Sole Survivor

by Holly Dunn

  We see violent depictions of the most heinous acts in movies and television shows every day. Brutal acts, murders, and rapes—things we see again and again as fictional realities, we read in the papers and see in the news about such crimes, except this time they are ‘real.’ We grow used to the climate, though; we grow calloused and indifferent.

  It seems almost inhuman to react as we do, but we don’t really have another choice, do we? We must live our lives, and we simply cannot give each tragedy its due, or our lives would be one long funeral procession.

  We just might have a choice, though. If we can remember that the anonymous stories of the papers and news do involve flesh and blood human beings, maybe we can retain a bit of our humanity in the face of such a maddening and desensitizing culture. Maybe with such a simple rule of thumb, we can avoid that hardening of our hearts that will eventually shock our self-respect to the point we can no longer recognize ourselves or our pain.

  To that grade school friend and high school comrade, I wish you the joy and peace you deserve. May the evil of that day remain there, never to touch you again. Thank you for the lesson in humanity.

  I had been controlled and precise while I read Chad’s article. Once I finished reading, the paper trembling in my hands, I looked up at the audience.

  “When I first read this, I remember thinking, ‘He had a crush on me?’”

  There was a collective gasp throughout the room as the girls realized the article was about me. I was the one he was referring to in this horrible story—the one who had been attacked, the one who had been raped.

  Throughout the weekend, I’d maintained my usual outgoing, friendly composure. I could sense the room was stunned to learn that this fun-loving girl in front of them was the same one who had endured this horrific tragedy.

  Without someone else’s words to read, I started to break down. I felt exposed, on display. I couldn’t make out one single face for the tears that flooded my vision. I decided to just be honest. I talked about how angry—how downright pissed—I was, how I had screamed and raged at this good God who was supposed to take care of me.

  “I can’t give you any answers to the questions we think to ourselves but are afraid to ask out loud,” I said between sobs. “I can’t explain evil. I don’t know what to tell you about why terrible things happen to people who don’t deserve it. All I can say is that God’s presence keeps pushing past my anger. He keeps showing up. In the midst of the rape. In the midst of my raging. When I least expect it, he keeps telling me he’s here with me, in it all.”

  By the time I finished speaking, I was crying so much I didn’t think anyone could hear what I said.

  During a normal session, attendees take lots of notes, or doodle, or shift in their seats. But for the entire fifteen to twenty minutes I spoke, not a person moved. Not a page rustled. Pencils were still. The room seemed spellbound. Those who hadn’t known this story were shocked to see my jovial and polished demeanor morph into something so raw and vulnerable.

  The most beautiful part was that I didn’t feel shamed or judged. I felt like the hearts of an entire room full of young women were breaking along with mine. I was weeping, but so were all the girls who had listened to me. After the talk, I was due back in the chapel for another round of prayer, but I could hardly advance a step without someone else standing up to wrap their arms around me. My presentation was ending in a huge hug-fest.

  When I finally made it to the back of the room, Nancy put her arm around my shoulders and walked with me to the chapel where I would pray again with the team leaders and leave the brass cross on the altar for the next speaker. As soon as we were outside, Nancy hugged me and told me how brave I had been.

  “I have never been more proud than I am right now,” Nancy said, “seeing you open up and change lives this weekend.”

  Typically, while a youth speaker is back in the chapel praying after his or her talk, the groups each huddle around their respective tables to discuss the topic presented. The takeaways from the messages don’t vary all that much. Usually kids will talk about a Scripture verse that’s new to them, or how they related to the story, or how they’ve learned from similar experiences in their lives. An assistant director later told Nancy the room was deathly silent after I walked out. Not a person spoke. The first comments that were finally voiced were, “How do you live through something like that? How do you live to tell the story?” This had been the dilemma of many of my friends and family: How do you respond to such a horrific event in any normal way?

  After the closing prayer time in the chapel, I was brought back into the conference room and the candidates were allowed to ask questions. I can’t remember what they asked, or how I responded. I understood that what I had shared was incomprehensible for most. But through the incredibly positive response I received, I realized maybe there was power in the simple telling of my story—power to change, transform, heal. Being open and honest and talking freely about what had happened to me, and seeing that I could do it—I saw that as a gift I offered the listeners, and one offered back to me in return. I decided then that I wanted to exchange that gift with as many people as I could. Maybe sharing my story would be how the horror would be transformed into beauty.

  The Chrysalis retreat was a profound and special moment that marked a shift in my spirit and in the direction my life would take after the assault. I was reminded that God’s ways and his thoughts are beyond human comprehension, and my faith nudged me toward trusting in his inherent goodness. Despite the circumstances, God still had a plan for my life; I simply had to rest and trust in him for whatever would follow.

  CHAPTER 11.

  First Anniversary

  Not long after my twenty-first birthday in January of 1998, the nation found itself riveted around news of Bill Clinton’s sex scandal involving a White House intern. While President Clinton was vehemently denying his relationship with “that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” I was living in a particular denial of my own.

