Pearls of Wisdom and Foolish Mutterings

A Single Decision

**It has taken me hours (literally) to struggle through this post. Consequently, the time frame I began writing about was much earlier. I offer this explanation because I don't want to change the entry. I'm leaving it as it was written, beginning at about 5:00 this afternoon.**


It's storming here - heavy rain, lots of thunder and lightning, the sky is preternaturally dark; not just dark, but a bruised purple color. A deep, rumbling thunder seems to originate in the distance. Ominously, it rolls through the clouds, picking up volume and speed, until finally it explodes into the air, seeming to release bolts of lightning which flash brilliantly--jagged streaks that light up the sky, exposing the full fury of the storm. Heavy rain soaks the ground and pools in the streets.

I have been inside the grocery store, shopping, as the storm rolls in. Driving home in the dark, windshield wipers furiously trying to keep up with the rain, I feel a knot of anxiety forming in my stomach as I drive toward home. I grab for my cell phone and, one by one, I call my husband and then, each of my children who live in the Houston area. Everyone is fine and all are surprised to hear from me. It's just a thunderstorm and I'm not a worrier by nature. I find myself wondering where this strange anxiety comes from. Normally I love thunderstorms.

As I turn the corner to enter my neighborhood, the sight that greets me is unnerving. The dark skies, the blowing rain, trees whipping furiously in the wind--it's all eerily familiar. As I pull into my driveway, I suddenly understand the origin of my anxiety. In a strange twist of fate, the storm today has evoked a memory of the beginning hours of Hurricane Ike. That memory, coupled with the lingering effects of seeing first-hand the devastation on Bolivar Peninsula seems to have triggered a delayed reaction in me.

I wondered, why now?, a full seven months after the hurricane. My reaction to the sights in Bolivar was visceral and I've not been able to shake it. I try to rationally examine my feelings, but I realize they're not rational. What I'm feeling--my reaction to the storm today--all of it is purely emotional on a very basic level. It is instinctual, rather than logical.

Then I remember that for almost two weeks after the hurricane, we were without electricity--no television, no internet, no news, no live coverage of storm damage. We were, in effect, isolated from the world around us. I remember now that the only information we got about the damage from the hurricane for those first weeks came from infrequent cell phone contact with my sister in Albuquerque, NM. By the time we were finally able to "connect" with the world again, reports of the damage were old news. The emphasis then was on the clean-up and the restoration of power. It was as if we skipped over the devastating sights of the days immediately after the storm. Then we were busy with the recovery, like everyone else.

It's similar to what happened when my daughter, Kristen, had a terrible wreck in front of my office years ago. She left my office and about a minute later, a young man ran inside saying, "That girl who just left here got hit! It's a bad wreck!" I ran outside, saw her car against the curb across the street and made a mad-dash to her. Surely I saw that her car was obliterated on the driver's side when I ran around it to get to her. But it didn't register at the time. All I saw was my daughter, bleeding and crying in the passenger seat where she had been thrown by the impact. Fortunately, she was not seriously hurt, coming out of the wreck with only a broken wrist and some minor cuts and scratches.

Two weeks later, I made my husband take me to the salvage yard where her car was stored. We walked together to her car; the passenger side was hardly damaged. I stopped in front of the car and slowly eased around to look at the driver's side. It looked like it had exploded. It looked like there was no way someone could have survived being the driver in that car. I started shaking uncontrollably as tears poured from my eyes. I thought I was going to vomit. I turned to my husband and fell against him, the weakness in my knees overtaking me. Until that moment, I hadn't faced the fate that Kristen had escaped. I was undone.

I think that is the same phenomenon I've been experiencing since Wednesday when we got on that ferry and went to Bolivar Peninsula. Until that time, I hadn't allowed myself to recognize the fury and destruction we were spared. Seeing the total devastation in Crystal Beach, I lost the ability to hold it at arm's length. I now know the reason I couldn't get Gail Ettenger's words out of my head. "I think I really screwed up this time," she told her friend on the phone. One decision cost her her life. She gambled and she lost.

One decision. Just one. My family gambled and won. How different it could have been. The weight of that realization is almost too heavy to bear.

A single decision. No more gambling for me or mine.