Scars: I Lost My Husband, Myself, and the Life I Wanted and Why I’m Okay With That Now
The story of how Beto and I met is an epic love tale — the kind you would only expect to read about in books or see on the big screen. Our meeting was a miracle and a testament to the reality that God cares about each of His children and will guide us to happiness if we seek Him.
But I will have to save the full telling of that tale for another day. Today, I simply want to talk about Beto’s scars.
Before Beto, I had never met anyone whose life story could so easily be told through their scars. The more time I spent with him, the more scars I would discover. And with every scar I found, I was delighted with a story of grand adventure.
Most of Beto’s stories began with, “I was with my brother and…” or “I was on my bike and…”
I loved Beto’s scars. The one above his left eye, just below his eyebrow. The one on his finger in the shape of a smile. The one under his chin hidden by his dark stubble. The surprise that his front tooth is actually false. The bump on his forehead that never went away… you get the idea.
I did not go into the relationship blind to the fact that I was falling for a man who loved high-adventure and extreme sports. And the scars didn’t stop accumulating once we were married, either. In fact, that smiley face scar on his finger? He actually got that just a couple of months after we got married.
And then he began accumulating scars from the bites and scratches of dogs he tirelessly worked to save and watch over as a veterinarian in Mexico. He would often come home from his clinic with a new wound and a story to go with it. Soon, the wound would become one of the many scars in the patchwork story of his life etched into his skin.
I loved Beto’s scars. They told me of him. His life. His profession. His adventures. His personality. His character. His heart.
But a year and a half ago, Beto called me from the hospital. He had crashed coming off a jump on his mountain bike and had broken his clavicle and femur. I rushed to the hospital and we spent the night together working through his pain as he awaited surgery in the morning.
He was going to have a lot of scars.
But he never made it to the surgery that morning. As I was taking phone calls from family and friends and throwing on a bit of makeup in an attempt to look presentable after a sleepless night, Beto began seizing up on the hospital bed.
The room filled with people and then emptied just as quickly as they rushed Beto off for a CT scan. When I saw him again in the ICU, he was intubated and unresponsive.
He had fallen into a coma that the doctors could not explain.
A day and a half passed before anyone had an idea of what had happened. Eventually, we learned that Beto had suffered a fat embolism. The fat from the bone marrow in his femur had entered his veins and shot to his brain. Each one of the hundreds of fat particles that dispersed throughout his brain had blocked off needed oxygen and caused irritation and bleeding.
Essentially, Beto had suffered between 100–200 simultaneous mini-strokes.
Even with a diagnosis, no one was entirely sure what that meant for his potential recovery. Fat embolisms are too rare, especially for someone his age.
The ensuing days, weeks, and months all became a blur, and yet each moment now stands out in stark clarity.
The discussions with doctors who thought he could be in a coma for three months or more. The conversation with the palliative team about whether or not Beto would want us to end his life support if he did not recover. The jolt of excitement that would run through my body when Beto would open his eyes in pain as the nurses rolled him over to change his position on the hospital bed.
The heavy heart I tried to hide while throwing a birthday party for our son a week and a half after the accident. Breaking away from the festivities whenever I could to call the hospital. Desperately awaiting the results of Beto’s second MRI; the MRI the doctors had ordered because he had stopped responding to pain stimulus.
The total joy that came when Beto first opened his eyes and smiled up at me. Or when he moved his finger for the first time. Or wiggled his toes. Or ate an ice chip. Stood. Took a step. Spoke. Remembered how to write. Pushed through the pain as he learned to walk again.
The demands of being Beto’s advocate and organizing everything from medical insurance to disability insurance, doctors, hospitals, bills, meals, flights, visitors, finding a home healthcare provider, packing, moving in with my parents, adjusting to post-hospital life, becoming Beto’s personal nurse, driving to rehabilitative therapy, scheduling doctor’s visits, finding Spanish-speaking psychologists and therapists, ad nauseam.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, we had a beautiful baby girl! And then Beto was diagnosed and treated for thyroid cancer!
But somehow, all of that was easier than what came next.
