Is there a day you’ve lived that marked a point when your life changed in a profound, fundamental way? Not the day you got your first job, or moved into your first place. I mean a single event that turned your life upside down, shaking you to your foundation. I’m talking about a day when your personal life continuum split in two so that from that point forward you would mark time as before the event and after the event.
If you’d asked me this question before June 30, 2006, I might have told you that pivotal point was the day I got married, the day my first child was born, or the day my father died. I might have told you there were several of these days, so it’s impossible to pick just one. Before June 30, 2006, I didn’t know what a day like that really was. I‘d heard the expression before, but didn’t truly appreciate the meaning of the phase, “Your life can change in an instant.” On that day in June 2006, an unbreechable chasm opened for me, like an earth quake, separating the before from the after, the then from the now. It severed my life from a state of uninformed, blissful ignorance to one of anguished, awful wisdom. It was that day I came to understand those things that happen only to other people could happen to me; that impossible, shrieking terror can strike right in your own back yard. And after it happens, nothing will ever be the same.
On June 30, 2006 I experienced such a day when my son, Justin Donnell Woodly took his own life. He was 24 years old.
Now when I reach back to life experiences from my past they are marked in time as before Justin’s death or after Justin’s death. The day we lost him seared a bright red dividing line through my existence in a way no other event has, or probably ever will. Those of us who’ve lived through such a day can tell you that the after death portion of this time continuum begins in a desolate, alternative universe; and the best we can do is to struggle towards some kind of equilibrium in an awful “new normal”.
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