by Delilah
Whatever you are going through today, whatever is happening right now to challenge your well-being and your sanity, you will get past it. You have the strength to endure any challenge you face. If you believe God placed you on this Earth, then you should also believe you have a purpose in this life as you stand here today. You may recognize the saying “If God brought you to it, he’ll bring you through it.” Believe that.
Some of the hardest, most painful moments in my life have been dealing with the health issues and trauma inflicted on my children. I can’t adequately describe how heartbreaking it is to worry in agony over a child. If you’re a parent who’s been there, you know. But the reality is we all agonize over something at some point in our lives. There will always be trouble in the world, but take heart—Jesus conquered it, and so will you. You have to experience the lows to appreciate the highs. I probably wouldn’t appreciate where I am today if I didn’t have to work so damn hard and endure so much pain to get here. And I probably wouldn’t know half as many things today if I didn’t have to learn them the hard way.
When I was battling my daughter’s severe health issues, and when I was wayward in my career, it was hard to see past the trouble. When you’re enshrouded in stress and uncertainty, there is no joy to be had. But the winter seasons of your life will pass, and God will make all things new again, as my mother, Wilma Dean, professed in her letter to Janey.
Today my daughter is a beautiful woman with a bright future. I see the pain of her own health struggles being redirected into a compassion and nurturing for others. Today I run my own company and my own NGO—no longer can I be fired! And speaking of my mom, I’d like to point out that within the depths of my uncertainty for my future and my family, God brought her back into my life and made that relationship new again. Old wounds were bound as my mom finally believed in me, and I could finally mend her broken heart.
I left home the day I graduated from high school. I didn’t ever go back to live at home again, and I never looked back. My little brother would call me at night and beg me to come home; Mom would call me crying and sobbing, telling me how much she missed me. I didn’t care. My heart was hardened because of the fights I had with my dad, and I had a chip on my shoulder a mile wide. It wasn’t until I had my first child that I realized how I broke her heart by leaving so soon, no transition, no time to adjust to the void in her life. One day I was standing on a wooden stage getting my high school diploma, and the next day I took a suitcase full of clothes and five thousand dollars I had saved and hidden under a loose floorboard in my closet and I left.
When my firstborn son left home, he only moved next door, and still I missed seeing his sleepy face in the morning. Suddenly the weight of how deeply I broke my mom’s heart was a reality, and why she had fought to retain her hold on Matt when he and Anne started to get serious. She died long before I fully realized the sacrifices she made to raise me, or how deeply she loved me. Certainly, I didn’t realize how I had broken her heart on many occasions by my impetuous or spontaneous decisions, nor did I have time to apologize.
My mom coming back into my life after a new baby, during a rocky relationship and stressful job situation, was the silver lining, a gift. I don’t know to whom it meant more, but it is one of the great blessings of my life to this day. It was a rainbow in the midst of the storm. Now when I look back, I realize it was God’s way of showing me how He works all things for good, and that it would all eventually be okay.
God will do that, you know. He will deliver the tools or the people to give you strength to press on. That’s how much He believes you can survive it, build strength from it, and emerge with a heart to change the world for one person, or many. But change the world, nonetheless.
CHAPTER 13:
A STRENGTHENED HEART
My brother Matt had found his way to a very strong faith before I did. It wasn’t a cosmic realization, an awakening, or a spiritual journey he went on to become a Christian. To be honest, it was a tall, blonde girl whose ample assets caught his attention. Anne was cute, with a nose that turned up slightly to give her a somewhat pixie look. They were in a jazz band together at their community college, and when my awkward, gangly, seventeen-year-old brother got up the courage to ask her out, she initially turned him down.
Anne and her family were religious—they were Christians—and though she had a crush on Matt, she wasn’t interested in dating a boy who didn’t share her faith. I think Matt’s conversion had little to do with the scriptures or divine revelation… but convert he did, even as our family smirked and mocked his newfound faith. Especially me.
