Chapter Three: The Calls

August 2011–May 2012 
Austin and Georgetown, Texas
​(and another lifetime...)

I spent the extreme heat of August and September 2011 in a frigid room at the Saint David’s Georgetown Intensive Care Unit. In hindsight, it must have been bizarre to see me driving between Austin, Texas, and the neighboring community, Georgetown, twice daily in the triple-digit weather wearing a sweat suit. I was too tired to care. It took all my energy to swipe my greasy blond hair into a bun. Makeup was out of the question, despite the dark circles that pooled like sinkholes under my eyes.

I felt like the walking dead, like the heroin addicts I saw on Hastings Street during a vacation to Vancouver. Yes, they were technically alive, but you could see their souls disassociated from their bodies. I saw the same soulless face looking back at me in the mirror each morning before I made the drive to sit next to my father’s half-alive, half-dead body.

The nurses and doctor—if I could ever fucking find him—probably thought I was in my early twenties, maybe a student, which in their defense was exactly what I looked like. I never took the time to tell them otherwise. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that I had skipped a grade; that I had overcome a severe drug addiction; that I had moved to Washington, DC, with nothing but a suitcase and dream; that I had worked for eleven dollars an hour at my first job, living in a four-hundred-square-foot housing project; that now, at the age of thirty, I had successfully led a team that lobbied the Texas government for more than $1 billion in cancer-prevention and research funding. None of it mattered now that my dad was dying. If it had been a week ago, I would have been compelled to tell them how important I was. Even in the face of death, I found I could laugh at my own absurdities. I had been collecting my successes like I collected the buffet of drugs I dined on in college. An addiction is an addiction, no matter the substance.

The thing is, I knew my dad was going to die. I woke up one morning a few months before he ended up in the hospital. I think it was around April that year. I remember shooting straight up into a seated position in bed when a voice said loud and clear, “Your dad is going to die.” I began to cry, and then I remembered a strange voice with no physical body telling me that something so important was crazy, forgetting all about Sar’h and our previous conversations. I stuffed the information back down where it belonged—buried with the other facts I did not want to face. I’d heard the voice before—it didn’t come from within; it was external and usually came from my left side. I was so far into the singular human experience, it never occurred to me that it was my soul speaking.

The last time the voice spoke with that much conviction was in the height of my drug addiction. It was 1999, twelve years prior. I was eighteen and living in an apartment in Austin’s West Campus neighborhood. My house was a carousel of drugs, dealers, and addicts. In a rare moment, I found myself alone and coming down off the latest three-day coke binge. The voice said, “You need to get everything out of your house.” It meant the drugs, paraphernalia, and the cast of shady characters. I heard it loud and clear, yet I chalked it up to being severely tired and strung out. Instead of cleaning out the apartment, I took a sleeping pill and went to bed.

As I was starting to drift off to sleep, police, some dressed in all black and with large guns, broke down my door and ransacked my house. They could have knocked. They found all sorts of things to hang over my head, the worst of which was a tiny plastic baggy with a bit of cocaine residue, which carried a felony charge in the state of Texas. The police and the beer-bellied detective wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt took me to some sort of facility, an office building in north Austin, where they explained to me after hours and hours of questioning that I could either be an informant or go to jail.

That day I agreed to be an informant, yet I ended up going to jail and then serving three years of probation after changing my mind. I did not need to have the experience of tattling on drug dealers with Mexican cartel connections and small arsenals in the trunks of their cars. My boyfriend, who was busted in his apartment the same week, did become an informant for the Austin Police Department. The detectives there were so smart that my boyfriend ended up busting a major drug dealer who was actually an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency officer. APD ended up ruining years of DEA work. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.

I remembered the voice played a part in my whole life, even though as an adult I often ignored it or was too fucked up to listen to it. It wasn’t until I was in the hospital with my half-dead father that I realized it was the voice of my soul—the one I had discarded to party with the cool kids and later in the name of success. In these instances, the voice existed outside my body, but it was about to reenter through the cracks of my human self, created by the immense grief I was experiencing as I watched my father die a slow death.

