Resurrected Roadkill: Triumph over Tragedy and Awakening from the Unlived Life

By Melanie Goodwin

 Melanie caught a life-threatening disease within one day of her birth. The heroic care to save her life was successful - except for the early affects of trauma, affecting her through life. Growing up in chronic conflict with parents, babysitters, and schools, Melanie "learned" people are treacherous

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author Academy Elite
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885831734

Book preview

Prologue

I am in my beloved woods. The deep, verdant canopy of green is rocking in the winds over Tennessee.

I love the oceanic sound of wind through leaves.

At first, I thought the sound in the brush behind me was a deer nearby. But it was a man. And not dressed for hiking at all. He was in Carhartt’s and steel-toed boots, but new ones. His head was facing down, covered by a ball cap.

Who hikes in brand new, steel-toed work boots? Not a hiker.

And . . . he was heading toward me.

I’ll cut my hike short today, I thought, conjuring ways to go off-trail and get right to my car. I picked up my speed. At a bend in the trail, I glanced behind me. The man had picked up his speed as well. He was closing the distance between us.

I could slow down and let him pass? That’s not weird—it’s typical trail etiquette. But nothing in me wanted to let him close the gap. I picked up my pace again. The trees were agitating in the wind now. Another glance confirmed the man sped up more, too, shrinking the gap between us.

Then I saw the hammer. Like a startled deer, I leaped off-trail in a full sprint.

This can’t be happening!

Unlike a deer, I tripped and fumbled.

I just need to get to my car. Find the clearing. Get to the car. And go!

Then I noticed the cold underbrush cutting my feet. That’s odd. Why am I barefoot?

Never mind. The crunchy underbrush was relieving because it meant there was frost on the ground. Without frost, I’d be worried about snakes. I’ve seen rattlesnakes at this lake, with bodies as wide as fire hoses. Thank God they’re all hibernating now. But why is someone chasing me with a hammer?

I reached the clearing and spotted my car. In that moment, it looked as beautiful to me as a lost loved one returned home. I ran faster and got inside. But when I opened the console, there were no keys. They’re here. I know they’re here. I checked the passenger seat and reached into the glove box. No keys.

I reached my hand under the seat and felt around on the car floor.

If my keys weren’t where I left them, then someone had been in the car. But I didn’t yet process the implication.

I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw the man enter the clearing. A sense of hatred filled my gut.

I finally spotted my keys on the backseat floor, but then something else was strange: I’ve never owned a car like this. When I put the key in the ignition, the engine just made a clicking sound. Now the man was only fifteen feet from the car.

Think, Melanie, think!

I turned the keys again and mumbled, Please work, please start.

I turned the keys one more time. Instead of a rumbling car engine, all I heard was a tiny click. I slapped the steering wheel with both hands.

Was the alternator dead?

What if that man chasing me has been here? What if . . . ?

My world reverberated with the sound of his hammer crashing through my driver-side window. I held the door lock with my left hand, but he slammed his hammer down a second time, right into my hand. That’s when my mind fractured. All I remember is images and non-sequential pieces after that.

He unlocked the door and fought down my kicking legs. I couldn’t scratch him or bite him through his Carhartt sleeves. He pulled me out of my car by my hair. I sputtered something like, Why are you doing this? and I asked him to stop. But he just kept dragging me.

He never spoke. Only marched.

I clawed at his hands with my one good hand, but he never let go of me.

I tried to swing around and kick him, but when I got a small footing, he jerked me off my feet and dragged me across the meadow.

Getting that brief footing made him angrier. He yanked me up by my hair and drop-kicked me in the stomach. I got a mouthful of dirt when I plunged down, and more ground as he pulled me further, face down. I heard something pop in my neck, and everything turned red for a millisecond. I tried to take a breath without inhaling dirt.

Then it all stopped. He turned me face-up and sat down on my hips like a rodeo cowboy at a roping event. What was he reaching for?

