Vernal Equinox March 2021 53.3983671, -113.9590000

In the hushed embrace of early morning, the world seems to hold its breath, unaware of the horrors that await just after dawn. As the first light of Spring Equinox paints the sky in tentative hues of pink and gold, I find myself thrust into a nightmare beyond comprehension. Each heartbeat echoes the agony of 32 vicious wounds inflicted by a merciless blade, leaving me to bleed out in a ditch on a fallen tree. As blood runs quick and freely over my eyes, I stare at the tail lights of the vehicle that has abandoned me to my fate. With every ounce of self will, I force my body to remain lifeless, I fight primal instinct, waiting for the car to turn the corner and praying my attackers believe I am dead . Time has slowed down and seconds feel like hours,beside the retreating car the treeline starts to come alive, wavering in and out of clarity, the trees begin to resemble people. They are people I know, they are loved ones who have already passed on. They stand silent and watch me , they wait for me to decide. Will I rise and fight for my life? Will I remain in the ditch. There is no right or wrong , just a decision that needs to be made . The tail lights disappear around the corner and I rise to my feet .I feel a surge of sticky warm thick syrup flowing over my eyes and down my face, like a slow waterfall it meets my chest and I feel a second stream down my back , it covers me. I realize then that my throat is cut, as well as both wrists , blood is pulsating with every heartbeat.

Right now I need to breathe . This is the calmest I have ever felt , I know how bad this is, but I have turned panic off like a breaker switch, I need to focus and quickly plan. There’s a farm building down the road across the field , I might make it.

There’s a stop sign at the end of the road and I think that means it’s a busier road up ahead, why else would there be a stop sign? So I grab my wrists with each hand , and raise them up around my neck to apply pressure to the arteries in all 3 wounds by pulling down hard, using the dead weight of my arms to my advantage.

I exhale ... And then inhale as much as my lungs can take , stepping forward I scream out

"SOMEBODY HELP ME!!"

For 45 minutes before I’d been stabbed I had been beaten, robbed, and stripped to 2 pieces of clothing, so barefoot and broken, I am now running through the silent morning landscape, feeling the last of Winter’s sharp ice and snow and the force of every pebble pressing into my feet from the road.

I am a specter of mortality , brazenly defying the shadows that seek to claim me. Half a kilometer stretches like an eternity as I now race against the encroaching embrace of death, my own desperation lending wings to my voice and my steps. With each gasping breath I scream for help, I now beg my body to persevere, to defy the darkness that threatens to consume me whole.

Finally I see a car coming down the road!!! I release the hold on my wrists to flag it down. A man and a woman stare at me from the open window, they ask me if I have been attacked by a bear... the question seems odd to me, why would they think a bear had stabbed me?

" I’ve been stabbed , my name is Allison , call my Mom" I continue to repeat this (along with the names of my attackers and my Mother’s phone number), like a broken record, my only thoughts now are that I don’t want to die unknown , I don’t want my family to wonder where I am, I want someone to know what happened. The man gets out of the car and lays me down on the road , he applies pressure to my arms. I feel bad that he has to do this for me, get covered in my blood , sitting in the snow and dirt. The woman is calling 911, I keep repeating my information, and the woman writes it down, I am acutely aware of the trauma that this memory will cause for them , but I can’t express that to them, my gratitude for their help despite the trauma and horror in front of them now. I’m only capable of repeating my information, I must be on autopilot because I don’t feel scared, or pain, or concern for myself right now. In the next instant my world blurs into a cacophony of sirens and urgent voices, I am being lifted from the road, while also fading into the backdrop of my consciousness. A paramedic is trying resolutely to keep me awake, she is pressing her fingers into my open wrist, hoping the pain will revive me, it’s very effective, but after 2 successful jolts of pain, I no longer feel her strong fingers ,I have no cares, and I tell her I want to sleep, I’ve done my job to survive this far and it is her job now to keep me alive , that I trust her, and I tell her to trust me , that I will wake up when we get to the hospital, I promise. 

The sensation I have next isn’t one I am ready for, the inside of the ambulance is shrinking, and I am leaving it. I am falling backwards head first through the ambulance floor, into the darkest thickest 'Black’.

I succumb to the embrace of oblivion. I dance on the precipice of eternity, I am riding on dark rivers, my fragile grip on life slipping through the fingers that I cannot see, but are still there somehow, I still exist, I am still Me, here, in The Black.

In the Black I teetered on the edge of what reality used to be, becoming a silent witness to the whispers of mortality that pull at the edges of my consciousness. In the depths of the coma, I traverse the realms between my death and life, my memories are a tapestry woven with threads of love, sorrow, pain, fear, and the ethereal beauty of the unknown. There are distant voices calling out to me , I feel an 'energy' all around me, it feels like standing in the center of a busy highway, but there’s nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to touch, everything is Black, and quiet aside from the distant voices calling me . I am inside the shadow of Oblivion, I cling to "death", the redundant invisible flickering flame of "life" I felt in my chest before coming here, is invisible amidst the warm Black. This is a journey that transcends the boundaries of what I thought was mortality, I am shocked at my testament of the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unfathomable adversity,but this is a journey I am ready to finally complete. I feel safe, I feel 'whole’. I feel like I can finally , really and truly BREATHE! That now, FINALLY, I am going to experience being alive. That’s when one voice blazes through the Black;

ALLISON 

I look over my right shoulder which isn’t actually there, at the recognition of my name, I have no ears to hear, no eyes to see , searching for the source, searching for who has said my name in this Blackness.

