by Chris Norton
Fights like this happened on a more regular basis as our relationship spiraled downward. The more we fought, the worse I felt about myself, and life in general. The fog of despair became even denser, and my energy completely disappeared. I stopped going to physical therapy with Chris—it was too much. I stayed in bed each morning until the last possible second before I had to get up and take Chris to Barwis Methods. Then I would drive home and take a nap, exhausted from the effort. Even after I picked up Chris, I’d head straight back to bed and just lie there, not sleeping but not wanting to get up. I started getting strange headaches too. They were always concentrated in one spot, in my temple.
I used to spend hours on the phone talking to Sophia and Whittley when they were having a difficult time. It didn’t matter if I had something else to do or if I was tired. They always came first. Now talking to them about their problems was becoming a chore and left me emotionally drained. I knew that I was all they had, and I was never going to give up on helping them or being there for them. There had been way too many people who had left them, and I wasn’t going to be one of those people, no matter how I was feeling, but staying connected to them became harder and harder. I wasn’t getting the same fulfillment I once felt during these conversations, and I doubted if I was even helping them.
Every once in a while, I mustered up the energy to do something I thought might make me feel like my old self again. I arranged for the Athletic Angels kids to go to a Detroit Tigers game, and I took an online life-coaching class. But none of it really helped. I was lost, without hope that I would ever be found.
My relationship with God fell away as I slipped deeper into the fog. All my life he’d been so important to me, but now I was pushing God away just as I did everyone else in my life. I was shutting down, and I had no idea how detrimental that would be to my relationships and my life. I didn’t let God or anyone else help me. To accept help meant admitting I had a problem and that I wasn’t strong enough to fix it myself. That was the last thing I was going to do. I’m extremely independent, and I always want to do everything myself. I always hated letting others help me, even God. I didn’t think I needed any help. Why would I? I had a “perfect” life, and nothing bad ever happened to me. When I did try to pray, I would break down crying, then I would again shut my feelings off. I didn’t want to deal with what I was feeling.
Deep down I wondered if I might be depressed, but I never allowed myself to come to that conclusion. I can’t be depressed, I thought. I haven’t gone through anything hard in my life. I’ve got a great family. I’m engaged to somebody I really love. I’ve never gone through anything traumatic. Why would I be depressed?
CHRIS
I hate to admit it, but I never thought depression was real. I assumed people who thought they were depressed simply had the wrong perspective on life or a bad attitude. After all, I had been through one of the most horrific things with my spinal cord injury, and I never crashed into depression.
So when Emily quickly went downhill, I thought I had the answers. First I thought I could fix her problems by easing her workload. “Let me hire someone to help us in our apartment,” I said. “You can go get a job, and I’ll use the insurance money to pay a nurse or hire someone to help with laundry or cooking. You don’t have to do this.”
Emily flat out refused.
Then I thought, Hey, I’m a motivational speaker. I just need to be more motivational and encouraging to her. I’ll commit to being a more positive force and always looking on the bright side. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well.
After days of the strange headaches Emily was having, she wondered if they had anything to do with how tired she was. “I feel like maybe I should see a doctor,” she said. “I mean, what if I have a brain tumor or something?”
Obviously, I didn’t want her to have a brain tumor, but the idea that there might be a physical explanation for everything made sense to both of us.
“Let’s get you a doctor’s appointment,” I said.
Doctors scanned her head and took vial after vial of blood for multiple tests. Everything came back normal.
As hard as our relationship got, and as frustrated as I was that nothing was helping, I never considered leaving Emily. Despite the fighting, I loved her. She was still the girl I first met, the girl I proposed to not that long ago. She was just struggling right now with something I did not understand. It felt like a roller-coaster ride for both of us. For a few days she’d be her best self, as though she didn’t have any problems in the world. Then we’d go through a few days of her being easily irritated. That was always followed by days where she completely shut down and spiraled out of control. Then, just as quickly, she’d be back to her best self. When she was her best self, I always thought we were through with the fighting, but the cycle always continued. I still believed that Emily would beat this. I just didn’t know how.
EMILY
Within a few months, I had fallen deep into a pit and had no idea how to climb out. Chris kept suggesting that I start running again or spend more time with kids. Part of me wondered if that might help, but I just didn’t have the energy or the will to try. I went through the motions, taking care of Chris and our apartment, always one wrong word from him away from a total breakdown.
At the same time, I was also an excellent actor. No one but Chris had any idea that something was wrong. I never let on when I talked to my parents or when I saw Chris’s trainers. But putting on a show in front of friends got to be too much, so I stopped going out with friends and let Chris go by himself.
But even Chris didn’t understand the full extent of what was happening. He saw me get angry or lying around the apartment, but I didn’t tell him how I actually felt. I was used to being strong and self-reliant. The last thing I wanted was to open up and be vulnerable.
“Why don’t you talk to your mom?” Chris asked me. “You can’t just act like everything is fine.”
I whirled around and glared at him. “If you ever tell anyone about any of this, or if my family finds out, I’m leaving,” I said, dead serious. “I will turn off my phone. I will take all my money out of my bank account. I will leave, and you will never see me again.”
