The Call

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021

It was just after 9pm when the call came. I was in the rocking chair in the nursery, breastfeeding my son. My husband, who had been fielding all of the phone calls for the last week – from investigators, and search parties, and the news reporters – was presently on a flight to Arizona, to join the search for my missing brother.

“Mrs. Neuberger?”

“Yes, this is her,” I answered in a low voice, not wanting to involve my newborn in what was likely to be a life-altering conversation.

She chose her next words carefully and delivered them with a clinical degree of care, “We located John below the rim. He was deceased.” I didn’t respond right away. “I’m sorry.” She added.

“Thank you,” I replied, and then, “I’m sorry you have to make these phone calls.”

“Thank you.” She said with an exhale that demonstrated the exhaustion of it in her bones.

She described the location. Exactly where my husband had predicted, and where he was planning to search first. She told me he fell 464 feet.

“His death would have been instant.”

I asked the only question that mattered to me at the time, “Can I ask, did it look…intentional?”

“Without video footage, there’s no way to know for certain. But,” She continued tentatively, “Based on the location of his body and bike in the canyon, that’s the way it appears.”

We were both silent for a while.

“What happens now?” I asked.

She explained all the next steps for his “remains”. It was jarring to hear my brother being referred to by that word, but that’s all that was left of him, I supposed.

In a haze, I ended the call, placed my baby back in his crib and robotically made my way downstairs. I called my sister (my brother’s ex-wife) and told her I needed her to come over.

I was numb.

It was nearly 10pm. I needed to eat dinner so I would have enough nourishment to pump five more ounces of milk to give my baby in another hour. And, sometime before that, I had to wake my parents and tell them their son was dead.

My brother was missing for one week – from the time of his last social media post to the time the Park Rangers recovered his body – it was a week like no other in my life.

I can’t begin to explain what life is like when a loved one is missing. Everything is suspended in mid-air, but reality goes on around you. You hold your breath. Every text, every message, every phone call could be the one.

Every opening door you expect them to walk through. You can think of virtually nothing else. Your mind reels with what if’s and possibilities. You become a real-life private investigator, trying to piece together clues and information. You go crazy looking for them, for answers, anywhere, everywhere.

It’s still surreal even now.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to go months or years or forever with a loved one still unaccounted for.

Toward the end of that week, my mother was sick with the thoughts of my brother’s body being out there somewhere alone. Broken. Abandoned Among the wild animals. She broke down in tears and in a desperate, guttural plea cried out to my husband, “Just go get him…Please!”

Seeing her so utterly fragmented was harder than my own grief.

The hardest part for me of that week is the fact he was dead for four days before I even knew he was missing. My heart aches at that detail. Somehow it feels like my fault.

Two days before the call, the first thought I had upon waking was, My brother is not alive anymore. I just knew it, in my bones. As plainly as I knew my own name.

Hours later, I’ll never see my brother again, rolled through my head with a fresh, and different, layer of grief. The two sentences carry the same truth but are two distinct losses.

It would be a full year before I would write out a full inventory of my losses from his death.

On the day of the call, I wrote in my journal:

This phone call was just a confirmation of what I already knew. I know more layers of grief will come. In waves over the next few days, months, years…For the rest of life on this side of Heaven.

When you experience such a profound loss, every part of you just wants to shut down. Stop eating, stop getting out of bed, stop caring. But, having a newborn at the time, none of that was an option for me.

I ended that journal entry:

But for now, life goes on. My baby still has to eat. I still have to feed by body for him.

And I’ve been putting one foot in front of the other ever since.

***

This post is part 2 in a series that starts with: http://racheldawnwrites.com/blog/reads-like-fiction/

Sabbatical

About 18 months ago, I was in a meeting with a client in Miami when the woman I was meeting with pulled a second person in the room. She announced she was leaving the company in two weeks, and this was her replacement. This was not entirely uncommon, but what happened next was.

I asked her what she was going to do, “Are you staying in the industry?”