Matt and Anne dated for a year before he got her the first promise ring and they started to discuss marriage. My parents, especially my mother, were against it. Matt was her firstborn, her baby, and she was not going to give him up easily. Both sets of parents encouraged them to let Matthew finish his education first. Anne waited patiently as he enrolled in Oregon State University through the ROTC program, and she worked at a bank to help support his efforts. A year or so later, he added a small engagement ring to the promise ring, and again my mom had a fit. Finally, after about four years of dating, they announced they would be getting married in the summer of 1981. Again, Mom protested and started to list the reasons they needed to wait.
Anne, usually somewhat of a wallflower, stood up from the kitchen table and said, “Mrs. Luke, I have waited for your son for several years now. I am not going to wait any longer. We are getting married whether you like it or not.”
Anne and her mom planned a simple but beautiful wedding. She wore a cotton gown and decorated her church with yellow and white daisies. She married my brother on July 11, 1981. I pinned a boutonniere on my dad before the wedding, and it was the last time I remember touching or hugging him.
When I returned to Seattle after Matt’s wedding, I moved in with my new boyfriend George, who was intoxicating, handsome, charming, and brilliant. He was also intoxicated. The first night I met him and pretty much every night after that, he was drunk. But I didn’t see a problem with his drinking, as he only became more engaging and affectionate as he drank.
I wasn’t used to mean or unruly drunks—I had been raised in a family of people who drank nearly every day, and I loved those people! My folks and all their best friends drank in the evening and usually tied one on every weekend. But these people were funny, loving, larger-than-life folks when they drank. I was never beaten, abused, or left out in the cold when my parents drank. I loved them when they drank even more.
Dad’s music was better, and his jokes were funnier; his friends would erupt in volcanic laughter as they sat around the campfire drinking Black Velvet whisky and playing the guitar. Mom’s best friend Doris was a gorgeous woman with a long neck and hair that was always teased into a frothy do! She held her cigarette between long thin fingers, her nails were always polished, and she would tip her head back and blow out smoke in a way that made her look sexy as hell. If I ever had a girl crush, it was on Doris!
Being around such funny, engaging adults who drank prepared me to fall in love with a funny, engaging man who drank. Like my dad and his friends, George could operate on all cylinders even after drinking half a bottle of whiskey and a six-pack of beer. In recovery groups the term functioning alcoholics is bandied around. But my parents and my first husband weren’t just functioning—they were hysterically funny and hardworking. They weren’t slackers who hung out in dimly lit bars or slept on park benches, who showed up late to work or couldn’t keep a job. I had no issue with the volume of alcohol my beloved consumed when I fell in love with him. Nope, never saw it as a problem in the early days of true love’s haze…
If you’ve watched the Barbra Streisand movie Funny Girl, then you saw our story. (Well, except the character played by Barbra Streisand was incredibly funny, talented, and a Broadway star; I was just a girl trying to make it big in radio.) George was so much like Omar Sharif’s character in the movie—debonair, suave, and oh so emotionally un
available.
The hot summer night I met George, a news reporter from another Seattle radio station, I was at a media event for the Seattle Mariners MLB team, and I was seated at a table with a dozen other broadcasters. I saw him standing at the door; my heart jumped out of my chest and into his hands. It was love at first sight. But I may have missed a few road signs that night as we chatted away in the press box while he pounded back half a dozen large plastic cups of beer.
A week before Christmas 1981 and five months after my older brother’s wedding, George and I strolled hand in hand in the lightly falling snow and bought a small Christmas tree beneath the buzzing streetlights on Harbor Avenue and carried it to our apartment that smelled of barbecue and weed. After we decorated the four-foot-high Douglas fir with ornaments, George got down on one knee, put a minuscule diamond ring on my left hand, and asked me to marry him. He neglected to mention he was still very married to another woman, six years behind in child support payments, and hadn’t filed taxes for at least five years. He also collected women’s phone numbers like I collected Journey albums, and he loved to party and get high with his friends. I missed these signs and many more, but I loved him something awful, and there was no snapping me out of it.
