So yesterday I posted about my e-mail from one of my soldiers. I ended with asking people to try to notice other people around them. Today, I just got home and found this article. It articulates exactly what I was trying to say. The link on the title will take you to the actual blog and the comments are very telling too. Please take a few minutes to read.
Melody Ross
Thursday 4 April 2013 6:10 am
By MELODY ROSS
After a dear friend telling me about a hurtful experience she’d had
this week. I began thinking again about a story I have told a few
times…. a story that my children will tell to their children, and maybe
even beyond that… because it was such a learning experience in our
family, maybe even a turning point.
It’s a story that I think about often because we were the main
characters in it 3 or 4 years ago, and even though it was something that
lasted less than 15 minutes it changed all of us and now I see others
differently, especially when it seems that they might be main characters
in the same story…or one a lot like it. I used to be too embarrassed to
tell this story… but I am not anymore. This is a human story that
everyone needs to hear, I truly believe this. I hope you will stay with
it, it’s kinda long.
As we move along… I want you to think about some of the big signs
with big messages that I bet you wish you could wear around your neck
sometimes so that people would be more gentle, or even that you could
put around the neck of someone you love — so that you didn’t have to go
into a big long story to defend yourself or someone else– so that people
would just stop judging and and just be kind.
I need to start this story by giving you a little bit of background.
You see, my husband had an accident in 2004 that injured the frontal
lobe of his brain. It has taken 6 years to get him back, but in the
middle there, between 2004 and now, lots and lots of stuff happened. He
was essentially out of it, but not just that, he changed to someone
else, we lost him.
His personality changed completely, he could not work, he was
angry and depressed
and could not cope with human beings. He did not feel love or
affection, really he only felt anger, rage, and he was suicidal most of
the time. He did not remember a lot of things. He could not take care of
our family or even himself, really (and I want to mention again that
through lots of miracles, he is 100% recovered now…we are so
thankful….he is even BETTER than he was before his accident).
But during that time he would have these confusing and amazing
glitches of time when he would be totally normal. It was bittersweet.
They would last for an hour sometimes, and sometimes for days or even
weeks then he would sink back down into that horrible place. When he was
sick, I protected him fiercely. I didn’t want anyone to see him like
that. I had faith that someday he would recover but man oh man it was
lonely. I wished every single day that I could just walk around with a
sign like this…
because on the outside I looked like I had EVERYTHING GOING FOR ME I
looked like I might just have a perfect life but I was hiding a very
painful secret…
Well, a lot of other things happened too. You can imagine what might
happen over the years while we have a 7 acre farm, a pretty big
international business that we own with lots of employees, a life that
HE managed before his accident, while he just let me do the fun and
creative stuff. Now we had lots of medical bills, lots of sorrow and
lots of distractions, we also had LOTS of kids — and no one competent
managing the business.
Well, after a few years, I couldn’t hold it all together. Our
business was suffering for all of the reasons listed above and a few
more reasons on top of that and we discovered that we were really
SINKING. Well, one day when he was partly lucid…he was THERE…he was
coherent — I told him the
condition of our life.
He kind of panicked and he went straight to work figuring out what he
could do. It was insanely heartbreaking when he would “wake up” after
weeks or months and I had to tell him how much things were deteriorating
financially, etc. It was very hard. But when he could, he did what he
could before his
mental illness sucked him back into the prison it kept him in most of the time.
He called a sign place and had a huge sign brought out to our
house…the kind that you can put letters on, and it was electric and lit
up. He put it by the road in one of our horse fields. Then he drove our
Suburban, both of our trucks, my classic Thunderbird that he got me for
my birthday a few years earlier, our tractor, all of our tractor
implements, the boat that I worked 10 years to get for him (and that
caused his brain injury, incidentally), and he lined everything up along
the fence and he put a price tag on every single thing. Then, he put
the letters on that big huge sign and plugged it in.
You have to understand that we had worked for MANY years for those
things. We started a business in our twenties and we sacrificed
everything we had for all of those years to make it work. We owned
almost all of it outright, but, when I told him that the business was
struggling, this is what he did.
Sooooo…there it was. All in a row. All of our stuff –out in our field.
All of the neighbors driving by, our friends, the community, people
who knew us most of our lives and people who knew nothing about us…we
were just the young family who lived in that beautiful little farm house
on Beacon Light road with the perfect lawn….or what USED to be.
You see, in addition, for months, our once beautifully manicured yard
started to be filled with weeds that were now several feet high. I just
couldn’t keep it up. The lawn was a nightmare. Everything was just
falling apart all around me and my heart was broken over my husband,
too. It was humiliating and exhausting and horrible, really.
Well, the sign was not up in the field for more than a few hours,
when my husband’s phone rang. It was someone who saw all the stuff and
my husband’s phone number on the big huge sign. We were sitting out in
the yard while he was still coherent and he was feeling devastated about
the condition of our lawn. I was apologizing that I just couldn’t do
all of it. He was so heartbroken at his limitations and that he had left
me to try to handle our life alone. We were trying to make a plan.
He answered his phone. I saw that he was just listening. I could hear
that the person’s voice was getting louder and louder and louder. My
husband just listened. He turned his back to me a little so I wouldn’t
hear. But I could hear it. It seemed to go on and on and on.
These were the things I could hear on the other end of the phonecall:
“You are bringing down the value of my property with that ugly sign!”
“What are you doing?”
“That is the most obnoxious sign, do you have a permit to have that out there?”
“Are you starting a used car lot?”
“You have got to get all of that moved and out of here or I am calling the authorities”
I sat there, mortified, embarrassed, humiliated, mad, sad,
devastated. I was certain that this would snap my husband back into his
dark hellish place.
But, when the man was done ranting, my husband waited a second and
then very calmly said something that I will never, ever forget.
“Sir,” he said, “There was a time in this country, in this
community…when if you drove past your neighbor’s house and saw every
single thing they own was for sale in front of their house…and that
their lawn had not been mowed for weeks….that you would stop and
say….WHAT IS GOING ON, SOMETHING MUST BE TERRIBLY WRONG, WHAT CAN I DO
TO HELP YOU?”
The man was silent, and then my husband went on to tell him a few details about what was going on with our family.
The man waited a moment and then his tone changed. He apologized. I mean, really apologized and then said:
“I am going to call all of my friends and see if any of them need any of this stuff….”
***************************************
I wish with everything in me that we could have put a sign up on that
big stupid lit up billboard in our field that said OUR LIFE IS FALLING
APART, but all that we really could put up is a sign with the price of
everything that we owned that was worth any money.
WHAT IF we could all wear a sign that said what WE REALLY MEANT? What
if we could go straight past the small talk or the masks, and we could
actually go straight to the heart of the matter. What if our friends and
family wore signs like this?
…we would treat each other differently.
I think we should just try to imagine it. That when a friend is
quiet…or not showing up to stuff she usually shows up to, or acting a
little “off”, or a family member is wearing pajamas to the grocery store
for weeks on end, or not answering the phone, or the lawn is not mowed…
whatever it is…
IT IS A SIGN. It is not a sign that can be read in words and letters,
but it is a sign that someone needs to be treated gently. That they
need help. Most of all, that they need love, understanding, and that
they DEFINITELY DO NOT need to be judged.
Every time I think of this story I want to be better. I want to do
better, I don’t want any silent signs to go unread before my eyes or my
heart. I don’t want to make up my own answers to what must be going on. I
don’t want to assume…
Let’s be gentle with each other. Let’s read each other’s signs.
