As the days passed, I began to cry openly, sometimes more than once a day. I could not keep my pride on my face. Every normal activity was a struggle, and it was hard to want to go on. Even though Kelly was there for me, I felt like it hurt her to see me so debilitated and frustrated. I would have bad thoughts often—thoughts about being a burden and how everyone might be better off without me being around. I was a broken person.
About forty-five days after the accident, I received a phone call that changed everything. It was Kelly, and she told me we were going to have a baby. I was going to be a father. I was shocked, and then I was overcome with tremendous joy. We both cried, but I couldn’t even say a single sentence through the phone without sobbing, and Kelly finally asked me what was wrong.
I confessed to Kelly that I had been thinking of ending my life if the opportunity arose because I had no reason to want to live. If I couldn’t fight or ride my motorcycle or skydive or be intimate with her—if I couldn’t do all the things my body allowed me to do before the accident, my life had no quality to it, and I was just going to throw it away. But now, I would have new goals. I would show our child the world, teach him or her to ride a bicycle, play an instrument, and live harmoniously with others. It made me so happy, and it seemed to lift the burden of emptiness and futility that I had allowed to grow in my mind. I felt so rejuvenated, like a new type of faith had sprung up within me.
I continued going to physical therapy. Every day, I thought to myself that learning to move my limbs again would help me teach my son or daughter how to do things too, and that inspired me. I wondered what interests my child would have, and I looked forward to helping him or her achieve goals and be happy. All of this gave me confidence and the will to live that Dr. Moore said was vital to my recovery.
Gradually, I was able to show small triumphs in moving my feet or my right hand. After a few months, I could move both of my feet a little and most of the fingers on my right hand. At the end of three months, I could work a wheelchair for myself, and I could shower, shave, and brush my teeth. By the end of nine months, I could move my legs and do most daily tasks on my own, but I still had to use a wheelchair. I was able to be there when my son was born, and it was one of the happiest moments of my life.
I never did ride a motorcycle again. But the birth of my son opened up a new collection of goals that were far greater than thrill-seeking. I taught him about the world, how to ride a bicycle, and how to live with others. Being with my son also encouraged me to be more active in other areas in my life, and today I run a martial arts school. I am rarely able to get out on the floor to practice forms or to spar with the students, but my son is eleven years old now, he is a brown belt in jujitsu, and he is on the floor every day.
I am so proud of him.
I will never forget that my son gave me a second chance at life and that I almost chose not to be here and be his father. I’m still not certain of whether I am a spiritual or religious person, but I do believe something or someone out there presented me with a shining opportunity to regain my will to live, to heal, and to rise to the responsibility of being a father. I’m not sorry that my accident happened. I’m not sorry that I endured so much pain. I would not wish the accident away. If I never had had my accident, my faith never would have changed, and I may have taken the same things for granted that I always had. I know in my heart that if things hadn’t happened this way, I would never have gained a higher understanding of what it means to live and where to find such purpose in my life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CYBERBULLIES: HOW THEY WRECKED AND SAVED A LIFE
I think the hardest part about being a teenager is dealing with other teenagers—the criticism and the ridicule, the gossip and the rumors.
—Beverly Mitchell
September 24, 9:02 pm—RadicalLife9: You are a fat slut.
October 1, 5:44 pm—ChamomileT000: You should eat sh*t and die. Ha!
November 4, 4:35 pm—BlackHairedQT: Jeremy doesn’t like you. None of the boys like you.
January 2, 6:07 pm—TheEnforcers26555: F*ck you, you ho.
March 6, 7:23 pm—TMNT9334: You are an ugly bitch with no friends and no one will ever love you.
These were just a few texts and instant messages that people sent me. They sent them to me at all times of the day and littered my Myspace page with similar comments. It seemed like it would never stop. The people who made fun of me in high school were the same people who made fun of me in elementary school. They mocked me for the way I looked, the way I dressed, my opinions, which music I listened to, which boys I might have liked. The girls were especially mean to me. They texted me in school with something nasty like, “You can’t ever have that boy,” or “That was a stupid thing to say,” whenever they saw me do something they thought they had to make fun of. I cried. I had maybe two people I’d call friends, but one was a boy and the other one distanced herself from me in school.
I did my best to blend in. I tried to be friendly to people. I tried to be pretty. It seemed like the more I tried to be a better person, the more everyone else hated me. I started to think that maybe I did have a weight problem, maybe I would always be unattractive to boys, maybe I was a loser. It was true that I never had a boyfriend. Maybe I was too ugly to be loved.
That’s what the texts told me.
In the evenings, and even on weekends, I sat alone in my room in the house, with only the television and the computer as companions. Sure, I had friends online from other places, but it wasn’t the same. They know the people did that were making fun of me. They told me that I had to ignore them or just be myself. I got tired of this advice.