Chris didn’t say a word, but the fear on his face said everything. He could see I wasn’t joking. I would rather lose everything than get help.
I didn’t understand why I was feeling like this. I completely understood why the kids I had worked with and mentored needed help and why they were struggling with depression and other mental health problems, because they had gone through the most terrible things you can imagine. But if I couldn’t help myself when I had never gone through anything difficult, how was I going to survive in life when something bad happened to me? There was nothing I hated more than being vulnerable and getting help. . I was extremely independent, stubborn, and a perfectionist. It was a dangerous combination that led to a lot of unneeded suffering.
I kept telling myself I could handle this. I had no idea how wrong I was.
14
Searching for Hope in a New Place
EMILY
“So, Nick told me he’s moving to Florida,” Chris said.
I had just picked him up from another therapy session. I still didn’t have it in me to go to the sessions anymore. My mind wasn’t fully awake, since I had dragged myself from the couch, where I’d spent my morning rotating between sleeping and watching bad morning television, to pick Chris up from Barwis Methods. But when I heard him say the word “Florida,” I was suddenly wide-awake.
“Wait, what? What is he doing in Florida? Why did he quit?”
“No, no, no, it’s not like that,” Chris explained. “They’re opening another Barwis Methods in Port St. Lucie. Nick is moving down there to get it started and help run it.”
Instantly, my mind raced. Chris started working out with Nick rather than Rhoades shortly before the graduation walk, and they really clicked. Nick explained things in a way that was helpful to Chris, an
d he saw progress right away once they joined forces. I didn’t want Chris to have to switch trainers again, but living in Florida sure sounded nice.
“Alright,” I said, glancing at Chris as I gripped the steering wheel. “Let’s go. Let’s move to Florida.”
Chris’s jaw nearly fell into his lap. “Are you serious? You want to move just like that?”
I laughed. “Why not? There’s no reason for us to stay in Michigan, and Nick is your trainer. Don’t you want to keep working with him?”
“Well, yeah, but there are plenty of good trainers in Michigan too.”
“Maybe,” I said, gesturing out the window to the snow already coating the ground, even though it was only November. “But don’t you want to get away from this?”
Chris stared ahead thoughtfully and slowly nodded. “Our lease is just about up,” he said.
“Right? This could be perfect timing! You could keep working with Nick, and we could live in the warmer weather and go to the beach all the time. It would be like living on vacation!” After months of sleepwalking through life, it felt good to have excitement stirring in me. I desperately needed a change, and moving to Florida sounded like the chance I was waiting for. Maybe life isn’t hopeless after all, I thought. Maybe I’ve just had too much of the Midwestern gloom. Maybe everything will look better in the Florida sunshine.
CHRIS
I never thought Emily might want to move to Florida. The idea came to me as soon as Nick told me he was moving, but I didn’t want to uproot Emily again. If a move was going to happen, she needed to be the one driving it. Seeing her excited about something for the first time in forever gave me hope for her and our relationship. The more we talked about it, the more it seemed like fate.
Ever since the graduation walk, we’d lived in a state of limbo. We talked about moving back to Iowa since our families were there, but Iowa didn’t offer the incredible training I was receiving in Michigan. But we had never really thought about making Michigan our permanent home either. We had signed a short lease for that very reason.
By now I realized that training at Barwis Methods wasn’t going to be my ticket to complete physical independence, at least not anytime soon. I moved to Michigan really hoping it would be my magic bullet. I’d never forgotten what Mike Barwis said to me during that first evaluation there more than a year before. “If you were in this program for five or six weeks, you’d be a changed man,” he said. I really believed that, and in many respects, he was right. I grew much stronger and made incredible progress, even beyond my graduation walk. In my mind, though, being a changed man meant walking on my own. Period. I’d be okay with walking with a cane, but I wanted my independence back.
Six months of intense training since the graduation walk had made it clear that full independence wasn’t going to happen no matter where I worked out. But I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. Nick and I made such a great team, and he drew so much out of me that I knew I needed to keep working with him. I also wanted to be ready for the day I walked with Emily back up the aisle at our wedding, even though we hadn’t talked about the wedding in a while. As our relationship deteriorated, so did my drive to walk on our wedding day. If it took moving to Florida to get our lives back on track, so be it.
“I think it’s an amazing idea,” I said to Emily right there in the car. “Let’s look into it, and if it works out, I’m all in.”
What I didn’t say was that the training was only my secondary reason for moving. Emily clearly needed a change. Nothing I’d tried had helped pull her out of her funk. She still showed no passion for the things that used to set her on fire. She still had zero energy. Most days she only lay around or slept whenever we weren’t fighting. I constantly walked, mostly rolled, on eggshells, trying as hard as I could not to say the wrong thing to set her off. I felt sick as I thought of all those nights when she drove away, screaming that she didn’t want to be alive. If I didn’t do something to help her, I was terrified that she just might get her wish.