January hit and I felt as frozen as the world outside. Beto was getting better and regaining some of his independence, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. I felt lost. Beto’s increased independence meant that I had a little more free time, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Instead, I would just sit and wait for the next crisis to hit.
And, it usually did.
When it did, I was back in action with a flash, solving problems, making phone calls, filling out paperwork, organizing, fixing, scheduling, and on and on. And then the crisis would pass and I would fall back into decision paralysis. I literally spent an entire day just sitting in my father’s recliner, holding my baby, and crying every time I tried to look at my to-do list.
I could operate at 100% when there was an actual crisis, but I couldn’t handle normal life. I hadn’t had a normal life for a long time and my life still wasn’t normal. The quiet moments were just the calm before the next storm. I couldn’t predict when the next one would hit, but I knew it would come.
So, instead of moving on with life, I would sit and wait with trepidation.
This went on for several months until everything came to a climax at the end of March. Beto had gone back to work at the end of January, working a couple of hours a day just a few days a week.
Since mid-February, he had been staying at a small apartment in Salt Lake on the days he worked so that he didn’t have to commute as far. The kids and I had stayed with him a few times, but he was there alone that particular week.
I had been on the phone with him while he was making dinner, but the call dropped and I didn’t call him back because I was in the middle of making dinner myself. An hour later, I got a text from the owner of the apartment. Beto had sliced open his hand on the lid of an aluminum can and was going to need stitches.
This shouldn’t have been a big deal.
Beto had cut his hand before (remember that smiley face scar on his finger?). My rational side knew that it was all going to be okay. He would get stitches, his hand would heal, and then it would scar over. But for more reasons than I can explain, this new cut triggered a flood of negative emotions in me.
When Beto had originally crashed, all he had was a couple of broken bones (granted, one was his femur, which is the most difficult and painful one to break). Despite the setback, we weren’t overcome with worry. We ate spaghetti together on his hospital bed and laughed and talked throughout the night. We spoke with the doctors early the next morning who reassured us that Beto would have his surgery in a few hours and go home soon after.
How was I to know that fat was going to rush to his brain and leave him in a coma?
Now that he had gotten hurt again, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice and treat his cut as anything less than what it really was…
This was an emergency!
However, I tried to remain calm on the surface. He was going to be fine. It was just a cut. But he was hurt and — just like the day of the accident — I was far away from him at my parents’ house. I just knew that I could have prevented him from cutting his hand somehow… If I had just called him back… If I had just gone with him that week to Salt Lake… If I had just let him go out for fast food instead of insisting that he make something healthier at home!
My insides were screaming at me. How could I let him get hurt again?
Beto came home the next day, got stitches, and his cut began to heal. But I wasn’t healing. I couldn’t stop mulling over the “what ifs” of the hand-cutting incident. And for the first time since Beto’s bike accident, I let myself ask all of the “what ifs” about the moments leading up to his fat embolism.
It was a dark and slippery slope and I let myself fall right down it.
For the next several weeks, I was haunted by flashbacks of Beto’s seizures. During the day, I would replay every detail of his crash and fat embolism and then ruminate over everything I could have done differently to have prevented it all. Then at night, I would have terrifying nightmares of my entire family being killed in front of me while I was powerless to help them.
The post-traumatic stress I was finally trying to process was overwhelming and unlike anything I had experienced up to that point. I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t function during the day. My whole body hurt. My heart hurt.
I couldn’t look at Beto. Every time I did, I would see another one of his scars and be overcome with sadness. His scars were no longer beautiful stories of his life — they were evidence of everything we had lost.
Evidence that I had lost him.
That was the hardest truth of all to face. Beto was different. Our happy, sweet, fun-loving, caring, social, adventurous, funny, confident, smart, hard-working, loving husband and father was not the same. Sometimes, we would see glimpses of his old self; but other times, he was a totally different person.
He wasn’t gone… and yet he was… at least for the moment.
Psychologists call this predicament “ambiguous loss” because one is grieving the loss of someone who isn’t physically gone. In my case, I was grieving the loss of someone who was right next to me. I missed my husband. But there was no clear way to come to terms with my loss because he was right in front of me.
I should just be grateful he was alive.