We were married on a Saturday in September 1982 in a park overlooking Seattle. Only sixteen people were at our wedding. My father had forbidden anyone in my family to attend, so he and my mother, sister, and little brother were absent. Only Matt and Anne, who had an independent life in California, were there to represent my family. My two best girlfriends from childhood, Natasha and Dee Dee, were there, along with a few work friends and some folks I had met in Seattle. I made my satin wedding dress from a McCall’s pattern; it had spaghetti straps with a little jacket to match. I made dresses for Tash and Dee and for my stepdaughter, Camille. I even sewed a vest for my stepson, Adrian, to wear. I made the bouquets for me and the girls to carry, plus half a dozen corsages, boutonnieres, and the flowers that were tied to the cake knife.
George’s insanely funny younger brother, Mike, was in charge of the music for the ceremony. Holding on to my brother Matt’s arm, I walked beneath climbing roses and entered the little gathering at the park. The music recorded on a cassette tape was supposed to be our song, “Always and Forever” by Heatwave. Instead, Mike forgot to take his personal tape out of the boom box, so I walked down the grassy aisle on my brother’s arm to Kool and the Gang’s “Get Down on It”! Everyone laughed at the irony as we tied the knot with the city spread out like a magic carpet below us.
The sun danced off the inky-blue waters of Puget Sound, birds flew overhead, George’s two beautiful children held my hand, and my heart nearly exploded with joy. It truly was the happiest day of my life, and I knew he would love and adore only me now that we were married. He promised to do so in the tender vows he wrote and spoke to me in his deep tenor voice. He promised to love, honor, and cherish only me… “And when the dark dog of despair comes howling at our door, as it will in life at times, I will protect you from all harm and hold you until the morning light.”
A year later we went on a delayed honeymoon to Mexico. After a very large margarita, I told George I wanted a baby and if he didn’t want another child, he would have to do something to prevent it. I flicked my wrist as I threw my birth control pills in the garbage can of the Siesta Royale. Within a few weeks, I was pregnant. But instead of being as elated as I was, George was frustrated and upset. I had no clue when I called him at work to tell him the good news that Rose, the woman who answered the phone in their newsroom, was in fact sleeping with him.
He came home and gently tried to tell me I needed to abort the baby; he confessed that he was not a good father to the two children he had, that he neglected his responsibilities to them and he felt bad for that. I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I knew he would be a great daddy, that we loved each other so much he would change, that he would stop going out after work and drinking every night, stop heading to the clubs on weekends with the boys. I knew the two other wives he had wed before me had simply not understood him nor loved him as much as I did.
When he realized I wasn’t going to change my mind, he actually changed his—his mood became acceptance, followed by happiness, even animation in the following months about our unborn baby. I was so happy, so intoxicated on love and joy knowing there was a little “us” growing inside me, I convinced myself our fights and problems were a thing of the past and we would have the most adorable, loving family in the history of families.
I had purchased a modest house—they call them war boxes in West Seattle, little shacks that were built during World War II for all the civilians who worked at the shipyards and Boeing field. I planted flowers and trees in our front yard, dug up the sod and put a garden in the backyard. I put a white picket fence around the whole lovely lot. I sewed curtains for the baby’s room, the living room, the bedrooms. I worked at a radio station part-time and a video production company during the week, working four months straight without a single day off. Working, digging, planting, painting, sewing, and rubbing my growing belly, I was so stinking happy my face hurt from smiling.
Our amazing son was born at 3:22 on a warm September afternoon. I had to beg George to turn off the TV—the Seattle Seahawks were set to play the New England Patriots, and he was well into his second six-pack of Henry’s Private Reserve when my contractions became unbearable. It wasn’t until I stood in front of our fourteen-inch TV and screamed at him that it wasn’t false labor, as the fluid ran down my swollen legs, that he abandoned the game and drove me to the birthing center in Redmond, half an hour away.
