Our Little Patch of Heaven

Walking back into the apartment, after finding out Aaron wouldn't be coming home for a long time, felt surreal.

Everything was how it had been left when the paramedics came.

Furniture was displaced in the event they needed to put him on a gurney. Dinner from the night before, pizza that no one had felt like eating so it had been left for breakfast, sat on the dining room table.  A box I was working on unpacking was left open with half of the contains emptied onto the couch.

The smell of rotten flesh filled the master bath and bedroom. I remembered what the paramedic had said in the living room to me as he was leaving. "Everything he got stuff on, the towel and wash cloth...anything. Throw it away. Just throw it away."

I went to the bedroom and gathered up bed sheets and towels and hand towels and all the trash from trying to fix my husband myself.  Every piece of fabric that went into the dumpster had been a wedding present.  But into the dumpster it was placed, without ceremony but in complete disgust for what had ruined them.

I went into the bathroom and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed the tub with bleach.

As I scrubbed I kept thinking,"I will never bathe in here again. I can't put my kids in this tub. This tub is dirty. This tub is ruined."

I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed the floor of the bathroom.  I thought maybe some drops of Aaron's insides had gotten on the floor and I couldn't stand the thought of getting it on my feet.

"This floor is dirty.  I'm never going to come in here again.  I can't bring my kids in this bathroom."

I started thinking that about our room. "This room is dirty. It is ruined. Our bed is dirty. It is ruined. I can't sleep on that bed."

I might have been having a nervous breakdown of some kind but, in that moment, I never wanted to see this apartment ever again. With its terrible smell (that haunted me for months even when no one else could smell it) and now full of dark memories.

***

8 weeks earlier, we were thrilled as we walked around this apartment. 

My stipulations for an apartment were "2 bathrooms. $700 a month. Allows dogs." 

Aaron's stipulations were "good area" "ground floor" and "over 900 square feet".

We had our reasons and we also had a very small number of apartments that fit that and we were running out of time.

Our house was suddenly selling, at long last, and we would need our stuff out in a week. That meant we needed to move out of the furnished apartment we were staying in in downtown Las Vegas and into a real place.

Walking through this apartment felt so right for Aaron and I. We knew after a day of seeing apartment after apartment that this was going to be the best fit.

It was a gated apartment complex that was part of a greater master planned community. Duck ponds and parks in walking distance. Grocery stores and restaurants near by. A hospital within 5 miles of the house.

"Maybe you'll have the baby there" Aaron remarked.

It was $700 a month which was highly important to me. It would allow us to save a really good amount of money every month to accumulate a down payment on a new house, if Aaron's job stayed in the area.

And it was on the ground floor. Aaron didn't want us to be on a second floor with two small children. He worried they would stomp around and upset the downstairs neighbors. Not to mention the hassle of bringing in groceries or getting our couches moved in.

Above that, we had been praying that Heavenly Father would lead us to the right place for us to live.  After uprooting our family because we felt like it was what we were suppose to do, we had faith that He would find us the right place where we should be.  Even after all of the things that had gone wrong all summer, we still believed that this was what we were suppose to do.

We were able to get the keys RIGHT before we left to drive up to Ogden (on Aaron's birthday), sign the last of the paperwork to sell the house, pack up all of our belongings, drive back down to Las Vegas and move in.  It was even Labor Day weekend which gave us plenty of time (and people to help) when we moved.  This part of the process fell into place perfectly.

***

After a few long nights at the hospital with Aaron, I couldn't do it anymore.  My pregnant body was screaming to sleep on a bed instead of a stiff plastic coated hospital couch.  

I didn't want to be in that apartment.  I didn't want to be in that room where my husband's body had fallen apart.  I didn't want to lay in the bed where we had been the morning in all happened.  The place where rotting tissue had come out.

But I was exhausted.  I couldn't do it anymore.

My in-laws had, kindly, gone out and bought new sheets for the bed since I had to throw the old ones in the dumpster.  My mother-in-law had put them on and made the bed.

