I Hate Happy People
Sitting at the high school basketball game with my husband, Steve, and our eleven year old son, Tyler, I glanced furtively around the gym. The bleachers were filled to capacity in our mostly parent area, and to both sides and above us, sat the students. We were slightly out of style compared to them; even the coolest of us looking more like our own generation than we hoped. The kids were mostly excited to be together on a Thursday night supporting their team and the parents stood, talked, laughed and bounced an age-old bounce to age-old tunes being blasted by the high school band. I sat there quietly, with my broken heart and suffocated spirit. I had one thought, “I hate happy people!”
How could happiness even exist tonight? Was I observing reality? Could others have joy, happiness or contentment so close to the surface of their hearts, changing their faces from interest to pleasure to hilarious laughter at some dimwitted comment from a mere acquaintance? How could someone conjure up a laugh? How could a person find anything close to amusing come out of another person’s mouth? I was deeply struck by the giddiness of others and also deeply troubled. Yep, I hated happy people!
Roughly three months before this high school game observation, our nineteen year old daughter was killed. She was returning from a special prayer vigil called on Tuesday afternoon on September 11, 2001. Our pastor wanted us to come and pray for our nation, the President and the many families who had lost loved ones the day of those horrific terrorist attacks. Our only daughter, Lindsay, was a young married
mother-to-be. She was eight months pregnant with our first grandchild. About nine o’clock that morning, she started calling us from work. “What’s happening, Mom? Is this the end of the world?” That may sound silly at this point in our nation’s history, but at the time, as a fearful young woman, she needed reassurances. I told her that these types of things had been happening in other places in the world for years and years but it was unusual for any enemy to penetrate our borders and successfully commit such crimes against America. ...........
Robyn Bloem
An excerpt from an unpublished piece which Steve and Robyn Bloem
are writing. If you are an interested publisher, please contact us
and we will send you a query.
Steve Bloem's Journal – 2005
March 2/ 05
–Grief has a different tinge to mental illness. Oh, there are similarities. But what I feel is not the same as having endogenous depression. That can be taken care of by medication and it has been so in my life. How I thank God for that blessing. But the trauma that I experienced that day Lindsay and Emily died took away something in the soul, in the psyche, that no pill could ever touch. It was as though someone thrust his hand into my body and pulled out my heart. I felt like an animal whose paw is caught in a trap. Proverbs 14:13, says Even in laughter the heart may be in pain, And the end of joy may be grief. Part of me died that day; I will never be the same. Steve Bloem {excerpt from a new book that Robyn and are writing.}
March 7/ 05 – I taught at Vista today. I know that I block out thoughts and feelings of Lindsay. However, whatever class I teach, the girls remind me of what Lindsay was like at this age. It usually catches up with me on the way home.
I see Lindsay in the 4th grade or 6th grade. Often I flash back to the accident, Lindsay pulls up along side of me smiling waving at Robyn, Brant and me.
Then I see the car coming out of the corner of my eye, across the lanes of traffic. We screamed Oh God! We ran up to Lindsay. Her head was stuck between the front door and the windshield. Her hair was unkempt, completely covering her eyes. I pushed back her hair and kissed her. Her tongue was sticking out of the side of her mouth. Blood was coming from her nose.
The horror, the extreme helplessness as a father seeing his child dying, all comes back to me in a moment. This can happen many times in a day.
It is part of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
S Bloem