***

The day before I got the call that changed everything, the “why-I-mattered” list was what kept me going. I told myself that I was the definition of American success and living the dream. Like some cheesy self-help guru, I listed off my success superpowers when I became anxious over things like discovering a typo in a company-wide e-mail or gaining three pounds on vacation. I could work my Blackberry in my sleep, convince legislators to vote my way, work sixty-hour weeks, and still have the time to run and diet myself into a size-four designer dress. I reminded myself of all the things that created the undeniable proof that I was a wild success. After the call, I couldn’t fathom that I’d ever actually cared about these things. I was dumbfounded at how much can change in any given moment.

The day of the call was like any other day for me. I walked out of work, got into my car, and called my dad on the way home like I did every weekday. Yes, my dad told me he was having a minor procedure that day, but he insisted I not take off work for something so minor. My dad had recently learned that scar tissue in his throat had built up so much, he was breathing out of a hole the size of a pen tip. The doctor speculated it was from exposure the Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, something he had volunteered for, but no one really knew for sure. My dad was also overweight and tended to ignore his diabetes, another thing he had picked up in Vietnam, where he ate and drank too much while running the post office and operating the ham radio so soldiers could talk to their loved ones back at home. The procedure was described to me as simply placing a stint into his throat to open it back up. It only took a short time to complete. We were not aware of the risks. When my dad picked up the hospital phone, he sounded OK.

“Better not to visit,” he said. “Doctor says I shouldn’t talk much. I’ll be out tomorrow.”

“OK, Dad. I’ll come tomorrow and pick up dinner.”

The next morning I received the call from his girlfriend, Nell, to come quickly to the hospital. She couldn’t tell me anything except to hurry, so I did. The shock in her voice told me something was terribly wrong.

“The surgery didn’t work,” Dr. D said flatly when I arrived, desperate. “His throat has closed up and cut off oxygen to the brain. We have induced a coma. He may not wake up, Lauren.”

It felt as if someone had put a pitchfork down my throat and into my stomach, where they began to twist it. I doubled over in pain. I may never get to say good-bye. I couldn’t control my agony. Then I couldn’t control my fear. Then I couldn’t control my anger. My feelings oscillated wildly.

“When will he wake up?” I asked again. “I have to tell him I love him!”

“Maybe never,” Dr. D replied flatly.

“Give me a percentage,” I said. It’s something my boss always asked about the chance of passage of the legislation I was working on at any given moment.

“Fifty,” he said. I could tell he felt it was much less by the look in his eyes.

Right then and there, time stopped. I felt my heart turn to glass and shatter into a thousand tiny shards. I watched them helplessly bounce and scatter across the cold hospital floor. Nell was beside me, but I felt completely and utterly alone in the world. Even though I had a husband and a mother, I’d never felt a connection to them the way I did with my dad, and where were they now?

My parents had divorced when I was twenty-one years old, and they never spoke. Brian was my husband, but he only knew parts of me, the ones he wanted to see. Besides, he seemed to always be at work during this whole ordeal. Neither of them ever quite got me the way my dad did. No one did. At the time, he was my one connection to this world that did not feel forced or surface level. And I knew I was about to lose him—in this form, anyway—forever.

It’s true my dad and I hadn’t been close when I was growing up. But when I was sixteen years old, my dad went into the hospital for triple bypass surgery. The doctors said he would be in for a week. Eight months and many near-death experiences later, he finally came home. Something had changed in him, opening me up to getting to know him. He had connected with his soul too.

