You Just Need to Get Over It!

“You just need to get over it.”

That’s what her mother told her when she tried to express the range of emotions she felt after loosing her home in the flood on the Souris River in Minot, North Dakota.   Her mother cut short their telephone conversation with the brutally curt advice, “you just need to get over it or take some medication and stop crying about it all the time.”

The woman who told me this is a 55 year old mother of three.  She and her husband came to The Salvation Army today for some financial assistance.  Their house, like so many others in this community, was completely flooded by the waters.  And while I was able to give them a voucher for some of the things they need, what she really needed was a chance to express her grief.

Her grief wasn’t for the loss of their home.  She and her husband seemed to be dealing with that pretty well.  They’d bought the house some years ago, paid off the mortgage and thought all was well.  Now they’re getting an SBA loan and starting over.  It’s hard but they feel up to the challenge. 

Her grief felt more like a death… and in a way it is.  She’s grieving for the loss of a close knit family.  She’s grieving for the loss of that intimacy she thought she had with her parents and her sibling.

Immediately after the flood her family helped her and her husband and their still at home teen-aged son to evacuate, but as the days and weeks and months now have passed they want her to “just get over it.”

“They don’t understand. And they don’t care,” she said before the tears and sobs choked her voice. “They don’t call.  They don’t ask about how we’re doing.”

She and her husband spent a little more than an hour talking with me.  And they came to realize that her sense of loss wasn’t so much for the house or the possessions they lost; her sense of loss is rooted in the realization that she doesn’t have the relationship with her family that she thought she had.

“Sometimes we see what we want to see.  We see things that may not be there because we want them to be there.”

But rather than drowning in that sense of loss, she very quickly came to the realization that she has in this the chance to reevaluate more accurately what kind of relationship she has with her family, the chance to ask herself what kind of relationship she would like to have, and the chance to ask herself what she can do to make the relationship better.

“It would be easy to make the relationship worse, to fight and say ‘I never want to speak to you again’… but I don’t want to do that.”

She might want that familial intimacy more than they do, but at least she’s aware of that fact now.  The immediate future will be difficult, and she’s anxious about the traditional family get together at Christmas, but she feels strong.  She has a good husband and three children that she loves and who love her.  She has friends at work and at church.  And she has a “calm in the center” that she attributes to faith in God.

Before they left I gave her a hug, and before I could turn to shake her husband’s hand, she grabbed me and hugged me again.  “Thank you.” she said.

I’m not sure what I did but I think she’ll be all right.

To volunteer in Minot visit http://www.usc.salvationarmy.org/usc/www_usc_minot.nsf,
or call: 701-838-8925.

Monetary donations can be made in the following ways:

-Donate $10 by texting “MINOT” to 80888 and replying “yes” to the confirmation text. A one-time donation of $10 will be added to your cell phone bill. For terms, see www.igfn.org/t.

-Or by calling 800-SAL-ARMY (725-2769)

-Or by mailing a check to The Salvation Army,

315 Western Ave., Minot, ND 58701

Be sure to designate your donation “Minot Flood.”

-Or donate online