In the Blink of an Eye

Friday - May 29 1970
Santa Ana, California
5:45PM

The Beginning of Memorial Day Weekend

My Mom and I were on our way home from South Coast Plaza. We’d been there since a little after 10am PT. My Dad had invited "his girls" out to lunch at Kaplan’s Deli. A Sort'a Kind'a big deal this luncheon ... more for what it could have meant ... than for what eventually transpired.

The previous 12 months had seen so much sadness and death. My Mother's Dad (Opa to me) died on December 7th 1969. My Mom took the news of my Brother's impending marriage as badly as she had her father’s death. All "her" dreams for him started dying the day he left home, and shattered when he married. Small wonder neither my brother nor his wife wanted contact with my Mom.

Dad went to Amsterdam that year, like always, and I was left home alone with Mom. After school Mom took me to Fountain Convalescent Hospital, where Opa was. On weekends and Holidays my Mom and I were there all day. After I visited Opa I went from room to room visiting people, most days I played piano for anyone who wanted to listen. On movie days I watched MGM musicals with the residents.

In September of 1969 when Opa’s health began failing, my Mom more or less vanished into a dark and inaccessible place. She became blind to the needs of almost everyone but her Father. While most of Opa’s needs were attended to by nurses, Mom was there every day and helped cared for him as well.

Even at the best of times Mom was a hard, brittle, and self absorbed individual. Her tenuous hold on sanity was thrown into the abyss by her Father's impending death. When my cat took ill (blocked bladder) I begged for someone to take him in to the Vet. My Mom slapped me silly and told me “no one has time for a god damned cat”. My cat Pussy Willow and my love for him were just so much collateral damage.

Life at home was so cold harsh I wished and prayed that God would let me die.

Unable to get help for my cat, and not knowing what I could do, I was forced to watch Pussy Willow endure a slow and agonizing death. I couldn't even touch him without causing him pain. He died bloated twice his normal size, writhing in pain. The memories of those two weeks triggered years of nightmares. Even now, the events of those days still haunt me.

No Christmas that year … not really … not that it mattered. I was living alone by then, surrounded by ghosts both living and dead … invisible to all. All the people Mom really cared about were gone. Her Dad had just died, her Mom died five years prior, and my Brother was as good as dead in her mind. She mourned them all with a vengeance that seemed horrifying to my young mind.

Five days a week my Dad was more like a residual ghost than a living person. Dad got up at 7am, lit a cigarette coughed and hacked, shaved, dressed, ate and went to work, came home at 6pm, talked with my mother, ate, and then watched television on the recliner until 11:30pm. I wasn’t really there to either of my parents.

A few years earlier, before my brother moved from home, when things were still semi-normal … as normal as things ever were in my home. I made the decision to get baptized. Pam Fancher, my best friend, introduced me to her church. Her parents had been taking me to there with them. Nothing unusual about that, various neighbors had been taking me to church for as long as I could remember. It got me out of my Mom’s hair on Sundays.

I lived for the Sundays I was able to attend "my" church. I loved Mrs. Lambeth (“Dusty” to other parishioners), our Pastor Dr Gerald Bash, and Jack Coleman the choir director. I loved going into the sanctuary to sing, the sound of the great organ, the silky feel of a choir rob against my skin. The sanctuary was a mystical magical place to me. A place where our children's voices could sound as if they belonged in the Mormon tabernacle.

Jack Coleman wasn't a phony, something I knew all too much about. He lived the love of God he was constantly telling us about. He was warm and kind and caring. I couldn't sing back then, too many strep throats had damaged my voice. My voice would pop up and hit strange raspy notes, go sour, or worse yet die altogether. Yet I was still welcomed into the choir. All God’s children were welcome.

Jack taught me, taught us all, how to sing. One day my voice found me, and I began to sing, really sing. I remember hearing my voice go out into the cool sanctuary air, sounding pure and true. Jack Coleman looked at me and smiled. I was singing and crying and thanking God for allowing me a place in his home. Two days later … when the call was given … I walked forward to accept.

Church was OK with my family, but baptism was something to be scorned. After I mentioned it became a target. It was as if someone tacked a bull’s eye on my forehead. My Dad heckled me for weeks. I remember coming to the kitchen table and being forced to listen to my Dad singing the benediction “Holy Holy Holy” in a taunting voice. My brother sat and watched and said nothing. My Mom said nothing. I felt so alone and lost I pulled even further away from my parents.