Pinned down for slaughter, I still fought by getting one of my legs underneath me and bucking him off. But he just hammered my knee and broke the leg I resisted him with. I tried to scream, but no sound came. All the dirt in my mouth made me cough and sputter.

For a flash of a second, I thought, This is how my life ends?

Raising the hammer above my head, he paused and savored what he was about to do. He premeditated doing this.

The hammer came flying toward my face.

Gasping, I sat upright in bed. I scanned the room and realized I was in my bedroom at my Nashville home, tucked in the hills above Granny White Pike. I could hear trees blowing in a heavy wind outside.

That same nightmare. Again.

My whole body was seized up in one giant muscle spasm. I couldn’t relax anything, and my chest ached from my racing heart. Still fearing for my life, I had to wait for my muscles to stop seizing before I could control my body and leave the bedroom.

What the f—k, Melanie! What the f—k are you doing?

I had startled my husband of almost twenty-four years. A frequent dilemma. I felt terrible for disturbing him, but didn’t have a clue how to calm him down. I chose a minimal approach and mumble the word Sorry.

D—it! he breached in bed like a boat-breaking killer whale.

Can hearts explode? I wondered, feeling my chest. My mind began conjuring ways to calm my speeding heart, but then I notice my husband had fallen back to sleep.

Thank God he wouldn’t be an additional factor right now. My heart was still pounding loud and fast. I waited a few more minutes, grabbed my robe, and then tip-toed out quietly.

Always be silent.

Unwinding the bedroom doorknob so the door would shut without a sound, I felt some relief from heading downstairs.

Once I was in the kitchen, I didn’t seize up anymore, but my chest still ached as if I had sprinted a mile.

I drank water, took a valerian root, and crossed the open floor plan to our sofa and TV area. The TV would provide a welcome distraction; it had been our opiate of choice for decades.

I did that weird breathing thing again.

I had searched the internet about rapid, involuntary inhales when it started happening many times a day, a few years ago. What is it called when small children who have been crying settle down and then take about five-to-ten rapid inhales? According to search results, it’s called stutter-breathing—an involuntary physiological response from crying so hard that the body needs to reset several disrupted systems. The odd thing in my case is that I was stutter-breathing without crying beforehand; I did it out of the blue.

Or so I thought.

The next thing I heard was a hammering sound in the kitchen. I jumped from my sleeping position on the sofa. It was my husband. I’ll call him Dylan, though that’s not his real name.

Dylan was slapping old coffee grounds out of a metal filter on the metal kitchen sink, and mumbling as he punched buttons on the coffee maker.

My body seized again and I couldn’t move. He’ll have coffee on the patio, I thought.

But instead of his routine outside, he came into the TV area where I was on the sofa.

"Jeez, you’re f—king killing me!" he hissed as he swept the TV remote off the coffee table and punched the volume button up about thirty clicks. With the TV blaring, Dylan stood behind the sofa, radiating frustration and anger.

On cue, I grabbed my robe and left the room.

My intention was to head straight to bed, but the empty squirrel feeder caught my eye outside the front door. These pesky things destroyed my garden and my attempts at beautifying, but I was fond of them anyway. . . . Was there meaning in that? I wondered as I gave them fresh walnuts and headed for bed.

As I climbed the stairs, I thought, Lord, who have I become? It’s 8:30 a.m., and I’ve had all the day I can take.

Part One

Reenactment

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

~ Carl Jung

1

The Worst Day

Some days you tame the tiger. And some days the tiger has you for lunch.

~ Tug McGraw

A few years ago, I was invited to attend a private house concert that one of my Nashville friends had won in a silent auction. The singer/songwriter giving the performance was an up-and-coming country musician who later became a full-blown star.

I spent that evening migrating from bite-sized quiches and canapes in the dining room, to my friend’s five-star living room with twenty-foot ceilings and an ebony grand piano. We watched as the musician set up his guitars beside the piano with his back to the stairs. The only empty seats we could find were front and center, less than three feet from the performer.

