Through Heaven's Gate and Back: A Spiritual Journey of Healing and What It Taught Me About Love, Life, and Forgiveness

By Lee Thornton

Lee Thornton’s book is an autobiographical account of how her life-changing encounter during a near-death experience helped guide her on a path of healing. An upbringing that included childhood sexual abuse and deception left her battling depression and illness on her quest for wholeness. She recounts growing up as the daughter of a distinguished U.S. diplomat in a world where respectable appearances concealed the reality of underlying secrets, violation, duplicity and manipulation. In the course of going through a divorce, long separations from her son, struggles with unresolved family issues, and trying to heal from a chronic illness, she learns universal lessons about love, self-acceptance, and forgiveness that help her win her hard-fought battle for wholeness, authenticity, and the realization of her purpose. She hopes that sharing her story helps others who have suffered similar adversities or are seeking self-acceptance and greater fulfillment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Aug 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483415178

Book preview

Love

Prologue

After living and traveling in India with my husband for two years, I became pregnant and was awaiting the birth of my first child. For many months preceding the birth, I had had a prolonged illness that was eventually diagnosed as a rare tropical parasite and had dwindled to some 90 pounds when I went into labor.

After many hours in labor, fatigue had begun to set in. When the time came to deliver, the doctor told me to push, and I began the process with each contraction. This went on for a long time. I kept expecting the baby to come any minute. However, after extended efforts, it seemed I was not making progress and I began to lose my strength. I continued to push, but after endless rounds still yielding no results, I finally fell back in exhaustion. The doctor instructed me to keep going but my body, in its weakened state, refused to cooperate, and I began to feel panicky. It was clear that my prolonged efforts had failed to further any progress towards the birth. As my muscles went flaccid, I felt my entire body tremble violently. Realizing my battery had gone dead and I had no control over my body, I was overcome with fear and felt as if the last drop of blood had seeped out of me. I thought, I’m going to die.

I could barely speak. Seeing that I had no strength left, the nurse turned to the doctor and said: She cannot push anymore.

At that point, there was a sudden change in the room. The previous sense of alarm seemed to turn to crisis. Everything happened very fast. I had no idea what had gone wrong; only that it seemed to be an emergency. My last hold on myself started to go, and I could hear urgency in the doctor’s voice. This was followed by an acute wrenching sensation, as if I had been split in half, and then I went unconscious. The light went out and I slipped away.

PART I

Growing Up a Global Nomad

CHAPTER 1

Looking Back

I stood at the top of the cliff, my eyes scanning every foot of the rock face that plunged to the sea far below. I could hear the roar of the huge waves as they rolled in, crashing on the boulders, then sliding back down them in bursts of foam and spray. There were crevices in the rocky slope and I contemplated sitting on one of the ledges with the full bottle of red wine I had brought with me, thinking that rather than jumping, I might first numb myself to get the courage to take the step I had intended to take. I had come up a winding road to reach the summit with that sole intent in mind.

It was getting close to sunset and the rose tones glinting on the surface waves made me wonder for an instant if the beauty of the scene might have the power to change my course. I walked down a few steps, sat on a ledge that was protected from the few people around and took the first sip from the bottle of wine. It had become too familiar a friend, numbing the pain, and I knew I had to stop using it as a crutch.

As I sat there, it came to me that the time had come to end my life and it was just a matter of how I would do it. My whole life had been marked by one crippling depression after another, and nothing I had tried to do to heal seemed to have worked. I had tried therapy, support groups, church, reading self-help books, journaling, everything I could think of, but here I remained, unchanged. Thoughts of ending things had become more and more frequent, although I had never taken any steps to follow through. Not long before, I had taken a leave of absence from work to check into a hospital for a week, not because I had taken any action like an overdose of sleeping pills, but because I had thoughts about doing it. I realized how close I was to the edge. I realized I needed critical help. But now I was beyond reaching for help. None of it had done any good. There was no ray of hope left to make me dial my therapist or the suicide hotline or the number of a close friend. It was all over. I had gone as far as I could go.

I reasoned, if one could claim reason in such a state, that nothing would ever change. Over the years I had believed in change, in the ability of people to move beyond their history, environment, conditioned patterns to overcome their past and transform who they were. That was why I had persisted in therapy with such perseverance and determination. But now I was convinced that all these beliefs were illusions. Nobody really ever changed. We were all destined to repeat our patterns from early childhood. We were really programmed for life early on and there was nothing we could do about it. My first memory from childhood was of me being alone, standing at a window looking out at the rain. I perceived others as distant. This caused me to see life as grey and scary. And I concluded that I must hide from or try to conquer this grey scary space that seemed to stretch into eternity in which there was nobody to turn to, to free me, to support me. I was alone from early on and I was still alone. I took another sip of wine and felt the warmth of it trickling down my throat, easing the crisis of the decision I was about to make.

