Kayla Aimee - Anchored: Finding Hope in the Unexpected

Chapter Eight

Flatline

When darkness seems to hide His face,
I rest on His unchanging grace. In every high
and stormy gale, My anchor holds within the veil.

Edward Mote

Another thing that Southern women tend to have in common is a flair for the dramatic. I am not calling us drama queens or anything, but I am saying that no one does a hair flounce quite like a scorned Southern girl. That is why I joined the drama club, because I needed an outlet for all of my exaggerated gesturing. When I was sixteen years old, I traveled to London, England, with my theater group. It was the opportunity of a lifetime and I was ecstatic to visit castles and geek out over places like Stonehenge. Plus, I had always wanted to go to London on account of my deep and abiding love for Prince William. I was also fairly excited about the fact that in London sixteen was old enough to get into pubs because I was a mature teenager who cared about deep, important issues. One night my girlfriends and I decided to go clubbing, which sounded like a great idea until I actually arrived at said club and remembered that I cannot dance. I do not mean that I dislike dancing. I mean that whenever I try to dance, my body literally does the exact opposite thing of dancing. I cannot even clap in rhythm.

I once spent an entire year taking Jazz lessons. I was eight years old and my parents made me a special little rehearsal space in the basement where I spent hours perfecting my jazz hands to Toni Braxtons Another Sad Love Song. When it came time for the year-end recital, the dance teacher pulled my parents aside and strongly suggested that I sit out the performance because I was kind of terrible. This is a true story. (Also, that lady should not be allowed to teach dance to second graders.) During a mission trip in college I stood in a service where the church members danced up and down the aisles, clapping and stomping and twirling a flag much like I imagine how King David must have danced before the Lord, full out and arms flailing. It was an incredibly spiritual experience for me, mostly because I spent the entire time praying with great fervor that no one would pull me into the dancing lest everyone discover my embarrassing lack of rhythm. (I realize that King David called his own dancing undignified but it is not like anyone is going to be all Excuse me, Your Highness, but your step-ball-change is totally off. I mean, okay so Michal tried, but look what happened to her. Spoiler alert: it wasnt good. See 2 Samuel 6.)

So while my friends shook their hips out on the English dance floor, I huddled in a smoky corner toward the back of the room and nursed an extra-large glass of soda. (Apparently they dont call it Coke in England.) Perhaps taking pity on the young girl sitting all alone in the back of the club, a handsome man sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. I, being awkward, made a quip about the fact that he was wearing sunglasses inside a club that was already so dark that I could barely make out my drink. He smiled and removed them, tucking them in his pocket, and that was the moment I realized that I was face-to-face with Hugh Grant.

Because I am nothing if not incredibly smooth, I blurted out Oh my gosh! Youre Hugh Grant! He put a finger to his lips and told me that he was trying to be incognito; hence the sunglasses, and then he signed his name to my napkin and snapped a selfie with me on my little disposable camera. This was back in the day before selfies or digital cameras were even a thing. Come to think of it, it is possible that Hugh Grant and I actually invented the selfie. Then he kissed my cheek and disappeared out the back door of the club just as my friends reappeared. They have terrible timing. I just met Hugh Grant! I squealed excitedly, pointing at his retreating form. Shut up! Jessie gasped as she craned her neck to catch a glimpse of his profile. I can NOT believe we just saw Hugh Grant. This is the coolest thing that has ever happened. I waved my napkin in the air and told them all about our amazing, albeit brief, conversation.

There is a six-hour time difference between London, England, and Atlanta, Georgia, but that didnt stop me from ringing home, waking my parents in the wee hours of the morning to share the news of my incredible celebrity run-in. And also to assure them that I was totally fine because apparently parents freak out a little bit if their underage child is traveling overseas and they receive a collect phone call from a foreign country at three oclock in the morning. Way to overreact, Mom and Dad.

On my return home I waited impatiently to pick my film up from the one-hour photo store. You know how our grandparents used to tell us about how they had to walk a mile to school in the snow? I am going to be telling my grandchildren about how we used to have to wait an entire hour to see our pictures. I quickly flipped through the stack of pictures featuring things like cathedrals and thousand-year-old landmarks until I found the one photo to rule all other photos. I yelled, Look! Look at me and Hugh Grant! as the people in that Eckerd crowded around to peer over my shoulder. That is when my parents obligingly squinted at the picture of me and a dark-haired man with his arm slung over my shoulder and said, Yeah, that is definitely not Hugh Grant. And also you are not allowed to travel to foreign countries unsupervised ever again. Apparently some people in this world who bear a striking resemblance to certain celebrities think that it is funny to pose for photos with unsuspecting American teenage girls. Bless their hearts.

I did not want to give up that story, the one exciting adventure of my youth, but I could not avoid the evidence in the photo. That is the thing about film, the way it exposes. And if you want to see what it holds you have to unravel it in the darkness. The image exists captured in the blackness long before it can be seen, but the truth always makes itself known, coming clear as the light meets the dark.

That is where I found it on the day my daughters heart stopped beating.

I began wearing glasses in the second grade. I likely needed them much earlier than that, but my second grade teacher was a hateful woman and ignored all of my protests about not being able to see the blackboard. Between her, dance class, and an unfortunate overbite, second grade was not a good year for me. On top of that, my parents also refused to believe that I needed glasses, although not so much out of bad parenting but because I was obsessed with The Baby-Sitters Club books, particularly a character that wore glasses. My mother just assumed that I wanted glasses in order to look like Karen Brewer and so it was not until I failed the annual public school eye screening that my parents realized that I actually could not see. Apparently a piece of paper with an official looking logo on it was more believable than their precious child. They had just attributed the fact that I continuously bumped into walls while walking to my extreme klutziness. (In their defense, I do still walk into an awful lot of walls.)

So suffice it to say, I have been the recipient of many eye exams in my lifetime. And while most of them have been cringe-inducing on account of how they put a tiny needle close to your lash line and then blow a puff of air into your eyeball, none of them have made me almost die. But inexplicably, after surviving countless biopsies and life-threatening infections and kidney failure and intricate surgery on her heart valve, an ordinary eye exam is what almost killed my daughter.

Blindness is one of the first things we were warned of when I was still round and pregnant in that hospital bed. If the lack of oxygen to her brain did not contribute to a loss of eyesight, the prematurity itself might, causing the retina to detach. For that reason a neonatal ophthalmologist visited Scarlette every two weeks to check on the status of her vision. The nurses tried to warn me that an eye exam for a premature baby was incredibly intense, upsetting for the baby and incredibly difficult for the parents to watch. They thought I should probably sit outside while it was administered. I balked at that because I did not leave my child unless forced. Many times they dressed me head to toe in sterile scrubs so that I could hold her minuscule hand while they worked on her. I had witnessed much in the first few months of her life and so surely I could handle an eye exam.