It held the opposite effect for my mom. After he got back onto his feet and retired from the job that took him away at all hours, my mother left him when I was sober, twenty-one, and a senior in college. It was for her reasons, and I understood completely. That’s when my dad’s and my true friendship began. Something was different. No longer hard as nails and overbearing, my dad became a gentle giant. I was able to share myself completely with him in a way I’d never shared with anyone before. He was present with me in a way he never had been when I was growing up. I found, much to my surprise, that I really liked him both as a person—he was quite funny and a rule breaker—and at the soul level.

I found when I looked at his gray-blue eyes, identical to mine, that I felt a connection to where I’d come from—not as a human but as a soul. He reflected back to me something I did not yet see inside myself—a strength and ability to make big things happen in this physical world. He also reflected back to me a way of being—an existence. My dad was not only a large man physically, but you also could feel his presence radiate from miles away. He taught me to never dim my shine and to never shrink myself to fit into situations. Instead, he suggested allowing situations to adapt to my expansiveness. Later I would learn I chose my parents for specific reasons before I came back to Earth in this life. I chose my father for his connection to my angelic or soul family and my mother for a connection to the bloodline I had been born into for so many lifetimes. As a child, I didn’t understand what brought them together; it seemed to make no logical sense. The more I remembered who I was, the more the dots connected.

If I had the choice to be friends with anyone in the world, I would choose my dad. I often chose him over nights out with friends. I knew having Robin Hutton as my father was something special on this strange planet. I would have lived in an ice fishing hole if he had asked me to, and the ICU room didn’t feel too far off. My dad’s lifeless body was covered in ice packs in an effort to freeze his organs to preserve them in the rare event that he woke up. The room temperature was kept in the fifties. It felt even colder as air seeped out of the ice packs covering his six-foot frame. It was a new technique and the first time the nurse had tried it. “Great—an experiment,” I thought.

I discovered that holding the coffee the silver-haired volunteers made each morning in my free hand while holding his frozen, swollen hand in the other kept my teeth from chattering. My human self was breaking into pieces, yet something else was happening too. After the first week or so, I felt an energy building at the base of my spine. The electric current it produced began to fill up my womb and pulsate up into my stomach area. It wasn’t so much in the physical body as it was active in the lower center region of my energetic body. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it or the knowledge to make any sense of it. I didn’t have the time to research it because I was focused on my father and his current state. Later, I realized it was my soul or spirit returning to the body, yet at the time, all I knew was that something major was happening inside of me. I tried to tell Brian about it. He simply shrugged, patted my head, and said it was stress and grief.

I stayed sober during the day, both to witness what was going on inside me and as a fierce advocate for my father’s well-being. As soon as I went home, I self-medicated with a bottle of wine followed by an Ambien or two from Brian’s prescription. I binge watched Mad Men until the drugs kicked in. I woke up to an alarm at 7:00 a.m. that told me it was time to go back to the hospital. This went on for weeks and weeks. I thought I’d only drink this much wine and take the Ambien to get past the initial shock, but it would become a habit as wave after wave swept the life I had created away. There was nothing left for me to do but watch it get drug out to sea.

One day, not unlike the rest, my dad squeezed my hand when I repeated for the hundred thousandth time, “Dad, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand.” I squeezed back, grateful, and felt warmth return to my body. The endless summer sun poured through the room’s single window. For the first time in more than three weeks, I noticed it. Was it September already? I had to check my phone. It was the first day I even wondered about the date, thought about work or my husband, or wondered about the last time I had washed my hair.

It’s strange to think I was married during this period. I slept next to Brian when he was home. His work took him to all sorts of places, Ukraine and India mainly, yet there seemed to be no difference whether he was there or not. He did his best to comfort me, make sure I was fed, and take over some of my household responsibilities. Yet there was a wall between us, and I’m not sure who built it. The real and only comfort I found was from my dog, Ollie, a fifty-pound golden doodle. My dad and I had picked him up from the breeder in east Texas right before my thirtieth birthday. Ollie was, and still is, an amazing presence in my life, exuding love and joy at all times. One of the rare things Brian and I ever agreed upon was that Ollie was the perfect dog.