At church people acted normal, seemed to love one and other, and treated me like I was really there. Now that Opa was dying I only went to Church when someone was willing to take me. Basically this meant I went when Pam Fancher’s Dad took me with them. Which by then wasn’t all the time, because both Pam and I were in the Children’s choir.

The problem was the Children’s choir sang at first service and we had to be there at 7am to warm up and practice. Suffice it to say I missed a lot of services and choir rehearsals. I remember trying to wake up my Mom so I could get to church. She picked up an aluminum cup she kept on her nightstand, threw it at me, and told me to leave her the hell alone.

After Opa died, Mom told the neighbors she'd put a tree up for Dad and me. Not true, because we weren't really alive to her. Mom put up a Christmas tree covered with blue ornaments and tinsel, to honor her Dad's passing.

Mom came down with the Asian flu a few days after her Dad died. It eventually progressed to pneumonia. Dad went to work and I was told to take care of my Mom. I’d missed a lot of school that year. I was sick a lot and had always missed a lot of school. School wasn’t considered important for me, a girl.

By then I had begun letting paper, clothing and trash pile up throughout my bedroom. I felt safer on the floor surrounded by clutter and trash than I did anyplace else. I remember lying on the ground trying to wish myself invisible so I could vanish inside the trash ... which is what I felt like.

Memorial Day - May 29, 1970 - was to have been special - Dad was taking Mom and me to lunch. Something he'd never done before. More than anything else ::: I longed for it to be special. I cleaned my room, removed the trash, washed my clothing and hoped. "What can it mean ... what can it mean?" My Mom had asked me for days. "He's going to take us on Vacation with him to Holland!" I hoped whatever Dad had to tell us would be magical.

Jack Coleman was in Hawaii with the Children’s Choir, my choir. Mom had said no to my going with them to perform. She said they couldn’t afford it and wouldn’t let me go even if they could. Her words were like salt on an open wound. “Hawaii is too far away and too dangerous, I’d most likely get raped and murdered” Mom had said.

Every year my Dad went to Holland to see his folks. Every year my Mom hoped and prayed he would take us (the family) with him. Dad went because he loved his parents and my Mom had forced him to immigrate to America ... something he never let her forget. He was able to travel cheap. He became a travel agent so he'd be able to travel cheap even though we were poor.

When I was little I didn't understand why he left. Today, with all the excitement of lunch I finally believe he was going to take us with him. I didn’t mind missing Hawaii.

Dad dropped the bomb just after eating lunch. Dad chose the perfect spot ... too many people for Mom to make a scene. Kaplan’s was so jammed full of people they opened the back restaurant. Dad threw his airline tickets on the table. He was leaving in a few weeks ... alone.

Mom was staring at Dad, silently watching him as he stood up and grabbed his wallet. "See you girls tonight. Glad we had lunch together. Let's do it again when I get back from Amsterdam." Then he picked up his tickets and walked away.

There was no mistaking Dad’s walk. His stride was like a soldier’s, his back upright and straight, his feet clomp clomp clomping heavily on the floor with a military cadence. I watched my scoop of chocolate ice cream turning into mush in the bowl, the sound of my Dad’s feet drumming in my ear. Mom looked right through me and into the wall. She’d fallen back into the dark place she’d been residing for the last two years and I was invisible again.

My Mom, the Mom I used to know, died that Friday afternoon, and I never really saw her again. I didn’t know this person sitting next to me at Kaplan’s. The stranger was crying, silently dabbing at tears between long drags on countless cigarettes. My Mom was always involved, always on the go, always in charge. A stranger had replaced my Mom and taken up permanent residence in our booth. It seemed as if she were content to sit in Kaplan’s forever, swathed in tobacco smoke.

After 30 minutes, the hostess came and politely told the stranger to leave ... they were too crowded and needed our table. The stranger looked past the hostess with blank red rimmed eyes and didn’t move. “I’ll give you and your daughter a moment miss,” said the hostess quietly “then you both need to leave.” The stranger slowly tossed her smoldering cigarette inside my Mom’s half empty coffee cup, gathered my Mom’s things and rose to leave. The stranger exited Kaplan’s with me following behind her.