  From the outside, my friends and family thought I was strong and keeping it together, but only because I portrayed myself that way. On the inside, however, I was suffering. I was still having panic attacks, and I regularly burst into tears. I wasn’t abusing drugs or alcohol or engaging in any obvious self-destruction, but nor was I doing anything to heal from the trauma. I felt absolutely miserable.

  I was also floundering in school. For spring semester, I attempted to take a normal course load, but I didn’t have a lot of drive or motivation to attend classes and couldn’t focus well enough to maintain decent grades. I assumed all my professors knew what I was going through, and I felt I was owed a little grace. Some teachers were really nice to me, but many didn’t even realize I was that girl most everyone on campus had heard about.

  While I had more or less come to terms with the fact that I’d almost died, I wasn’t facing the full extent of what had happened. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back it’s clear to me how much I was repressing the rape. Much worse than being beaten nearly to death, the rape was the most traumatic part of my experience. Rape is such an intimate, dehumanizing violation that the emotional and psychological damage it causes is almost indescribable. A rapist takes away a woman’s agency over her own body. I tend to be a control freak anyway, and my rapist completely robbed me of my personal power and control. But I couldn’t have articulated these feelings back then. I thought I was processing the attack by talking about it with my loved ones, but I wasn’t getting any closer to real healing.

  Throughout the spring semester, I developed an increasingly close relationship with Jacob. He was living on his own in an apartment just a few miles south of campus and working full-time at Phillip Gall’s. I spent countless evenings sitting on the beige carpet in the middle of his living room, bawling until my eyes throbbed, trying to express the feelings of loss, the overwhelming guilt and shame. Jacob was a saint: though he couldn’t really understand what I was going through, he listened faithfully and held me
and did his best to offer words of wisdom and comfort. But what could he say that would really make a difference?

  Though Jacob and I spent a lot of time together, I continued working at the outdoor store and relished being with my friends and sorority sisters. Despite my inner turmoil, I was poignantly aware of how precious and fleeting these college years were. I wanted to enjoy my last couple of years as a carefree young adult, which meant doing my best to ignore the continued reverberations of such traumatic violence. Though I desperately needed to heal, I couldn’t do both the hard emotional work and have fun—so I chose to have fun with my friends as often as I could, and when negative feelings cropped up I warded them off by being funny. That was just my style. For the most part, coping this way carried me through the rest of the semester.

  When school wrapped up for the year, I moved out of the sorority house and went home to Evansville. My sister was engaged and would get married at the end of June, and as her maid of honor, I stayed busy helping her prepare for the wedding and the bridal showers that preceded it. That summer, Heather and I worked for our dad at his office in downtown Evansville, but we spent most of our time planning her wedding: filling out invitations, printing mailing labels, stamping envelopes. I was grateful for any activity that filled up my time and every diversion that kept my mind occupied. There had been no meaningful progress on the investigation since the attack, and no matter how much I tried getting on with my life, I grew more and more unsettled the closer we came to the one-year anniversary. It loomed like a ghost in the shadows, determined to haunt me every single year. For all my coping mechanisms, for all the ways I avoided facing the worst, there was no way I could avoid that dreaded date.

  In the meantime, I tried to focus instead on a more cheerful occasion. On Saturday, June 27, 1998, Heather and her fiancé, Fred Niemeier, were married at St. Benedict Cathedral in Evansville. St. Ben’s, as we called it, was an enormous church with a red-brick exterior and a regal sanctuary with ceilings that soared sixty-five feet high. White Corinthian columns lined the far walls and held up the baldachin above the marble altar. This graceful cathedral was also our childhood church, and our family felt a warm familiarity with the parish. Heather and I had both attended St. Ben’s Cathedral School when we were elementary students, before moving on to Reitz Memorial High School just down the street. St. Ben’s was also where we had our first communion and where we were confirmed in the faith.

  The wedding started at six o’clock, after Saturday’s afternoon Mass. Jacob was in town to be my date to the wedding—and to help calm my nerves. I had agreed to sing during the lighting of the unity candle, and I was anxious about performing in front so many people. The sanctuary’s ornately carved wooden pews quickly filled with hundreds of guests. Wearing floor-length, sleeveless pink gowns, the bridesmaids and I processed to the front of the church, followed by Heather, escorted by our dad.

  After the exchange of vows and rings, our parents and the groom’s parents came forward to a small table near the altar where they lit two tall white candles on either side of a larger one. As the candles were lit, I stood at a microphone and sang a song called “Household of Faith,” by a Christian artist named Steve Green. “We will be a family in a house that will be a home, and with faith we'll build it strong, we’ll build a household of faith, that together we can make.”

  For once, in what seemed like a really long time, my family and I were gathered in our church where all eyes were gazing at someone other than me. Though I was singing a solo, I was off to the side while the guests watched Fred and Heather take the smaller candles to light the candle in the middle, signifying the start of their union. I wasn’t merely that “female UK student” who had been assaulted on the train tracks in Lexington. For this special day, I was the maid of honor in a beautiful wedding, supporting my big sister as she entered a new phase of life.

