A Most Unusual Life
Wish:
A Bucket List to Remember
July 12, 2013
By Sara Niles (A.K.A.
Josephine Thompson)
The term ‘bucket list’ is a term that was made more popular
by the 2007 movie by the same title: The Bucket List and it means to list
things that you want to do before you die. Most people list things that they never
got around to, or special achievements that may have been lifetime dreams.
I have one primary thing in my life that has achieved a ‘do
or die’, sacred mission status to me: it
is the one thing I want to do, no matter what happens in my life. It is the thing that is of greatest
importance to me, besides the most obvious and universal goal that most of us who are human share, that of putting
family and loved ones first; but in order to clearly articulate why this one
thing is so important to me, I have to tell a short version of my long
life. The life altering, and consuming mission
that I have been propelled into, was aroused by my own personal life
experiences and cultivated by unfortunate circumstances along my journey.
In order to tell the story of my mission, I have to tell a snippet
version of my life:
I was born to a country prostitute during a time when race
relations in the southern United States were less than ideal and as a result,
as a child of mixed race in the 1950’s, I was given away to my great-great
uncle and aunt to raise, both of whom were in their eighties when I was barely
past my toddling years. My relatives died while I was still a child and I
married a man who was both abusive and mentally unstable, and about fifteen
years and five children later, I found myself on a run for my life with five
small children. After a traumatic upheaval, my children and I found an oasis of
sorts in a small community in another state and life appeared to be grand.
To make a long story short and without telling the details,
life was far from grand, as I discovered over the years. My five children had
been damaged psychologically in ways that were not readily apparent, and it
would take years before I fully understood the triple impact of domestic
violence and abuse upon impressionable young children, or how childhood abuse
affects them as adults. The impact of prolonged and extreme dysfunction is
often triple and generational, successive generations are affected. I call this
triple effect that predisposes victims toward drug addiction, trauma reactions
and mental health issues, the ‘Three Headed Monster’.
My mission is to keep the Three Headed Monster at bay and my
tools are my words: I wrote The Torn Trilogy, a monumental 1200 page work that
is a testament of the power of the human spirit under fire, and as a long
mission statement against family dysfunction and extreme domestic violence.
When my mission is completed, I want to visit one of the
greatest mountains in the world:
Mount Kilimanjaro