The hospital had not helped. In fact, it had made it worse. I had a roommate who was anorexic, struggling apparently to be the perfect child for demanding parents. There were patients with all manner of disorders…bipolar, schizophrenic, psychotic, all mostly sedated on medications, staring through rather than at a TV, all like the walking dead. We shuffled from art therapy to support groups to exercise class to meals, and I was so exhausted it took all my energy to get through the day. I told myself the other patients were worse off than I was. I concluded that being among them only made me feel like I would catch a more severe disorder and become even more crazy than I already felt. So I checked out.

And now here I was, all my resources exhausted. As I drank more wine, I imagined falling down the cliff, landing on those forbidding dark rocks where the surf was crashing over them. It was starting to darken as the sun lowered toward the horizon, and its golden glow suffused the rocks in amber light. A strip of crimson in the sky cast glints of red on the ocean waves. Mellowed by the wine, as I took in the setting sun, something happened that had happened to me before. The beauty of the light filling the sky and sea seemed to fill me, as if we were connected, and I thought: if nothing else, this scene is worth living for. And so is my son.

I sat there watching the sun sink until the light went out of the sky and the bottle of wine was finished and thought about what had brought me to this point in time…

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I was almost five, and we were on our way to live in Paris. With six-foot wardrobe trunks and army lockers filled with our immediate possessions, we boarded one of the most grand and elegant of the old era ocean liners. For a week my sister Nel and I were in heaven exploring the labyrinth of passageways and decks lined with lounge chairs overlooking the enormous grey-blue waves of the Atlantic. At night we dressed for dinner in our best dresses. We dined in wood-paneled rooms with chandeliers at tables draped in fine linens with starched napkins, silverware and crystal goblets. Served by waiters dressed in snappy white jackets who catered to our every need, we feasted on one gourmet course after another. This was my entrée into a life in the diplomatic corps—servants, beautiful official residences, exotic lands—though these were to be only one side of the diplomatic life. As what became officially coined a global nomad, I would join the international ranks of all those expatriate transients—military, business or others—who lived abroad. Like my parents, grandparents, and other relatives before me, I would follow the wayfaring path of a world traveler.

Having been raised in foreign countries as the son of a Navy officer, my father had chosen a career in the Foreign Service. He had a keen interest in international relations and avid curiosity about other cultures. After graduating from Princeton with a degree in economics and studying journalism at Harvard, he began his career as an Economics Officer. It would take him all over the world.

We would, until I went to college, move every three years to a new foreign country. That path began the day I was brought into the world, not in the country of my citizenship, but in Rome, Italy, just after World War II. Three years before me, my sister Nel had been born in San Salvador, my father’s second posting. Later when others were told where I was born, they often asked, Are you an Italian citizen? As a Roman ‘bambina’ I was fondly coddled for the first three years of my life, not primarily by my mother, but by an Italian nanny who later accompanied us to Boston where we lived briefly until we moved to France.

In Paris we settled into an elegant, high-ceilinged townhouse in a posh section not far from the Eiffel Tower. At home, many evenings in our house were filled with the sounds of voices, laughter and the clinking of glasses at cocktail and dinner parties that were part of my parents’ diplomatic life. Often when things wound down I heard the familiar sound of my mother singing solo at our baby grand, surrounded by guests who sometimes joined in a duet or sang along.

A pianist gifted with a beautiful soprano voice, my mother had been raised as a serious musician. She had later attended Juilliard, among the finest music academies, before marrying my father. Though she had chosen to raise a family rather than pursue a possible career as a singer, she had continued to study music seriously under various well-known teachers of her time, and often performed at functions. She was highly disciplined, and the daily morning sound of her voice diligently practicing scales became as much a part of my childhood as the sounds of classical music on the record player. It was not surprising, then, that my mother decided to start me on piano lessons at the age of five, with a French teacher. Between instruction in French and trouble reading music, it was a challenge. But after hours practicing at my mother’s baby grand, I soon learned to play Beethoven’s Fur Elise and other classical pieces.

