Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Beginning of My Destiny

While a sophomore in undergraduate I took a class in Public Relations with Dr. T. Ford-Ahmed. She asked us to write an article to be submitted to a newspaper or magazine. As I think back to the assignment and the article I wrote, I see the hand of God moding me all those years ago for the day He would tell me to turn that article into a book.

Here is the article I wrote as a sophomore that in a few short months will be release as my first book.

Have you ever lived through what you believe was a nightmare? I have. I believed that the events of December 3, 1993 would haunt me forever. It would be this day that would shape the rest of my life. It would be shortly after 8:30 pm I believe when my sister’s friend would wake me up from my sleep to tell me our next door neighbor had just shot my mother, sisters, and brother. I sat up and looked at her for moment thinking, “What reason would Randy have to shoot my family.
So I returned to the warmth of my pillow and scolded her for playing a horrific game on me, “Get out of my room,” I yelled, but she would not go away. She shook me awake again, insisting I get up and call my grandmother.

I lay there listening to her try to comprehend her words for about two minutes before I heard the screaming, the sirens, the police officers and my sister’s daughter crying. I jumped to my feet, stepped outside my bedroom door and went to the top of the steps where my 1-year-old niece was standing. I took her in my arms while Kia handed me the telephone “Call your grandmother,” she told me again while taking my niece out of my arms.

While I was on the telephone, a police officer who stood at the bottom of the stairs directed me to come down so he could talk to me. I continued talking to my grandmother and yelled, “No, I’m not coming down there.” I was scared! I didn’t know of my family members’ bodies were down there or not. I kept saying no until an officer that I knew from school came in and asked me to come down. I trusted him and felt he would not allow me to see the bodies of my family. Still on the telephone, I walked cautiously down the steps. As I turned to face the officers, I saw my sister lying in our doorway bleeding. At that moment I knew my life would never be the same.

My grandmother told me she was on her way. I hung up the telephone and stood there thinking, “What could have made him do this?” Then I heard a paramedic say, “We have a black woman in her late 30s to early 40s with a gunshot would to the head, shoulder and leg.” I just dropped to my knees feeling helpless and weak. No one I knew had ever lived after being shot in the head. What would I do know? My mother! My sole purpose in life is gone! The woman who give birth to me and took care of me all my life may be dead.

At that moment, it seemed as if someone snatched my heart out of my chest and began to stomp all over it. I sat there thinking my mother meant everything to me. How could I survive in this world without here? How could this happen to my family, who I just saw alive and well hours earlier? How could this happen to me? What I did I do to deserve this?

I started to cry again. Then another one of my sister’s friends ran through the door and yelled, “Tracy is dead.” My 19-year-old pregnant sister was dead.
I went ballistic, kicking the television, screaming: My heart was completely broken. The comfort those around me tried to offer was simply not enough.

My thoughts returned to my neighbor, who had sat on the back porch with me and my family. How could he shoot them down as if they were nothing? This was too much for me to handle. I was 15-years-old and the life I had known was complete gone. I began to focus on my niece, so tiny, so innocent, precious and hopeful. How were we going to explain to her that her mother was gone and never coming back?

When I finally went outside the house of horror I found out my brother was shot in the chest and the leg and that he was on his way to the hospital.

I later found out that my mother jumped at our neighbor after he shot my sister and brother. She had to stop him from shooting her children down as if they where nothing. In the midst of them fighting for the gun, she managed to get her fingers on the trigger of the gun, shooting and killing him in the process.

All of a sudden another emotional overcame me and this time in was rage and anger. I could have shot, hit or stabbed someone in order to make them feel the pain I was experiencing at that moment. The people I loved were dead or on their way to an operating room to fight for their lives.

When I arrived at the hospital where my mother and sister were, my brother and aunt met me. They told me my mother and sister were ok and they should make a full recovery.

Another aunt called to let us know my brother, who was taken to another hospital, was also ok and should make a fully recovery. This was great to hear, but what about the emotional recovery? I thanked God for letting three members of my family survive the attacked but in the same breathe I questioned and was anger with him for allowing my sister and her unborn baby to die.

At Tracy’s funeral, I sat there feeling helpless. I could not believe the person I had grown-up with all my life was dead. She was the one I told secrets too, the one I went to when things were going wrong. Who was going to be my confidante now?

Following Tracy’s funeral I refused to admit she was dead. I could not and would not accept the fact we buried her and her baby boy, even though I had witnessed it with my own eyes. I could not accept the fact my sister and her baby were dead. My nephew never got a chance to take one breath in this world. It all seemed so unholy to me.
The months following their deaths, I walked around pretending nothing happened. I convinced myself she had only moved way and she would be back one day. I did everything the same as always. I went to school, talked on the telephone, went out with my friends and had fun like a normal teenage girl.

