Posts Tagged ‘1968’

Bahamas June 1968--Hair growing back after chemotherapy.

I have spent a considerable amount of time researching and writing about the events of my life in 1968.  It was a pivotal year for me–a very big “before and after.”  I lost a baby, had cancer, my marriage was not doing well, my son was being taken care of by relatives and friends, and my sister came to live with us.  I was estranged from my mother and fighting with my father.  Then Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in April and I was distraught.  We lived in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, and they celebrated his murder.  Part of my recovery and return to normal life was my decision to go to nursing school.  I was scheduled to take the entrance exam in June, but Robert Kennedy was murdered the night before—my devastation was complete.

My husband then had a business opportunity in Grand Rapids, so we moved.   Shortly after that I had another cancer scare and more surgery and more tests.  I felt betrayed and abandoned by my mother, who I didn’t want to see anyway, and by my husband who could not be faithful but who I chose to stay with.  I wanted another child and I needed an “intact” family to adopt.

I keep looking to make sense of how the events of that year shaped the rest of my life between then and now.  Reading the history of that time period, I see how the country was also in a state of before and after.  It was as if the assassination of President Kennedy had been the worst thing that could happen to us, and then there we were burying Martin and Bobby.  And I was burying my innocence, my sense that the world was a safe place and that the life I was living was safe.  I see now how I was asleep, mindless, living a life that I reacted to rather than created.  But who knew?  I didn’t know that language or practice mindfulness then.

So, here it is 2010.  And my friend Pat Singer says to me “forget 1968 and wake up to who you are now.  And you are beautiful!”

More about that later.