Pearls of Wisdom and Foolish Mutterings

The Calm After the Storm

My brother called me last night. He was calling from work, on a break, and had apparently been caught up in thoughts and reminiscing about the last several years of our lives and all the turmoil that ruled those years. Mike works nights and his position as a supervisor often allows him the luxury of time to let his thoughts wander. So, it's not surprising for me to get a call from him late at night as he attempts to sort through the detritus of the tumult that has so often accompanied him in life.  Admittedly, much of the mayhem in his life has been of his own making, but the events that were on his mind last night were not of that category. The chaos that attended not only Mike’s life, but mine as well, and in turn, our extended families, was of a different ilk. It was thrust upon us with no warning, no sign of storm clouds gathering in the distance, and allowed no time for preparation.

The storm that blew into our lives on February 16, 2005 had the force of a hurricane and the devastating effects are still apparent.  Neither of us had any inkling, standing there at the graveside of our father on that cold February day, of the hellish events we were about to encounter. We could never have foreseen the bizarre path before us. We had no idea that we would lose our mother, too, in exactly one year, or that his wife was about to begin a battle for her own life against the brain tumor that lay festering at that moment in her body.  Four years later, in retrospect, it is difficult to believe that we also survived the avarice that would result in a hostile takeover of our father’s business, or that a small-town-banker and a former business partner would band together with my father’s widow in a plot that successfully framed my brother for fraud, sending him to prison for fourteen months. Four years later, with that insanity behind us, finally hearing the dying gasps of an adversarial and hotly contested probate , we have both emerged, battle-scarred and weary, but miraculously alive and relatively sane.

It was these events that were on my brother’s mind last night when he called me. He had a question for me. He wanted to know if I thought we would ever be able to forget all that had happened, leave it behind us and go on with life. Or, did I believe that those events had so scarred us that our lives were forever changed and we would always carry those scars with us? 

I didn’t hesitate in my answers to his questions, for I had already done battle with those very thoughts. I had wrestled with the inequity of the situation, the disbelief that the God we trusted in had allowed all these things to happen; especially in such rapid succession that we couldn’t catch our breath before another wave hit us. I had railed against heaven and cursed the justice system that I felt had failed us so miserably.  I danced with the devil, whirling around each doubt and question in a desperate bid for understanding. Finally, the understanding came. And I wrapped myself in it; I wore it like a custom-made garment until it became a part of me.  It was as easy as breathing for me to answer Mike’s questions when they came.

Will we ever be able to forget about what happened, leave it behind us and go on with our lives? No, we’ll never forget and it would be impossible for us to leave it behind for it is a part of who we are now. Neither of us is the same person we were before February 16, 2005. We have been fundamentally changed. We are the sum total of our life experiences. But, we have the responsibility to decide how those experiences affect us. We can choose to let them affect us in a positive manner or a negative one. We decide whether we will be better or worse because of what happened. Do we leave it behind us and go on with our lives? Again, the choice is ours. We can choose to let the past be the past, allowing it to stay where it belongs. Having been affected by it, we decide whether to take what we have learned from it and move forward; or we can chain ourselves to it and drag it along with us, thus never allowing the wounds to heal. Either way, we will go on with our lives. How we go on with them is up to us.

Yes, we are indeed scarred by the chaos of the last four years. We can choose to wear those scars as a badge, thereby letting them define us. Or, we can allow those scars to be exactly that—simply scars. Battle scars that are undeniably a part of us, but scars that are nothing more than reminders of the strength we gained and the victory that we snatched from the jaws of defeat.

I choose victory—nothing more, nothing less.