One Friday night, I was talking to a few people online and doing my homework at the same time. Three girls started messaging me and telling me that I sucked because I was not out at the dance that was going on at the community center. They started to tell me who was going to be there and that all of the boys there would think I was ugly anyway and wouldn’t want to dance with me. They called me an ugly pig and said I should die.
I cried as I typed back. I told them they would be sorry for saying these things.
Then I just lost it. I typed a goodbye letter and printed it out. I put on some makeup. I left the house in a hurry without disturbing my parents.
I only had a vague idea of where I was going. It was almost like I acted on the first idea that came into my head when I left the house. I came to a bridge above an overpass. I rode by that area nearly every day. I folded up the goodbye letter and put it in my jeans pocket. I stood up on the barrier. I looked at the horizon and down at the cars passing underneath. I played with the charm I wore around my neck, a gift from my mother on my eleventh birthday. I cried and thought about how I wouldn’t have any more experiences like receiving a pretty piece of jewelry. Then I thought I wouldn’t have them anyway, because if I lived no one would love me. At least this way, I wouldn’t know what I was missing.
I took a deep breath. I leaned over and let myself fall off the bridge.
The few seconds of falling are still blurry to me. The fall didn’t kill me, but I didn’t wake up for quite a while. I suffered a severe blow to the head upon impact. EMTs showed up very soon after I’d hit the ground, and I was rushed to the hospital. I suffered a broken leg, bruised ribs, a broken cheekbone, and serious head trauma, but I never felt any of it. I went into a long, dark, dreamless sleep.
While I was asleep, the world went on. My parents and my brother came to the hospital. My two friends from school came a few hours later. Doctors told them what had happened. I was in a coma. They told friends and family that I could come out of it at any time, but also that I could be like that until I died. There was no telling whether I would actually survive.
The next day, a few kids from my class showed up to visit me. They told my parents that they were sorry about everything. They knew that I was bullied in school and online. One girl said she knew it might have been something someone told me online that pushed me o
ver the edge. The next day more kids showed up to express their sympathy and tell my parents that they wanted to be supportive. They all seemed to feel guilty, like they stood by and let me get bullied.
The next week a group of kids showed up to visit me with a card, and one of the boys went by the name ChamomileT000. He’d always picked on me online. He told my parents that he had said cruel things to me, and he said that not a day went by since he found out I tried to kill myself when he didn’t feel like a completely awful human being because he knew he contributed to my reasons for doing it. After awhile, another girl—who went by the name BlackHairedQT online—showed up with her friends and brought flowers and a card.
Groups of kids started to come over, sometimes on their own, just to sit in the room with me. After a month, it became something of a ritual for groups to come and hang out in the room where I was unconscious, just for a half hour or so every week. My parents had forgiven the kids who admitted to bullying me, though they weren’t sure how I’d feel when I woke up, if I ever did wake up. No one was making them come to visit, though, and they kept coming to show that they wanted me to live.
I opened my eyes one afternoon after a little more than three months of being unconscious. Only my parents were in the room at the time. They cried and hugged me, and I acknowledged them the best I could. My motor and speech skills were affected quite a bit by the coma, but I told my parents in sobbing, broken sentences that I was sorry for having scared them and that I loved them.
Later that evening, kids from my class started to show up, and they immediately told me they were sorry when they came into the room. My parents told me that the kids had been coming over on a regular basis to be with me and show their support. They had told my parents everything about the bullying, and they all seemed to share in the consensus that they didn’t want things like that to happen anymore.
I felt a little pitied at first, like it was put on for me. But a group of girls visited me the day after and wanted to tell me personally that they were sorry for the texts they had sent me the night of the dance, when they were so mean to me. They said they were sorry for acting like bitches, and they told me things would be different from now on in school. They seemed genuine enough. They seemed to want to treat me better. I knew it was probably hard for some of those girls to say they were wrong or to treat me like I was on the same level as they were. But they were being nice to me, for the time being anyway.
I felt a little embarrassed about what I had done, even though no one even once made me feel badly about it. Everyone only told me that they loved me or that they were sorry and wanted me to feel like I belonged.
When the day came for me to go home from the hospital, something happened that helped me believe I was accepted. I came into the house, went to my room, and checked my phone. I had 328 messages accumulated from the three months I was in a coma. When I went through them, none of them were mocking. On the day after I jumped, all of the messages—from everyone, friend and bully—were positive and sent wishes that I would live through it and come out of the coma. The messages became apologies, some of them long and rambling. There were a bunch of “Where are you?” messages from friends who didn’t live near me. The rest were messages of “Get better soon” and “We are praying for you to live” and “My friends and I are supporting you and we want you to live.”
