The Unbroken Horizon | Excerpt One
Excerpt from The Unbroken Horizon, Chapter 5. Sarah, a humanitarian nurse who had to leave South Sudan early when she started unravelling after a tragic incident, is doing an EMDR session with her therapist on her father’s sudden death when she was twelve years old.
“I nodded and closed my eyes. This memory was readily available, having split my childhood in two. Even after twenty-two years, I remembered every minute as though it were yesterday.
“It was June 14, 1989. I was twelve years old. The night before, the three of us had had an early dinner at my mother’s favorite French restaurant before taking her to the airport. She had a surgeon’s conference in Boston, I think. I mostly remember exchanging shy smiles with the boy at the table next to ours.
“The next morning, I woke to the wailing of my dad’s alarm clock. I was both annoyed and surprised. He almost always woke long before it went off, heading out for his morning run before reviewing the day’s cases. I asked him once why he set the alarm at all. I think his answer was ‘just in case.’
“Anyway, I shouted at him to turn it off and was getting ready to barge into his room and give him a piece of my mind when it finally stopped. I think I’d just gone back to sleep when it went off again. I yelled at him: ‘Hey, Dad, are you in the shower? I’m trying to sleep here! Some of us are on summer break!’
“It didn’t stop, so I stormed into the bedroom, figuring he’d left and forgotten to turn it off. When I saw he was still in bed, I froze. I’d never seen him sleep in, not even on weekends. I said something like ‘Dad, you have to get up, it’s late,’ but he didn’t respond. The sheet was covering his face, so I couldn’t see him.”
“Sarah, what are you feeling right now?” Patrick asked, startling me. I’d almost forgotten there was someone else in the room with me.
“I feel sick to my stomach. It’s hard to breathe. I’m anxious and want to make sure Dad’s okay, but at the same time, I don’t want to touch him or go anywhere near him.”
“Sarah, open your eyes and follow the movement of my fingers.”
After a few minutes, my breathing was less labored, and I felt calmer. I continued:
“I approached him on tiptoe, grabbed the sheet with two fingers, and jumped back. His eyes were closed, but his face looked pasty. He still didn’t respond when I shouted his name. At that point, I ran into his office and called 911. I was shaking so hard it took several tries before I could dial it properly. ‘It’s my dad, he’s not moving,’ I told them, barely able to get the words out.
“When the medics arrived, they said he’d had a massive heart attack. They pronounced him ‘deceased.’ One of them, a young woman, squeezed my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie,’ I remember her saying. She was the only one who was kind to me that day …”
I stopped to let out a breath.
“Sarah, what are you noticing in your body?” Patrick’s voice cut through the fog of the memory.
I had told this story countless times, but I had never allowed myself to actually feel it. It was as though my mouth and voice were doing the retelling, disconnected from my heart and from the rest of my body.
“I don’t know. I feel numb. Frozen. I can’t move. I can’t feel anything,” I said, following Patrick’s fingers with my eyes. Slowly, I started noticing a heavy weight in my chest, making it difficult for me to breathe.
The movement of the fingers stopped. For a moment, I felt myself stop breathing too, and I gasped for air. Then I felt a subtle shift. Like a big boulder, lodged in my heart, starting to budge just a little. My breath came out jagged and uneven.
“Take slow, deep breaths, and just allow what you’re feeling to come up,” Patrick instructed.
Without any forewarning, tears started streaming down my face. I wrapped my arms around myself and rocked back and forth, sobbing. When the tears finally subsided, I felt exhausted. But also, a little lighter.
“Sarah, is that enough for today, or do you want to continue?”
I wiped the residual tears from my face.
“Oh, I want to continue. I don’t want to have to revisit that day again.”
To gather myself, I gazed behind Patrick at the framed photo of the waterfall crashing into sparkling turquoise waters surrounded by lush green trees. Although the picture looked professionally shot, I knew Patrick had taken it, and I imagined him kneeling to capture the perfect image.
I sighed, bringing myself back to the present.
“After telling me my dad was dead, the medics asked me for a relative they could call, since I was a minor and couldn’t stay alone. I had no idea which hotel my mother was staying at and couldn’t remember the name of her conference, so they went through the list of people I might be able to call. They were able to reach my Grandma Belle, my mother’s mother.
“She arrived forty-five minutes later, lips pressed together. I only saw her once a year, at most, and she and my mother had a frosty relationship, but I remember desperately wanting her to hug me and tell me it was going to be okay.
“Instead, she patted me awkwardly on the arm and said, ‘Your father always worked too hard. I’m not surprised it came to this. Maybe your mother will learn from this, or she will be next, I’m sure.’ And then she went off to make phone calls to try to locate Mom at her conference.
“Her words felt like a slap in the face. I barely slept that night, but when I did, I dreamt that Mom had died too, and Grandma Belle was sitting there stonily, saying, ‘I told you so. Now it’s just the two of us, kid.’
“My mother arrived in the next afternoon. I couldn’t wait for her to come. I just wanted her to hug me and reassure me, even though that wasn’t her way any more than it was her mother’s. She did hug me, which was unlike her. And she was sobbing. I’d never seen her cry before, and it felt like my whole world collapsed.”
Although I said the words, I had gone numb again.
“Allow yourself to feel things collapsing, Sarah. It’s okay. You’re safe now.” Patrick said, and for a split second, I believed him.
I felt the boulder shudder and dissolve a little, but then it lodged in my throat.
“Sarah, what are you believing about the world and yourself right now?”
“I don’t know. I guess that I’m alone. That I can’t trust that things will be okay.”
“What new belief would you like to replace that one with?”
“I have no idea. I’d love to believe that I’m not alone and that everything will be okay, but even now I don’t. Not for a second. After all, I was just asked to leave South Sudan because I wasn’t okay.”
Patrick continued guiding me to feel my feelings, follow his fingers, and describe what I was sensing. By the end, it felt like there was a little more space. Some of the boulder was still in my heart, but some of it had shifted to form ground under me.
When I got home, I drew a bubble bath and wept for an hour into the soapy water. I went to bed at 8:00 p.m., feeling completely spent, and fell into a deep sleep.”
