Sometimes I Wake an Atheist: Stories of Tragedy Bringing Forth Hope

By Linda Cunningham

Tragedy can strike at any time, and individual tragedies can be harrowing, painful experiences in the moment. Yet after tragedy, we can be left with feelings of doubt, guilt, grief, and loss, and the suffering can seem to have no end. We may even question our deepest beliefs.

Sometimes I Wake an Atheist is a collection of hopeful personal stories of tragedy—but stories that end in triumph thanks to an abiding faith and trust in God. Author Linda Cunningham and other women of faith share their true stories of being impacted by the variable courses of life-altering events. Each uniquely personal and true story is an exertion to propel you into realizing that life beyond uncharted tragedy is both amazing and joyous.

God is able to take our heartaches and guide them into faith with thanksgiving. He takes our suffering and coverts it into hope. God will meet you in your every heartfelt loss and sustain you through himself—he will never leave you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973659150

Linda Cunningham

The authors of Sometimes I Wake an Atheist are resilient women who have all experienced some sort of tragedy throughout their lives. Their stories are as equally heartbreaking as they are hopeful, sorrowful as they are courageous, and painful as they are beautiful. The authors currently live in Jacksonville, Florida.

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Copyright © 2019 Linda Cunningham and Friends.

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-9736-5914-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-5916-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-5915-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019904071

WestBow Press rev. date: 5/17/2019

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CONTENTS

Prologue

You Are My Son: Shine!

by Tricia Cox

Loss of Child to Drug Addiction

Beautifully Broken

by Meghan Woods

Living with Post-Traumatic Injuries

Allison’s Gift

by Drew Haramis

Loss of a Child to a Car Accident

Held in Your Grace

by Shirley Elliot

A Husband’s Death and the Broken Relationship of a Daughter

A Wooden Fence

by Jennifer Trednick

Strength in Living with Chronic Diseases

A Stern Struggle

by Anne Marie Maige

Chron’s, Cancer, and Surrender

Sudden Loss of a Soul Mate

by Nia Bradberry

From Traumatic Grief to Finding Solace

Tidal Wave

by Sam McCranie

The Debilitating Slide of Multiple Sclerosis

Remembrance

by Mary Bower

A Family’s Embrace of Cerebral Palsy

Lindsay Grace: Blessings in Disguise

by Michelle Watt

Life with a Special Needs Child

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

Linda Cunningham

T ragedy comes slowly for some yet swiftly for others. Often, it comes out of nowhere, and lives are forever changed. Whether an individual’s journey has a life-altering event that comes on like a tsunami or is a never-ending rainstorm, we are left holding the remains. They are holes too deep to fill, hearts irreversibly empty, and physical bodies beyond repair.

What remains is the choice of our minds’ trajectories. Where is God? Where was God? How could He? Does He still exist for me presently? Is there hope for redemption? Restoration? Forgiveness? Is there life beyond sorrow and hardship? The answer is Absolutely! There are hope and hidden treasures in the new abyss. These hopes are to be found in our God, who has created us and continues to draw our hearts and souls closer to Him. Hope can also be found in our families, our friends, and ourselves.

Having been personally involved with my family in a traumatic car accident, weathering and surviving breast cancer, and suffering the pain of divorce, I understand when hope is dim. I can arise not unscathed but sustained and positively changed by God.

Women of faith whose lives have been affected by variable courses of life-altering events have written the chapters in this book. Each uniquely personal and true story is an exertion to propel the reader to realize that life beyond unchartered tragedy is both amazing and joyous. God can take our heartaches and guide them into faith with thanksgiving. He takes our suffering and converts it into hope. God will meet you in your every heartfelt loss and sustain you through Himself. He will never leave you.

For the last thirty years, I have had the privilege of working as an entrepreneur, fashion designer, and retailer. Through my professional and personal relationships with my clients, God has providentially placed each of these amazing writers in my path. Open your heart and mind to each woman’s story. You will find both heartache and divine inspiration.

YOU ARE MY SON: SHINE!