During his mid-set banter, he asked, Have you ever had the worst day of your life?

Since I’m not from the South, I’d never heard this expression before, and I didn’t know it was rhetorical. I recalled the worst day of my life and blurted, God, I hope so!

Although this singer was up-and-coming, he had honed his craft with audiences for years. He laughed at my comment and incorporated me into part of his act. My face was so hot I thought I could fry an egg on it.

My brain traveled back to that worst day. It happened in my home state of California, in the summer of 1987. It had marked some kind of milestone for me. Like the end of childhood, like the first time you’re sick away from home and you wish you could call and get some chicken soup from your mother.

That was the first day I thought my life might not turn out very well.

It was a sunny day and my two beautiful daughters were with me—a three-year-old and a nine-month-old. Everything was hard that day despite the glorious weather. Getting up, keeping a smile on my face, and trying to stay present. When I spaced out sometimes, my children would have to call to me, or get in my face to bring me back into the moment. That mental leaving is a symptom and has a name, but I hadn’t learned this yet.

On that day, we had tickets to see Sesame Street on Ice. After reaching our seats at the Long Beach Arena, my daughters and I waited for the matinee to begin. When the lights dimmed, the announcer began his excitement-cueing line: Ladies and Gentlemen. . . ., followed by the appearance of that big yellow bird, towering and awkward in his ice skates. It was delightful to experience an arena full of excited preschoolers releasing high-octane squeals of exuberance that only small children can emit. I enjoyed hearing them, but I felt outside of life that day, observing from behind an invisible veil of stunned sorrow and shame.

My senses felt dulled and delayed as if I were wearing earplugs. The only thing that could touch me were the gleaming faces of my happy baby and my toddler. My children anchored me in the present; something I could not do for myself.

As the audio boomed and the ice-skating began, my children’s eyes were super-glued onto the performance. Now. Now I can stop holding myself together for a little while. I felt the first tears slipping down my cheek.

Besides the juxtaposition of Big Bird’s bumbling elegance, the other irony was how I wept in a sea of humanity, feeling alone. At twenty-nine, all expectations I had of a good life were dying. Soon, I’d be a two-time divorcee, but this time I was a single mother too. A label that stung like a slap.

How did this happen? I kept wondering. I did well in school, earned top grades, won lots of awards. What was wrong with me?

My three-year-old gave me a "Did-you-see-that?" glance—one of the great joys of parenting. I summoned enthusiasm and nodded back to her. My children continued to check in with me from time-to-time, and it made me smile to see them happy and engaged.

But my mind was looping.

It was stuck in a replay pattern from which there was no exit. I asked myself over and over, What is wrong? How did I get here? There are no answers from inside a loop. I knew I was exiting a volatile situation by ending the marriage, but I also hated that I was getting a second divorce. My inner life was like a washing machine on an agitation cycle; it was a tangle of different fabric patterns, revealing recognizable glimpses of my life here or there, but my brain was twisting up, sinking in subsurface knots.

Then, the audience’s laughter in the present jerked me to wake up back in Nashville, at the private country music concert. It had been twenty years since Sesame Street on Ice, but once again, I was feeling alone and exposed while surrounded by humanity. And once again, I was with a volatile man—my new husband.

Throughout the last two decades, I had divorced my children’s father, become a Christian, and spent seven of the happiest years of my life as a single mom. As a single mom, my home was a place of peace.

Then I married a Christian man, expecting things to go better and vowing to stay married for life. Now, both my adult daughters were university graduates living their own lives. Even though that’s what parents want for their children, nothing could fill the loud and persistent emptiness that had been exposed by their leaving home.

I stayed married for twenty years, but that didn’t make it a good marriage.

So, there I was again, at another performance, fighting tears and thanking God for dimmed lights. Did the country singer, three feet from my face, understand why I was choking back tears? That’s when I realized I hadn’t had the worst day of my life.

