|
FAIRMONT
A
split second can change a life forever for the better or the worse.
In a split second, David Rowley’s wife was taken from him.
For 28 years, Nancy Rowley had travelled with her husband across the
country, as he pastored one church after another, raising their children,
taking care of her husband. It was a “very happy marriage,” he recalls.
All that changed on Sept. 14, 1998, as they were driving from their home in
Bismarck, N.D., to Pensacola, Fla., for his college reunion.
It was 3:30 a.m., on dark, desolate and deserted road near Sioux Falls.
Nancy drove while Rowley and two of their daughters, 16 and 19, slumbered.
David Rowley knows only what happened next, not why. Maybe she nodded off at
the wheel; maybe she swerved to avoid a pothole or animal.
He was jolted awake to hear his wife screaming and feel the van lurching
zig-zag across the highway. She lost control and it hit the median, flipping
end over end over end.
The only one wearing a seat belt, Nancy was thrown 30 feet from the wrecked
van. Their daughters were relatively unhurt. Rowley suffered a blood clot
that didn't show up until several months later.
To this day, he shakes at the sight of the flashing red lights of emergency
vehicles.
"It was horrible. I didn't know where Nancy was. I thought she'd been thrown
under the van, so I was trying to lift it. All those theories you hear about
superhuman strength, don't you believe a word of it. It didn't work for me."
One daughter flagged down
a trucker, who called for help. The Rowleys were taken to the nearest
hospital, Nancy
—
barely alive — by helicopter and the rest of
the family by ambulance. Within
minutes of arriving at the hospital, she died. She was only 48 and had been
planning a party for Rowley’s 50th birthday, just a month away.
“I’m
laying flat on my back (for X-rays),” he says. “My two kids were strapped
down. We all started crying. To put into words how you feel at a time like
that, it’s impossible.
“This can’t be real. I had to be dreaming. This happens to other people, not
to me. To try to imagine that my life had been altered so badly — look, I’m
shaking now — it was just ... I can’t even go back and relive it."
“Just to hear those words — ‘she didn’t make it’ — my mind immediately went
into spasms, trying to comprehend just what did that mean.”
It meant that his wonderful marriage was over, that his devoted,
hard-working, frugal, honest “and good-looking” wife was gone forever.
“We
just had a really deep love for each other. She was just an awesome lady,
that’s all.”
David Rowley was devastated. Like anyone who has suffered such a loss, he
began to grieve, not knowing it would take more than five years for his
wounds to heal.
Rowley hurt and mourned, but he
thought he was doing pretty well. Nine months after Nancy died, he married a
woman from his church who had lost her husband four years earlier from
cancer.
But the marriage wasn’t working out. He thought she’d understand his grief,
but she didn’t, which made his pain all the more acute. He began to suffer
from depression, insomnia, panic attacks, hyperactivity and claustrophobia.
“One day it hit me,” he says. “BOOM! I woke up in bed and wondered what was
going on here. I’m not sure what brought it on. I know the grief had started
before that, but it didn’t intensify until I got into that marriage. “They
don’t have a school for this kind of stuff. I wasn’t prepared for it,” he
says.
Life was so unbearably painful that he took tranquilizers “just to survive.
I couldn’t do it any other way.”
His grief and depression deepened as the marriage withered. On the verge of
suicide one painful night, he had a conversation with God, he says.
“He said, ‘You really want to do this?’ I said, ‘Yes. I’m ready to go.’
“He said, ‘All right. Just remember you’ve got three grandkids who think you
hung the moon in the sky and four children who just lost their mother.’ And
I said, ‘You got to bring that up now?’
“That was the end of that conversation. God won ... and I’m glad He did.” Depression became his closest and least welcome companion.
“It was just not having any desire to live. Wishing it was all over, that
you could take a pill and make it go away, but also realizing that you’ll
spend a lot more time crying — which is therapeutic. I cried buckets and
buckets.”
Over the next 18 months, as references to North Carolina started to flood
his life — a favourite author was from that state; he met other people who
lived there, too — Rowley began to feel that was the place he should be.
“It was like God was saying, ‘David, I’m trying to get this into your mind
... That’s where I want you to go.’”
He packed his bags, told his wife he had to get out and left. He’d never
considered divorce before, but now felt that a burden had been lifted from
his slender shoulders.
Leaving North Dakota was “a big step, a big turning point” for him, Rowley
says.
“Being in grief at the same time as being in a bad marriage doubled the
pain. And when I left, what a difference!
“Providentially, God had sent me to a small church in North Carolina where
the pastor had gone through the same things I was going through,” Rowley
said.
He attended for almost two years, basking in the warmth and love he felt,
and taking a break from the ministry to let God soothe his aching soul and
heal his wounded heart. He then learned that a pastoral position was open in
a church in Fairmont and moved here in June 2003.
He loves his
“little mountain church” here, but he wants to help more people even more.
“I look at people and see the hurt in their eyes and their grief, and I want
to help them. I’ve been there. In a town like Fairmont — right now — there
are people sitting in their homes, crying, because they hurt. I would rather
have a broken back than a broken heart.
“Emotional pain is horrible. If you’re sick you can take a pill and lay down
for it to go away. But this stuff, depression, doesn’t go away.”
