🎧 Chapter Forty-Five | The Terrible Gift
When grace breaks through time and teaches a lifetime of lessons
What you need to know:
In the aftermath of recovered memory, a deeper truth begins to emerge - one that transforms understanding of both past and present. What if the worst moments of our lives aren't just wounds to be healed, but doorways through which grace enters? What if the greatest gift is hidden in our deepest suffering?
Content Warning: While this chapter revisits events from the previous chapter, its focus is on transformation and revelation. Though handled with care and moving toward hope, readers should proceed mindfully.
Chapter Forty-Five
The Terrible Gift
In the days, weeks, and months following that session, more and more waves of memory unfurl to finally reveal every minute detail of what happened at that summer camp in 1972.
All these years it had been trying to seep through the cracks, but never fully showed itself to me because I wasn’t ready, I suppose. I wasn’t steady enough in my mind, body, and heart. That it held itself back for so long—forty three years—is a remarkable and mysterious grace. But now it is time.
It started with the swim instructor establishing me as an “untouchable” to the other kids in the summer camp. At a group swim lesson, he threw me in the deep end of the pool, again and again, because I could only dog paddle and explained—quite calmly and with measured control—that my weakness wasn’t allowed. All the other children (my older brother included) were made to stand around and watch. Silenced. Stunned. And worried they’d be next.
Once I was shunned into invisibility, it was pretty easy to peel me away from the others and take me to a private room where the attacks took place under the guise of “punishment” for baffling crimes he added up against me.
In the mornings. In the afternoons. In the middle of the night.
During these attacks, I could hear children’s voices echo off the pool where they all played together as if all was well. Or hear crickets singing in the night.