“No,” she said, “I’m going back home (some country in South America) to take a sabbatical. I’m going to spend time with family and take time to figure out what I want to do.”

I started crying. Right there, in the middle of her office.

Her words were like a salve to my soul. That was exactly what I wanted. The only problem was, there’s no such thing as sabbaticals in Corporate America. You can’t just take months off of work to figure out what you want to do with your life. There are bills to pay and adult responsibilities to fulfill.

But this woman’s plan was like a refreshing oasis in the middle of my desert wilderness of exhaustion. I couldn’t stop thinking about her words, or the peaceful calm on her face when she said them.

I cried because I wanted to be that brave. I wanted to give myself that kind of time and space for my soul to breathe and my head to think clearly again. I wanted a sabbatical too. But that wasn’t realistic for me at the time.

There’s a song on the radio right now with the lyrics,

He makes a way where there ain’t no way,

let me tell you ‘bout my Jesus.

Ready?

Monday morning, May 2nd, 2022, I was a nervous wreck. The weekend prior, my husband and I had decided I would ask my company for some time off and a new position when I returned. With a knotted stomach and sweaty hands, I emailed my boss to ask if he had time for a call.

Once we connected, I told him everything that I had been wrestling with the last eight months. All my indecision, doubt, fears, uncertainty about what God was asking me to do. Travel or stay home? Work part time or full-time? Or, should I leave the workforce all together and “just” be a mom? What if I did that and hated it? How would I come back?

My company had already been SO gracious to me after my brother’s death, which happened in the middle of my maternity leave. They had given me additional time off for bereavement, and then more time again once I had been back to work a few months, when I was overwhelmed getting everything in order with my brother’s possessions and estate. And now I was asking for even more.

I couldn’t even verbalize what I needed because my head was so overloaded and scrambled I didn’t even know myself! I just knew SOMETHING had to give.

“Look,” I said, “I know there’s no such thing as sabbaticals in corporate America, but that’s what I’m asking for. I want a significant chunk of time off – like three months – so I can even have the time and space to breathe and think a clear thought about what my next steps should be. Basically, I want to take the Summer off.”

My boss said many empathetic and reassuring things to me that day. He was an absolute gem about the whole thing – a part I attribute to God. But the last words he said to me were, “As far as I know, we don’t have a sabbatical program (how he said that without laughing I’ll never know), what I imagine will happen is you will be separated on good terms and can come back anytime you’re ready, but hey, check with HR, they have more knowledge about what we can and can’t do than I do.”

My next phone call was to HR. I relayed the whole scenario and conversation with my boss. And when I was done, I kid you not, that woman opened her mouth and said, “Actually, we do have an administrative leave program. It’s kind of like a medical leave of absence, except with that you need a doctor’s note, with this, you just need your managers to sign off, which it sounds like they already have. And it lasts up to 12 weeks.”

Twelve weeks. Three months.

I was getting my sabbatical. I was going to get to take the Summer off to spend with my son and hear from God.

What. In. the. Actual. Was. Happening?

Sparing all the side-stories and details, suffice it to say, God’s provision went so far over and above what I could even imagine during this time. It was one blessing after another. More and more and more abundant overflow of His goodness than I would have ever asked for.

It was honestly bananas.

The one story I want to tell you about is this: The week that I called my boss – the VERY week – my husband got a phone call from a prospective client to do his largest project to date. If he won the job, it would net as much as his entire previous year’s income combined. And then, he got another call like that. And another. Three calls, in one week. Each would individually exceed the last year’s income. He ended up winning two of the three projects.

It’s been a year now, and the calls haven’t stopped coming.

What I didn’t know when I worked my last day on Friday, June 3rd, was that I wouldn’t go back to work at all.

My Summer never ended.

On Death, Loss and Resurrection

Easter looked different for us this year.

I hesitated to even post this picture because it is so shockingly deceiving.

What you see is the smiling faces that have posed on this same back deck for the last 20+ years.