When we exited Kaplan’s the stranger walked over to the fountain just outside, sat down on a bench, put her gloves in her purse and removed her high heels. Appearances were EVERYTHING to my Mom. She never went out without nylons, high heels, makeup and gloves. The dead eyed stranger sitting next to me didn’t care.

The stranger walked up and down the lower level of South Coast Plaza close to 4 hours. She walked shoeless between Sears and May Company, past the Galleon, past the carousel, past the food court and beauty salons and a dozen other stores. I followed her for a while, but eventually wandered off by myself, walking around the mall and looking at different stores, while keeping an eye on my Mom.

At 5:30pm PT we found ourselves inside Sears. The stranger had left. My Mom looked up and said "Dad will be home soon, we need to leave." Mom sat down on a bench, put on her shoes, and we walked out to the car together.

Memorial Day traffic was insane. It looked as if the regular 15 minute drive to our house would take close to an hour. I'd never seen so many cars on the street. By the time we reached the intersection of Bristol and McFadden, traffic was at a near standstill.

Mom turned onto McFadden and eased over to the far right lane. The light on Pacific had just turned yellow when a car suddenly veered in our path ... cutting us off and racing past the intersection to avoid the red light. I remember looking at my Mom and saying "that was close".

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a car coming at us. We were at a full stop, sandwiched between a million cars, with no place to go. As if in a dream, I watched the car to our left back up into the left suicide lane and keep on going. As if in a dream, I watched the other car racing towards us through the break in traffic. As if in a dream, I watched our two cars collide.

My Mom placed her arm against me to shield me from impact. When she touched me ... time seemed to stop ... and the world lost synch with the laws of physics. Everything around me was moving in slow motion. I heard the sound of groaning metal and breaking glass and felt myself floating gently around the inside of the car.

My head was slowly gliding towards the right passenger car door ::: “my” door. I put up my arms and easily pushed myself away. The car was gliding backward now. Amazed, I felt my body rising from my seat. I watched my feet rise up and touch the dashboard. I raised my arms again and pushed against the hood of the car. An instant later my body was rammed down onto the floor of the car.

When the car came to a stop, my rump was on the floor, my feet up against the windshield, my knees up near my face, and my head was resting against my seat. I was covered in broken glass.

After what seemed like an eternity of jarring noise, the sudden silence was disorienting. To my left was my Mom. I could see that her feet had disappeared beneath the car’s floor and were now embedded where the brake pedal once was. Her face was a ghastly shade of pale ashen grey ... her nose was broken and bloody, her lips blue ... a slender ribbon of blood oozed from her right ear.

She'd broken the steering column on impact. Her neck was draped over the steering wheel in an odd angle. She wasn't breathing. I shook her and she fell over limp next to me on the seat, her feet still embedded in the floor of the car. She took in a single deep breath and the color began returning to her blue grey lips.

My car door was half open. I can still hear the strange creaking sound the door made as I pushed open. I stood up and viewed the carnage surrounding us. Our car, and the car that hit, us had merged into a single misshapen pile of fractured glass and smoldering metal.

I could see someone lying unconscious ::: the driver ::: in the back seat. Glass was everywhere.

I saw a man's head encased in the cracked and fissured remains of what had been the front windshield of the other car. I watched the man twist and pull his head until it was free. He looked at me in tears and asked if I was OK. I didn't know.

The driver ::: a drug addict and alcoholic ::: had just been released from jail earlier that morning. He and his companion had been partying all day.

My Mom suffered multiple cuts and bruises, soft tissue damage, a fractured skull, broken nose, broken ribs, broken feet and a brain contusion. She was in a coma for 5 days afterward. I tore all the muscles on my left side, fractured countless teeth, suffered multiple cuts and bruises, a brain contusion, soft tissue damage to my left side, and a dislocated jaw.

Mom regained consciousness briefly in the Ambulance. She asked me what happened. I told her we’d been in a car accident. Her response was “Oh.” She told me to call Steve when I got to a phone. Steve, her x-lover, the man who molested me throughout my childhood. The man who eventually raped me, strangled me and left me for dead. The man she refused to believe had ever hurt me in any way. “You dreamed it.” was her standard reply.

