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MISSOURI DIVISION |
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
DINNER SPEAKER: DR. GRADY BRAY
MR. BRAY: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I must confess when I first got the call I was somewhat intrigued. Why would you want a sex therapist to come and talk with a group of people about an after earthquake kind of a program? And then I remembered that a few of my patients have talked about feeling the earth move at different times. I decided maybe it wasn´t so far off.
It was really a delight to get to come out and see Allen. I first met Allen a few years ago. I grew up in South Georgia and moved to Upstate New York in the 1970s. I taught at the medical school for seven years. That's where I got my certification as a sex therapist.
Anyhow, I saw an ad that was listing a seven-day cruise to the Bahamas. That seven-day cruise was leaving from New York City. It was only $295.00 for seven days for the whole trip. I thought I couldn´t miss out on this. I got to take advantage of this opportunity. I went to the address that was given and that address was on the lower east side of New York City down near the harbor. There was a giant warehouse when I got there and great big cargo doors in the front. I went up and I knocked on the door. I said, "Is there anybody in here?" There was a voice, and the door came open a little bit, the voice said, "Yeah." I said, "I´m here about the cruise. I want to go on the cruise." And all of a sudden, out of the darkness this big red pipe hit me right on top of the head. When I woke up I was strapped in a great big airplane inner tube slowly floating toward the southeast. I looked around and there was another inner tube and there was Allen. We were sort of floating side by side. I said, "Excuse me, do they serve any drinks or any refreshments on this trip?" And Allen said, "I don't know, they didn´t last year."
This evening, I would like to change the focus a little bit for you. I´m from New York, and a sex therapist, and you can make an obscene gesture I'm not offended.
I looked at the program and you have had a tremendous amount of technical information, everything from bridges to buildings to systems that handle shock after shock. You´ve looked at equipment, communication, and construction. I would like to change the focus to you, as opposed to what you do. In the short time we have I would like to talk a little bit about the primary resource you have for any earthquake. The greatest resource you have will be you and the people that work with you. I don't care how much equipment, computers, bulldozers, backhoes, or engineers. It doesn´t matter. The pivotal piece is will be the people. The people are going to be important to you. If you don't use your people, it doesn't matter what kind of equipment you have. The job is not going to get done.
As a way to lead into talking about the people, I would like to build on an experience that most of you probably shared when you came to this hotel. I will be very honest with you, I got lost. I felt like I was in a maze of some kind. You go down one corridor, make a left down this corridor, you turn to the right and so forth. I found it to be somewhat confusing hotel. It reminded me of the last time I got confused in a hotel was a few years ago. I would like to build on that experience to try to get you to relate to what happens to us when we go through a crisis.
In working at the university, I got bored with what I did. I decided I would learn to play Black Jack. I learned to count cards. I would sit at the dining room table with my son and daughter and they would deal me cards and my daughter would say, "Do you want to hit, Dad?" I was keeping a count on the cards and I thought I was great at it. I thought I was the hottest thing since grapes were invented when it came to playing Black Jack.
At the same time, I had been leading a three-year study with a team. We were looking at sexuality and aging. We even had a catchy little title called "Sex after 60." And the outcome of that whole three years of research is there's still hope for some of us.
The point is, I was going to go to San Diego to present a paper on the results of our research. I knew that I could stop off in Las Vegas and play Black Jack and nobody at the medical school would be any the wiser because the ticket cost the same. I just had to pay for one night's lodging in a hotel. Besides that I was going to make so much money playing Black Jack in Las Vegas I probably would never have to work again. I was going to become a professional card player. I was sure.
So I stopped off in Las Vegas and checked into the hotel. Being the good little fire fighter that I was, when I first went into my room and put my bags down, I didn´t look at that sign on the back of the door. I never believed those things anyway. I walked out into the corridor and I counted the doorways between my bedroom and the emergency room exit. Counted them, walked down the corridor, opened up the emergency exit door to make sure there was nothing stored in there. Externally there was no problem. The hotel had not put linen or cleaning supplies or anything else in the stairwell. It was all clear.
So having done my job, I immediately went downstairs with that bead of sweat across my upper lip, in terms of being so excited. My hands were a little wet. Sat down at the table, plunked down my stake, which was $100.00, and I began to play Black Jack. I had an awakening all of the sudden, because I suddenly realized in Las Vegas they do not play Black Jack with a deck of cards. They play with a seven-deck shoe. I cannot count seven decks of cards. I can count one deck of cards. The old saying that a fellow and his money are soon parted was very true. I went to bed early that night. I got up the next morning. I went in and took a shower, as I always do in the morning. As I came out of the bathroom with a towel around my waist I walked over to turn on the television set, and as I walked over I smelled something.
