less acknowledged losses in life.
But our failure to grieve saps us of life. We spend so much time pushing it down, keeping the feral cat in the bag. We spend so much energy keeping our upper lip stiff as a steel beam and our heart as protected as Fort Knox that we don’t have anything left for being human.
Frances Weller says, “If we don’t address our grief, our hearts close. And our hearts don’t have the capacity then to register the suffering of the world.”
Grief doesn’t shut us down. It makes us more alive. Maybe now I am more alive.
I guess learning that was enough.
Saturday, November 18, 2023
On the 20th Anniversary of My Father's Death
(Note: this is a post about my father. Well, his absence, his death. Over the years I’ve written a good bit about my father. Enough so that I’ve been accused of “not wanting to heal” and told to “just get over it and move on.” If you can’t read my words without rolling your eyes and wishing I would just toughen up and grow a pair, then move along. I’m not writing for you. If, on the other hand, you understand the complexity of life and relationships and loss and grief and don’t mind hearing the words of a sensitive soul as she processes an important anniversary, read on.)
It was 20 years ago today that it happened. I was crossing the front yard, returning from the grocery store, having gone on a road-trip-snack-finding mission in preparation for the next day when we were planning on heading south to Florida. We were pulling all four kids out of school in order to go on a press check near Tallahassee for my husband’s job, then on to Pensacola to see my dad. That was our plan. He was dying. This would be my goodbye to him.
I crossed the front yard and standing on the steps was my husband. “Bonnie called. Your dad died.” Just typing those words brings tears to my eyes. Still.
Something broke in me at that point. My dad was gone. But he had been gone. In some ways he had always been gone.
But something about this, the finality of it, tore through me and tears that I had stored up for years, decades, broke loose. A Johnstown Flood of intense grief, sweeping through every valley and nook and cranny of me.
Flashback. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving. We pull into the driveway after school and the garage that had, over the past couple of weeks, become a holding center for various pieces of furniture and boxes of possessions, was empty. He was gone. Gone. Gone.
Gone. I couldn’t get past the word. I felt the word the way you feel hunger or cold or punch to the gut. Gone. it took my very breath away.
I didn’t ever grieve him gone before. He wasn’t really. He was just across town, calling every so often to ask me how old I was and how was school. He wasn’t really gone because he would come and pick us up once a year, two or three days before Christmas, and take us out to eat. He wasn’t really gone because I would see him in articles in the newspaper or ads for his Dale Carnegie classes.
He wasn’t really gone because he had never really been there. Or I had been so afraid of him when he was. It’s hard to remember now. That was so long ago.
But gone. I didn’t really notice the impact for several years. But once I did…it was like a trap door had opened up and I had fallen through to this deep underground cavern, pregnant with emptiness.
I realized that I had to grieve not just what I lost, but what I never had.
You’d think by now it would be easier. It’s been 60 years since I was born. Forty-six years since he left. Twenty years since he died. And yet I feel the lack just as keenly as ever. The relationship that so many people take for granted, I cannot fathom.
I cannot fathom being taught how to hit a ball or go fishing or play an instrument or work on a car. I cannot fathom intelligent conversation or shared silly songs. I cannot fathom shooting the breeze. I cannot fathom being valued and respected in any, any way by any man (other than my husband).
For years I was told that God would be my Father. That he himself, he alone, would be able to fill whatever Grand Canyon of emotional and relational need that I had. But he didn’t. And just telling me that only put the burden on me with the message: “If you had a right relationship with God you wouldn’t feel this pain.”
But I do. I still do.
I suppose I always will. Last I checked, grief didn't have a timetable. Not 20 or 46 or 60 years. Especially when you grieve not only what was lost, but what never was.
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