Hard Facts and Hopeful Stories

Heard any good stories lately? Living some interesting ones yourself? If your stories are about resilience, inventiveness, and humor in the face hard times, I want to hear them.

Here are some hopeful tales I’ve collected. I’m tossing in occasional lists of hard facts to keep it real.

HOPEFUL STORY #1

One Woman’s Resilience in the Face of a Flood
-and Other Disasters of Biblical Proportions

by Carolyn R. Shaffer

(© Carolyn R. Shaffer 6 May 2009)

At 4 a.m. on January 10, 1995, Diane Ericson, single mother of two children, awoke to the sound of a bullhorn. “All of you must evacuate NOW,” boomed a male voice. “This area is flooding.”

“The announcement came too late,” said Diane, who back then was renting a house near the mouth of California’s Carmel River. “When I opened the front door, water rushed into the house. My car had already filled with water.” As fast as she could, Diane bundled up her son and daughter–ages 8 and 12, respectively-and they and the rest of their neighbors walked to higher ground with not much more than what they were wearing. By the time she and her children arrived at a makeshift shelter, Diane was in a state of shock. “Have you had anything to eat today?” the Red Cross worker asked her. “I don’t know,” she replied.

“Only later did I realize,” Diane told me, “that in the darkness one of my children could well have been swept away without my noticing in time to rescue him or her. I saved my children, but I lost everything else: the roof over our head and my furniture, clothes, work files, personal papers, family photos, art supplies, original art, precious mementos, all of it. This flood experience changed me. It changed me at the molecular level.”

Diane is relating her harrowing flood story as we relax on the sunny deck of a country lodge set deep in a wooded valley. It’s lunchtime on the second full day of the Spring Women’s Retreat at Buckhorn Springs Retreat Center just outside Ashland, Oregon. Before this conversation, I would never have guessed that this vibrant woman’s life had been filled with such nightmarish loss.

Throughout our retreat, this tall, athletic-looking woman in her fifties with short, easy-care blonde hair seems completely comfortable in her own skin. She strides about confidently and, in our daily women’s circles, speaks out boldly and with humor. At each of these circles, Diane, simply by showing up and being herself, reveals more and more forms of her creative expression: the art-jacket she made from a paint-stained drop cloth, the found-object wrapping technique she’s offering to teach anyone interested, the eyeglasses she wears with a round lens on the right side and a square one on the left.

Back on that sunny deck as we finish our dessert, Diane reveals that the flood was Loss Number Four in a series of four. She provides a brief rundown on the other three. Each seems catastrophic enough to crush a person, or at least cause them to hunker down and live the rest of their life with extreme caution. Not Diane, though. After every one of these tragic events, she chose to bounce back stronger than ever. As she tells these stories, I make a mental note to dub her Poster Girl #1 in the collection I’ve just decided to start of Living-with-Resilience Poster Girls and Boys.

Diane’s four catastrophes

To help you grasp just how resilient Diane has been over the years, here are thumbnail descriptions of her four losses:
1.   She and her husband had built their passive solar “dream” home and were enjoying raising their young family when he announced that he was leaving the marriage. Diane’s world fell apart. But here’s the amazing part: Although emotionally devastated by the enormity of this shift, Diane managed to land a high-school teaching job. That’s not all. With only two weeks to prepare, she taught subjects new to her at a grade level she had never before taught.
2.   Less than a year after this blow, Diane “lost” her two children. Her ex-husband, now re-married, insisted on taking his turn raising their son and daughter in his new home. Although she knew this was the right thing to do to support her children’s relationship with their dad, her heart ripped open every time she talked with them on the phone or said goodbye to them after a custodial visit. Often after these calls and drop-offs, she wept. This went on for a long two years. Time after time, Diane had to return to trusting that she had made the right decision.
3.   Shortly before her children returned, Diane’s life took an amazing turn for the better–followed by yet another catastrophic loss. Diane met “the love of her life,” they entered a deeply committed relationship, and within six months of his moving in with her, he became seriously ill and died.
4.   Then came the flood and Diane’s loss of all her material possessions.

The happy outcome: Diane’s now-grown children are both doing well, her third committed relationship is going strong, and she’s earning a living doing work she loves, most of it related to fabric art. Besides making her own creations, Diane teaches everyone from high school students, to developmentally disabled adults to retired seniors how to turn “throw-aways” into functional and wearable art.

Diane’s three “lessons learned”

I want to make clear that Diane is not Wonder Woman. She has no special powers that the rest of us don’t have. She is not immune to shock, discouragement, anger, fear and despair. Indeed, she has felt all of these in full measure. What Diane does do is pay attention and learn from her experience.

Diane wanted me to be sure to include in this story the three biggest lessons she learned from the flood and the three catastrophes that preceded it:
1.   We always have what we need, and it’s never about stuff.
2.   Use the good stuff (as in the best fabric and china). This is not a practice life.
3.   Keep choosing to get bigger in response each loss. We don’t get to pick what happens to us, but we do get to choose what we do with it.

Here’s my main take-away from her story: If Diane can get through the flood and three other major losses with her health, humor, work life, and artistic expression intact, then surely I can weather whatever upheavals lie ahead. And in the face of these, I can continue to create a thriving, joyful life for myself and my loved ones.

© Carolyn R. Shaffer 6 May 2009
[DISCLAIMER: I am not attributing the Carmel River Flood of 1995 to climate change. I'm telling Diane's story simply as an example of resilience in the face of catastrophe. Still, according to the Hard Facts I've gathered about rising sea levels and floods, we'll likely be facing more such catastrophes in the years ahead.]

HARD FACTS ABOUT RISING SEA LEVELS AND FLOODS

Excerpts from “With Climate Change Comes Floods,” by Anna Vigran.
NPR.org, January 14, 2008

As global temperatures rise, oceans get warmer. And when water heats up, it expands and sea levels rise.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that from 1993 to 2003, global sea level rose about 3 millimeters each year, and approximately half of that increase is attributed to the ocean expanding as it warms.

[Carol Auer, an oceanographer with the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration] says that a half-inch of vertical sea level rise translates to about three feet of land lost on a sandy open coast, due to long-term erosion. And even a slightly higher sea level can cause more dramatic tides in deltas and estuaries.

Rising sea levels also make coastal areas more vulnerable to storm surges and, in turn, to flooding.

The higher sea level gives a storm surge a boost to reach further inland.

Auer points to two hurricanes of similar strength that hit the Chesapeake Bay area. The first hit in 1933. The second was Hurricane Isabel, which pummeled the East Coast in 2003. “Isabel was far more damaging because there had been about a 20-centimeter rise in sea level,” Auer says.

A warming planet also means snowy regions become rainy. People who live near rivers could see more flash floods: Melting snow slowly trickles into rivers, but rain can dump large amounts of water all at once.