Still, I knew that I needed to allow myself to grieve. My run-in with post-traumatic stress made it very clear that I had yet to find an effective way to do that. I knew that Beto was going to be okay in the long run. I had known from the beginning that he would eventually recover; at that point, there would be nothing to grieve, so why grieve at all?
But refusing to feel the pain meant that I was in a permanent state of limbo. I could not find closure. I was stuck in crisis mode, frantically trying to save Beto so that I could get my husband back. But trying to control everything was an impossible endeavor that just left me paralyzed.
With time and a lot of support, I slowly came to the realization that our life was no longer a crisis. It wasn’t back to normal and it would never be the same, but it wasn’t a crisis. I didn’t need to save Beto. Not anymore. I needed to let go of who he used to be so that I could focus on loving the person in front of me.
But letting go wasn’t easy. Acceptance is just one of the stages of grief and I knew that I was never going to get there if I didn’t let myself work through all the emotions.
So, I let myself grieve.
I let myself feel all the pain, the stress, the anxiety, the worry. I did not want to numb myself to it or ignore it any longer. And it hurt. It hurt in every way possible.
As strange as it may sound, though, my pain and grief did not keep me from feeling the love of my Heavenly Father. I looked to the Savior and thought of how he wept with Mary and Martha at the loss of Lazarus. He knew that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, but he still wept. His eternal perspective did not keep him from feeling the pain of the moment.
So, I went to God again and again with all of my hurt and disappointment.
And He wept with me.
He showed me that grief and faith are not mutually exclusive. He allowed me to feel the weight of all I had lost without ever leaving my side. Despite the deep heartbreak and confusion that I was experiencing, I knew He was there. And I knew that He understood that my grief did nothing to weaken my trust in Him.
And then, when the pain had served its purpose, He took it all away.
There are no words to describe how He did it. I don’t understand how such deep pain and suffering could suddenly be gone, but it was. I had felt the Lord strengthening me ever since Beto’s accident, but now I had something more than His strength, I had His peace.
The months to come were still difficult, but I began to feel the light pushing its way through the darkness. I spent a good month just focusing on taking care of myself and enjoying my children. I helped Beto when he asked for it, but he didn’t need me to save him anymore, just love him.
By mid-May, I was ready to let the past — with all the trauma and even the “old version” of Beto — go. Could I love the person in front of me? Of course! Beto is amazing! Could we build a life together? Yes, we were finally in a place to think about the future.
After a lot of prayer, a lot of study, and one clear spiritual prompting, we were able to look at all our options and determine that we were going to move back to Salt Lake as a family. Then, after a lot of house hunting and thanks to one very generous family, we found the perfect place to live in South Jordan.
On June 22, we moved back to Salt Lake.
On June 23, we gathered with my family at Deer Valley Resort where Beto had crashed one year earlier and met the patrol team that responded to his accident. Dr. Winne had been in contact with me throughout the year and had been such great support, and now we finally got to meet him. He introduced us to the patrol team and then we all hiked up to the crash site.
It was a big jump. The little children in the family could barely walk down it without falling over.
The patrol team showed us where they had found Beto in the middle of the stinging nettle when they arrived. They said he was one of the nicest injured people they had ever encountered. We got to shake their hands and thank them for their role in saving Beto’s life that day. We even met the patrol dog who was on duty at the accident!
It was an incredibly healing experience.
And for a couple of months after that, it felt like we were totally healed. The wounds of the past year had become nothing but scars. Beto was now working 40 hours a week and I was jumping back into my business. It was so wonderful to be on our own and to be living a normal life again.
Work and kids and home.
It was delightfully normal and we reveled in it.
Beto’s scars were no longer a sign of what we had lost. They were a sign that he — no, we — had all healed.
And since we were healed, I didn’t feel a need to discuss the accident at all with our new neighbors and friends at church. I didn’t want it to define us anymore. We were all better. Why parade around like victims and show off our scars?
But then the honeymoon period wore off.
And when it did, we realized that our ‘normal’ has never been easy. I thought that going through trauma would make normal life seem so much easier, but normal is hard too — especially when it is a ‘new normal’ that involves living with scars.
