Today, She Is
Molly Miltenberger Murray
Today, She Is
Copyright © 2013 Molly Miltenberger Murray. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-461-9
EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-131-4
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
This story is written for any, and for every, reader that it helps.
There is plenty to say to everyone, but one thing really: look both ways.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my friends who have given me so much of themselves.
Thanks especially to JanJan for sharing her story and her excitement for life.
So many thanks to my very dear friend from high school who wishes to remain anonymous; she kept a journal of my accident, and she has taught me how to be a faithful friend since we met 14 years ago.
Thank you to Aunt Eugenie for teaching my first-ever class in creative writing, for being such a wonderful if unwitting story-telling mentor, and for bringing me back to my roots with the coziest and most inspiring of homes for the three months that I wrote this.
Thank you Mary Claire Miltenberger for your help and encouragement footnoting and story-telling.
Thank you Gordon Murray for your help editing and footnoting, for supporting me and loving me through every day and a honeymoon book, and for making me happy.
Thanks fam for being the best and for not pulling the plug then or since.
Thanks be to God from Whom all blessings flow.
Introduction
The summer that I was 15, I was hit by a speedboat. I had a miraculous survival, and I had the next three tenuous, painful years to figure out how far I would recover. That was high school.
During those three years, I would have given anything to talk to someone who had undergone a similar recovery and who had come out the other side. Recovery from a freak accident is lonely enough; experiencing a head injury is intensely isolated. I was trapped inside my head: I empathized with those trapped inside of burning buildings, locked inside the Titanic, or otherwise caught in a cataclysmic and unavoidable turn of fate.
I related to the world through reading and I understood it through writing about it. Although no one that I actually knew seemed to go through any of the same issues, the treasury of literature that I read seemed to catch and express the turbulence and emotion of my experience. Even though I was too exhausted to engage in even the most inactive of activities, I could still pick up a book or listen to a recording, most of the time.
After I balanced enough that I could hide myself away, I intentionally blocked and burned as much as I could: but after college, I was still reeling from flashbacks and after-shock. I knew I had to tell my story to really let it go.
My mom saved a stack of pictures from the flames: I began with these and embarked on a journey through old journals, old letters, old books, any part of myself that I had not literally burned. My old journals, found hidden in a cardboard box in the barn loft, recorded every step of my recovery. The book of quotes that I kept was even more insightful.
I unlocked my lost self by finding and experiencing these sources again. It was an extraordinarily successful and painful process to re-trace my steps and recreate the flashbacks: but as I understood what I went through, the fragments came together and I could finally reconcile with the past. I haven’t had a flashback since.
I did not include many medical details in my endeavor to present an authentic experience. I ignored and avoided them as much I could during high school, and I still think they are distracting. I have yet to meet anyone who has had a speedboat land on their head, but I meet people every place I go that share the experience of mental trauma and the experience of pain.
I’ll just give it away right here and now: the point of this book is to share my experience. This is the book that I wished I had in high school. It’s for people who honestly want to understand some of the issues of recovery and that want to know what it feels like to recover from a life-impacting head injury. And now that it’s down on paper, I can let it go.
“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me.”1
1. Job 40:6–7.
PART I
Since yesterday, a century has passed away.
— Jean Lafitte1
These days I am waking up, and I am walking into a conscious dream where I am choked by the smell of a twisted forest that is the mint-green shade on the cover of those old Serendipity books about unicorns and trolls. It smells so densely of Bath & Bodyworks Bamboo Forest that I am seasick. I lunge and fall unconscious.
“Since yesterday a century has passed away,” said Mssr. Jean Lafitte. I sentenced how the rough-battled captain had meant these words every day for a long long time of my life. In one day he had won a battle and his world had changed.
It takes only a day to overturn a world and to build a new one. A man in his prime has fought in the morning only to be plucked from the fray like a flower in the afternoon to be buried in the soil in the lightly falling rain of twilight while his sweetheart watched the setting sun from her porch and the breeze that carried away her heart left a void, she stood there twined around the porch column and did not know that the childrens’ childrens’ children of her and him together would not be playing a melody on the guitar in a hundred and twenty years.
Before Christian, the family stretches out for time immemorial in a French village in Alsace-Lorraine, attending court, mowing fields, paying the tributes of fashion and philosophy. Christian left the family chateau and escaped the guillotine by beginning anew, a plantation owner in the sugar fields of Haiti.
Waking
