The Truth About Butterflies: A Memoir (26 page)

Later during
the night, I awoke to use the bathroom but sat on the side of the bed
momentarily because I was dizzy.  I looked down and noticed two shadowy figures
on the floor.  The moonlight pouring through the window had washed the room in
a blue glow, and the two shadows looked very ominous.  It came to me that I
might’ve left the garage open after unpacking some boxes and critters might’ve
gotten into the house, but the more I reasoned it out the more unlikely that
seemed. 

Deciding
that it was obviously something I’d left on the floor, I reached down to pick
them up.  As I did, one of them moved, and I jumped back into the bed.  The two
critters jumped into the bed with me.  And in my desperate attempt to get away
from them, I realized that the two critters were my own two feet.

That next
day, I found the printout that came with the sleeping pills and read the
potential side effects.  Seems people could do things and not remember, such as
preparing and eating a meal or having sex.  I knew I needed something to help
me sleep, so I decided from then on to take only half a pill, and I put all my
friends on alert.  If I showed up at anyone’s house in the middle of the night
with a picnic basket and a condom, they were to simply turn me around and point
me toward home.  

Six months
later in the early morning darkness of December 28, 2008, I lay in bed having
had yet another restless night.  I had taken half a pill the previous evening
but felt like I hadn’t slept a wink.  Every day and night of the past year had
been filled with a dark, deepening sorrow, but this particular morning the
grief was intense.  I climbed out of bed and dressed so I could leave the
house.  Over the months as my grief had intensified, so had the pain in my
joints, so getting out of bed in the morning had become slow and uncomfortable.

As I pulled
out of the driveway, I was blinded by tears.  Even though I was in the car
alone, I was embarrassed by my own horrific lamenting.  Unable to see the road,
I pulled off the road and into a parking lot.  And there I said to God
something I never thought would come from my lips, “I give up.”  Whatever
“giving up” meant, I was doing it.  I could
not
go on the way I was.

I
had often told Nicole that if she ever found herself in a place where she was lost,
where nothing in her world made sense, she should go back to the place in time
when she was convinced there is a God and that He is omnipotent, and when she
returned to that moment of epiphany, she should wait there for God to show her
the road ahead
.

Now
I was the one who was lost, and my own place of epiphany was hollow, as if
someone had drilled a hole in the bottom of it and all the exalted beauty had
leaked out. I was giving up, not because I doubted God, but because physically,
emotionally, and spiritually I simply couldn’t hold on any longer.

Still
weeping, I started the car and headed out of the parking lot not sure of which
way to go now that I’d given up.  I imagined myself driving until my car ran
out of gas, then walking until I couldn’t walk anymore, then curling up on the
ground and just letting the world happen around me. 

I
made a right turn onto the road and within seconds, and without warning of any
kind, the sorrow of the last 12 months vanished.  The profound sadness was
gone, the heaviness was gone, the all-encompassing darkness… gone.  The drab
houses and trees and landscapes I passed every day were suddenly bright and
colorful as if the very dome of the sky were a lamp that had been switched on.
The shift was so visceral and so instantaneous that I thought I was dying.  It
was the only thing that could explain this sudden buoyancy.  I pulled my car
off the road and sat for 20 minutes before turning around and going home. 
  

How
could grief of this magnitude simply disappear? 
If I’m not dying
, I
thought,
then
perhaps I’m having a nervous breakdown
.  Whatever
was wrong with me, I stayed in the house for the rest of the day walking softly
and trying not to breathe too loudly just in case the darkness was lurking
nearby.  I thought about calling Eunice to tell her that this inexplicable and
wonderful thing had happened, but I was afraid that if I spoke too soon, the
sadness would come back. 

That night
as I lay in bed, I wondered, again, if maybe this sudden and profound peace was
a warning of my death.  But then another thought struck me.  I hadn’t had a
pedicure in months.  Being found dead with neglected feet was very unsettling,
so I asked God if He were indeed coming for me that He come the next night. 
Nothing would make me happier than having the coroner announce, “She died
peacefully in her sleep… and her feet were gorgeous.”

I awoke the
next morning still weightless and lucid, as if I’d been healed from a great
fever.  That day I cried a sweet, cleansing cry.  And every morning thereafter,
I eased into my day unsure if the darkness had returned during the night.  The
hours turned into days, the days into months, and the months into years, and
yet the darkness has not returned.

Over
time, different ones have given me their opinions on what they think happened
to me on that Sunday morning in December, but what I know for sure is that when
I’d given up and left myself for dead, God knelt next to my broken spirit and
poured in the oil and the wine.  After He reset my bones, He girded me with a
peace that surpasses human understanding.

Of
course, Grief still visits me. I often awake to find it perched on the side of
my bed, but it never comes to stay. It follows me around like a child under
foot for a few hours or a few days, but then lightness comes and almost before
I realize it, Grief has gathered itself and flown away.
          

On March 6
at 1:25 p.m., I saw my first butterfly of the season.  White with splashes of
yellow, it flew erratically along a row of juniper bushes.  In three blinks of
the eye, it was gone.  And in that instant, without trying, I imagined myself
standing on a breakwater in the warmth of the sun wondering how it would feel
to be truly free—free of people and things and attachments of all kinds. 

And
as I sit here on this warm, sunny afternoon writing these final words, I think
of how blessed I am to have been Nicole’s mother and how my life has grown
wings because she was a part of it.  And each evening when I close my eyes
against the darkness and think about her, I imagine her walking in the sun, her
laughter rising like petals against cloudless blue skies
.