Several days passed before my dad could open one eye, and after several days more, he could open the other. Each morning I would rush on my drive to the hospital, optimistic for news of progress. More days passed, and he wiggled his big toes. Each day brought a small but new hope-filled movement. The sky outside continued cloudless; translucent waves radiated off the asphalt parking lot, a demonstration of the triple-digit temperatures and drought the newsmen endlessly discussed on the small television in my dad’s ICU room.

Then the day came when my dad was conscious enough for me to tell him the surgery had failed. I explained to him a hole had been cut in his throat to open the airway. He could not talk now as a result. He might not be able to talk ever again. The doctor didn’t know. My dad would have rather heard he was dead and in hell than hear he might not talk again. It was the worst thing I’ve ever told another human being, even worse than telling my husband that I was going to leave him.

My dad’s life was about communicating. He was a salesman who had worked his way up to CEO. He gave speeches, mentored, and held court at the Whataburger in his retirement community or on his back patio each morning over coffee. He was Texas’s best inappropriate joke teller. The man made telemarketers want to hang up, and I had signed the papers approving the tracheotomy that had left him speechless. I’d had no other choice, I told myself on repeat. It had been the only option.

On my way into the hospital the next day, I stopped at Target for a dry-erase board and markers, hoping to bring some optimism and an ability to communicate. But he couldn’t make words, only scribble. His eyes welled up with tears, and I was mad at myself for embarrassing him as his girlfriend, Nell, stood by his side. Nell was a faithful and loving partner to my dad. She showed up to the hospital each and every day to support him, and I knew she loved him. Yet when it came to making health decisions, paying bills, and the host of other tasks that needed to get done, let’s just say she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. She did what she knew how to do—she prayed to God.

God—some high-and-mighty man in heaven involved in my dad’s health—it was a completely outdated, limited concept to me. Something inside me knew the choice to stay or go was my father’s alone, a decision of his soul. But if prayer made her feel better, who was I to say anything?

As my father’s medical power of attorney, I was there for one job—to make sure his wishes were being honored in that freezer of a hospital. I consider myself a smart person, but nothing short of a medical degree would have qualified me to make the decisions I was forced to make. I felt completely overwhelmed and inadequate. He was a “do not resuscitate,” or DNR, and I had to fiercely protect his right to die. And let me tell you, that was no small task. Everyone in the hospital wanted to keep him alive at any and all costs. Was this the kind of thing I’d spent the last five years lobbying for, sacrificing my health and time to make these drug companies and medical suppliers richer? It was something I would have to revisit later; there was too much on my plate already.

Eventually, my dad gained enough control of his motor skills to make fists with both hands. Still without a voice, he used the opportunity to communicate through sign language. I watched him place the thumbs of each fist together and pull them swiftly apart over and over—a high stakes game of charades. After several wrong guesses, to which he violently shook his head no, I realized it was the motion of a plug being pulled from the socket. I realized he desperately wanted me to end his life. The discussion had occurred years prior during one of our weekly lunches. He had pulled out a red binder containing his will and medical power of attorney.

“Kill me if you have to, Lauren,” he’d said. “Don’t let me live like that.”

My dad placed his hand on my wrist and looked into my eyes, the same gray-blue eyes as mine. Soul family. Lifetimes and lifetimes together. I nodded yes.

“I’ll take you out,” I’d said, and we’d laughed together.

I played out the situation in my imagination. I would rip out all the cords hooked up to his body, unplug every machine, and wheel him outside into the hospital parking lot, where he could die looking into the sunlight in the triple-digit temperatures, not in this horrible, cold place. Then I saw myself in a jail cell. The situation was ridiculous. He was ready to go. It was illegal to help him but perfectly legal to pump him full of drugs and hook him up to machines against his will. What kind of world did we live in? With nothing to do, I crawled into his hospital bed, with all the tubes and monitors, and wrapped my arms around him the best I could. We lay in silence. I cried hard and tried to keep the sobs from ringing out.

