By HEATHER CATHLEEN COX
Special to the NEWS
heathercathleencox@gmail.com
Heather Cathleen Cox
Every time I saw an ambulance pass by, in the direction of my parents’ house, my heart sunk into my stomach. I just knew it was for her.
To live a life always waiting for bad news—waiting to hear your Mama died, somehow, as if you were hearing nothing more than the dinner menu—that’s no life, yet it is the only life I’ve known.
It’s always been difficult for me to tell a story, so perhaps you’ll forgive me as I try now. See, I have a tendency to let my words run away with me, so instead of telling one story, fully and succinctly, I tell eight or 10,000 small stories, and I’m left to wonder what the words mean when they bleed together.
Whenever I write, I use the same words, yet somehow when placed together in different positions, I tell another kind of story, about another day. There’s someone, somewhere who wanes philosophical like I do. There must be someone, somewhere with the gumption to blame me for the mistakes I’ve made, yet where is that person when all the rest of the world has been blinded by idiocy?
Today is a day for celebration, because I’ve finally, after a long hiatus, recaptured the essence of me. I’m finding myself, again, after a long period of time in which I thought she’d been lost. But no. She’s still here. She’s perhaps been encapsulated in sorrow, in the sorrow she’s been afraid to break loose from because, from the age of tender childhood’s first memories, it’s all she’s known.
Afraid to cry, because what if I broke and no one was around to pick up the pieces. Afraid to mourn and afraid to dance for the same reason. Afraid to love or to receive love. Afraid of everything but death, and somehow—though it may have been my only attribute for so many years—it was enough to sustain me through the living of life which I did so recklessly, so emotionlessly.
I live life boldly because I’m not afraid to die; I’m not afraid to die because I know what death looks like. I saw death for the first time when I was 3-years-old, the corpse of my emaciated grandfather who died of the hardest lung cancer. I remember the smell of formaldehyde, the water cooler outside of the viewing room, hushes of those around me so as not to discuss such topics in front of someone so young. I remember the hospitals and the doctors’ offices. I remember being numb to tragedy because how can you live in a state of shock? It’s easier to pretend there is nothing to feel.
And now, as I begin a journey toward finishing an education commenced nearly 10 years ago, and after losing three grandfathers, one grandmother, one aunt, one mother and watching my last living grandmother wither away from Alzheimer’s, after enduring heartbreak upon heartbreak, abuse upon abuse, neglect upon neglect, failure upon failure, I have finally realized there is nothing that can ever break me in this life unless I permit it to do so.
The one brokenness I allow is the brokenness of a Savior, to continually break me of the poison I am tempted to drink from life’s most polluted wells. He is free to break me, and He has. After a lifetime spent praying and worshipping for brokenness of spirit, I realize – tears rolling down my cheeks and onto my tired body, nose stopping up, the burn and sting of real tears not wiped away – there will always be an excess, always a supply. There are batteries when I didn’t know there would be batteries.
I am free to find the me I had to leave behind so long ago, the me I neglected so long ago, the me I never learned to love. In learning to truly love others, it is only now I am free to learn to love myself. And perhaps, one day, I’ll write a true story.
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