Another one from Joyce Evans, and quite dramatic.
I always hated knives because I’ve seen too much blood shed from them: a childhood flashback of my mother accidentally cutting my father, and of my brother’s many near-fatal knife attacks. One Christmas while living in Georgia, my husband, Taft, bought me a set of knives. They were so shiny I could see my face in them. New, shiny and deadly, I thought. I asked him to take them back to the store, but he wouldn’t. If I had followed my intuition, I would’ve returned them.
No, we kept them and moved them to Milwaukee with us. I still wouldn’t use them. In fact, I never even looked at them until I saw one of them lying beside my husband who was stretched across the living floor in a pool of blood.
The tension was thick as I stepped inside that room where I sensed that death hovered. I could feel its presence because I thought Taft was dying. My heart thumped, my head throbbed as I stared at him in the puddle. The room was filled with despair and darkness. I gasped. “What happened?” I asked a black-haired paramedic, my quivering voice a near whisper. “He stabbed himself, and he’s bleeding profusely. Are you his wife?”
I answered yes, and he told me to keep calling his name. I did, but Taft never answered. As they rolled him out of the apartment, I whispered: “Please God, don’t let him die.”
Before the incident, Taft had called his psychiatrist to tell him he was feeling deeply depressed and suicidal. The psychiatrist dispatched an ambulance to bring him to the hospital for treatment. Taft called me at work and left an emergency message with my editor who said I should call home immediately. After talking with Taft, I rushed home.
Taft survived, thank God, and he later told me that the pain before stabbing himself became so great that he thought cutting himself would dull it. If I had heeded the internal warning four years earlier, I would have gotten rid of those knives. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize that my inner turmoil brought a deeper meaning – until now.