What you don’t see is the pain, the heaviness, and the deep, deep grief that is carried behind each of those smiles.

At first glance, you might notice my brother is missing. Not uncommon, as there were years in the past he was “too busy” to come to Easter. But, my brother died two years ago, so, of course, he will never be in another Easter photo again. That’s an image I’ve already come to grips with.

What you can’t see through the pixels on this screen is that my Father is also missing.

He is there – physically present – with the same, iconic smile he’s worn his entire life, but my Daddy – his unique personality and identity – left us, realistically, last Fall.

Six, or so, years ago he was diagnosed with some form of Dementia. His mother died from Alzheimers in her 80’s, and his older brother is nearing the end of his battle with the horrid disease presently.

My dad’s progression has been slow. So slow that if you didn’t know him, you wouldn’t even have known anything was off. A missed word here or there, a little fogginess on details… Until last Summer.

Within weeks of one another, two events back-to-back effectively stole my father from us.

First, he fell at our house and broke his foot. A minor break that only required wearing a boot for six weeks. And, simultaneously, his doctor told my mother that he could stop taking one of his memory medications as it had “been as effective as it could” to that point.

Within two weeks of those two events, it was like a light switch was turned off in my Father’s brain.

Daylight and dark.

One day he was there and the next he was not.

He went from being able to keep up well enough in a game of Canasta (a strategy-based card game we played as a family) to not being able to dress or groom himself in the correct manner.

He hasn’t shaved in months. And his body looks weak and emaciated. He is unsteady when he walks or sits and rises.

It happens all the time. A common earmark of dementia is fall-injury-decline. The way I understand it, the person’s body diverts all of its energy and resources to the site of the new injury/trauma that it has nothing left to support the preexisting, chronic cognitive trauma. So a significant regression occurs.

I haven’t posted anything on social media about my Father’s diagnosis because, until this Fall, he was still; regularly checking his own Facebook account. And, we are none of us, certain how aware or unaware my father is about his disease and progression. I didn’t want him reading something about himself he may not have even realized yet.

In October, my mom told me my dad was talking in his sleep. She heard him say, “I wonder what I’ll be like six months from now.” It was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever heard. But, it let’s me know that he’s aware on some level, some of the time.

And also, I have felt almost like not saying it out loud might keep it from being real. Or permanent.

But at this point, my father can’t even use a TV remote without my mother’s assistance.

And as much as I want to pretend this image is the same as all the others we’ve snapped, I also don’t want to be living in – or portraying – a false reality.

Following the second anniversary of my brother’s death in February. I called my mom and told her I was having a strong need for familial/holiday traditions. Things will never look the same again, because a literal quarter of our family is missing, but I am needing to establish new rhythms and traditions for my son and my own healing.

Because of that, on Easter morning, we got up and went to my parents’ small country church – alone. I have never once in my life attended church on Easter without my parents.

They haven’t been able to attend for months due to my father’s physical limitations. My heart breaks over this, as their church was always their strongest form of community and identity.

I read their names in the bulletin on the prayer list under “shut ins”, and felt like I was being punched in the gut. Men “Amen’d” when the Hymns ended, and my eyes stung with tears at the absence of my father’s voice in that chorus.

Samson got to hunt eggs after the service, and we took some sweet family photos in our color-coordinated outfits. Which was one of the parts I needed most, as trivial as that is.

And when we got home, my mom had my dad all dressed up and groomed. The first time I’d seen him that way in months. All so we could snap this photograph. And because that’s what I needed.

Because grief is hard. And we are all drowning in it together. And just trying to hold on to each other in the waves as best we can.

We visited my brother’s grave Sunday afternoon and planted some Easter lilies there. It was the flower my brother brought to my mother every year on the holiday.

My brother’s funeral was two weeks before Easter in 2021. At it, I preached a message on Resurrection and the promise we have to be reunited with my brother again one day. It seems bitterly unfair that just two years later we are grappling with another loss as monumental to our family, but the promise is still the same.

