Eric and I broke up when I went to Minnesota for my internship a month after the abortion. I finished college the following year. The summer after graduation, I took a month-long sea-kayaking course taught by the National Outdoor Leadership School in Alaska. I had been toying with the idea of starting my own therapeutic recreation business and I wanted to see firsthand how I fared as a leader in that environment. In all my outdoor pursuits thus far I had felt confident, but I always needed help in one way or another because of my leg. Could I be a leader and help others without needing help myself? Unfortunately, halfway through the kayak trip, my peg leg broke and my guide had to help me jerry-rig it back together. Perhaps I sold myself short, perhaps I gave up too early, but that experience, for as awe-inspiring as it was to kayak in Alaska for a month, solidified the notion that I didn’t have what it took to be an outdoor leader.
After that summer, I started my career working as camp director at a summer camp for people with developmental disabilities in Idaho. I no longer felt stigmatized to be associated with developmentally disabled folks like I had on the Skiforall bus so many years ago. In fact, I felt honored to be able to provide a place for them to feel included, something I had been searching for since my accident. Though I’d struggled to find connections in my own life, it turned out I was good at creating them for others who sought them out.
Over the years, all but one of my siblings had gotten married and started families. A new niece or nephew came along every year or two. Each time I visited a new baby, my grief was reignited. Each time, I swallowed the lump of regret in my throat. Each time, I reminded myself I made the choice to have an abortion so that I could live my life, my active life. I continued to ski in the winter and backpack and kayak in the summer.
After two summers at camp, I moved back to Seattle to work with adults with developmental disabilities, supporting them to live independently. Suppressing my grief—for the loss of my leg and my two abortions—was second nature to me by then. I continued to search for activities that brought joy and meaning to my life. I joined a dojo that taught Aikido, a martial art that focused on nonresistance. This practice nurtured my spiritual cravings as well as my physical ones. My sensei, or teacher, accommodated my needs well; I learned how to fall and roll alongside the other students. I went to class twice a week. With each move the sensei taught, she tied it to one of the principles of Aikido: see things from another’s perspective, help others see things from your perspective, and strive for harmony.
The summer of my thirty-first year, my suppressed grief was catching up with me. Driving to work became increasingly difficult. When a car started merging into my lane, I panicked. All I could see was that white bread truck from fourteen years ago merging into our lane. I played out the scenario of my accident over and over. And I created new scenarios in my mind of getting hit present day. I sobbed as I relived the memories and thought about the possibility of getting hurt again. There were instances when I was so scared or I was crying so hard that I had to pull over and collect myself. Friends asked me to go with them to a Bonnie Raitt concert that was a four-hour drive away and I said no, not because I didn’t want to go—I did—but because I knew I couldn’t be in a car on the freeway for that long. I’d be a crumpled mess by the time we arrived.
No one really knows why trauma symptoms emerge or worsen many years after the inciting incident, but emerge they did for me. At the dojo on a sunny Sunday morning, we were practicing a new move. The sensei talked about compassion and patience, nonresistance and harmony. My partner threw me to the mat in a way I had been thrown many times during the previous year. But that time when I landed on my back, I suddenly felt like I was back on the highway, lying next to our car, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Everything I was resisting in my emotional life came crashing down on me. I gasped and felt as if I was falling into a black hole. I slapped my hands on the mat to bring me back into the room. I had stuffed my sadness this many years; I wasn’t about to let my grief spill out here on the dojo mat, but internally I was a mess. I got up, scrambled over to the shoes, grabbed mine, and left the dojo as fast as my legs could carry me. I started sobbing, just as I had when I left Father Dempsey’s office, trying desperately to keep myself together. What happened that Sunday at the dojo was terrifying, and I wasn’t willing to let that happen again. So I never went back.
Though I couldn’t put these words to it then, my world was becoming small. I started living with fear—of getting hit by another car, of my grief, of my future that was looking more and more like I was going to be on my own.
I knew my emotions were bottled up and unresolved, but that was the only way I knew how to be. I didn’t know how to grieve. Instead of going back to the dojo, I went to see a therapist, Lynn. When I first met her, I told her that I was there to “get over my accident” and I wanted to wrap this up in six months. Lynn suppressed a laugh and told me it might take a little longer than that.
I didn’t know a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder, but Lynn did. She created a nurturing, warm environment. Sitting in her office was like being in a cocoon of comfort. During one of our first visits, I was explaining to her how the accident happened. I had learned to talk about this moment of my life with the practiced authority of an orator. I spoke with little emotion, a master at hiding my feelings. As I was explaining why it took so long for the ambulance to arrive on the scene of the accident, a siren started wailing outside Lynn’s window. My voice cracked, but I continued my narrative. Lynn gently asked me to stop talking.
“Listen to that siren, Colleen.” The siren howled louder. “How does that make you feel?” Ever since the accident, the sound of an ambulance sent my heart racing, which made me feel foolish and weak, not strong like I had convinced myself I needed to be. Sitting there with Lynn, in that warm room, I allowed myself to give in to the anguish. I couldn’t respond to her. I could only sob.
Lynn told me about the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and explained that people go there to grieve. On purpose. There is no shame in the tears that fall at the Wailing Wall. There is no expectation to be stoic. I was aware that though I had cried a lot over the years, I had stifled my deepest grief, but Lynn’s permission to express it was the first time I felt safe doing so. She loaned me a piece of the Wailing Wall, about the size of a small stone, which someone had brought her from Jerusalem. I tucked it into a leather pouch and wore it around my neck every day for months. Here was a construct for healing that was far removed from my Catholic upbringing—no shame required. I rubbed the rock whenever I heard sirens, whenever my leg hurt, whenever I felt sad. I learned how to allow the sadness to bubble to the surface instead of constantly shoving it down.
Lynn likened the process of grieving to that of peeling an onion. When I peeled an onion later at home, the first papery layer was hard to remove because it was clinging to the onion. After I peeled it off, I noticed how transparent it was. I wondered if the emotions sitting on the surface of my heart were going to be equally difficult to peel away. I wondered if they were just a mirror of what lay beneath. Lynn worked with me on how to appropriately express emotions, how to ask for help, how to be vulnerable.
As I grieved for my accident, I also allowed myself to process my feelings about my abortions. Lynn asked if doing a ritual would bring closure to those experiences. I liked that idea. On a Saturday morning I made two small figures, each about two inches long. I took scraps of fabric and made crude bundles resembling swaddled babies, one purple and one green. With colorful beads from my craft cupboard, I decorated the bundles by sewing spirals and stars on the fabric. Intuitively I knew one was a boy and one was a girl. I carried the baby bundles around delicately in my pockets for four days—four representing the four seasons of the year, the seasons they did not live through because of my decision to terminate their lives. On the fourth day I then took them to an old-growth park near my home and buried them under the largest cedar tree I could find. The cedar felt protective and wise. I wanted to give my little beings a proper burial. With my bare hands, I dug a shallow grave in the soft ground under the cedar and set the two bundles inside, resting them side by side. I sang a Native American chant I had learned from a medicine woman I’d studied with a few years earlier. After I covered the bundles with the earth, I sat down and leaned against the tree and meditated. I envisioned these two little souls soaring into the heavens, free and happy.
The process of burying these bundles helped me exhume my grief. I felt lighter after the ritual, having brought closure, as much as I could at that point, to the decisions I made. When I buried those bundles, I made the decision to let go of the regret and self-recrimination that I had held on to for so many years. I forgave the unforgivable.