Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again

by Crystal McVea

  When I was eight or nine, my mom let me start babysitting Jayson on my own. Most times it was fun—like when we watched the science show Mr. Wizard on TV, then tried to light a napkin on fire and burnt a watermelon-sized hole in the living room rug (well, it was fun until my mom got home). Other times Jayson knew just what to do to get under my skin. He loved riling me up and jumped at any chance to do it. If I had a friend over, Jayson would run around in his underwear, because he knew it made me crazy.

  Yet no matter how much we fought, I always felt extremely protective of Jayson, almost like I was his second mother. And in many ways I was. As things got more complicated and chaotic in our family, Jayson and I were often left to fend for ourselves. And as more and more of the family craziness got dumped on us, I tried even harder to shield Jayson from it, even if it meant absorbing more of it myself.

  But I was only a child, too, and I’d learn I couldn’t always protect Jayson or myself from the harm that came our way. Like the big black dog that wandered into our yard, the evil that entered our lives was something I couldn’t stop—it was only something I could try desperately to escape.

  JUST AROUND THE time Jayson was born, my stepfather Hank’s younger brother Joe was murdered. I never got the full story, but I do know he was beaten to death in his own home. And I know that when it happened, it changed Hank profoundly. That was when he turned to drinking and drugs.

  My mom’s marriage became a nightmare of fighting and violence. But my mom was still very young and naïve, and she didn’t realize what was causing Hank’s sudden transformation. So she cut him break after break, and she tried hard to make the marriage work. She even got Hank to go to counseling with her, though it never made much difference.

  By then Hank was like a runaway freight train, heading straight for a crash. He was sullen, withdrawn, wild, unpredictable. He constantly yelled at and badgered my mother, when he wasn’t disappearing on benders and binges. One night Hank and my mom got in a vicious fight. I remember seeing her curled up on the ground, trying to block Hank’s punches. I ran to her and threw myself on top of her to protect her, and as I lay there shielding her, the sheer terror of it all made me wet myself.

  Then came the evening Hank nearly killed me in my bed.

  After Hank shot at me, my mother rushed into my bedroom, scooped me up, threw little Jayson in his car seat, and drove us away from the house. At the time my father, Brad, was still living in town, and she went straight to his house to ask if we could stay there. Their marriage had ended badly, and they both held a lot of resentment toward each other. But this was an emergency, and my mom felt sure Brad would take us in.

  “Crystal can stay here,” my dad said, “but not you.”

  My mother refused to leave me, so she got back in the car and drove to her friend Bridget’s home. I can only imagine how scared and vulnerable she must have felt to be turned away like that by my dad, but my mom just rolled with it and did what she had to do to protect her kids. In fact, I was still asleep in the car when all that happened, and my mother never even told me my dad turned us away. I only learned about it years later, in a talk with my father.

  In hindsight, he says now, that decision is one of the biggest regrets of his life. But what I would come to realize is that he did what he did out of a deep well of pain. As a kid, I heard only my mom complain—and I only saw her pain—so I figured she was the only one who was hurt by the divorce. But my dad had been deeply hurt, too. After all, he’d lost his family.

  I also learned that as soon as we left that night, my father got in his car and went looking for Hank. They knew each other and had once been friends, but on that night my dad wanted to kill him. Fortunately he didn’t find him. If he had, life might have been much different for all of us—especially for my dad, who would probably still be in jail.

  Hank’s descent into madness created an atmosphere of chaos in our home. And in that atmosphere, bad things happened, and any chance to get them under control was lost. In the downward spiral of my mother’s second marriage, bad things only got worse. The regular working order of a family—parents watching over their kids, weeding out bad values, asserting good ones—completely fell apart. And Jayson and I, still just children, became vulnerable to a host of predators.

  WHEN I SAID THAT I HAD DARK SECRETS IN MY life, this is what I meant. This is what I kept hidden for thirty years. It is very hard for me to talk about, and for most of my life I didn’t share it with anyone, not even my mother. I just shoved it deeper and deeper behind a curtain of shame.

  I was three years old when I was sexually abused for the first time. My mom left me with a babysitter in town, and the abuse happened there. I began having trouble going to the bathroom, and when my mom asked me about it, I told her something had happened at the babysitter’s house. My mom took me to see a doctor, and the doctor confirmed that something severe had happened to me—something much worse than inappropriate touching. The doctor also said that because I was so little, I wouldn’t remember anything and the best course of action was to not mention it to me at all. So my mom never brought it up and neither did I. She never took me back to that babysitter, but otherwise we never discussed it.

  We wouldn’t talk about it again for almost thirty years.

  WHEN I WAS five and a half, it happened again, in the home of a different babysitter. The babysitter had an older husband, and I remember him making me sit on his lap. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt I had to. My brother, Jayson, was with me then, tucked away in his infant carrier. I remember looking at him sound asleep in his little carrier and thinking, As long as I stay on his lap, he won’t touch Jayson.

  This time, I didn’t tell my mom about the molestation because I wanted to protect her from more bad news. Even at that age, I knew my mother had a hard life, what with Hank and money problems and all her other headaches. The last thing she needed was another crisis to deal with. So I never mentioned anything to her or anyone else.

