Rescue Me

Little Cuter wonders if anyone has ever rescued me.

There were four handsome Australians who rescued me from predatory Italian teens in 1969.  There was the job offer that kept us off food stamps in 1977.  But I went straight to Nurse Nancy and Dr. Dave, who triaged and compressed and calmed me that morning on the sidewalk outside the grocery store 8 years ago tomorrow. 

They literally saved my life.  That counts as a rescue. They win all the marbles. But I went deeper, because that kind of question deserves contemplation.  Even if I'd wanted to ignore it, the damn thing kept popping up in my brain, day after day.  Here are my thoughts.

Tanya (the only blog person without a blogonym because she's just that special) rescued me from feeling that I had nothing left to offer.  She opened the doors to her classrooms and the loving hearts they contained.  I left one child bleeding on the sidewalk only to walk through the door of a school with more than 600 hearts just waiting to be held. 

It was a rescue I didn't know I needed at the time, which makes it even better.

The gynecologist who diagnosed my depression and sent me on to find the proper medications rescued me from 50 years of living with a knot in my gut.  That, too, was unexpected.  I thought everyone walked around with a fistful of anxiety in her chest.  That moment of exquisite peace when the meds kicked in and the angst went away certainly felt like a rescue, even if I had been unaware that I was drowning, unnecessarily going down in a morass that was fixable. 

Fixable.  That was a new concept for me.  The notion that I didn't have to suffer before I could smile, that I could relax and enjoy the world, that disaster wasn't lurking around every corner - she tossed me a lifeline and I've held onto it ever since.

But the rescue triggered by my daughter turns out to be the most personal one, the quietest one, the one that links generations and fills my heart whenever the question reappears in my head. 

Sitting Shiva for G'ma, the family around the table, playing games and drinking, laughing and remembering, FlapJilly there but not yet announced, it was, as Intrepid Cat noted, a great party...too bad G'ma had to die for us to have it. 

It was snarky enough to ring true to all of us.  We each could conjure up that judgmental face, that twinkly eye, that knowing nod of the head that defined the woman we were gathered to mourn.  And it hit me like a ton of bricks - she was really most sincerely dead.

Gone.  Forever.... the concept of infinity that hurts my brain was suddenly stabbing me in the heart.  No one between me and the abyss, and no way to recover that which I had lost.  No more answers to unasked question, no frame of reference through which to view the past. 

I was bereft.

And there was my girl.  Can I cry on you, kiddo?

Of course. Let's go.

And we went into a quiet room and she held me as I sobbed, patting my back as I missed my mommy, reassuring me that she had me and would always have me and telling me to cry it all out, just let it go.

I'm teary as I type this.  She pulled me back from the edge.  She straightened me up and aimed me in the right direction.  She supported and comforted and strengthened. 

If that's not a rescue, I don't know what is.