Twenty years ago yesterday, my life changed. And I mean, changed. It wasn’t the last time it would happen, but it was the first time it was so massively significant. It’s the kind of change that is permanently tattooed on your timeline. The kind where you mark things as “before” or “after.” Covid-19 did this for us on a global scale.
But the change that occurred on July 14, 2006, was deeply personal with ripples and repercussions that completely upended the trajectory of the rest of my life—both for better, and maybe a little for worse.
That morning, I was woken up early by a phone call from my sister. My father had been taken to the hospital with a presumed stroke. She was already on her way, driving from almost 3 hours away, and I had to figure out getting on a plane. I also had to figure out how to reach my mom, who had flown out the day before to go to a friend’s daughter’s wedding. My father was meant to join them that evening. Somehow, we all managed to get to the hospital by day’s end, where my father lay in ICU with all kinds of wires and tubes keeping him alive. He had had a stroke. A massive stroke, actually, and the prognosis wasn’t good.
Thankfully, the neurosurgeon on call was one of the best in the country, and he saved my dad’s life. He also gave us the option to use a treatment still in testing, since he was part of the clinical trials. Even with that, the likelihood of dad recovering was slim; but we went ahead and tried anyway. In a moment like that, you almost feel like you need to lay it all on the line.
Fast forward a week or so, and he was stabilized. During his time in the ICU, we took turns sitting with him. He was in a medically-induced coma so we were always watching for signs of life that he might come around. On one of those days, as I sat quietly in the corner of the room keeping watch, my mom arrived to swap places with me. When she walked in the room, she looked at me, looked at him, then looked back at me and said, “You’re doing Reiki. You need to go get trained.” Now, I wasn’t touching him or sitting next to him. In fact, I was as far from him as possible within the same room. But she saw the energy moving, even though I wasn’t consciously doing anything.
At the time, I had received Reiki a few times from a practitioner, but I had no intention of studying it myself. I had a growing career in the fashion/retail industry, and I was doing quite well at it. I saw my future in a very different way. But, as I said at the start, my dad’s stroke had ripple effects in unexpected ways. Since mom had studied Reiki, she knew what she was seeing and so she prompted me on my way. It wasn’t the first time, nor the last, that she would prod me into a direction that I needed to go.
Over the next few months, my father’s care transitioned from ICU to a step-down facility to get off the ventilator, and ultimately to a rehab, where he stayed for 2-3 months. During his month at the step-down facility, my ex and I went back to Dallas, packed everything up, and moved home to help my mom. The future was unknown, and she had asked us to come. So we did.
Initially, my time was spent between days with my dad at rehab and nights working at my job (they were kind enough to keep me on long-distance for a while until we knew what was happening). Somewhere in there, my mom mentioned the Reiki again, so I reached out to a friend in the know and asked him for a referral. He sent me to Wendy Jordan, who happened to have a Level I class coming up; it was at that class that it became clear that my life would never go back to how it was.
If my dad had never had a stroke, I would probably have done my best to stay in my corporate career, climbing the proverbial ladder and living a life of blissful ignorance to the miracle of all the unseen aspects of life. While I still have days where that sounds enticing, I can’t imagine going back to “sleep” and shutting down those pieces of me that make me feel more like myself than almost anything else: the psychic, intuitive, and energetic gifts.
So, twenty years ago yesterday, everything changed. It was a detour that forced me off the highways I had been traveling and onto the most well-worn Roman roads of the ancient past. Even though they initially made my legs and feet more weary, they are more reliable, solid, and transformative to walk on than any reinforced concrete will ever be. I couldn’t see it then in the midst of crisis, but that’s the gift that hindsight and time give us: Clarity.
One day I will share the full story of how my gifts showed up and unraveled (including how I ran from them for a few years!) because I think it’s more common than the “overnight” or “lightning bolt” stories we often hear about from others with similar gifts. For now, though, I will leave you with this:
I think it’s important to take a moment to mark those dates in our life that created the changes we needed, even if we didn’t see it at the time. For me, one of those days is July 14, 2006.
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