“I want a second opinion,” I told the nurse the next day. “I want to hear from another pulmonologist. I want to get his regular cardiologist in here.”

The shock wore off. I saw red. We were not a priority here.

“Dr. D is the only pulmonologist with privileges in this hospital,” she said. “You’d have to hire an ambulance to transfer him elsewhere, and he’ll never make it.”

“Screw purgatory,” I replied. “We’re stuck in hell.”

There are more politics in a hospital than in the fucking Texas State capitol.

Each day Nell and I waited for Dr. D to make his rounds, and I got angrier and angrier with him. Some days he never came, or a substitute doctor was sent who knew nothing, and I would have to fill him in. I sat in that arctic hospital room, a rabid advocate for the best treatment for my dad, until the sun went down and the nurses asked me to leave when visitor hours ended at 8:00 p.m.

Yet through some miracle and with the help of a small group of amazing nurses, my dad got better. His tenacious will proved stronger than his illness, likely fueled by the desire to die at home with dignity rather than in this gray, depressing, maddening hospital with no answers. He harnessed his great might and spoke his first words.

“Get. Me. Out,” he gasped, finger over the hole in the tracheotomy tube protruding from his throat. He followed it up with a dramatic gesture, mimicking a racecar driver making his final left turn. The relief at hearing him speak again after so many weeks of silence rapidly turned into sorrow at seeing him in so much pain, with so much fear. But we couldn’t leave yet. The man who was so fiercely independent now could not walk or even hold himself up to go to the bathroom, so we headed to the third floor for rehab, thankful to be out of the waiting room of death and thankful that he had his voice back for the time being.

When my dad was released from the rehab floor in two rather than the prescribed four to six weeks, the nurses were surprised. I was not. When I was sixteen, I’d seen him do it before when he was a lot sicker. My mom and dad had still been married at the time, and the decisions that had kept me up at night were hers. I held a new respect for what she’d gone through. Taking care of a sick husband and a cocaine-addicted teenage daughter was no way to live. My mother had been forced to raise her youngest brother at age fourteen when her own mother was checked into a mental hospital. No wonder she had left us both when my dad got well and I got sober; she had to save herself. I get that now in a way I never did before everything changed, and I’d be forced to do it myself in two years’ time.

After this last resurrection, my dad went back to holding court at the Georgetown Whataburger, albeit he was slower moving and thinking. I dove back into my job at the Lance Armstrong Foundation headfirst. No drugs, no problem. Work addictions are much more socially acceptable and even highly encouraged in our current global economic conditions. By this time it was October 2011. Two months had passed. I forgot all about the soul experiences I’d gone through while my father had been in the coma. Human amnesia is a real bitch.

That’s when Brian received his call. Doctors had diagnosed his mother, whom I loved deeply, with stage-four colon cancer. She said there was no cure and nothing to do but try to slow it down. Shortly thereafter, we got a call from our fertility-treatment nurse. Despite pumping myself full of hormones and being artificially inseminated, I was not pregnant, again. Yes, during this whole mess, my husband was pressuring me for a baby. I was too messed up to fight it. The baby boy carrying Brian’s name was the only thing we had left to check off the list of evidence of our perfect lives.

Brian was upset. I felt a huge wave of relief and then guilt for feeling the relief. After all, I’d told Brian I would have children with him when I’d accepted his marriage proposal. But things were different now. Everything would be different when my father died. I didn’t know much, but I knew I needed to wait to see. There was absolutely no way I could be a mom right now, especially not with Brian taking off on planes every other week across the world.

I remember I did not have the energy to put up a Christmas tree that winter, something I usually did with gusto. That year I wrapped a string of white lights around a rosemary bush I’d purchased on sale at the grocery store, opened a bottle of wine, and called it a day. That New Year’s Eve, I leaned into Brian’s chest and whispered so our dinner party guests could not hear, “Surely 2012 is going to be a better year; it can’t get worse.” He hugged me tightly but didn’t say anything.