I woke up in the hospital while someone was cutting off my clothes. I was so big and tall the people working on me assumed I was older. When I tried to make them stop cutting my clothes, they held me down and told me to stop acting like a child. The room faded back into grey as they were tugging on a hospital gown. I woke up again on a cold hard X-Ray table, screaming in pain. Lay still … lay still … this will go quickly if you lay still. The room turned gray when the technician shoved a foam wedge against my back.

I woke up on a gurney inside a big room filled with at least a dozen strange women. My Mom was in a bed, laying strangely still. Her makeup was gone and her face was covered with bruises. “ONE … TWO … THREE” suddenly I was lifted off the gurney and onto a bed. Someone handed me a plastic box. “If you need anything push this.” Suddenly everyone was gone, the door was shut, and it was pitch dark.

In a wild panic I clutched the box and began frantically pushing buttons. A television on the other side of the room fluttered to life. I could see my Mom’s face in the light. My panic started to fade. The woman below the television was calling out. “Nurse … nurse …. will you PLEASE come here.”

Five minutes later a nurse came in, bent over to hear the woman speak, then stood up and turned off the television. “Sorry about that. Don’t know how it came on. Get some sleep now.”

The darkness terrified me, always had. Bad things happened to me at night. My panic returned. I grabbed the plastic box the nurse had handed to me and pushed the buttons again. Suddenly a voice came out of the box. “Can I help you?” Startled, I whispered “I’m scared”. “I can’t hear you” replied the box. I began to cry.

A tall dark haired woman came to my bed and asked me what was wrong. I told her I was afraid of the dark and she laughed. “You can’t have the television on all night, and I can’t keep the door open.” Then she left. She returned with a hypodermic syringe. I asked what she was going to do. “Give you something to help you sleep.” She drove the needle into my arm as I was begging her not to. I lay unconscious for two days. (After my accident, when I saw my pediatrician she said the nurse nearly killed me.)

About three weeks after the accident my Dad took me home. He came and got me after work. My Dad drove an old beige VW with a stick. My Dad drove fast. That evening, the evening he took me home, I screamed every time he accelerated or turned left into rush hour traffic. He yelled and scowled at me … cigarette jutting from his mouth … told me to shut up and stop being a baby. So I closed my eyes, tried not to breath in the smoke, gripped the seat of his car. I shook and cried for the remainder of the trip.

My entire left side was navy blue. Dad decided to drive me various places to show me off to all his friends. A dozen times he forced me to lift up my top and lower my pants so his friends could see all my bruises. I was pudgy and self conscious but he insisted. The room was spinning and I could barely stand, but he couldn’t tell. Everyone stared and commented how sore the bruises and the welts looked. No one once asked me if I needed to sit down.

When Dad and I got home the refrigerator was almost empty, there was no food on the stove, no milk to drink. The sink was piled full of dirty dishes. My room was so clean I almost didn’t recognize it. I’d forgotten, hoping for magic, I’d cleaned it up weeks ago. The room next to mine, my brother’s old room, was full of boxes and other odds and ends my Mom had placed there.

I lay down on my bed and thought about the choir and my friends in Hawaii and wished I was with them. I cried myself to sleep ::: too tired and too weak and too sore to pull off my clothing. That night my epileptic Dad had one grand mal seizure after another. Afterwards, he roamed the house in a daze crying out in Dutch for “Mama”. When he stumbled into my room stinking of sweat and tobacco, wearing nothing but urine soaked jockey shorts I ran into my bathroom and locked the door.

I lay down on the hard cold linoleum floor of my bathroom, my head under the sink and my feet against the toilet. When my Dad kept banging on my bathroom door I cupped my ears and prayed for God to take me. I prayed until I fell asleep, not waking up until the morning light was coming in my bathroom window.

There were no happy endings that year … or the years that followed. I lived in a sort of vacuum … a place with little warmth or care. No one came to protect me, help me or save me. I was alone in a way no child should ever be.

The first day back to Jr High I told my physical education teacher that I’d been in a car accident and wouldn’t be able to do P.E. for a while. She called me a liar and a looser. I’d been sick a lot that year and missed a great deal of school. She always thought I’d been truant, and was cutting classes on my own. She didn’t know my family, and the hell I was living in.

