Where to start with this post!
I have had some really difficult times in my life.
August 1987 I was raped at knifepoint by a serial rapist and I didn’t think I would survive the attack. I was 16 years old. The days, weeks, months, even years that followed were the darkest time in my life. Coming back from that was the single most difficult thing I have ever had to do. To this day only two people, other than the police, know every graphic detail that happened to me that night, my mother, because she was present when I gave my statement to the police and when the Forensic Medical Examiner examined me, and my husband who became my boyfriend ten months later and put me back together again. I cannot talk to anyone about the attack other than to outline the briefest details. Even my friends at the time don’t know everything, it’s too graphic, too horrific. It’s something that is burned into my memory everyday and the shame and humiliation almost ate me alive. I still struggle with triggers now, nearly thirty years on.
In January 1996 I lost my third baby. I literally fell apart.
In 2002 my husband became really ill, really quickly with a heart condition that almost killed him. I was faced with becoming a widow at the age of 31. I didn’t know how I was going to cope with my grief and the grief of my 3 children. Thankfully, it never came to that, but from the appointment where the doctor told us he only had months left to live unless he had major heart surgery, until he had the operation that was a really bad time.
December 11th, 2010 my brother was rushed to hospital. He was unconscious. My mother had found him like this first thing in the morning. He had an illness called Friedrichs Attaxia, so was confined to a wheelchair. He had become unwell earlier in the week with a sickness bug. By the following evening the Drs said there was nothing more they could do, he was in a coma and was not going to wake up. He died on December 16th. His funeral was December 23rd. During our grieving my Dad became ill. He was rushed to hospital early January 2011. He never came home. He died April 26th 2011. This was a dark, dark time. I couldn’t sleep, I was terrified my husband and children would die in their sleep and I would spend all night going back and forth making sure everyone was still alive.
These have been the darkest times in my life.
Life Through My Lens. 