By now neither of us talked much about our wedding. I brought it up every once in a while, but the idea of planning a wedding was too overwhelming for Emily. From time to time, my parents asked if we’d set a date or if we’d looked into any venues. Six months had passed since the proposal. I always told them we weren’t going to rush into anything. I wanted Emily to be excited about planning a wedding, and if she wasn’t enthused, I didn’t want to push it. With all the fighting, our relationship wasn’t in the best place anyway.
That evening Emily chatted much more than usual. There was a light in her eyes that I hadn’t seen in months. Instead of slinking back to bed, she typed furiously on her laptop. I could tell she was in research mode, Googling everything. I smiled as I felt my shoulders relax. Emily’s spark seemed to have returned. Maybe, just maybe, this move would be what she needed to snap out of whatever was going on.
“Chris, they have some amazing group homes there!” Emily called from the family room. “They’re set up like a family home, and they have live-in parents actually stay with them. The idea seemed so much better than group homes where staff are constantly coming in and out. That’s such a smart idea! I would love to get involved with that.”
We made a few calls over the next couple of days and decided that since our lease would be up in a month, we had to move quickly. Emily flew to Florida to scope out apartments and found a brand-new complex with a nice pool and workout facility. It even had a little movie theater and pool table in the clubhouse. “It feels like a vacation home, Chris!” she raved on the phone. “It’s not perfectly wheelchair accessible, but they have a ground-floor apartment available, and the doors are pretty wide. I think it’s the best we can do.”
Both of our parents supported the move. I think they were sad we would now be a plane ride away, but they definitely didn’t mind having an excuse to visit Florida in the winter, not to mention having a free place to stay.
Emily almost seemed back to normal as she mapped out the details of our move. She seemed to be regaining the energy she’d lost in recent months. She got me on the Barwis Port St. Lucie training schedule. She hired movers to haul our boxes and furniture down to the new place. Then we spent Christmas in Iowa and headed down to Florida with my family. My parents, my sister, and one of her friends came down and helped us to unload and set up our new place.
As we waved goodbye and their car disappeared into the horizon, I looked at Emily and grinned. “Well, we did it. I think this is going to be a great change for us.”
EMILY
At first living in Florida did feel like a vacation. I was surprised every time I saw palm trees out my window. It didn’t take long to get used to walking outside without a coat in the middle of January. We found it amusing when the locals wore jackets and pants when the temperature was in the sixties.
During that crazy month of planning and preparing for our move, I felt energized, as if the fog had finally lifted and I could be myself again. I carried that momentum into the first few weeks in our new home. I reached out to the group home that had intrigued me and met with the lady who founded it. I toured the facility to see if it was right for me, and I worked with the founder and the trainers at Barwis Methods to get the kids from the group home to work out at their facility. Chris was visibly relieved to see me getting out and pursuing my dreams again. I was too. Maybe whatever was wrong with me had disappeared.
Then my Grandma Max’s health deteriorated.
My mom called and told me that my grandmother was in the hospital. My grandma and I had a special relationship and remained very close even after I moved away. She was the strongest person I knew. Her faith in God was incredible, even though she’d lived through the kinds of trials that cause a lot of people to give up on God. My grandmother meant the world to me. I always wrote her long letters every birthday or Christmas or Mother’s Day, telling her how much I loved her and how special she was to me. Now she was sick and in the hospital, and I was more than a thousand mile
s away.
In February I flew with Chris to Iowa for a speaking engagement—he was getting more and more of them lately. Grandma Max, who lived in Wisconsin, was two hours away from my parents, who still lived in Iowa. Grandma ended up coming home from the hospital on our first day back. We all hoped she’d turned a corner. But the very next day, her condition plunged downhill. My aunt told us that my grandmother struggled to get in and out of bed and couldn’t even stand up to get herself into her wheelchair.
I looked at Chris with fear in my eyes. “I need to be with her,” I told him. Instead of going with him to his speech, I drove up to Wisconsin with my mom to take care of Grandma Max. We made her fruit smoothies and chicken noodle soup, trying to coax her into eating and drinking when she didn’t feel like it. We begged my grandma to return to the hospital, but she was adamant that she wanted to stay home.
When she was ready for bed, I jumped into action. “Grandma, I’ll transfer you from your wheelchair into bed,” I told her confidently. “I do it with Chris all the time.”
She looked at me skeptically and sized up my five-feet-four frame. Just the day before, she had fallen when one of my cousins and a few larger guys tried moving her out of her chair. “Honey, I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“Come on, I can do this.” I felt as if I was at one of Chris’s training sessions. “I can get you up. Just trust me. All you’ve got to do is sit up a little bit, and I’ll do the rest.”
She was still nervous—I heard her gasp a few times during the transfer process. But we did it. I was even able to help her adjust her position in bed to help her sleep better than she had in days.
We didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last night she would ever spend in her home. When I transferred her to bed, she asked me to stay with her, which gave me one last, special night snuggling up next to my grandma. She cried out in her sleep multiple times about seeing heaven, worrying me that she was going to die right then and there.