  A few weeks after her wedding, Heather was shocked to discover she was pregnant—the unintended consequence of taking antibiotics during her honeymoon. Only a year and a half out of college, she had just gotten married, started a new teaching job, and was in the middle of building a new house. Having a baby seemed like too much, too soon for her. I remember being with her when she looked at the pregnancy test results, even before Fred found out he was about to be a dad. She was distraught and in tears.

  “We had a plan!” she cried. “I wanted to live in the new house for five years before we had a baby.”

  “Don’t worry, Heather, you’re married now and this just means you’re having a baby a little sooner!”

  I did my best to reassure her that everything would be all right. After all of the tragedy in our family, we had new life on the way! There was so much joy ahead, even if the timing wasn’t quite in the plan.

  Heather’s adult life was in full bloom while mine continued to unravel. I tried to look past the impending anniversary of the attack and straight on to when my niece or nephew would be born, but the denial and avoidance was no longer working. The closer the anniversary came, the more I realized I couldn’t keep ignoring this gaping wound.

  During the summer, I had been returning regularly to Lexington to visit Jacob. But the crying on his shoulder all the time—whatever that form of processing and being with him and having him try to understand was—wasn’t working. I had been feeling emotionally detached, like I couldn’t be close to him, or anyone, or anything. It was the strangest feeling, to be both falling in love and yet completely on my guard. My heart wouldn’t let me continue this intimacy with him until I found some resolution to the tempest raging inside me.

  I came to the conclusion that I had to break up with Jacob so I could focus on fixing myself, whatever it took to do so. I remember the day I ended things with him—it was a hot and humid day at the end of July, and we went to get frozen yogurt, an otherwise fun and casual outing. We sat at a round table inside a TCBY store whose air conditioning was about as cold as the cup of frozen yogurt I held in my hand.

  “Jacob, I need to face the fact that I was raped. This is something I have to work on—I can’t keep avoiding it. And I have to do it on my own,” I said. “We need to break up.”

  Needless to say, Jacob was shocked. He hadn’t had any forewarning. I hadn’t led up to this pronouncement by detaching or pulling away—my decision seemed to him rather abrupt. His shock turned to anger and then to hurt. He took it hard—he had fallen in love with me after all. Jacob knew I was dealing with rape, and he had wanted so much to fix me. For a short while, he was still very kind to me, even sending me flowers just to make me smile.

  Not long afterward, an Internet search led me to the Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center in Lexington, which offered an eight-week support group facilitated by a trained counselor. The group started around the time I moved back to Lexington for my senior year and took place once a week on Thursday nights for a few hours a session. The crisis center was in an old, cream-colored house situated less than a mile northeast of the Kappa house. Our group met in a living room decorated in bright, lively colors with a hodgepodge mix of couches and chairs. The area was lit up by lots of lamps. It felt warm and safe.

  At our first meeting, we went around the room to introduce ourselves. The counselor who facilitated the group had a reserved but sweet demeanor, and I could tell she was experienced in cultivating and steering beneficial discussion. Besides the facilitator, there were six women in the group, all different ages and from a variety of backgrounds. When I told the women how I had been attacked, the general response was, “Oh, my God—that was you? I read about you in the news!”

  Most rapes are committed by someone the woman knows—an ex-boyfriend, a friend of a friend, an acquaintance of some kind. Only one other girl in our group had been raped by a complete stranger. She was about my age and also a college student. Someone had broken into her apartment and attacked her in her bedroom. Of all the women in our group, I identified with her the most.

  The college student who was raped by a strang
er was also the only other person who pressed charges against her attacker. Some were too scared to press charges or said the police hadn’t believed their side of the story or were afraid their personal histories would be used against them. In that sense, I had a better experience from a legal and societal point of view. Being violently raped by a stranger leaves little room to question the victim. Women in my support group who had been raped by people they knew were left in a grayer area, one that has been historically difficult to prosecute. There are, unfortunately, many people who tend to think that unless a weapon or some other kind of force was used, a woman wasn’t really raped. Given how easy it is to be disbelieved, to be blamed even, rape victims are often silenced and left reeling with shame. Even when a woman does seek justice, she can count on a legal process as vulnerable and traumatizing as the rape itself. No wonder most of the women in my group never bothered to proceed.

  After the introductions, our counselor explained the rules and boundaries that needed to be honored so we could all feel safe to share. What was said in the group would be mutually supportive and absolutely confidential. We were allowed to respond to each other and give feedback. If we ran into each other outside of the sessions, we could say hello but we weren’t supposed to fraternize.

  “Over the course of the next eight weeks,” explained the counselor, “we’ll walk together through the typical stages of recovery from rape. Everyone has her own journey of healing, but understanding these phases will assure you your feelings and responses are normal and help you recognize where you are in the process at any given time.”

  We had a booklet to accompany the program. As the counselor spoke, I flipped through the pages to get a sense of what I was in for over the next two months. The booklet first described the acute phase, a period of a few days to a few weeks immediately following the rape, in which a survivor would likely be feeling shock, fear, and anger. She might be numb or extremely upset. During the immediate aftermath, physical pain and disruption to sleep and eating patterns are common.