As a fire fighter there are two smells that you never forget. One is electrical insulation burning and the other is a charred body. If a body is burning it has a smell to it. That morning what I smelled was burning insulation. I thought I must have left the heat light on in the bathroom. So I walked back into the bathroom and looked up and the heat lamp wasn´t on. As I walked out of that bathroom, the door to the corridor was on my right.There were wisps of black smoke coming up from under the door. I remember thinking, wow, there´s a fire out there. Not a great thought but it was early in the morning.
So I was standing there thinking, as a fireman my training took over. I knelt down by the door and put my hands on it to feel it. It was cool to the touch. Put the back of my hands against the doorknob. It was still cool to the touch. I stayed behind the door in a kneeling position and I opened the door slowly. I looked up to the ceiling to see how far down the smoke was coming. There was no smoke on the ceiling. But about three feet off the floor and falling into that room like a heavy oil was a thick cold black smoke.
I remember thinking how strange that was. I stood up and pushed the door closed and I took the towel from around my waist and put it underneath the door. I flipped off the air conditioning system, as I walked by. I walked over to my suitcase and I stood there as naked as the day I was born. I looked through my suitcase and thought, "What the hell do you wear to a fire anyway?" There are no bunker pants here. There is no turn out gear for me to put on. There's no tight air pack for me to put on my back. What do you wear to a fire? That was probably as close to panicking as I came. I stood there looking into that suitcase for a few seconds and I reached in. I grabbed a pull over shirt, a pair of jeans and my boots. On the nightstand I stacked up my billfold, my travelers checks, and the two $5.00 chips that I had left over from the night before, and my room key. I put them in my pocket.
I walked back into the bathroom and grabbed a towel and turned the water on to wet it down. There was no water. I was on the 20th floor of the MGM Hotel and the hotel was on fire. The fire went through the deli area downstairs and took out the standpipes and the alarm system for the hotel. So all of the water on the other floors drained out. I´m looking around that bathroom and I suddenly realized there was only one place with water. Up to that point in my life, my wife had been trying for 15 years to get me to flush the toilet after I went in the mornings. You know, now you can follow along after me in any hotel and you could drink out of my commode.
That day I didn´t worry about that little yellow stain. I dumped my towel right down in there and I slapped it on my face and I went back to the doorway. I was going to crawl out because you remember I knew where the emergency exit was. I knew how many rooms between the doorway of my room and that exit. I felt the door again. It was still cool to the touch. When I opened the door, there was solid black smoke from the ceiling to the floor and no light whatsoever. I crawled into that smoke with my right hand against the wall and my left hand on the floor to keep from getting disoriented. I´m crawling along.
In the weeks and the months that followed, it was often that period of time when I was crawling down the hallway that would bother me the most. I could not see anything in that total darkness but I could hear. First of all, I heard a woman in one of the rooms and she was saying the rosary. She would say her rosary and her voice would get softer. She would say her rosary and she would cough. Her voice would get a little softer. She would cough again and then she would get quiet.
Coming down the corridor was as dark as any cave you've ever been in without any light, when you turn the lights off. Behind me in that darkness, I could hear a man coming down the corridor. He's crying and he's swearing and he's coughing. I followed him and put my hands over my face so he wouldn´t kick me. He actually ran past me. He hit the wall and he fell to the floor. I could hear him as he started to choke. Then he started to throw up. And he aspirated and pulled it back into his lungs. He's coughing and then within seconds he was quiet. All of this takes place during the time I´m holding my breath. How long can you hold your breath? If you're not excited maybe a minute, if you're in pretty good shape. When you´re excited you can hold it for less time than that. Then I couldn´t hold my breath anymore and I took a breath. It was the most painful breath I´ve ever had in my life. Even with that wet towel, the best analogy I can give you is if you took a five gallon pail, put about a gallon of water and stirred in a couple quarts of ammonia, and put your head into the fumes and inhaled as deeply as you could. That´s about what it would feel like.
I was aware, as I started to cough that the other people I heard coughing just coughed a little bit and then they passed out or died. They stopped moving. They stopped coughing.