It became obvious to me that people cared about me who had the same interests as I did and whose lives would be changed if I was not there. I knew that some of the messages were from kids who wanted to band together and send me texts so that I would know, if or when I came out of the coma, that I was not hated by others and that everyone was thinking about me when I wasn’t there. They had sent texts over and over, like they were checking on me; it was truly thoughtful.
It was only after I had seen all of the new texts on my phone that I decided I did appreciate my life and that I did want to live. I cried. Knowing that everyone was willing to accept me made me feel a certain happiness—the type of happiness you have when you receive a gift from a person you love. I felt that way when my mother gave me the charm I wear around my neck. I felt confident that I would be able to go forward in my life again and that it wouldn’t be all loneliness and sadness. I felt like my life did have meaning and that there would always be friends who cared about me. I have a new hope, too, that someday I will experience that same special happiness when I meet a person who will love me for exactly who I am and think I am beautiful exactly the way I am.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE
It takes one person to forgive; it takes two people to be reunited.
—Lewis B. Smedes
I watched the sun shine over the rolling hills that were home to line after line of gravestones from years past. Everyone in the car was quiet. I was only about seven years old at the time, and I just assumed people were supposed to be quiet during a funeral. I probably would not have understood all of the reasons some people in my family didn’t talk to other members. My parents never would let me hear them say something negative or insulting about any of my sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, or anyone. They were always polite and proper. But all of my relatives were there that day, in the cars in front and behind me.
I would have been more sad, I suppose, if I knew my grandfather that well. He was uncommunicative for the latter part of his life, due to complications from his stint in the army during World War II.
The day of the funeral was the first day I ever saw my father cry. It was unsettling in a way that I had not experienced before, and I didn’t want to experience again. He was a powerful, confident person, now helpless and broken down in tears over the death of his father.
We got out of the car and congregated by the gravesite. The priest started to say whatever a priest is supposed to say about ashes to ashes. He offered other hopeful words about going to be with God, peppered with morbid images of decay and portrayals of the transitory nature of human life and all of the things we love on this earth. I can’t say I had the attention span for it at that age. But I stood there respectfully.
I caught a glimpse of my sister Christine, who had come with her son and daughter and her husband, Glenn. My father hadn’t spoken to Glenn for ten years. I didn’t know the whole story at the time—it was just another one of those things that went on between adults that I did not question, nor was I allowed to question under the family mores. (My father believed children should be seen and not heard.)
Christine smiled at me—one of those sour smiles that ended in her putting her head down. It was a smile that said, “I’m trying to stay positive, but everything is actually really bad right now.”
Before I was born, my sister Christine ran away from home. She and my father didn’t get along very well, and my mother, wanting to be a good parent, would always support my father or stay out of the argument. The fact that my mother didn’t stick up for her, I think, probably made Christine really angry. It was just normal teenage stuff they fought about, like not letting her wear certain clothes, hang out with certain people, or go certain places. My dad caught her with pot once or twice, but his first instinct was to punish my older brother, Matt, instead of Christine. Christine and Matt were close. Dad punished Matt instead of Christine, I guess, because he assumed Matt brought the pot into the house and had exposed her to it.
But that was one of the last straws for Christine, watching Matt get struck in the face and yelled at for something that she had done herself. One day, she just basically said, “I’m not going to school today. I’m packing my things up, and I’m going to live with my boyfriend, Glenn. Screw you, Dad.”
I believe my dad responded with something like, “If you go out that door, you can’t ever come back.”
She didn’t even look over her shoulder when she left. I mean, I didn’t see this happen, I wasn’t alive yet, but that’s what I hear.
Christine did just what she said. She went and lived with Glenn. Glenn was a kind
of rough guy. He worked construction. He didn’t mince words. He’d tell you what was up if there was something bothering him about you. He and Christine were happy together. Christine might never have regretted moving in with him, I don’t know.
Christine and Dad were on talking terms, but she didn’t come around the house, and she never introduced Glenn to them. After the birth of their son, Jake, Christine and Glenn started to warm up to my father a bit, but it didn’t last. When they were over at the house one night—I was too young to actually remember any of the details on my own—Dad and Glenn got into some spat about whether Glenn had taken Christine away from him or whether Glenn was doing Dad a favor by taking care of his daughter and providing for her. It ended with Dad kicking Glenn out of the house and telling him he was not welcome there anymore. All I personally remember was that it was not pleasant, and there was a lot of shouting involved. I probably wasn’t even allowed to know what had happened. My parents never wanted to give me the idea that there was bad blood or hard feelings between family members. We just didn’t talk about it. Glenn did not talk to Dad, and Dad did not talk to Glenn.
As we all dutifully said the words of the prayers and incantations together, I saw Dad, Christine, and Glenn, all together, in the same area at the same time. They were calm and solemn. It was strange. I could tell that they were all trying to just focus on the ceremony and not think about being in each others’ company.
Second Chances Page 7