I crawled into bed and went to sleep.  Thinking that I could still smell that horrible smell and believing that it would always be there.

For weeks, I felt disgust when I thought of this apartment.  Logically, I knew that the apartment didn't do this to Aaron.  There was nothing here that caused everything to happen.  But I felt like it would always be filled with dark memories and it would always feel contaminated.

The 8 weeks of living in the apartment had seen Aaron slowly deteriorate which all culminated in the paramedics washing Aaron's blood and guts down the drain of the bathtub.  There were very few GOOD memories.

I wished that the lease wasn't a year long because all I wanted to do was get out of there.

***

For many pains in life, time heals.  With time, came added happy memories and also, godly perspective. 

The LDS Church tells you what building to meet in based on your geographical location.  That means that if we didn't live in this apartment, we would have been in a different ward building with entirely different people.  And you know what?  I can't imagine a better group of people to be with during this ordeal.

Aaron and I said numerous times to each other that we were so thankful that we had moved out of our ward in Ogden for these trials.  We can count on one hand (and not use all the fingers) the number of times when we desperately needed help in Ogden and asked the ward for it.  And it takes zero hands to count the number of times we received it.  There were good people in Ogden, don't get me wrong.  But for something this big, that required more than just a couple meals dropped off?  It never would have happened. 

It took 6 months going to church in Ogden for anyone to make eye contact with me.  It took 3 weeks for us to form a group of friends that came over to our house on a weekly basis.  Because of this, the night Aaron went into the hospital, I had someone IMMEDIATELY give me a bag of food for sleeping at the hospital and call the women's organization (The Relief Society)  to tell them what was going on AND come over to the hospital with a member of the Bishopric to give Aaron a priesthood blessing. 

For that one thing, we are grateful that Heavenly Father had us move away from Ogden.

But I'm talking about the miracle of this apartment.

This apartment was only 10 minutes away from the hospital.  I didn't give birth there.  But driving twice or three times a day to that hospital to see Aaron, made me EXTREMELY grateful that we only lived 10 minutes from a hospital.

We had wanted a ground floor apartment.  I'm really glad that Aaron stuck with that stipulation because, if we had NOT gotten a downstairs apartment, he would have gone to live at a rehabilitation center, probably for another one or two months.  Long time readers might remember that Aaron couldn't walk when he got out of the hospital.  He was using a walker and was not cleared (or at all capable) of climbing stairs.

Something that had irritated us about this apartment when we moved in was that the second bathroom had a walk in shower.  Not a tub.  We settled for one tub in the master bedroom to bathe the kids even though we thought that that would be an annoyance.

Nope.  Aaron had to use a walk-in shower.  He couldn't get INTO a tub.  For the same reasons he couldn't get up stairs.

The social worker in the hospital assigned to Aaron's case was relieved when we told him that we had ground floor entrance, zero stairs in the apartment, AND a walk-in shower.  He could sign Aaron off to go home.

My plan to save money for a down payment on a house didn't work out.  But because we had chosen to live in an apartment with a low rent cost, we did have money to pay our hospital bills.  Considering that our whole family was in the hospital for a cumulative THREE MONTHS, you can bet that even with great insurance, we had some hospital bills that needed to get paid.  And we had the money.

This apartment was the perfect place for us to be in the most stressful and chaotic time in our lives.

And how sweet the memory is in my mind when Aaron and I got to lay down together in our bed again while we fell asleep holding hands.

Or the day that I brought Sydney home to this apartment and we all snuggled her and adored her while we sat on the couch as a family.

We celebrated Easter together, hiding eggs in the front rock garden.

Zach's second birthday was a beautiful day.  We've enjoyed playing trains with him for months since then.

The smell has gone away, even the imagined smell in my mind.  We bathe our kids in the bathtub.

The dark memories have been scared away by the light of our faith and new memories.   Aaron and I have grown into better people in this apartment.  Our family has grown in this apartment.  Our love for each other and our testimony of the Atonement have grown in this apartment.

It has become a piece of heaven on earth.