  But there was something else at work, too. The abuse was happening again. This wasn’t the first person to do this to me, and I wondered, What is wrong with me? How could I let this happen again? I began to feel dirty and broken inside. That was another reason I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mother—because it made me feel so bad about myself. For the first time I can remember in my life, I felt shame.

  By the age of six, I’d already seen my mother’s two marriages fall apart and endured horrible sexual abuse. So when I was put in harmful situations after that, I didn’t even realize they were harmful. They were just my “normal.” The reality of being sexually abused at a young age is that it identifies you—it becomes a part of who you are. It causes something inside of you to break, and once it’s broken, it makes you vulnerable to even more abuse. That is what happened to me. All the shame and the dirtiness and the brokenness that I felt became my identity. This was who I was.

  MY MOTHER DIDN’T leave us with that second babysitter for long, but when I was six, she started taking us to visit Hank’s mother once a week. Every Thursday night after my piano lesson she’d pick me up and take me to the two-floor condo where Hank’s mom and his stepdad lived with their two teenage daughters. Even after she divorced Hank, she kept hanging out with his family. And Hank’s family was, to put it mildly, really dysfunctional.

  The ones who bore the brunt of it were the two daughters, Alice and Rita. As far as I could tell, their parents basically treated them as slaves. They were not allowed to have any friends or make any phone calls, and they had to come straight home from school every day. They spent their afternoons and evenings cooking and cleaning the house.

  My mom would hang out with Hank’s mom and stepdad upstairs while we all waited downstairs. Whenever the grown-ups needed something, they’d bang on the floor—once for Alice, twice for Rita. The girls had to run up, see what they wanted, and hurry back down to fetch it. I remember Alice and Rita constantly scurrying around with beers and food. It was obvious they were severely
browbeaten, to the point of having their spirits completely crushed.

  Besides poor Alice and Rita running around like servants, there were always people coming in and out of the house on the nights we were there. They’d go upstairs and join the party while Jayson and I stayed downstairs. In an atmosphere like that—weird, chaotic, toxic—a lot of bad things can happen to unsupervised children. Unfortunately, one of the worse things that can happen did happen—and it happened to me.

  During my weekly visits I was sexually abused by someone in the house. It began as inappropriate physical touching, and it got a lot worse from there. It didn’t happen every time we were there, but it happened a lot. And it happened for five straight years. I didn’t tell a soul about what was going on: not my mother, not a friend, not anyone. For one thing, I didn’t know how to tell anyone—just the thought of putting the words together and explaining it made me sick. But by then I was also convinced it was all my fault. If it had happened once, that would be one thing. But three times? With three different people?

  I was the common denominator. The problem had to lie with me.

  AND WHERE WAS God in all of this? Where was the Creator I had heard so much about? My mom took us to service and Sunday school each and every week—for a while to a Baptist church, and then to a Methodist one—and every week I heard about the greatness and glory of our Heavenly Father. But the concept of God as a loving father had no meaning for me.

  You see, I couldn’t fathom such a thing as a loving and completely devoted father. My time with my own father was so very limited, and my stepdad was certainly no shining example of fatherly love. So when the pastors spoke of a loving father who would always protect me, it didn’t make much sense to me. Nothing I heard in all those sermons and Bible classes seemed to apply to my life at all. And I sure as heck knew God hadn’t protected me from harm. Just as my feelings of shame and worthlessness were taking root, so, too, were my doubts about the existence or goodness of God.

  Now, Jesus Christ—that was a different story. Everything I heard about Jesus made him more and more attractive to me. For one thing he was human, not some celestial being. Plus, he died on a cross for our sins—he died trying to save me. After a while I felt like I loved Jesus, and I wanted to get closer to him. So when I was nine years old, I told my mom I wanted to be baptized.

  I was in church when I first heard a pastor talk about how baptism cleans your soul, and the word cleans really stuck with me. I remember thinking, That’s what I want. I want to be clean. So many bad things were happening to me, and the thought of having all the shame and the pain washed away with a simple dunk in the water was, for me, thrilling. I nudged my mom in church and told her I wanted to be baptized, and she took me down front. The congregation prayed over me, and that evening we came back for the baptism.

  I went in a room and changed into a simple white cloth gown. The baptismal pool was high up in a balcony area, and it had a glass front so everyone in the church could see. I walked slowly toward the pool and could barely catch my breath. This was it! I was going to be cleaned! I stepped into the pool and waded in lukewarm water that came up to my chest. Then the pastor put his hand on my back and dunked me in the water, then brought me up and dunked me again. I came up dripping and spitting water. I had accepted Jesus Christ into my life.

  And sure enough, I felt clean. I felt like my soul had been scrubbed. To this day, I can remember that feeling and how magical it was.

  Unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last. The baptism, I figured, didn’t take. I assumed salvation meant being saved from all the crud that was happening to me; I didn’t realize it meant Jesus was saving my soul. When all the things that made me feel dirty kept happening, I asked my mom if I could be baptized again. And so, a few months later, I was baptized again.