When I got to the hospital, they said the baby was in distress and his heart rate was slowing down, so they prepped me and did an emergency C-section within a few minutes of our arrival. So much for my birthing plan. I had envisioned listening to deep-breathing exercises, relaxing to James Taylor, lighting aromatic candles, and having an underwater delivery in the birthing center’s new soaking tub. Instead they rushed me in, gave me an epidural, cut me open, and then placed my beautiful baby boy in my arms. Isaiah entered the world at almost nine pounds, and the world as I had known it came to an immediate end. My life was divided into before and after Isaiah was born. My son’s birth was the earth-shattering event that changed everything. Rearranged my psyche and put me in touch with the infinite.
I honestly had no clue how much my mom loved me until Isaiah was born, no clue the level of love I was capable of experiencing, sharing, or giving until he came into my life. And it was by holding him, nursing him, and caring for him that I began to comprehend what my brother had tried to share with me the last time we talked—that there is a heaven, a purpose, a plan, and a God that is real.
Many years ago, a pastor named Mike McCorkle shared a few simple thoughts with me and the rest of our tiny congregation; he said he believed when he arrives in heaven, God will ask him two questions. The first will be, “What did you do with Me—did you get to know Me?” God will want to know if you had a relationship with Him. The second will be, “What did you do with every person I placed in your path?”
I don’t know if that will happen or not. I haven’t a clue if God will ask me those two questions, or if something entirely different will transpire when my heart stops beating and my life ebbs away. But what if Pastor Mike was right? What if God wasn’t kidding about the “Judge ye not” thing and wants me to love others instead of judge them? What if he is serious about that “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” part? What if every single person in my life, from my hardheaded, stubborn father to my tenderhearted firstborn son, every person I served a sandwich to on the street or every person whose call I took on the air, was placed in my life by God and I was supposed to impact their life for good? What if God means it when He tells us to love the unlovely? What if life is more than random coincidences and chance meetings? What if He actually orchestrates the people we encounter? What if there is a grand plan to things and He is putt
ing people in my path to connect with, appreciate, and even love? What if?
These thoughts could not leave my mind. I was in my twenties and searching for answers, having lost my brother Matt and his wife, Anne, in a tragic plane crash.
After graduating from college with a civil engineering degree, Matt attended Officer Candidate School and graduated with the rank of second lieutenant in the US Air Force. He was stationed at Vandenberg AFB near Lompoc, California, and assigned the exciting task of reengineering the base sewer and drainage system. Anne, his wife of nearly four years, worked at a local bank, and there was a lot of talk about them becoming parents.
Once comfortably installed on base, Matt set out to realize his lifelong dream of becoming a pilot. Flight had been his passion for as long as anyone could remember; he had spent countless hours as a youth and teen building and flying model aircraft, and he wanted to be a military pilot. Unfortunately, his six-foot-five-inch height had prevented this, but he now had the time and the means to pursue a private pilot’s license, and he did. Anne attended ground school so she could be his handy copilot on the many airborne adventures they dreamed of taking.
They set off from Vandenberg on their first flight together the Wednesday before Memorial Day weekend in 1985, en route to North Bend, Oregon, to visit both sets of parents. From there they were to fly to Seattle to meet their new nephew and godson, Isaiah, now eight months. Bad weather met them, and they landed in Redding and camped in a tent under the plane on the tarmac that night. The next morning, Thursday, they were cleared for takeoff, but the rain and fog pursued them. Matt was not yet instrument rated, so he tried to get below the cloud cover and follow the Umpqua River west toward the coast. He had contact with the small airport tower in Roseburg, Oregon, before heading west, and that was the last anyone heard his voice. They vanished into the clouds. Gone. Ground and air search teams found no trace. On the second day of the search, a Civil Air Patrol plane crashed, killing all three volunteers on board. Our family was shattered.