The hard part, of course, is the living without them between now and then.

******

Footnote: I know this blog post is so very different than what you are used to reading here. And maybe not what you signed up for. Me either. Be aware, as I move forward through my grief journey, I will be posting more about it here. If that’s not what you want or need in your inbox right now, I totally understand, and will not be offended if we break up.

I want you to know you are still loved, you are never alone, and your – and my – story is so far from over. You keep telling yours and I’ll be here telling mine.

I Never Wanted to Be A Mommy Blogger

This time last year, I went to bed about 9pm on a Wednesday just like any other night. Save for the fact I was VERY pregnant – 38 ½ weeks.

Around 1am, I woke up to the sound of a pop and the sensation of a gush – my water broke.

Twenty hours later, I went from wife-and-woman-only to: mama.
When it was over, I cried, but only because it was the most grueling two hours [of active labor] of my life and we both survived.

I never wanted to go through labor and delivery. In my naivete, I always told people if I ever had a baby, I would schedule a c-section to avoid it. In fact, I never really even wanted to be pregnant. I begrudged the whole process most of the nine months.

Children were a theory, of something, sometime, in the future. And mostly, I planned on adopting them. My son, Samson, was a total surprise.

But now I understand why women do this physically-illogical thing over and over to themselves. Which was always the most baffling part to me.

Those nine months of my life, and the 20 hours of labor, are such small slivers of time in the grand scheme of the 37 years of my life so far.

While yes, the first three months I was only nauseous, and last three months I was ONLY tired and uncomfortable. And while I can vividly remember how utterly depleted my tiny body was after pushing “just one more push” for 45 straight minutes…
… all of that pales in comparison to the fact that I’ve now had a whole year with this tiny human I call my own son.

Don’t get me wrong, at first, it was totally awkward and strange.
I remember sitting in the NICU, looking down at this stranger-baby against my chest and feeling disconnected. All I sensed was a mere protective obligation for this small creature now solely in my (and my husband’s) care.

It took almost three months at home with him before I felt any sort of attachment or bond. Not until he started becoming something other than a blob that only demanded more than I wanted to give, at all hours of the day.

But now, every day, I get to know him better. Every day, more of “him” emerges. And every day, I fall more and more helplessly in love with who he is.

I am wholly, entirely smitten.

The sound of his voice, his laugh, the smell of his skin, the sweetness of this touch, the look in his eyes when he looks at me – when I can tell he is just as enamored with me.

I fall recklessly, head-over-heels, irrevocably in love.

When I started to understand, I described loving him with pieces of me I didn’t know existed. It was so weird finding this new capacity in my heart, when I thought it was already so full. I couldn’t imagine it containing anything more, but it was overflowing to the point it felt like it would literally burst!

I have heard all of these sentiments from other mamas before me. So much so that it’s almost trite. But it doesn’t make all of it any less true.

Being a mother is the most exhausting thing I’ve ever experienced. Just making it through a single day, he takes every ounce of energy and bandwidth and love I have to give. Then, the minute I put him in his crib and walk out of his room, I miss him. I want to go wake him up so I can spend more time with him.

This love is reckless because I already know he’s not mine forever. He never was. He’s merely on loan to me. Entrusted to me to steward and shepherd, for a time. And then let go. To turn him back over to God and the world as he ventures out on his own. To walk out his own path and purpose. To find another woman to love, if he chooses to.

I am already praying over her. Whoever that little girl may be. Who may one day come and steal my little boy’s heart. Who will join him and walk alongside him in all that God has for him to do on this earth. I pray she will love him well.

But for now, he’s my little love alone.

My whole life has flipped upside down in the last 12 months, and I am still trying to wrap my head around it all. I can’t believe a year has already passed since I met him. And one thing I know is that the time I do have with him will never feel like long enough.

So yesterday, I savored the last day of his 11th month, and today I am basking in the first day of his 12th. And I will fall more in love.