Because, despite the healing they represented, the scars were still there. We weren’t the same people we were before the accident. Yes, we had experienced a great deal of healing, but we weren’t the same.
The scars had changed us.
The scars etched into Beto’s skin had changed him physically, from the butterfly and caterpillar scars that still run up and down his leg to the hidden scars in his brain revealed only by MRI and the thick scars that mark where he had breathing tubes, feeding tubes, and a lobectomy.
Those physical scars meant we still had a handful of appointments to work into our “normal” lives every single month. (And we continue to work through the ongoing consequences of the accident and the damage to Beto’s brain — from chronic fatigue to occasional slurred speech.)
But many of our scars had less to do with the physical effects of the accident and more to do with who we were becoming.
In many regards, this was good. The refiner’s fire had helped us to become better people and overcome so much. But in other ways, it felt like the opposite was true too.
Personally, I felt like I had become a pitiful version of my former self. I felt less patient, less social, less compassionate, less service-minded, more prone to overwhelm, more critical, more envious, and more unhappy with our new normal.
I’ve rarely been one to compare myself with others and beat myself up about it, but all I could do when I looked at these scars from the struggle of our life was to compare myself to who I had been before.
I didn’t like what I saw.
And I beat myself up about it.
I missed the “old me.” I wanted life to stop being so hard so I could catch my breath and go back to being the nice person I imagined I had been before. I had thought that pretending we were normal would accomplish that.
But it didn’t.
And no matter how hard I tried to avoid bringing it up, somehow, our new friends and neighbors learned about what we had been through. And every time I retold the details of the past year of our life (followed by looks of shock, horror, pity, and even awe), the more I realized that there was no way around it: we had been through what we had been through and it was always going to be a part of our story.
I didn’t need to announce it to the world. The scars did that for us. As much as I wanted to ignore them and run away from them, it seemed that our scars would always define us.
When our new normal got too overwhelming for me, I turned to God once again. He gave me direction, peace, strength, courage, and the help of so many angels. Parents, siblings, in-laws, psychologists, doctors, friends, strangers, co-workers, and so many others have all been a source of great support, friendship, and wisdom.
Best of all, Beto’s mother came to stay with us for two and a half months to help with the children and the house so that I could really dive back into work. She was a great blessing to our family at such a critical time. (Our son even started to speak in Spanish!)
Now that Beto’s mother has returned to Mexico, we’re settling into a new ‘new normal.’ It has been an adjustment, but we’re figuring it out. We’ve gotten better at living with our scars, facing our weaknesses, focusing on gratitude, forgiving, communicating, serving, and seeking understanding.
We aren’t who we used to be, but we’re working on who we are.
I look at our life now and see so many blessings. I see a future that is exciting and promising. In many ways, it is a future I never would have imagined for myself or our little family. For a time, that hurt. It hurt to let go of the life I had imagined.
But I’ve discovered that holding on to “what ifs” keeps you from seeing what is. Thinking about what could have been does nothing except keep us from seeing who we have become and the new adventures that are ahead. Letting go of one life has given us the freedom to embrace and create a new one with the help and direction of a loving Heavenly Father.
And with that freedom, I have begun to understand our scars in a new light.
For a long time, Beto’s scars only represented the past — what we had been through and what we had lost.
In other ways, they began to represent healing. The physical scars are all signs that it’s over. The wounds have healed.
But the scars have also come to represent a fundamental change to who we are. They are a new story that has been etched into Beto’s skin and my heart— a physical representation of an inward change.
But because of Christ, our scars do not have to define us.
They have contributed to who and where we are now, but this is not the end. God’s not done with us.
I don’t care anymore about who we were before the accident or if the current version of ourselves is better or worse than the one without the scars. Progress is not linear. Who we were has no power to determine who we can become. It has no power to limit our ability to turn to and depend on the Savior right now.
Nothing about the past — not even the physical representation of it in the form of scars or the emotional wounds that still linger — has any control over the future unless we let it.
If we choose to follow Christ, none of that matters.
