Some of you may have been following my recent adventure to eastern Canada because of a family emergency. It’s been an interesting few days to say the least. What’s really cool is that although it was a horrible situation, it was the perfect experience to frame our next book currently titled: Re:LIFE Being to Blessing – Trusting the Invisible, Living the Impossible. It also happens to be the banner for a new kind of Village around the concept of “Creative Facilitation and Coaching.” I’m not going to go into too many details as they are still evolving. But I hope this preview gets you as excited as I have been too write about it.
One Love – One Life! – Ed
Chapter 01: Seizures
I received the unexpected phone call around 7:30 am on a Friday. It was my sister-in-law Natalie; her voice was weak and quivering. Immediately, I began bracing myself for the worst. In a tiny breath, she managed to say, “Can you come? Eric wants to see you.”
My heart dropped into my throat. I knew it was bad—real bad.
“Yes, I’ll come right away,” was my response.
Just a day earlier my mother had called asking what a seizure was. Mom, having emigrated from Korea over thirty years ago, still had some trouble with her vocabulary here and there. So of course she called her Canadian-born son with any English language challenges, from legal matters to programming the sprinkler system. I asked her why she wanted to understand what the word seizure meant, trying not to jump to conclusions.
My mother began to weep as she explained that my brother, who lived on the other side of Canada, in a small town called Morden Manitoba, had collapsed and was now hospitalized in Winnipeg. It became a distressing conversation as she laid out the details.
You can imagine my feeling of impending grief and hopelessness when just a twenty-four hours later, I was to take a two hour flight the same day, from our home in Calgary, at the request of my only brother. Natalie explained that he had come home after certain medical tests were inconclusive and drugs had been prescribed—only for more seizure-like episodes to persist which led Eric back to the hospital for a second time.
Up to this point, our families had been pretty independent of each other. Lately however, some other medical emergencies in the family had been bringing us together in more communication than usual. My brother had also been acting as a sort of wise council to me because of a recent surge in community growth centered around my last self-published book, Re:LIFE & The Myth of Motivation.
Now Eric and Natalie are not the type of couple who would make the kind of request they did lightly. So the gravity of the situation began taking its toll on me. I spent the next ten minutes shedding my own healthy dose of tears and began asking myself, how could this be happening?
Thankfully, for the generosity of my current employer and spiritual brother, Steve of The Goliath Group of Companies, I was able to receive a ticket on points and the necessary time off to fly out the next morning. And my wife, as ever so valiant as she is, agreed to take care of our family while I tended to family business. My mother and father, whose fear had peaked into utter panic, told me that at least my mother would be on the plane with me. Knowing my family, I instinctively knew I had to take a position of leadership and make the tough choice of denying a mother the chance to see her own son—not because I didn’t want her to, but because without knowing the full extent of the situation, her panic could exacerbate an already difficult situation. I promised my parents that if I felt it was necessary, I would invite them to get on the next plane to Winnipeg.
So off I was at 7:00 am the next morning.
While waiting in the airport, scarfing down a bagel and coffee, I was being conflicted by multiple distinct emotions. In my mind, I felt something was terribly wrong. In my heart, I ached with the fear and burden of wanting to rescue my brother and be a hero to my family. But despite the emotional rollercoaster I was on, in my spirit, for some odd reason, I felt peace and even some anticipation that something cool was going to happen.
I decided to Twitter my experience.
@edkang99: Off to Winnipeg to see my brother. Feeling there will be opportunities to trust the invisible to live the impossible.
@edkang99: Feeling the pressure of leadership for my family. What if I can’t help my brother? Want to rescue but know I can’t.
Upon arrival in Winnipeg, I managed to fight off the piercing wind chill long enough to get into my rental car and avoid having my hands falling off from frostbite. Then I was off on an hour-and-forty minute drive, which seemed like just thirty minutes, to arrive in Morden Manitoba where my brother resided. When I arrived at his house, I received a warm greeting from my sister-in-law Natalie.
My first reaction was a sense of joy in seeing my nephew Winston and niece Liberty—my brother has been blessed with super cute kids. I also noticed that the house, which I knew was a “heritage” home over a century old, definitely had a certain charm I could get used to. But the mood quickly sobered as Natalie began tearfully explaining the details of my brother’s current mental and physical state. He was currently asleep upstairs. So I sat and listened patiently, doing my best to remain calm and not jump out of my own skin in frustration and dread because of what I heard next.
“He can’t talk,” is what Natalie said.
“What do you mean?” I asked quickly.
She explained that my brother could barely speak without going into another episode of convulsions that appeared to be seizures. His only method of communication was to scrawl words on paper and the attacks subsided when he managed to dump his thoughts.
I decided it was best not to jump to conclusions for the moment.
After about an hour of conversation and an introduction to Lego Star Wars on the Nintendo Wii, Natalie beckoned me upstairs at my brother’s request. I quickly said a short prayer underneath my breath and steadied myself with the motto, “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” I then slowly walked up a creaky set of stairs making some dumb comment about how cozy the house was to fake my calmness.
My false sense of confidence and positivity seemed to be working—until I entered the room and actually saw my brother.
My heart jumped into my throat.
Seeing my brother lying there, helpless, with this sort of grimacing tortured look on his face, was pretty much all I was prepared to handle. Horrible thoughts swarmed my mind.
My brother then mustered up the strength to acknowledge me with a squint of his eyes and whispered something about my hair growing long. I decided to make another dumb comment about his futon bed to buy me some time to calm down, but was quickly interrupted.
My little brother Eric, of thirty years, went into convulsions.
And at that precise point—as I watched his body clench and twitch—is when the miracles started.
Chapter 02: Do You Believe in Miracles?
What you are reading is about miracles.
According to Dictionary.com, a miracle is defined as:
mir⋅a⋅cle –noun
- an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.
- such an effect or event manifesting or considered as a work of God.
- a wonder; marvel.
- a wonderful or surpassing example of some quality: a miracle of modern acoustics.
January 13th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Maybe “One Laugh” could be put into that ending, like “One Love, One Life, and One Laugh,” just an idea as you seem to usually bring a smile or two to me regularly.
For myself, this brings back eerie memories of when I went to see my mother back in the fall of 2001, where she was just so transformed in terms of voice changes and weight loss that while it was a head that was similar to what I remember, the rest just wasn’t the same. While my mother’s tale is tragic, there are a few other points to note, like I was living in Seattle, Washington while she was with my father and sister in Chatham, Ontario and this was a couple of months after 9/11 so flying on a plane wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do along with leaving where I worked that was in a bit of flux as my employer wasn’t in great shape at the time. Hopefully this is useful and not bringing others down as that isn’t my intent.
Hopefully your brother taught you a few things and you are better person for having had the experiences you did. I do applaud your acknowledging your feelings throughout what you’ve written as I’m still working on acknowledging my feelings some of the time.