When my parents were not hosting parties and cultural functions, they were attending them. We saw little of my father, who worked hard and came home late, and though we saw more of my mother, she was also often busy with her musical performances and social engagements. Thus my memories of these early years were of a formal, distant relationship with my parents. My father was average in height, bald and wore glasses. He was an authoritarian figure with a temper and was a strict disciplinarian who spanked us readily when we were bad. One time Nel and I had poured the scraps of our unwanted food down a hatch under the dining room table, and the food had ended up in a pile of garbage in the basement. When he discovered this, we were given a major spanking. More than once when he became very angry, he pulled my pants down to spank me, compounding my shame. Often with his head behind a newspaper or book, he seemed remote in his intellectual world, and I have no recollections of him being affectionate or playful with us.

My mother alternated between sweet gentility and anger. When she was angry, she expressed marked irritation, impatience and frustration with my inquisitive mind, full of persistent and never-ending questions. She would say, Oh, Lee, would you just stop it. You ask too many questions! You have such a one-track mind. Seeing that these questions elicited her displeasure, I was drawn early to the conviction that something was wrong with them, and with me. She seemed generally preoccupied with her social life, busy on the phone making arrangements for teas, activities with the wives club, or calling upon the wives of dignitaries. She was beautiful, with delicate features, short black hair and dark eyes framed by prominent arched eyebrows. I thought she looked a little like the actress Vivien Leigh who played Scarlet in Gone with the Wind. Very proper and fashion conscious, she dressed meticulously in tailored suits for the day and glamorous long gowns for evening functions. She was very conscious of appearances, raising us to be polite little diplomats and to have good manners. She sometimes made our clothes and dressed us like mannequins, often in matching outfits like twins. While she saw to it that we were engaged in activities, such as ballet lessons, she and my father seemed to move in their own world, separate from ours. It was our French servants who raised us in their frequent absence, and to whom we felt closer.

At five, I started first grade at a French school where I had no choice but to become fluent in French if I was to learn my ABCs. It was a challenge to learn new subjects in a new language at a young age among foreign speaking strangers. But exposure to the language was helped along by the servants who played an important part in our upbringing. In our parents’ absence it was the servants who looked after and disciplined us, who comforted us through what were then big losses. It was our cook, Lydia, who helped us nurse an injured sparrow that had fallen in our patio until it healed under our ministrations, and one day flew away. When our little green parakeet died, Lydia held us against her flour-powdered apron. She hugged us when our turtle died and when our hamster passed away.

Unlike my mother, who was delicate, nervous and easily distressed, Lydia was a stable and nurturing presence, tall, solid and protective. One of my favorite pastimes was going to the bakery with Lydia. With my hand firmly clasped in hers, I could not wait to turn the corner to the open door where the smell of fresh French bread hot out of the oven wafted into the street. Beside the shelves of bread loaves, my eyes feasted on the tantalizing French pastry display. Artfully laid out was an array of colors, designs and textures: red and green fruit tarts in scalloped circles, orange apricot centers in powdered hearts, custard layered Napoleons, mocha filled flowers, and marzipan fruits for my dolls. I was allowed to choose a favorite to bring home for tea, our daily snack at four o’clock. Two loaves of warm bread were placed in a paper bag, and, indulging my fantasy, Lydia would tear off a piece for me to nibble on all the way home.

She became an important maternal figure in my life. And so it was a big and sad event when, one day, our parents announced Lydia would be leaving us. She was going to have a baby. My parents were as shocked as we were since there had been no visible sign of her pregnancy. She had evidently had a lover and wanted to keep her condition secret to retain her job as long as possible.

During this period in France, our surroundings seemed fairly idyllic. On many afternoons we were taken by our maid Michelle to the Bois de Boulogne, a beautiful park like those depicting genteel life in impressionist paintings with women in long bustle gowns and parasols. Though the gowns were gone, the aura of Parisian propriety, refinement and gentility remained. There were elegant navy blue infant carriages pushed by maids in no-nonsense navy uniforms; little boys dressed in sailor suits, sailing their toy boats in the pond and little girls in frilly dresses playing with their dolls. There were families, stylishly dressed, sharing picnics on blankets under the shade of huge leafy trees. In the folds of this propriety, lost in furtive groves, beat the heart of Paris in the arms of lovers intertwined, eyes lost in each other, oblivious to the surrounding world. These serene, secluded scenes out of Renoir and Monet were in stark contrast to scenes from my parents’ Parisian ventures into Toulouse Lautrec’s more bawdy world of Moulin Rouge can-can dancers or more decadent venues.

One day amidst the park’s serenity I ventured off into a wooded