One day as I sat in the school auditorium, Tracy walked across the front of the stage. I was so happy, thinking, smugly to myself, “I knew she wasn’t dead; I knew she would be back.” But then, poof, she was gone. The person I saw was a classmate of mine and not Tracy. Tears of anger rushed down my cheeks. I wanted my sister back. I wanted to hold my nephew.

My friends took me to the counselor’s office but instead of talking, the counselor sent me home. She called my mother and told her what happened and suggested she take me to see a psychologist. I would start see a psychologist once a week for a year and a half I was still feeling the void left by the loss of my sister and nephew and thought no amount of counseling was going to full it.

It seemed like the more I tried to deal with it the worse I got. One night I walked into my bathroom looked in the medicine cabinet and decided to end all my pain. I could not take being without my sister any longer. I took some pills that were my mother’s and went to lie in my bed. But suddenly a voice in my head told me I did not want to die, I wanted to live and get through this.

I got up and called my father. He immediately came and rushed me to the emergency room, where I drank some black stuff that looked and tasted like charcoal.
This was undoubtedly one of my darkest hours. As I lay in the hospital psych ward in nothing but a hospital gown, I wondered what I did to make God abandon me when I needed Him the most. Was I an evil child? Is this why he took my sister and nephew away from me? I had lost my faith in God. When people would tell me he does everything for a reason, I thought, “What was His reason for taking Tracy? Why should I turn to Him?”

I was still trying to cope with my sister’s death and the multiple shootings of my family, when one of my friends was killed in a car accident. His funeral was at the same mortuary where Tracy’s was held. I replayed her funeral all over again in my head. This was too much for me. Why was I losing the people I cared about? What could I do about it? Nothing!

I was even more depressed than before. I thought nothing or no one could help me through this. Death appeared to hold a vigil at my door. Some moths later another friend was killed and then another. Every month it seemed like someone I knew was dying and all I could so was cry. Death was all around me.

I could not escape it; I knew God had it out for me. He simply did not love me any more. What was left? I attempted suicide again. I tried to overdose on some pills that I found. I lay in my bed and prepared myself for my death. When I closed my eyes I thought, “The pain is over, you can rest easy now.” I woke up the next morning to my disgust and wondered why God kept me here. If He did not love me, I wanted Him to let me go.

That is when my grandmother told me “God was not ready for my yet and He had a plan for me. You may not know what it is right now,” she said quietly and confidentially, “but He will let me know when the time is right.”

That same day my mother gave me her Bibles with some passages highlighted to read. I sat there in my bed and wondered if they were telling the truth about God never really abandoning me. Had I abandoned Him and His Word instead?
I finally did what everyone had been encouraging me to do. I got on my knees and asked God for His help.

Psalm 23 would ministry to me on many days when I felt like life was too much. I would try and read it everyday because it brought me comfort. I believed the Lord was my Shepherd; I shall not want. I started to believe God walks with you in your time of need; all you have to do is call on Him. I believed, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will feel no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and staff comfort me.”

Things started to look up for me. I begin to think about my future again and what I wanted to do with my life. Suicide was not the answer any more because I had God on my side and I knew it. I made a promise to myself, my family, my sister and my God that no matter how hard things got, I would never try to commit suicide again.
Months after making this promise, I came home from school to find out my brother Ronnie was murdered in the same alley where Tracy was murder only two and a half years earlier. He had been shot several times and no one knew who did this to him. All the pain I felt when Tracy was killed came rushing back. I asked God why He didn’t let Ronnie die that night with Tracy and the baby if He was going to let him die now. Why did I have to go through this again?

Suicide was not an option so I turned to alcohol to ease my pain. I was 17-years-old when my birthday was murdered, it was two weeks before my 18th birthday.
I was drunk at Ronnie’s funeral. I could not take being at that funeral home again. I sat there looking at my brother in the casket and wondering why? Not knowing who sis this to him was killing me inside.

The more pain and hurt I felt, the more I drank. I went on a four month drinking binge. It would take me looking in the mirror one day and realizing this is not who I wanted to be, so I returned to my God and asked for help.

Since the murders of my siblings I have watched many of the people I have grown up with are buried but I have tried with everything in me to lean on the Lord. I would loss two very dear friends to violent deaths.

The last 12 years of my life have been an emotional rollercoaster but when I submit to the will of God, is when I found peace in the midst of the storm. I used to believe I would never be happy. I used to believe inner peace was never gone to be mine. But the moment I let go and give it all to God, He begin to heal my broken heart. He begins to make me over in His glorious image from the inside out.

Healing, faith and deliverances are what From the Gutters to a Mansion: My Journey to My Heavenly Father is all about. It’s about how I tried to make it through the storm without God and how He time and time again saved me, not only from other people but from myself.

God Bless!
Ryane