I knew I could not make it to the exit, so I went back to my room. I crawled back down to my room. I had only gone down two doors. I crawled back to my room. I reached into my pocket and took out the key because the doors locked once closed. I got into the room and ran across it to the windows. They looked like sliding glass doors. I grabbed it and I threw it open as far as it would go. It was bolted so it would only open about three to four inches.
To this day I can remember the feel of cold steel when I pressed my face into that opening and the smoke was coming out of my mouth. I thought there's a lighter grayer smoke outside, but my room has kind of a darker, colder smoke in it. What I needed is outside. I stepped back and reached over and I picked up the chair. I punched a whole in the lower right-hand corner of that window. I put the chair down and I knelt down and put my head outside. As I put my head outside I heard something. I thought an explosion. What is this? Bright sparkly stuff was all in the air. I started to pull my head back into the room and as I did, I felt something on my head. Then I pulled my head all the way into the room. Where my head had been a chair came flying down. The white sheer curtain that was on the right side of me was getting darker and darker very fast. I felt I had about a five-inch scalp wound from a sharp glass. A guy had thrown his chair through the window. That glass had cut me on the top of the head. You don't bleed to death from a scalp would, but it's really messy. It's a lot of blood. I was afraid to put my head back outside because people were throwing things through windows and I knelt there. I don't know how long the time was: seconds. . . minutes. All of a sudden, I became aware that I couldn't breathe very well. And then it sounded almost like I was awake, but snoring at the same time. It's called chain smoke breathing. It's characteristic for people who have respiratory distress before they pass out and die.
What I honestly remember thinking was before you die here you really should get up and walk over to that table and take out some of that stationary from the hotel and write your kids a note. Write April and Scott a note and tell them it is not hard to die. Death comes softly, very gently. It's just hard to live.
Next thought: You´re anoxic. You're not getting enough oxygen to your brain. That´s crazy thinking. If you're going to do something you better do it right now. Are you going to pass out right by this window? Like you've seen children by windows in house fires because they thought it was safer there and someone was going to save them. Some fire marshal is going to come in here and take a picture of you dead by this window. I do not remember standing up. My hands were cut on the palms from the glass. So clearly, I pressed against the sill as I stood up. I didn´t bother with the chair. I picked up the couch, the sofa and I rammed it into the framing of that window and it sheared off three-eighths inch steel bolts all the way around the frame. The frame went flying. The glass went flying. The couch went flying. I didn't worry about the people down below me that was their problem as far as I was concerned. I just wanted to live at that point.
I fell across the base plate of the window and I'm sort of hanging out and I heard this roaring sound. I thought, oh, no -- because I just finished reading a book by Ray Moody, an associate of mine. In Ray's book, he talks about people with near death experiences and they all hear this roaring sound and I thought, no, this is not fair. If there's going to be a white light, I'm sure not going to keep looking down. I´m going to look up. I looked up to see where the white light was. I looked up. There was no white light but the most beautiful helicopter I have ever seen.
They were lined up taking people off the top of the hotel. It was the down wash from their rotor blades that blew the smoke away from the sides of the building and that many of us on the upper floors actually lived. Most people who died, 80 people died, floors 18 to 22 were the primary areas. The reason for that was, when they put the little bubble black casino cameras in the casino area, they ran into a wall with their wiring as a problem so they just cut a hole through it. What they connected was the emergency smoke dump to the hotel. It should have pulled all the smoke from a fire into the smoke dump up through the center of the hotel and out the top and then connected to the emergency smoke dump while a passing cooling tower from floors 18 to 22. So the smoke was sucked into the cooling area, condensed and pumped into the rooms. That's why so many people died fast because of the concentration of the smoke. I didn't know any of that that morning.
All I knew was that all of sudden I'm leaning out this window, my head started to clear a little bit. I could start to think a little more rationally. The helicopters are there. The smoke is being blown away from the building. All of sudden I'm looking around. Now, the hotel is laid out pretty much like an X. If you were to go there now it's called Bali´s. It's not called the MGM anymore. The MGM is a new hotel.
Looking across through the X, I could see into the windows and there were people waving towels and all kinds of things and they were crying out. All of a sudden out of the 14th floor window, I saw a woman go head first through the window. Now, you don't slip and go through a window like that. She dove head first through that window. At that moment in time, it made complete sense to me. I understood that. She couldn't stand the waiting any longer. She just couldn't stand it because we didn't know what was happening, where the fire was.
