My Deerest

There are significant moments that you cannot relive and you have a difficult time putting into words the exact feeling that came over you during that moment.   This is why people don’t always share these moments.  They know that they can never retell it to the point someone will have that same feeling to that experience or understand the significance of that experience by the person telling the story.

When you read a story in history, take the story of the crucifixion, for example, you never get all of the feelings and emotions that were felt at that exact moment.   Even with all the gospels,  we will never know the atmosphere of the crowd as he stumbled by, the weather that day, what the mob was yelling, and so on.

Another crucial factor of telling a story is the person listening to the story.  What do they bring to the table before they even hear the story?  Detest for anything that cannot be explained scientifically and statistically?  Disbelief is stories from someone in an emotional state?  A lack of belief in a higher power because terrible, awful and cruel things happen in this world?  My answer to the last statement is that terrible things do happen, there is the fact we have free will, that we were born with imperfections such as mental illnesses, and for me to believe in God and miracles, I have to also know that there is darkness in this world.

I say all that to try to explain one moment in time.  At this one particular moment in my life,  I was standing in my daughter’s apartment that had passed away.  I was there with my husband, my oldest daughter and my father-in-law.  We had moved in like a militant crew as fast as we could to grab everything and anything that was hers without standing there too long to have an emotional breakdown.  Being someone who was in the military, I could almost imagine someone yelling, move, move, move, at the top of their lungs.    It was early morning so we were in and out in about an hour I am guessing, maybe a tiny bit longer with grabbing furniture, all of the hundreds of shoes and piles of clothing.  We were just almost recklessly bagging things up, but not to the point of losing anything.

When we were all finished my husband said, “let’s go.”   Everyone was headed out the door and I said, “I need one minute alone, please”.   I have spent many years in the operating room, so I had the ability to disassociate when needed.  I had not really been in mom mode that morning, I was in “get it done” mode.  I had also avoided the place where she had died during this frantic hour.  It was easy because it was the living room and not much of her stuff was there to pack up.

With everyone gone, I took off my nursing hat so to speak and became Mikenna’s grieving mom. I stood with my back to the front door, facing her kitchen and glass sliding back door and porch. She lived on the second floor of a row of apartments on the end with some trees on a hill behind the apartments.

I stood at the same spot my daughter died in just days before and I screamed a cry of agony that you cannot replicate.  As the cry came out of my mouth and before the sound had left the room, a pair of eyes blinked at me from the backyard and it shut my mouth instantly.

Staring at me from the backyard, that appeared at that exact moment, was a beautiful deer. I yelled for my oldest to come back in the house and she immediately did. I said, “look, look, as I was standing here what appeared!” As I pointed we saw it was not one deer, it was an entire family of five deer staring and blinking back at us quietly.  They were just a stone’s throw from us out the back door.

My oldest continued to see more deer, more frequently than before all over her college campus. Seeing a deer was not horribly unheard of around campus, but the number of how many she crossed paths with over the last 6 months was definitely outside the statistic gradient.    A couple of days ago, my daughter went to visit her therapist who has a new office on campus.  She and I have noticed that the shock has worn off and the 6 months mark seems to be very difficult.

She hasn’t really been able to open up much but she was sitting in the new office and she was very emotional and sharing about losing her best friend and sister.  Just as she started to cry, a face was looking at her through the window.  It was not casually walking by, it was peering into the window as if to say, “It’s ok, your sister loves you too.”

A Christian healer told me the other day that angels send messages and also that God sends comfort.   I cannot believe that these two specific events were random acts of deer visitations.   I believe that God does comfort us in our greatest moments, and seconds, all you have to do is be willing to receive it.