ALLISON

"Mum?" My eyes open to a blinding white light, finally focusing on her face , my mother’s face, the nurses are pulling something from my throat and mouth, I am so incredibly thirsty.

 

My mother is touching my forehead, my eyes betraying my relief with salty tears, I say "Mum, I’m safe now", and then fall asleep. Not the same dark sleep as before, now I am fighting to wake up, although I know I need this time to recover, I know that when I finally wake up I won’t have this easy kind of healing rest again. I know this nightmare is not over..

So I rest, in a dreamless empty place, not in the loving embrace of The Black, profound grief washes over my consciousness. I’m alive . Why?

 

March 23, 2021 — a date I know instinctively . It’s my daughter’s birthday, it strikes me as odd that I have any sense of time… … I open my eyes and now I have another reason to remember this date, as the day I woke up to a nightmare I hadn’t yet fully comprehended. My body felt strange, with a pain I was numb to and still ached all the same. I couldn’t move my head easily, I felt stiff and my face felt heavy. As my eyes adjusted to my surroundings, I saw two figures standing at the side of my bed: two RCMP investigators. Their expressions were grim, their presence quiet yet commanding.

The first few minutes after regaining consciousness felt surreal. I struggled to make sense of where I was and why I couldn’t move properly. My arms were heavily bandaged, my neck stiff, and my head throbbed in sync with my heartbeat. Each shallow breath reminded me of the tube that had just been removed a few hours earlier. The investigators introduced themselves, their voices calm  but firm. They gently explained that I had been a victim of a brutal attack, (like it was news to me, ‘of course’, I thought to myself). As they spoke, the entire day of the attack began playing like a silent movie in my head. I had so much to say, but my mouth wouldn’t make the words come out quickly, I was still coming off some sedatives apparently.

One of the officers asked a nurse if I was capable of giving a statement. She said yes I was officially conscious and hadn’t been given anything for pain recently. Green light, they didn’t waste any time. They needed my statement to piece together the events that led to this moment. They wanted to confirm the information I had given my rescuers. The questions came carefully, each one building on the last, trying to put the pieces in place.

"Do you remember who did this to you?"

“Do you remember what happened" 

"Where were you before the attack?"

"What can you tell us about the hours leading up to it?"

Their questions made me realize how strong my recollection was. My mind felt ready to go the distance , and it was holding onto pieces of information that wanted to be known. I answered their questions, then I told a nurse I had to make a call to my daughter, and she motioned for my mother to come back in.

(I didn’t tell my daughter what had happened, nobody had told them anything yet about any of it, so I was able to let her celebrate her birthday without this hanging over her head thankfully)

 

I drifted back into sleep again after my Mum ended the call. More sleep, more rest. My thoughts hung onto what one of the nurses had said to the police as they were leaving “ was alive — against all odds.”

*Two years later in preparation for pre-trial I would be given a thumb drive containing this interview. AFTER listening to it alone at the detachment first. I had thought I had been clear and strong in my statement, my mind had been. My physical condition betrayed it in those first moments though.

 

I cried openly, my heart was shattered at the sound of my voice , I could hear the pain I was in that day, as faint as my voice was. I could ‘hear’ the broken bones of my face, the swelling and bruising, the effort it took to speak the words I needed to.

I cried openly, my heart stitched back together at the sound of my voice, I could ‘hear’ my determination that day, DESPITE the broken bones, the swelling and bruising, I made the effort that day to SPEAK the words I needed to, PROUD of my voice, no matter how faint. *

My attackers had intended to end my life. Yet, here I was.

 

The ICU was a place of paradoxes. On one hand, it was a space of life-saving medical care, and on the other, it became a place where I confronted the darkest moment of my existence.( Despite all the movement around me and all of the lists of things I had to accomplish , all I could focus on was the deep ache in my heart, the Black,why I wasn’t connected to what felt like home as strongly as before?)

I thought about all that had happened the day of the assault , in just a few short hours, and I made a promise to myself: I would never let this experience be defined by the brutality. Instead, I would control the narration and let it be a testament to the strength of the human body and the presence of the human consciousness, the spirit , in and out of that body.

My body bears the scars of what happened, my soul has taken a few deep cuts as well, but my Self has the knowledge of my EXISTENCE, and that is stronger than ever. March 23 is my daughter’s birthday, and after waking up on that date in 2021 it also marks the beginning of a new experience in my life — one told by survival, resilience, and PTSD. My experience is not just a story of violence; it is my experience of consciousness , spirituality, hope, recovery, and reclaiming my voice.