by Christine Korn

Created on: September 06, 2008

Ten Years After
I have learned that many people who have survived some sort of huge trauma in their lives are plagued with nightmares and "flashbacks" of that event, sometimes forever thereafter. In some perverse way, that was reassuring to me. In early 1998, the solid flooring of my life literally fell away and left me hanging without a safety line. Now, ten years later, I can see that for at least a year after, I was functionally insane. At the time, reading those articles and realizing that other people suffered those nightmares and flashbacks somehow convinced me that I was okay. I wasn't.

The erosion of the solid ground beneath my feet began on Valentine's Day, 1997, when my mother died in her sleep. My father called at 1am to say that he heard her struggle, turned on the light, and found she wasn't breathing. We were later told it was an aneurism, and that she was gone in only a couple of seconds. There was no warning, no health problem, this was a complete blind-side for me. I was still reeling, and in retrospect, maybe reassessing my own choices and priorities several months later, realizing my own mortality and that of my loved ones.
In summer of 1997, my husband Lon and I decided that our high stress jobs were robbing us of our lives. We'd both been married before, and started over from scratch, together, only thirteen years before. I had three older kids when we were married, he had no natural kids, only "steps" from his first marriage, all grown. Together, we'd had one son, Lon's only natural child. We were not only married, we were best friends, partners for life. Life in the fast lane was holding us apart. We were pooling our financial gains to have things we had dreamed of, but we were so drained from the work of getting those things, we had no time or energy left to share them and enjoy them. In addition, we had my 15 year old son and our mutual 9 year old son who hadn't seen us together for months, and spent relatively little quality time with either of us. We talked and decided that we would take a huge leap and realign our priorities. Both of us would resign our jobs, we would build t!
he small business we dreamed of, and most of all, we would work TOGETHER.
In August of 1997, Lon took an early retirement. He was 51 years old, I was 45. I just quit my job. We pooled the money we could gain from selling some of the toys we had accumulated, and we tapped a couple of credit cards to start a mobile catering truck business. The plan was to get

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