Leveled

But, like always, I couldn’t stand to see anyone in pain and hurting, so the following week during their session I asked the little boy to help me with some of the exercises. At first he balked because his mother told him to stay away from his sister, but when I cut her a look that indicated I was a hot second away from kicking her out of the room altogether, she changed her tune. I moved the little boy in front of the girl where she was sitting on the floor with her immobile legs in front of her and handed him a heavy length of rope.

“You ever play tug of war?” He looked up at me with serious, sad eyes and nodded. “Okay, well, that’s what you’re gonna do with your sister. She’s gonna pull as hard as she can and I want to you pull back without moving, okay?” He nodded again. “Once she’s back as far as she can go you help pull her back until she’s sitting just like that.”

It took a minute for the siblings to figure it out, she was obviously not pulling as hard as she could and the little boy was terrified of doing something wrong. The rope kept falling out of their hands and landing on the mat between them, but eventually that innate rivalry all siblings have kicked in and they started actually tugging and pulling the way I wanted them to. It only took a couple times of the brother yanking the little girl back up into a sitting position for them both to be laughing and having fun with it.

I crossed my arms over my chest and looked out of the corner of my eye at their mother. “He could be an instrumental part of her healing process. She’s going to need help for the rest of her life, including when you and your husband are no longer around. Trying to take him away from her isn’t going to help anything at all.”

The mother put a hand to her throat. “I kicked my husband out. I told him over and over again I didn’t want those guns in the house.”

That didn’t exactly absolve her entirely of the blame, but I couldn’t say I faulted her. “She forgives him. There isn’t any reason you shouldn’t be able to. It was an accident, a tragic, avoidable accident, but now you have to move on from that. She needs her family … all of them.”

“It’s so hard to move on from something like this.” Her voice broke and she excused herself to get some water as I continued to watch the kids play.

The little girl wouldn’t walk again and the little boy had played a hand in that, but to her, all she saw was her little brother. Maybe it was because she hadn’t been jaded by life yet, maybe it was that she was just a sweet kid without a resentful bone in her body, or maybe it was that she was smarter, more self-aware at twelve than I was at twenty-six and realized nothing was going to change. She could hate her brother, blame him and hold him responsible, but that wouldn’t help her walk. She could be bitter, angry, and curse everyone for landing her in that chair for the rest of her life, but again none of that would make her walk again. Her new normal wasn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy, but the clarity, the resilience that she was showing to get back to living life was something magically and particularly eye-opening.

Bad things happened, it was how we navigated the fallout afterward that really defined what our new normal would be. You could do it gracefully, generously, thoughtfully like this precious little girl, or you could do it sloppily, haphazardly, and blindly like I had done.

I lowered myself to the floor and told the little boy to go sit next to his sister and told them both to try and pull me over. They huffed and puffed and obviously didn’t get anywhere until I gave in and let them both fall backwards. They collapsed in a fit of giggles until I pulled them back up.

“How would you guys like me to show you some things you can do together at home, fun stuff like this that will help your sister out?”

The little boy looked at his sister and then down at the floor. “I hurt her. I’m not supposed to be too close to her anymore.” He sounded heartbroken and it made my back teeth clench together. I was going to tell him it was okay, that when we hurt someone it was our job to try and make the hurt all better, but the little girl struggled to get her body – a body that suddenly wouldn’t follow her commands – closer to him. The little boy fell into her outstretched arms and started crying.

I had to blink back a wash of tears myself as the little girl petted the top of his head and muttered soothingly, “It’s okay, Sammy. It was an accident. You didn’t hurt me on purpose.”

Was that the key to moving forward? Understanding that someone who loved you, who you loved, could hurt you even though they didn’t mean to, accepting it and moving on? For a long time, I struggled with guilt, with regret because I pushed Remy, laid down an ultimatum that was going to make our relationship crash and burn, but I was mad at him, too. Mad he left. Mad I had to put the ultimatum out there in the first place. Mad that when he died I had to suffer and grieve on my own because the rest of the people that loved and lost him didn’t even know I existed. I took that anger out on myself, let my life spiral out of control and did things that justified those feelings of anger and guilt, but now … now I had a new normal with a good man staring me right in the face and I couldn’t pull the trigger because I was scared.

I was scared of love, where this little girl, this hero, this exceptional human being, was embracing it and using it not only to heal herself but also her family. In the face of such courage, such warmth and delight, I knew there was no way I could continue to let fear and doubt win. I may have lost Remy, but I wouldn’t trade any of our moments together for anything in the world. That brilliant discovery of first love, that sharp sting of first heartbreak, I wouldn’t give any of it up, even knowing how badly it all would hurt in the end. The same went for my relationship with Dom. I wasn’t willing to give him up. I knew it from the get-go that he was a keeper and I was holding on to him, but I’d done a piss-poor job of allowing myself to enjoy falling in love with him. Fear ruined everything and it had taken enough from me.