Now, as a fire fighter, I decided a long time ago that if I ever have any choice I would not be burned to death. I knew I would do everything that day I could to survive. I would put the mattresses against the door. Every place the fire could come in I would do everything in my power, if everything failed, if the fire came into that room, I would step off the ledge. Never a question in my mind about that, 100 percent sure that's would take place. So I'm watching and this woman hits, of course, and she dies. Everybody is just sort of stunned.
All of a sudden out of the fifth floor window a woman is leaning out the window with her feet against the window and under her arms she has a make shift rope out of sheets and spreads and blankets and drapes and there's a man standing in the window and this make shift rope is going behind his back, and she's going to repel down the side of the hotel. People are screaming "No, no, no, don't do that. Get her back in." All of a sudden, I realized I was screaming as loud as I could with everybody else, "Don't do it, get her back in the room." As we watched, the slip not pulled apart. She fell straight down with her hands holding, clasping, that sheet. She never cried out. When she hit she hit with such force that her femurs disarticulated at her hip and her feet literally hit together over the top of her head. That morning would go on and on.
I´m leaning out and looking at all this and wondering what is happening. As I'm looking around in the room next to me in the corner closest to me there´s an elderly gentleman. He has his wife cradled in his arms. I'm leaning out and the wall between us is what, 12 inches, 14 inches. As I´m looking at this man, I see him take a breath in that dingy, smoky room and he bends down and he blows into her mouth. He doesn't even know to pinch off her nostrils and I couldn´t look away. I watched him. At one point her eyes were open and her pupils had dilated. She looked like she had already died. As he´s doing this, he stops and he looks up and he sees me. I was so close. I could see where the tears washed away the soot from his face. He took his hands from behind her head and he put his hands against the glass. By straining as far as I could around that wall between us I could put my fingertips on the glass, and I held my hand there against his and I watched that man die.
As a teacher in a medical school, it´s all about life. I'm a trained fire fighter in my community and when we´re that close to people we don't lose them. When you can see people, they don't die, you save them. In my head I knew I could not save that man's life. I knew it. In my heart it took me more than a year to accept the fact that I couldn't save that man's life. It's called survivor's guilt. You see it with the people who are in a disaster and live. You'll hear all of those questions like, why did this person die, or why did this child die, or why was this family killed, and I didn't die.
You also will ask those same questions if you respond to an earthquake and the disaster that is inherent in it. We find the same survivor guilt issue not just with the primary victims but within all of us who work and go there to serve to do everything we can to bring a community back into existence again, to restore that infrastructure, to give them the ability to continue government, and to continue schools and life the way it should be. Every one of us in this room, no matter what insignias we wear, what companies or agencies or governments we work for, we're just people. We're just people. Every one of us is vulnerable that way. When you go it´s what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch that let's us experience the trauma. Does that mean that you're going to be overwhelmed by it and you´re not going to be able to function? No, because you´re going to do your job. The people you work with, the vast majority of them, are going to do their jobs. We need to be aware that there's a price that we pay that goes on long beyond that moment in time when you're there and exposed to the disaster. I can assure you in the stillness that comes with waking up at 2 o'clock in the morning, when you're trying to go back to sleep, and you have lived through an earthquake or responded to one, that´s when the image will come, whether it's what you see, the pictures that play through your mind, or the voices that you hear or the silence that´s there. Sometimes it is the silence, particularly with earthquakes, when there is nothing there to make the sound that can be most devastating to us. We rarely experience true silence in our normal lives. Our lives are filled with sounds. One of the strangest things in working an earthquake is the fact that often there is no sound after the earthquake itself. It's eerie, it´s haunting for people and people talk about how it is.
With you folks, you need to keep in mind that for every structural change you can make, everything you can do to help assure the survivability of whether it's a building or a bridge, ultimately it's all about the people. It's all about the people. What you do makes a difference and sometimes, determines whether others live or if they die. It makes a difference in terms of the people you work with after the earthquake and you're there with the victims. We need to understand that this care giving we give is for your folks too. Someone needs to be there and be available to help them as they work through these kinds of emotional situations.