The worst day was still coming.

2

Good News from the Czech Republic

‘Behold, the days are coming,’ declares the Lord God, ‘when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.’

~ Amos 8:11 (ESV)

As a single mom and brand-new Christian, I struggled with the contrast between today’s version of Christianity, versus how the church was described in the New Testament. New Testament believers, especially the Apostles, seemed to know where to go, what people needed, when to show up, and what God was saying or wanting to do. Unlike them, I could not hear the voice of God.

I heard it once, and it was the reason I became a Christian, despite my distaste for Churchianity. But hearing God was a rarity. I did not experience the nearness of God, nor the abiding reality described in the New Testament. I was told that hearing God was only for Old Testament Prophets or New Testament Apostles. Hearing God didn’t happen in our time, or to regular people like you or me.

I found that position heartbreaking and hoped it wasn’t true. What kind of father doesn’t converse with his children? What kind of friend doesn’t share his heart or talk with you?

Soon, I met an additional circle of Christian friends who were involved in prayer groups where I got to see the Holy Spirit was active and speaking—even today. These situations whet my appetite further for the reality of an intimate relationship with God. After that, I left California with my two children, aged five and three, and moved to Kansas City, Missouri. I attended a ministry school there called Grace Training Center.

During that time, I had the honor of serving the freed church in Eastern Europe right after the Berlin wall came down. I entered Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution and the forming of the new nation of the Czech Republic.

I noticed something different about the Czech church right away; they seemed to hear God the same way as New Testament believers had. Under communist persecution, Christians had no church building and it was illegal for them to gather. They never met in the same place or on a predictable schedule. Even young Christians were adept at finding church services by hearing and following where God wanted them to go, and when. I marveled at how the Holy Spirit guided these people where they needed to go. The church had to hear God’s Spirit; it was the only way of being in fellowship, and their survival as an underground movement depended on it.

This ended any question in my mind about whether God was speaking today, and if hearing Him was possible.

But the question remained, why was hearing God so hard for me?

I returned from the Czech Republic in 1992 with an insatiable hunger to hear God and walk with Him. If God was always present, and always speaking, then the problem must be with me.

That’s how my prayer and worshiping lifestyle began.

When I married Dylan in 1994, I spent the next ten years solving the problem of feeling disconnected from God. I call those years my Cloister Years. I spent most of my time homeschooling my children and spending about a hundred hours each month in private prayer and worship. I was a contemplative, but I didn’t know that yet.

Why was feeling disconnected from God so hard to change? And how was my severed state resolved? Rather than tell you, I hope to show you. But the short answer is that God used my worshiping lifestyle and one particular gift—given to all of humankind—to bridge the disconnect and save my life.

The Christian Imagination, as pioneered by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and G. K. Chesterton, is a little-known gift functioning as the long-lost twin of reason, and a gateway to hearing and knowing God. It’s a huge part of what my story is about. This image-forming capability has been called the Christian Imagination by Chesterton, and The Poetic Imagination by C. S. Lewis and his Inkling cohorts. All of them were students of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

To begin, let me say what Poetic Imagination is not.

Our secular schools have taught us that imagination is the ability to source ideas or make stuff up. Some people believe that it’s normal for only a few people to reach adulthood with their imaginations intact. That is a reduced concept of the imagination. A Christian understanding of the human imagination sees our imagination as a God-given capacity for receiving input from Beyond; thus, making dialogue with God available to all.

In contrast, the modern (reductionist) understanding of the imagination is a major reason some believe they cannot find or hear God. When God speaks within their minds, they think they are making it up, and when God speaks through symbols, they don’t understand or trust symbolic communication well enough to know that God is communicating. The result is that human beings believe they are living in isolation—a condition God did not intend.