The next call came from my mom.

“I have breast cancer,” she said. “But they caught it early. No need to worry.”

I was relieved to hear the doctor had caught it early. With complete removal, my mom could avoid radiation and chemo, which she said were poison. I agreed.

A couple of weeks later, my dad called in tears. His stepson had died unexpectedly in his sleep. He was in his forties and had multiple sclerosis but was seemingly getting better with a different cocktail of medications. He and my dad were close, and Nell, who was now his wife, was beside herself with grief. My dad worked way too hard for someone that sick to put his stepson’s affairs in order and physically clean out his apartment. In hindsight, I think he came back from his near grave just to clean up the mess and support Nell before it all became too much.

Then in April, my dad told me he’d have to have another surgery. This time he was going to try something else to help with the scar tissue in his throat and remove the tracheotomy tube. He looked absolutely terrible; his skin was the color of death, and he smelled like it too. In my gut, I knew it was the end. The surgery was experimental, but he told me he could not live with the tracheotomy tube one more day. I wanted to protest, to argue with him, but then I looked into his eyes. There was no changing his mind. He either wanted death or to get better. The tracheotomy hole in his throat represented purgatory, and I forced myself to respect the decision. He told me over our usual weekly lunch, and when I hugged him in the parking lot that day, I lingered, knowing it could be the last time. It was.

That day at lunch, my dad told me that he was satisfied with his life. He loved running a company and especially loved all the people he worked with and his hundreds of friends. His regret was that he did not take the time to travel when he had been healthy.

“Don’t do it,” he said to me. “You’re on the same path.”

He was right. Brian and I both worked entirely too much. I promised I’d make more time for fun and travel. I had no idea that what lay ahead of me was so much grander, and neither my father nor I knew we would be able to experience it together, after he was gone.

My dad’s surgery was scheduled for three days before my mom’s double mastectomy, his in San Antonio, hers in Corpus Christi. I had to choose where to go and who to support and attend a couple work strategy meetings in between. My dad insisted I not attend his surgery.

“You will not,” he said. “You take care of your mom.”

My dad came through the surgery fine and was discharged the same day. I talked with him and Nell on the phone, and they sounded ecstatic, so I ignored the feeling in my gut to go to him instead. My mom created a story where she made it sound like I had no choice but to be there, to choose her surgery over his. I know it doesn’t matter now, but for a solid year
I lambasted myself for ignoring this gut feeling.

After my mom was wheeled into surgery, I checked my phone. Seven missed calls from my dad’s house. I called back in a panic. Nell handed the phone to a neighbor at the house. She couldn’t even tell me herself.

“Lauren, your dad died,” said the minister’s wife, flatly. No emotion or sympathy. Only facts. “He was sitting in his chair and didn’t wake up. I’m sorry.”

I doubled over in grief in the hospital parking lot, yelling, “Fuck,” and, “I knew it,” over and over again to the minister’s wife. I did not give a damn who I was yelling at. When I see it now it’s like I’m watching myself in a slow-motion movie. I see myself walk back into the hospital waiting room. I see myself tell my mom’s boyfriend at the time, “My dad died. I have to go.” And I see myself walk back to my car. I was not in my body. It hurt too much to be in my body.

I called Brian. He did not answer.

“In a meeting,” he texted me. “What do you want?”

Did he not remember I was juggling two sick parents alone?

“My dad died,” I texted back.

The movie continued in slow motion. Was this man really my husband and texting me at a time like this? I was as work obsessed as him, I reminded myself. From outside my body, I told it we did not have energy to be mad right now. We needed to drive four hours to get to my dad’s body. I’m not sure why I was in a rush. He was dead, but it wasn’t even an option not to go right that minute. The decisions we are forced to make in life are inconceivable. The things we worry about are trivial in the face of what happens out of our control.