Tricia Cox

A few weeks after my twenty-seven-year-old son, Max, died of a drug overdose, my daughter, Mallory, said to me, I think our goal here, Mom, is to laugh a little more than we cry each day. Most people wouldn’t understand this, but we had sort of been planning for this day for a long time. It had been a fifteen-year struggle for our family as we watched our beloved son and brother slowly kill himself each day. A mother believes and dreams so many wonderful things for her child. From conception on, her plans are big, and God forbid if anything should get in the way of them. So even the idea that anything might be going wrong is not an option. And so my own struggle began.

I found out Max had a serious drug problem from his best friend’s mother. It’s a little blurry now when it all really began, yet all the horrific moments still stand out crystal clear, as if they happened yesterday. It seems he went to bed one night my beautiful, handsome, sweet boy and woke up the next day an angry, med-seeking, drug-addicted stranger.

In the beginning, he complained of depression, and his doctor was concerned. Not knowing as much as I know now, I went ahead and found him a therapist. But truth be told, most young adults who are using drugs at that age—or really any age—cannot be diagnosed with any disorder until they are clean for about a year. The health community was slow getting on board; he was even diagnosed as schizophrenic. It was all pretty devastating. He was hospitalized and drugged, which made him even more dependent on opiates. Eventually, his doctor realized he was simply medication seeking and recommended he go to a drug-treatment facility. It was my first experience with having no control. A little thing called HIPPA made it hard for us to keep him in treatment in Florida because he had the right at sixteen to walk out of drug rehab anytime he wanted. We couldn’t even protect our minor son from killing himself with drugs.

He was sixteen when he ran away. It was April 22, Easter morning. Just like his birthday and the day he passed, it’s a date I will never forget. And Easter plays a recurring theme in Max’s story and mine. Easter is a beautiful time in the church. A time of rebirth. It is the holiest week in the Catholic Church. It’s more sacred than Christmas. But for me, I could focus only on the price Christ had to pay. I couldn’t see any hidden gift in all that horror and betrayal. As I look back now, Max running away from us was the beginning of the end of life as I would know it. I felt the weight of the cross and all the horror that came with it. I lost my son the day he started taking drugs.

I’ve often said if the military had sent mothers to Iraq, we would have found the weapons of mass destruction because, after a frantic search, we found him. We had the police pick him up for his own protection while we tried to find somewhere safe for him to get help out of state. As Max was in the back of a cop car being taken away to juvenile detention, my father, who was more like a dad than a grandfather to Max, walked up to the car to talk to him. Max spat at the window. It is a memory I have tried hard to forget. And I asked the question millions of people ask every day when they are in that place that no one can describe you until you find yourself there, feeling your whole being dissolving until there is nothing left of you.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

I later learned a word that I would use a lot in the next fourteen years.

Inconsolable.

We had to go out of state to get him someplace he couldn’t check himself out of. So we paid two ex-LSU football players to pick him up from the detention center, and they drove him to a lockdown boot camp in Mississippi. It was just one of the many hard things I had to do. We weren’t allowed to talk to him for the first two weeks. I had never been away from him that long and never went even a day without talking to him. He wrote us the sweetest letters: He was adjusting, he was getting better, he sounded like my son Max again, and we had that beautiful thing called hope.

It was short-lived.

Thirty days later, he sweet-talked the staff for a pass that led to him stealing a car and driving it back home with two other kids. He did not want to go back, and he promised he would go to rehab. It was the first of many such incidents. Every weekend, we would pile in the car and drive to the rehab in Orlando for family time. It was hard on us all.

I remember during one of our family sessions when the counselor recommended that I find some support. As I look back now, I see this was the first of many times God answered my prayers through other people. It’s how I found my way to the recovery group that saved my life. This was a place where God lived and worked through so many inspiring, caring, and struggling people just like me. But God wasn’t working fast enough for me. Max was not progressing and continued to struggle. It was hard for us. He moved out when he was seventeen. He said he wanted to be emancipated. It was pathetic and painful seeing him try to be independent as a drug user. He would leave and end up back at our doorstep, shoeless and with a garbage bag of clothes. It was gut-wrenching that we could do nothing to help, protect, or heal our minor son.

A week after he turned eighteen, I was on the phone with someone from my group sharing some strength and hope with her for her son. I was telling her that I