Excerpt from Darkness Was My Candle by Lora DeVore
Born into poverty and violence, Lora’s early life was one of extreme vulnerability. She was prostituted for the first time at the age of nine and suffered unspeakable treatment from those who should have protected her. Early trauma led to her institutionalization soon after she started college, an incarceration she would not have survived but for a courageous nurse who fought for her release.
Fifty years later, with an advanced degree in clinical psychology, a long career as a successful mental health professional, a leading educator and sought-after public speaker, Lora revisited the grounds of the Illinois state mental hospital where she was once kept in inhumane, degrading, and life-threatening circumstances.
This profound and compelling memoir traces her life as a survivor of child abuse, sex trafficking, illegal pharmacological drug research, and institutional abuse. Lora’s experiences illuminate and validate the power of love and the strength of the indomitable human spirit that lives within each one of us. This is her story.
Excerpt from Darkness Was My Candle by Lora DeVore
One Saturday morning, after a lonely anxiety-ridden night, I wandered outside to sit on the steps. I was hungry and my mother had been gone for days. I grew tense as a group of five kids who bullied me came up to me.
A girl named Barbara, who was nine like me, asked friendly-like “Hey, what are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for my mother.”
One of the boys stuck out his tongue and grimaced. “I bet she’s out being a slut.”
I’d momentarily mistaken their attention for friendship. As I jumped up to move inside, they ran past me into the apartment and slammed the door in my face.
Blindly, frantically, I pushed to get in. My hands and arms broke through the upper glass in the door. Only the sudden explosion of broken glass and blood stopped me.
The kids scattered except for Barbara, who dragged me up the block to a small weekend emergency room. Several hundred stitches closed torn flesh with bandaged arms and hands, a beating seemed certain for the mess, the broken window, and the bill from the emergency room stuffed in my pocket. Overwhelming dread and misery engulfed me as, step-by-step, I neared the apartment.
Pausing as I approached the entryway because I had seen movement inside, I stiffened, anticipating the blows my mother would rain down upon me. To my surprise, the kind face of the upstairs neighbor greeted me. The hall was cleaned up and he’d almost finished installing a new window.
“Hi, are you okay? My wife, Dale, came down and looked for you after we heard the glass break and all the commotion. She cleaned things up a bit and sent me to the hardware store. I’ll be finished here in a little while,” he said with a smile.
Speechless, I stared at him.
“Your mother doesn’t seem to be home yet. Dale’s making lunch and said to send you up when you got back. Go on upstairs now” The door at the top of the steps stood open and inviting.
Dale tenderly touched my bandaged arms and hands and asked me if they hurt.
I shrugged as I shyly looked around her apartment. Although the floor plan was the exact same layout as the one, I lived in, it could have been in a different world. It was orderly, neat and clean with beautiful potted plants everywhere. It smelled like sunshine and the chocolate-chip cookies she had just pulled from the oven. Unlike the cookies and lemony smell of Dale’s apartment, ours was filled with the rancid smell of beer, whiskey, stale cigarettes and sex.
Dale was stunningly beautiful, with the raven-haired and porcelain-skin that made Elizabeth Taylor a star. And she was kind to me. For the next several months, she warmed me with grown-up attention.
Dale and her husband only lived upstairs a couple of months.
The morning of the day that would be leaving, I made the slow and painful climb up the stairs to say goodbye, I hoped she wouldn’t see my legs and arms. They were bruised by Oscar, who had been there the night before pounding me into the bed, down to the springs. He’d given my mom enough money for beer and cigarettes for weeks, as well as the rent money.
I tried to focus on the flowers I’d picked from the courthouse lawn as a surprise. But the grief and terror of Dale’s departure overtook me. I choked back tears, my panic of losing her mounting with each step. As I limped into her apartment and saw the stacked boxes, I took one look at her soft, beautiful face and fell apart––my body shook with sobs. Dale reached for me, pulling me to her, and held me close.
“I love you. I love you, shush now, I love you,” she murmured.
The gap between the life I knew and this holding and murmuring was wide enough for me to fall through. My hand crept up, touching her neck in wonder. The warmth of her skin filled me and plummeted me further into infant-like, racking sobs.
“I know, I know,” she crooned
Dale held me, rocking me close for what seemed like hours. I wanted to melt into her body and never leave its soft, warm contours. As she cradled my head, gently patting my matted hair, I begged her not to leave me, at the same time knowing that I had been indelibly imprinted with something important––and yet intangible.
“This is very important, look at me as I tell you this. I want you to remember every word.” She gently sat me up, lifting my chin gently, taking my face in her hands as she looked deeply into my eyes
“I love you. I wish you were my little girl so that I could take you with me, but I can’t because you’re not mine. You must learn to take better care of yourself, because your mother is too sick and can’t take care of you.
“I’ll always keep you in my heart.” She pointed to her heart. “Right here. You have to reach out and trust others like me and remember that I love you.”
I saw the truth of this thing called love radiating from her face as love, moved fully into me and took up residence. It filled me inside with a pulsating energy, filling the empty aching spaces of longing.
Something life-giving, like air, but not air, but like what I often felt in church, as the music, lifted me, enfolded me, and I suddenly became part of everything as the music rained down from the choir loft. My heart and body opened fully to something intangible and as essential as food and water. For the first time in my life, I felt like I not only deserved to be alive, but I knew why I was alive. For this: to accept, feel, and learn to receive this living thing called love.
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Lora DeVore is a writer and catalyst for transformational change for both individuals and systems. Her wisdom comes from the field of psychology, transpersonal development and spiritual psychology. Most importantly, it comes from the inside out, from facing the darkest aspects of human experience and mining the dark for the treasures that can be found.
In doing so she has not only moved through post-traumatic growth, but beyond as she is transcending all previous limitations to living a Luminous Life.
And you can too.
For more info about Lora and Darkness Was My Candle, please visit https://www.loradevore.com/
Category: On Writing
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