She said she didn’t believe me and ordered me to strip so she could see for herself. I had to struggle to pull down my pants and lift my top over my head. I remember standing half naked in front of her and asking if she believed me now. Bruises covered my entire left side. She was crying when she motioned for me to get dressed. I never spoke to her again.

Mom couldn’t walk and moved around the house in a wheelchair after she came home from the hospital. I could barely get myself up from bed or a chair. Not knowing how to cook anything beyond fried eggs and bacon … Dad brought home McDonald burgers to keep us fed. When Mom could make the trip we ate at Thrifty’s coffee shop.

Dad canceled his trip to Amsterdam. The hospital sent a nice black woman to the house to fix food and help around the house for a few weeks. One of my Mom’s friends came and took us to physical therapy each day. My church set up some people to pick me up from school and watch me until my Dad came to take me home. I missed my Jr High graduation. Mom called it “a pointless waste of time and money”.

In July Mom and Dad had a huge fight. He had just told her he was going to Holland. We could take care of ourselves. Mom canceled our physical therapy, canceled church assistance, and canceled our visiting nurse. She booked two tickets to Canada and told me we were going to stay with “Uncle” Steve. Only she didn’t know Steve had taken up with another woman. A nice lady with three daughters for him to molest like he had me.

Mom and I spent a week in the Astor Hotel, then moved into a cheap studio apartment that was cleaned once a week. We slept together in a tiny fold out sofa. I spent the summer of 1970 pushing my Mom around Vancouver in a wheelchair, barely able to walk myself. I bought the groceries, cooked, and did laundry in the bathtub. When we ran out of toilet paper we tore up my Mom’s newspaper and used it.

I remember walking and down Kingsway by myself when my Mom was in too much pain to go out. My shoes didn’t fit, (my Mom had told me they didn’t make them in my size). As a result I my feet were in almost constant pain. I walked barefoot whenever possible. It wasn’t until I was an adult and able to purchase my own shoes I learned they manufactured shoes in size 10 and over. By then it was too late and my feet had suffered permanent damage.

Walking on Kingsway I saw parents with their children, families together and people doing things together. I wept when I saw churches inviting parents to sign their children up for summer day camp. Life went on around me. I turned 15 in Canada that year. Mom and I ate at the Astor Hotel coffee shop. The girls put a candle on a cupcake and sang to me. I spent the day caring for my Mom. She called me her special special girl.

We returned home a few days after my Dad left for Amsterdam.

The house was filthy and stank of tobacco. The sink was full of dishes, and the hampers were full of soiled clothing. Other than a bag of peanut MnM’s, half a loaf of bread, and two cans of Coke, the refrigerator was nearly empty. I found cans of frozen orange juice in the freezer, boxes of instant potatoes and cans of tuna in the cupboard. I fixed tuna and mashed potatoes with orange juice until we ran out.

My Mom called my brother for days asking him to pick up some food. No one ever came. So I took my bike to the grocery store and picked up a bag of food. Unfortunately the muscles on my left side were still too weak. On the way home the bag I was carrying shifted and I lost control of my bike. I ended up on the street with broken bottles and damaged food. I came home bloody and disheartened. My brother drove over the next day, angry and upset. He dropped off a bag of food and left.

I started high school in the fall of 1970, friendless, alone and in constant pain. I went from a size 14 to a size 24. I was heckled for my size, the way I walked and the way I looked.

May 2011 – Memorial Day

Even now, 41 years since the day of my accident, I still bear the scars. I have no feeling in the parts of my left side that suffered soft tissue damage during impact. It almost always hurts when I walk. I developed dysautonomia as a result of my brain contusion.

I will never look normal. I will never feel normal. I will never go to a school prom ::: never attend a school dance ::: never be a cheer leader ::: never get high school Valentine flowers ::: never be called beautiful ::: never get asked out by a popular boy ::: never get a chance to be a child ::: never get a chance to grow up without pain and sorrow.

I have lived my life striving to attain and maintain grace. An indefinable something which I have used to define my soul ::: the person I am, both inside and out. While I can NEVER forget my past, I have been able ::: to some extent ::: to grow beyond it.

My soul resides someplace between what was and what might have been. A place where hope is both my motivator and my salvation. A place where I can still believe in all that is good and best in mankind. A place where I can be almost anything I choose.