  All in all, I was baptized four times: once in a Catholic Church when I was born, twice in the Baptist church, and finally in the Methodist church when I was twelve. And after each one, I truly felt cleansed.

  But each time, the feeling didn’t last.

  And so I began to doubt if I could ever be saved—or if there was even a God in heaven to save me. After all, if God could save me, why hadn’t He already? It seemed the path my life was taking was only leading me further way from God, not closer. No matter how much I wanted to feel like a loving child of God, I couldn’t—I just felt unclean and unworthy.

  But most of all, I felt like I was on my own. I felt like I had no protector, no hero, no champion. I truly believed that in a hostile world, I was all alone.

  LOOKING BACK ON my younger self now, it breaks my heart to think I felt so isolated and abandoned by God. I wish I could tell young Crystal not to feel so terrified and so alone, because—as I now understand—we are never alone, not even in our darkest hours. “For He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways” (Psalm 91:11). The truth is, I did have protectors, I did have heroes, and I wasn’t on my own—none of us are.

  God is with us always. And His angels are guarding us in all our ways.

  THE ANGELS

  I WAS INSTANTLY AWARE OF TWO BEINGS IN FRONT OF ME and to my left, and I knew right away who they were—they were angels.

  But they weren’t just any angels—they were my angels.

  I recognized them immediately. There was so much brightness coming off them that I couldn’t make out any features. But they weren’t shapeless blobs; they definitely had a form, which was roughly that of a human body: long and slender. The being on the right appeared a bit bigger than the one on the left. They didn’t move or hover or anything—they were just there.

  And what I instantly felt for them was love.

  A great, sweeping love for my angels overwhelmed me. It was like they were the best friends I could ever have, though the word friend doesn’t come close to describing them. The angels were my protectors, my teachers, my mentors, my heroes, my strength, my spirit, my heart, everything, all rolled into one. I felt like they had been a part of my existence and my journey forever—as if they had been by my side for every tear I ever cried, every decision I had ever made, every day I ever felt lonely, not only on Earth but through all eternity. I felt so unbelievably safe and free in their presence, so happy and fulfilled. I understood why they were there—to greet me upon my arrival and guide me back home. They were the best welcoming committee you could ask for.

  What’s more, I realized there was instant and complete communication between us. What do I mean by that? Imagine a button you can press; as soon as you press it, you know everything there is to know about someone, and they know everything about you. Or a password that, if you let me use it, gives me instant access to everything you’ve ever said or thought or felt or written or believed in your life: past, present, and future. Instantly, I would have a more complete understanding of you than is possible on Earth. Well, that is what this was like—a sensation that everything we were, everything that mattered, was passing freely between my angels and me, strengthening our profound connection and an eternal bond. There was no room whatsoever for secrets or shame or misunderstanding or anything negative.

  There was just this wonderful, beautiful, nourishing sense of knowing.

  I wish I could say I recognized them as people I previously knew on Earth, but I didn’t. Many who have died describe seeing a favorite relative waiting for them in the beyond. They talk about the amazing joy of such a heavenly reunion. I would love to have been reunited with my precious Grandma Ernie, but I wasn’t. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen; it just wasn’t part of my experience. Still, meeting my angels left me overflowing with joy. They never left my side, and I knew they never would.

  In addition to my guardian angels, there was also a being on my right, and instantly I knew who this was, too. And I felt as if my spirit form just crumpled and fell before this being, as if—had I had a physical body—I’d fallen to my knees and raised my arms and bowed deeply in praise and worship.

  Me! Cryst
al! The sinner and the skeptic, the one with all the questions!

  Here in the presence of God.

  PLEASE DON’T THINK MY CHILDHOOD WAS ONE long parade of misery—it really wasn’t. Like I said, I didn’t know what a normal childhood was, so my life seemed pretty normal to me. And I have a ton of really happy memories. Even on my worst days, I found something to laugh about. That’s a trait I inherited from my mom, and it’s something I believe helped all of us survive. No matter how dire things got, we found the humor in them and laughed instead of cried—like the night my mom decided to make homemade Christmas ornaments.

  I was four or five, and she let me help roll the dough and cut it into the shapes of candy canes, reindeer, and snowmen. When we finished, she put them in the oven, and I went to bed. A couple of hours later, my mom rushed into my bedroom and woke me up.

  “Come on,” she said, “we have to go.”

  Turns out she had spray-painted the ornaments in the kitchen instead of the backyard, and in the process filled the house with noxious fumes. Even opening all the windows didn’t help. So she and Hank roused me from bed, and the three of us sat on the front porch in the middle of a cold winter night until the fumes were gone.

  That little bit of bad luck turned into one of my favorite childhood memories. After she led me to the porch, my mom dashed back in the house and returned carrying all my favorite board games. “Let’s have a game party!” she suggested. I remember the three of us sitting on the porch steps—me in my pajamas and winter coat—and playing the game I loved most: Hook, Line and Stinker, in which you tried to hook these tiny fish with little magnetic fishing poles. I sat between Mom and Hank, and it felt like all the attention was on me. We played and laughed and joked well past my bedtime, and we forgot all about the fumes.