For me, the person who was there was a construction worker. He saw them recharging the air packs from the fire department. He was not a fire fighter. He walked over and he put on an air pack as a volunteer. He decided on his own he would just go up the emergency exit and he would get off wherever. He happened to get off on the 20th floor. He's going down the corridor and he's saying is there anybody still up here. He doesn't know that when you put a faceplate on with a mask and a system that you use breathing equipment that you really can't hear very well what somebody is saying. So I heard something like, mumble mumble, mumble, this noise, but in his hands he held a No. 10 crescent wrench and a ball-peen hammer. He´s banging away on this cylinder, this compressed air cylinder, with a hammer and with a wrench. I heard this clanging and this weird noise. As it came close to the door, I ran over to the door and I could hear him and he said, "Is anybody up here? I hit the door and I said, "Yes." He came in real close and he said, "Is there anybody there?" I thought, who the hell do you think is banging on this door? I said, "Yes, I'm in here." He said, "Open the door." I opened the door and as I opened it all of this smoke is coming in. I held my hand out. He figured out what I wanted and he took off the faceplate and he gave it to me. We were buddy breathing walking out of the building over the bodies in the corridor, over the bodies in the stairwell. People died in the stairwell itself. We got downstairs and he said, "I'm going to go upstairs." I said, "Okay." I stood there. I never told him not to be banging on a compressed air cylinder with his hammer and a wrench. He's walking upstairs, and I´m standing outside, I'm bloody, I'm sooty, I'm a mess. I'm clearly in shock. I'm just standing there. I just remember looking up and seeing all the smoke coming out of the building thinking, wow, what a fire. This is a big fire.
There was this lady across over the Barbary Coast who saw me. She came through the yellow tape, crawled under it, came over to me, and she said, "I'm a nurse from Philadelphia." She never told me her name. I never even got to thank her. She said, "I'm a nurse from Philadelphia. Are you all right?" I said, "I don't think so." She said, "I don't think so either." She said, "Come on go with me." We go and there is nobody at the exit. There was nobody stationed there. We go around the back of the hotel to the triage area. Of course then once you get hooked up to the medical system it's like I'm on an IV and then oxygen and lights and sirens. We´re going to the emergency room along with all of these other folks.
I'm lying on this gurney outside of the emergency room and this paramedic comes over. He looks at me and they clean you up just enough that they´re desperate to write on you. That´s why they clean you up so they can write on you. Sometimes they're writing on my forearm and on my chest where he cut my shirt. He took out his penny cutter. Those of you don't know, penny cutters -- paramedics carry them. They´re like big scissors and you cut through all kinds of straps and things with them. I knew what he was about to do and I said, "Please don't cut off my boots. I'll take off my shoes. Just don´t cut off my boots." He said, "No, we do not have time, Mr." Do you know how long it takes to break in a pair of Tony Lamas? The truth was, I wasn't worried. You know, down south my mother always said, "You put on clean underwear in the morning so if you're ever in a wreck I don't want you to have messy underwear or underwear with holes in them." I wasn't worried about my underwear that day, because I didn't have any on. So I thought if you take off of the rest of my clothes you're going to get a shock too.
He opened his kit all the way up and there were toe tags in there. Toe tags are kind of strange things because you put them on people and they're called triage tags. I remember looking over and saying, oh, God, please not a gray tag. Please, Lord, I´ll be really good. If you get a gray tag that means you're going to die. We're going to make you as comfortable as we can, but there's nothing we can really do for you, you're going to die. I said, oh, no, not a gray tag. So I looked down, I watched. It is a weird feeling when they put on those tags on your toes and they zip it down. It wasn´t a gray tag. I was greatly relieved at that point.
Anyway, it was soon my turn to go into the emergency room on the gurney. They're pushing me over and just as I'm going in, the helicopter takes off and this guy stands out by the doorway. As he walked over to my gurney, it blew his jacket open and I read the label and it said Brooks Brothers. I thought nice threads. He said, "Would you mind signing this form before you go in?" I said, "Sure. What is it?" He said, "This is a release form from the MGM hotel, I'm their attorney." I said, "You know, this is ridiculous. This is duress." I said, "This will never hold up in court anyway. You know what, because you did this I'm going to sue you. I´m not going to worry about the hotel, I'm going to sue you for doing this." I never sued anybody in my life. I was so furious. I gave him his clipboard back and told him where he could put it.
They pushed me on into this emergency room. And this young lady came running over and she grabbed the side of the gurney like this and her knuckles were white. Her nostrils were flared like a horse at the Kentucky Derby. Her neck was all spotted and broken out. She was breathing hard and excited. She said, "Mr. I´m all you've got." I said, "What?" She said, "I´m all you got. All the doctors are busy and all the nurses are busy. I´m a third year medical student and we need to run some tests on you." I said, "Yeah, we need to run some tests on me. I want a SMA-12, BCO-2." I ordered every test I ever heard of in all of my years of medical school. She said, "Are you a doctor?" I said, "Yes, I am. I teach at a medical school in Rochester, New York." She didn't say are you a physician. I´m a PhD, psychologist, doctor of psychology.
