God Bless This Mess(18)
They say the causes are biological. Maybe hereditary. But part of me can’t help but wonder if it’s caused by fear—if my narcolepsy is a direct symptom of the trauma of the murder itself.
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I can remember the car ride up to the funeral, sitting in my booster seat next to my brother in his car seat, staring out the window at the desolate roads and green pastures as we made our way to Hamilton.
I can remember seeing their bodies in the casket. Just one casket. My aunt and cousins were buried together, with Aunt LeeLee in the middle, and Robin and Trent on either side of her, wrapped in their mother’s arms. They were so pale. It was easy for me to recognize, even at that age, that they were no longer there anymore. It was just their bodies.
I had to believe: They were angels now. Up in heaven.
I didn’t cry once at the funeral. I remember just staying very quiet and wanting to leave the whole time, because the bodies weren’t them. To this day, if the song “One More Day” by Diamond Rio or Garth Brooks’s “The Dance” comes on the radio, my throat closes up. Those were the two songs played on a slideshow of pictures at their funeral.
Even though we never talked about it, and even though I buried the memories so deep in my heart that it truly was forgotten, whenever those songs came on I was forced to remember what I lost.
As I got older, on a couple of occasions I tried to talk about some of this with people I cared about, but their reaction was like, “Wow, that’s awful. I don’t want to hear about that. That’s just too much to handle.”
Look, I don’t blame people for having that reaction. You might even be having that reaction as you read these pages.
Yes, it is too much to handle. But that’s the thing about trauma: it happens anyway. I didn’t have a choice to “handle” it or not as a six-year-old girl.
When, in my teens, I toyed with the thought of opening up and speaking about it again, it took a lot of strength. But I got shot down then, too. And it hurt. It kept me from dealing with the pain, and discouraged me from telling the truth—which only made it harder for me to find any type of closure and move on with my life. Instead, I just stuffed all the feelings and memories of it down inside and tried to pretend like it didn’t exist.
I know now that there are options for kids and families in these situations. There are grief counselors I could have seen, and groups I could have joined. I just didn’t know it then.
I wouldn’t begin to heal until I was in my mid-twenties, in the presence of a therapist. And until I opened up about it in this book, almost no one knew about it. So now, I’m just hoping that you, and anybody else who hears about it, will take this story and treat me gently with it.
Chapter 6
Something Big
During my 2020 quarantine self-help reading spell, I devoured some of Glennon Doyle’s writing. So did a lot of other people. Her book Untamed was a huge best seller. And one of the things she talks about is how after she’d broken free of her old life and found more of her true self, her own mother noted that she hadn’t seen her daughter that happy since she was ten years old.
The thing that she didn’t realize then but realizes now, Doyle writes, is that around ten years old is when children start to realize their roles in life. Whether consciously or subconsciously, it’s at that age—around the fourth grade for most of us—when we first figure out that there are certain boxes we’re supposed to fit into, certain lanes we’re supposed to stay in, certain types of people we’re supposed to be to fit in with the rest of society.
It’s from that point that we begin the long journey of figuring out what we’re going to do with our lives. Not just in terms of career choices, but in terms of relationships, marriage, having kids, and more. And it’s at that point where some of our spark, our childhood dreams and boundless energies and passions, tend to get lost. Or if not lost, then certainly buried.
It was a pretty remarkable thing to read, because it rang so true to me. As I look back now, I know that something definitely changed in me when I was ten years old. The only problem was, I had no idea what in the heck it actually meant. And I’m still trying to figure some parts of it out to this day!
The thing that came to me when I was ten is that I wanted to do something big.
That’s it. I didn’t know what “big” meant, what it was, what it represented, but I kept having this deep-down feeling that I was supposed to do something big with my life. As if God had some big purpose for me.
Great, I thought. What the heck do I do with that?
Why couldn’t my spark have been I think I want to work in a hospital! or I want to get married and have kids of my own someday! or anything even slightly normal?
Having this “big” feeling without any context or understanding of how a girl from Alabama goes and does something big with her life just left me with all kinds of anxiety.
The problem, I think, is that I was still trying to figure out how to be the good girl I wanted to be instead of figuring out what was okay for me to be outside of those expectations. I couldn’t seem to separate the core beliefs I’d been taught in my childhood from what might be right for me—and that caused a lot of internal friction.
I remember one Wednesday night at church, the pastor gave a sermon, saying, “God has a purpose for you!” And later that night, after all of my mother’s bedtime rituals were finished, the prayer said, and the fairy dust sprinkled, I began crying. Sobbing, actually. My mom sat down on the edge of my bed. “What is wrong?”