God made human beings capable of dialogue with Him. The story of Adam and Eve shows they had easy access to conversation with God in the Garden of Eden. When human beings cannot communicate with God, we have difficulty fulfilling a divine purpose, receiving divine guidance, and finding meaning in our lives. The famine of meaning arises from a reductionist understanding of imagination.

One of my favorite descriptions of our God-given capacity to see images within our mind is in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.1

Steven Pressfield, a contemporary author, describes the artist as one who shuttles between two worlds.² In other words, the artist shuttles between the world of the conscious mind and the world of the higher mind, or Divine Ground.

Poetic Imagination involves artists in their work, but making art is the byproduct of the human imagination, which is given to all. Understanding parables, seeing mental pictures, hearing within the mind, and even language itself are all uses of human imagination. Parables, metaphors, and even words are symbolic and based on our capacity to process information where one thing can mean another.

Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares is not about agriculture or weeding. The story points out that not everyone claiming to accept the principles of the kingdom of heaven lives by them. Also, the parable reveals that evil and good will remain intertwined, and the removal of evil that we long for is not always an option until the end of the age.

The difference between the Christian and modern, secular understanding of imagination is input versus output. Christians believe that an intangible, invisible, and loving God created our universe. Therefore, He designed our brains for communication with Him. On the other hand, secularists only believe in the material, visible and measurable world. To a secularist, our brains are the only source of everything we hear and see within our minds. Christians believe in a cosmos that is in dialogue with God, and human beings can take part through prayer. Secularists believe they are alone. Modernists credit the brain as the only source of all intangible experiences.

Scientists once sent an external stimulus into the brain and watched the brain respond using dye,³ which mimicked what would happen when a person encounters God. Since neuroscientists mimicked a God encounter in a lab setting by using external stimuli upon people’s brains, they claim to have proved that God doesn’t exist.

But, not all scientists reached that conclusion. I believe it proves that human brains recognize input from outside sources. It does not prove that they sourced a God encounter in the human brain.

For example, when we hear a train, we can know the train sound is external. We don’t think we made up the sound with our imagination. Hearing God is similar. There is a distinct sense, and a distinct area of the brain at work when listening to God, as opposed to the area of the brain that is engaged in making something up or hearing external sources. Part of the Christian life is learning to tell the difference.

Part of the Artistic life is learning to position oneself to receive from the beyond.

Poetic Imagination is an external force that penetrates the human mind with content and intent that is not our own. People who have non-lab encounters report being healed, guided, inspired, taught, cautioned, reprimanded, and given creative solutions to problems. Some of the more famous intellects who credit God and the imagination for their body of work are C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Shakespeare, and Albert Einstein, to name just a few.

God is communicating. However, until I understood and trusted my imagination, I could not hear God speak.

According to poet Malcolm Guite, Coleridge argued that insights of the imagination are insights into reality itself. We possess the ability to see beyond and to know that there is something—Some One—behind the veil, reaching out to us. He writes:

A man that looks on glass

On it may stay his eye

Or if he pleases through it pass

And there the heavens espy.4

Elizabeth Barrett Browning understood, as well:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God:

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,

And daub their natural faces unaware.5

As Malcolm Guite says, the imagination, far from being a merely subjective realm of fantasy, is, in fact, an essential instrument with which we grasp the truth.⁶

Since I had an incorrect and reduced understanding of the Christian Imagination, I lived in a cut-off state, unable to hear God who is ever present, speaking, and life-giving.

Like bricks in a wall, God deconstructed the blocks and removed barriers within my soul. Perhaps my experience with imagination (specifically the artistic, Poetic Imagination) reached beyond grasping for truth. Like C.S. Lewis, Leanne Payne, and others before me, I saw the imagination as more than just a means to appreciate or make art. I saw it as the primary vehicle—a gateway—for hearing God, renewing the mind, healing, and recovery.

3

Permission to Rest

Stopping, calming, and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, the course of our destruction will just continue.1

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Pear trees blossomed outside my immunologist’s third-story window