One of the reasons I am telling you the story is to illustrate some changes that you may not be aware of. One of the tests I ordered was called a lipid profile. In other words, I ordered my cholesterol level checked. Who cares what your cholesterol level is when you're about to die in the emergency room. What amazed me the most was she ran it. After I was transferred back to a hospital back in New York and we got all the lab data back, the guys were just choking. They were laughing so hard. They said, "You ordered your cholesterol checked." I said, "Yeah, that's one of the tests I heard everybody talking about." The point is this; normally I run a serum cholesterol level about 180. That was my normal serum cholesterol level. After being in the fire for a little over four hours that morning, they ran my serum cholesterol level it was 460. I had 30-weight oil flowing through my veins. You could have cut the tip of my finger off and drained oil into your crank case it would have been just fine for your car or truck. So I said, "Hey guys, how is this possible? How can you go from 180 to 460?" I sure didn´t eat 50 pounds of prime ribs or anything. What is this?
In 1980 we didn't know, now we do. Whenever you go through high stress operations very stressful events, like an earthquake, your body tries to help you every way it can. One of the ways it will do that is, it will start to produce massive amounts of cholesterol. Cholesterol is an energy rich compound. We have to have it to live. You cannot have a 0 cholesterol level. You would die before you get to that point but we don't need too much. In very stressful or unusual events, we know that cholesterol levels go up. That is why we have an increase in sudden death heart attacks for people during disaster response. You can use it up through aerobic type of activity where your heart rate is up and then you're physically straining yourself in a good kind of way. If you don't use it up, it gets like sludge in your system. It gets deposited into arteries and vein walls, combined with other material to form plaque. This is the most common mechanism for heart attack. The wall actually ruptures. It's like a cauliflower looking effect. Part of that effect is from all of the excessive cholesterol in the system. We need to be aware of all these changes.
I would like to make you aware that during a disaster the common denominator is we're all people. We're all subject to these experiences in ways that alter our lives. I assure you, you will never go through an earthquake or respond to an earthquake and be the same afterwards as you were before. These kinds of events change us. We adapt. We either grow through them or we dont.
Years ago I taught 7th grade science and during that science year, we came to the biology section where you taught the children about butterflies and cocoons and caterpillars. When the season was right, I took all of these 34 inner city children across from the school into the park to break off little twigs that had cocoons on them so we could bring them back to the room. To my horror all of a sudden I got 34 children climbing around the trees and cutting off four inch and five inch limbs and mutilating cherry trees in a city park. They would bring these back into the room and whittle them down to the point where the cocoon was on the twig. The twig would go into the window box. That window box had little holes in it for aeration and everything. We had cocoon watch every day. Now, that was really cool if you had cocoon watch. Why? If you have a test that day you didn´t have to take it. If you had homework that night you didn't have to do it. So the children liked having cocoon watch. When the cocoon would start to come out or break open, the butterfly would be coming out. The person that had the cocoon watch would say, "The butterfly, the butterfly." Everybody would get up and run to the window and watch. They would all watch the butterfly climb out of the cocoon out. They would open the top up to the window box. The butterfly would fly away and the children would all applaud. They collected so many cocoons, it wouldn't take many days until a lot of them would come out one after another after another. I would say wait a minute we can't stand here all day watching these butterflies. I said, "Who wants to help the butterflies come out faster?" I do, I do. Those that would volunteer, I gave the scissors. I never had a child kill a butterfly. They would take the cocoon twig by twig, snipping them so carefully. As they were working most of them would get through about the same time, and the butterfly would come out of the cocoon that was being cut open. And the butterflies would climb to the end of the twig and they would fall over dead. The children would say, "You killed the butterfly, you killed the butterfly." They would yell and scream at each other. I said, "Wait a minute, No, they didn't kill the butterfly. If a butterfly doesn't struggle to come out of the cocoon by itself, it doesn't activate a circulatory system, therefore it can't breathe and it dies."
There is no growth in this life without struggle. So when we face adversity, when we face horrific situations, the question is not why did this happen. The question becomes how do we grow through it?
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