A grief counsellor in North Dakota told him it could take a long time to get
over his grief. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
“But she was honest with me. It does take a long time. People going through
it think it’s never going to end. The closer you were in marriage, the more
it’s going to hurt. There are thousands of people in pain — but who cares? I
care! But I didn’t care as much then as I do now because I didn’t
understand.”
Now, from his own pain, he understands that sometimes all you need, all you
want, is someone to talk to.
“That’s unbelievably important. It gives you some hope to see another person
who has come past where you are and you think that maybe someday you’ll get
there ... somebody who’s experienced the same thing you’ve experienced. You
have no idea what courage that gives you, because you don’t think you’re
going to make it.”
One night, he recalls, the pain was just too much.
“I was on the floor on my hands and knees, crying and begging God for help.
And He said, ‘I’m going to help you, but I’m going to let you go through
this so you’ll know what it’s like, because there are other people out there
that I’m going to use you to help somewhere down the line.’”
Rowley is ready to let God use him by listening to anyone who needs a
sympathetic ear. He may not be school-trained or certified as a grief
counsellor, he admits. “But I can guarantee you I know as much as anybody else knows about grief. I
want to reach out to people who need the kind of help I think I can offer
them — not for money, but from my heart. I want to find people who say, ‘I
wish to God there was somebody I could talk to.’ And I’ll talk to them.”
Helping people is serving God. And perhaps he can bring some people to God
by helping them.
“That would be a tremendous help to them. To know Him is to have the comfort
of the Holy Ghost.
“I can offer an understanding heart and encouragement, because they can see
somebody who’s been where they’re at. I can offer practical advice for how
to deal with what they’re going through on a day-to-day basis. And I can
offer them friendship. That’s what they need; they need a friend.”
That’s what he misses most about Nancy: their friendship. “That’s what we
were: friends. I guess I still do miss her.”
As a pastor, it would be easy for David Rowley to say he wasn’t angry at God
when his wife died.
“But to be honest, I would have to say yes, I was. I don’t know if I was
angry with Nancy, with God or with myself, but it showed up sometimes when I
least expected it,” such as losing his temper at a salesclerk who had sold
him the wrong item.
“But this is part of the process of getting over losing a loved one.”
People who are grieving must be able to confide all their fears, he said.
Otherwise, “they’ll think they’re going crazy. That’s what I thought. Nobody
told me it was perfectly normal to experience this kind of stuff.
“The average person who hasn’t gone through anything like this cannot
possibly understand what it’s like and the length of time it takes to
recover. It’s different for each person, depending on the intensity of love
in the relationship.”
So where was God in all of this pain and anguish and depression? Well?
“I felt that God wasn’t answering my prayers,” Rowley says. “Well, He was,
but I didn’t sense it at the time. I knew the verses. I’ve read through the
Bible — I just finished my 41st time reading the Bible. I'd walk down the
street, look up, tears streaming down my face, and say, 'I know what
the book says. But where are you?" There was no answer.
“I thought God
was mad at me and I got terrified of God,” he says. “I felt abandoned. I
didn’t know what He was doing. I didn't understand why I felt like this. Now
I know why He allowed me to fell like He wasn't there. Grief is part of life
and other people are going through that, saying,' Where are you God?'
"And I'll be able to say to them, 'He's here; He's here.'
"And I was there.
I understand exactly the doubt, the fear, the nagging
you're feeling. I can tell you that you're gonna come through this."
He adds that he is available any time of the day or night by calling his
cell phone at 657-9538 or at the church at 363-9530.
His pain and compassion are making him a better pastor, he says. "I know the
hurts they have, so I have a broader vision of what needs to be done.
Before I just wanted to help people. Now I have a burden on my soul for
people with hurt. "Like it or not, pain is part of, " the imperfect human condition" that
includes death, he says. “We’re
all going to die. Some people die young, some die old, but everybody goes in
one way or the other. And that always brings broken hearts when it happens.”
Cautiously he found
his way back
from his own slough of despond by taking long walks, writing poetry (found
at
www.sounddoctrine.com)
... just taking things one day at a time.
Slowly he began to accept his wife’s death.
Now, more than five years after
that September morning, David Rowley is no longer grieving.
"That's over; that's done," he says.
"Oh, some things get me all over again, but that's OK. We're human.
I'm ready to get into another relationship. Six years are long enough. But
loneliness is far better than depression." "I still think very
dearly about Nancy, and certain memories can still stir my heart
— but she's gone and I wouldn't want to bring her back. She's in a much
better place. Oh, well . It's done. I'm a happy guy now. My life right now is pretty nice. I'm at the point in
my life now where I could remarry."
"He's also very busy, pastoring at his church,
composing poetry and listing
it on his Web site, being the “Internet pastor” for a church in Scotland,
answering e-mail from around the world and writing a paper on what he calls
“eternal security.” He picks every now and then on his five-string banjo and
“fiddles around” on his viola.
He’s “tickled” that a study
Nancy
had written, which he’d posted on his Web
site, has been picked up and translated into Portuguese and is being
distributed in book form in Brazil.
“But mostly I enjoy helping people. This is my reason for existence. Without
a purpose, your life is meaningless.”
Permission to use
by David Rowley |