“I should have been there for him. I should have been there when he died.” The thoughts repeated over and over. I’d sat by his deathbed off and on for sixteen fucking years, and I was not there when he fucking died. I hated myself. Brian was smart enough to call my longtime best friend, Teresa. She talked me through the drive, telling me funny stories, keeping me occupied, and, most importantly, keeping me from driving my Infiniti G35 into the concrete highway divider. The love and appreciation I have for her—there are no words.

After my father died, his body was immediately taken to the funeral home for cremation—my dad thought caskets were a waste of money. I pulled out the infamous red binder, which now lived in my car, and turned to the funeral tab. I found a blank page. It included a will, a medical and financial power of attorney, a list of all bank accounts, all the bills I needed to pay, a life insurance policy, and details I didn’t even know I needed. But for a funeral—the pages ran blank. Fuck me.

With no direction, I simply did my best to honor his life. I planned a service in Sun City Georgetown, Texas, where my father had spent his last five years. Dozens of people showed up to pay their respects. A front row of seats was reserved for family. It sat empty except for Nell, my husband, one girlfriend, my uncle’s ex-wife, and me. That’s it. I relied on neighbors and friends of my father’s to pull it off. I can’t even remember their names now, but I am extremely grateful for the strangers who reserved rooms, helped order food, and kept things running while I was falling apart.

I gave a short speech, and when I got back home, I chased the grief I’d swallowed with a yet another bottle of wine and an Ambien. More Mad Men binge watching. Thank you, Don Draper. Later that week, I held a happy hour—much more my father’s style—in Houston, where he had run a company. One hundred or so of his rowdy friends showed up, telling crazy, wild stories about my father. They drank and ate so much, the bar tab was around $6,000 when we were done. It’s the best money I’ve ever spent. I heard stories about my dad and his wild adventures I had never heard before, and the joyful mood of the crowd was so fitting for the boisterous man he was. Afterward, Brian and I went to Rockport, Texas, to see my mother, who was recovering from surgery nicely. After a week, I was expected to go back to regular life. What a fucking joke. I couldn’t fathom going back to the same life. I was an entirely different person. About that time, a random check arrived in the mail addressed only to me.

“This is your ticket out. Go,” Sar’h said energetically.

The communication from my soul voice came from within this time. After years of patience, Sar’h itched to get back on our soul path. I told her it might take some time to untangle myself from this mess. I quit my job that September, four months after my father’s death. I told my husband I was not sure I could be married that October, and packed my bags for India that November.

The strangest thing of all is that none of this seems that big of a deal to me now—simple human-life details that did not matter much in the context of the expansive journey of the soul—but at that moment I was getting pounded by one wave after another. Waves don’t happen in singles. They roll unforgivingly in sets, growing in power and speed. I was only able to capture a few shallow breaths before the next wave punched me back down to the ocean floor.

I needed more oxygen, more space, to save myself or I was going to drown. My survival came signed, sealed, and delivered in the childhood memory of the I EXIST. The I EXIST was my surfboard. If I could find a way to get back onto the eight-foot board, paddle hard into the next wave, and pop to my feet, I could ride the wave into shore. I could wake up from this strange dream turned nightmare.

In all this mess, my soul seeped back into the shell of a human I had become, into the cracks created by the shattering grief. The more my soul seeped in, the more my human life unraveled, and I found that—much to my surprise—I did not want to put it back together. Something greater was bubbling up under the surface, yet I could not find the words to describe it. Could it be that the self-realization or enlightenment experience I had been so quick to discard in my teens was a real possibility? It was too soon to tell.

Perhaps my journey to India would provide some much-needed insight. It would at least provide the time and space needed to figure out what was next. Regular yoga classes served as my sanctuary throughout all this. The yoga studio was the safe space to allow my emotions to flow, let myself unravel, and pull myself back together. I reasoned a month on my yoga mat at the source of the practice would afford me some answers. It was worth a try.