On July 3, 2024, I had this text exchange with my dad:

Frances: I’m at the house and Rosie just puked

Will: What came up. Bile or more. She has been eating fine. We will have to watch her.

Frances: They had grass in it and was pretty chunky. I left it for you to clean up.

Will: K

     I was at my parents’ house with my son. We had gone for a swim in their pool, and when I came into the house to change, Rosie, my dad’s Black Lab, puked all over the floor. I had a two-year-old who was into everything, and I couldn’t put him down to even attempt to clean it without him inevitably getting in the puke or sticking his finger in an unguarded electrical socket. So that was the last thing I said to my dad before he nearly died the next day. 

     It seems silly, but in the days and weeks following, I could not wrap my head around that that could have been the last thing. It is slightly better than the previous text he sent me, which said, “Fran I going to shoot you if you are sending cat pics to Melody.” 

     Now, I have an amazing relationship with my father. He is literally the world’s best dad. He is caring and kind, strong and capable, wise and knowledgeable in both the practical and the spiritual. With hard work and focus, there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. He raised me to be the woman I am:  strong and independent, forgiving and compassionate, capable of doing anything I want to if I work hard. He showed me how to be proficient in building a fire in the woods, confident in descaling and gutting a fish, and ready to both identify and handle a variety of local snakes and wild creatures. But he also taught me to be a servant of Christ and a leader in the Church. 

     I grew up hearing stories about the wild things my dad did growing up. He told us stories of being dropped at camp for an entire summer every year, surviving in the woods, watching birds, marking trails, hunting and fishing, building camp, and doing incredibly stupid things that he shockingly never got too injured doing. He told a very true tale of outlasting a hurricane in the Everglades with a picnic table and tent in a makeshift shelter. He was dropped into Canada to fish, but a massive winter storm came through. He was not able to be picked back up by the helicopter due to the storm, so he and my great-uncle just rode it out in the Canadian wilderness. This is the kind of man my dad is. Strong. Resilient. Thoughtful. Tough. Daring, but not irresponsible. A lover of all the beautiful wildlife and nature that the world has to offer.

     So, on July 4th, he did what he always did on days off. He took the dogs, Rosie (the puking Black Lab) and Hazel, a Vizsla, out to the property he owns. At nearly 400 acres, he knew every path and road, every stream and landmark. It was almost deer season, so he went around checking food plots, marking his maps, updating his spreadsheets, and safety-checking his deer stands. 

If I seem to skim over details and move on quickly, it is because this is my dad’s story to tell. It is also something that is still very real and raw to my family. We are not quite as removed from it as we are from my son’s birth, so I will continue to hold some of the worst moments as private.

     We don’t know exactly what happened, and we never will. We have, however, looked at all the information available to us, timestamps and phone locations, accident scenes, and medical advice, and we have drawn this conclusion: 

     My dad was safety checking a deer stand between 11 am and 12pm when a piece of equipment malfunctioned. He fell from 30 feet in the air out of the tree and landed on his side. We assume that he lost consciousness at that point and never woke up while there. Both the dogs appear to have stayed by him the entire time. His phone was lying near his hand, untouched. 

     Whether it was the instinct that comes from being married for 38 years or a nudge from God, my mom knew something was wrong and went to search for him. In +100º temperatures, family, friends, the sheriff’s office, EMS, and search and rescue, with scent tracking dogs, helicopters, ATVs, and heat radar devices, we searched. Eight hours later, with minutes to go until sundown, my dad was located. He was unconscious but alive. He was medivaced to our nearest trauma center, where he spent nearly three weeks in ICU before being transferred out of state to a neuro/spinal rehabilitation center.

     Our entire world stopped. The days after the accident were spent gathered in waiting rooms, weeping, praying, and pleading. I stepped back into a world that I knew all too well, into the same hospital that I spent 6 months in with my son – eating the same food court food, parking in the same sketchy parking garage, and riding the same elevators – just to a different floor.

     I’ll jump to the present and say my dad is a miracle. That is truly the only way to say it. We were told that had he remained in the woods for 30 more minutes, he would have died. His core body temp was 105º. We were told by doctors and law enforcement that they had never seen someone take that type of fall from that height without the results being death or a critical spinal injury. We were told that someone who sustained his level of injury should never be able to run again – but he can. Someone with his brain injury may never drive again – but he can. Every single person is astounded that my dad is where he is today, less than one year after his accident. 

     The hope and thankfulness we have in the present is something we could have never imagined just a few short months ago. But life, a fickle and weary thing, threw more at us again and again and again.

     Rosie, the puking lab, did not just eat something sketchy in the yard. Five days after my dad’s accident, we discovered she had extremely aggressive, late-stage Lymphoma. She had weeks left to live. After 4 weeks and 2 visits to my dad in the hospital, she passed. 

     A dear friend’s cancer returned, but this time, it was too fast. He passed that fall. When I got the news, I sat on our sofa and wept at the injustice of it all. It felt like a sick joke. A friend said I was living in a book that is so unbelievable that you can’t even finish it. It was the second plane crash in Grey’s Anatomy, the one that made you say, “This is so unrealistic. There is no plausible way that all those wild things could happen to one person.” But the punches kept coming.

     Hurricane Helene hit my region. Local friends lost everything but the clothes on their backs. Houses flattened by hundred-year-old trees. Entire cities in Western North Carolina were washed off the map. The places I was raised, the lake I spent every summer on, the camping sites and hiking trails where I learned to love nature as a kid and then trekked and explored again with my husband years later, the little towns and shops, the roadways in and out – all gone.

     During all of this, I was juggling work and motherhood, a disabled child and declining grandparents, doctor’s appointments and therapy intensives, and long drives to visit Dad in rehab. And then, Dad came home. His healing was and is far from finished. And life continued. New grief and old grief intertwined. Trauma met trauma. Tears overflowed. 

     On December 3rd, my grandmother finally passed. After battling Alzheimer’s for over a decade, she was finally at peace. We gathered together, the kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, cousins and partners, friends and coworkers, and on December 6, we celebrated the life and legacy of my incredible grandmother. We sat around telling stories, reminiscing about old times, crying together, and sitting in awe of the legacy that she left behind. Then, on December 8, my nephew was born at 28 weeks. We were snapped back into the reality of the present, into the grief and heaviness of life. Life is fickle and weary, and she wasn’t done. 

     It feels like I am giving secondhand trauma to people when I tell this story of my life. There are other things that happened over the last year that added to this season of grief that I was impacted by only secondhand. We grieve with those who grieve, and in this season, people I love deeply were deeply grieving sudden loss, new diagnoses, broken relationships, loss to suicide, and senseless violence. 

Psalm 42:9-11

I say to God my Rock,

    “Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I go about mourning,

    oppressed by the enemy?”

My bones suffer mortal agony

    as my foes taunt me,

saying to me all day long,

    “Where is your God?”

Why, my soul, are you downcast?

    Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God,

    for I will yet praise him,

    my Savior and my God.