Christ does not define us by our scars. He does not care about our privilege or lack thereof. He does not judge us by how far we’ve come or how far we’ve fallen. All He cares about is direction. No matter how many scars we have, no matter how far we are from the path, no matter what this life has made of us up until now, the moment we call out to Him, He will take us exactly where we are and show us the way forward.
Because, in the end, the only scars that will matter are His.
In Isaiah, he lovingly tells us, “Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me” (Isaiah 49:16).
We are His scars. He has graven us upon the palms of his hands so that he can heal our wounds and then take us — scars and all — into His arms and show us how to “graven” his image upon our countenance.
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland once taught,
“Even though the power of the Resurrection could have — and undoubtedly one day will have — completely restored and made new the wounds from the crucifixion, nevertheless Christ chose to retain those wounds for a purpose…
“The wounds in his hands, feet, and side are signs that in mortality painful things happen even to the pure and the perfect, signs that tribulation is not evidence that God does not love us. It is a significant and hopeful fact that it is the wounded Christ who comes to our rescue. He who bears the scars of sacrifice, the lesions of love, the emblems of humility and forgiveness is the Captain of our Soul (Christ and the New Covenant [1997], 258–59).
It is the wounded Christ who comes to our rescue. Who runs to us. Who loves us.
If anyone is going to understand my brokenness (and yours), it is Christ. And He is telling all of us that our scars don’t matter. He wants us to trust the journey He has given us. Even if we feel we’ve become worse than we were before — scarred beyond recognition — He was too.
But he overcame it all. And with his help, we can too.
In October 2018, Elder Robert C. Gay taught:
“In the eyes of Christ, each soul is of infinite worth. No one is preordained to fail. Eternal life is possible for all… We must trust Him… His love is greater than our fears, our wounds, our addictions, our doubts, our temptations, our sins, our broken families, our depression and anxieties, our chronic illness, our poverty, our abuse, our despair, and our loneliness. He wants all to know there is nothing and no one He is unable to heal and deliver to enduring joy. His grace is sufficient. He alone descended below all things. The power of His Atonement is the power to overcome any burden in our life… Whatever the price you must pay to trust Him is worth it.”
And that is the resounding truth that I have come to know with all my heart: Whatever the price we must pay to know Him, to trust Him, to become like Him, it is worth it. Even if that price is losing someone we love, losing the life we had imagined, losing who we thought we were, or even gaining some scars, it is worth it.
There was a time in my life when I ran away from trials. I avoided praying to become a better person because I knew the price I would have to pay. I distanced myself from God because I was afraid of what He would ask of me.
But there came a point when the distance was more painful than anything He could possibly ask me to give up.
I could not be without God. I could not stand the distance.
And the moment I sought Him out, His Spirit came flooding back into my life. It was overwhelming and beautiful. It filled my life with so much joy that, just three weeks before Beto’s accident, I stood in church and testified of how much God loves us and wants us to be happy.
And when my heart was ready, when I felt submissive and humble and ready to submit to whatever the Father asked of me, He asked for my whole world.
At times, I humbly handed it all over to Him. Other times, all I wanted to do was run away… somehow back to the way things were before the accident. But I don’t want my old life back anymore. I want this life.
I don’t care about the scars. God doesn’t care about the scars.
I just want God. And He just wants me.
In the words of Sister Linda S. Reeves:
“I do not know why we have the many trials that we have, but it is my personal feeling that the reward is so great, so eternal and everlasting, so joyful and beyond our understanding that in the day of reward, we may feel to say to our merciful, loving Father, ́Was that all that was required?´ I believe that if we could daily remember and recognize the depth of that love our Heavenly Father and our Savior have for us, we would be willing to do anything to be back in Their presence again, surrounded by Their love eternally. What will it matter … what we suffered here if, in the end, those trials are the very things which qualify us for eternal life and exaltation in the Kingdom of God with our Father and Savior?”
This life is the way back to Him. It is the preparation. The schooling. The test.
And it’s all worth it.
Whatever the price we are asked to pay, we will one day ask, “Was that all that was required?” If we truly understand His plan, we should be willing to do anything, suffer anything, give up anything to be back in His presence.
Any price.
And because Christ paid the ultimate price, He will be standing there waiting to welcome us home, scars and all.
