Leeky Behrman, the ultimate survivor, teaches us that we can move beyond surviving and choose love and happiness.
How many times can one person survive?
How does one keep surviving when others do not?
How do you go on and be happy when the one who died is the one who saved you?
Leeky Behrman shares her riveting true story of survival in which she endured many different life and death challenges, including the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Behrman remarkably survived incredible circumstances time and again only to be faced with the suicide death of her younger sister— a death that forced Behrman to confront all of the pain and trauma that she had already survived. Behrman allows us to witness her deeply honest and painful journey to shed the survivor that helped her endure and expose all of the hurt and pain in order to heal. She shares her brave journey and sets an example of finding love and happiness.
Excerpt
I was 17 months older than my sister, Jessica. My mother had thought that since we were so close in age that we would grow up to be the best of friends, or at least that is what she had hoped. However, I can’t ever remember a time that we were friends. Even at our earliest ages, I was too mean and selfish to say a kind word. While growing up, I never thought about her needs because all I cared about was my own self-preservation. I wondered why she couldn’t be more like me. I considered her too soft and weak, and I expected her to toughen up and not let the hurt bother her.
By the time I matured, the damage was already done. We were two very hurt souls struggling to find some solid ground and did not know how to help each other or ourselves. Her suicide left me devastated and responsible. If only I would have reached out. So much pain was immediately suspended in me with nowhere to go, and she was gone forever. Our relationship could not be healed. We would never be friends. Tomorrow would never come to make things better. There was no more time, and I was left with all of the unfinished business.
Not only did I personally turn my back on her, I was guilty that I lived and she did not. Why me? Why did I survive our childhood and she did not? What did I do to deserve to live and love? And then a whole other layer of guilt was exposed. My life had been a mix of wishing I would die with a profound luck of surviving. How could I want to die but be saved so many times, and most of all, by her? She was the one who saved me. She gave me so much, and I left her with nothing in return. I owe my life to her.
This is my story. This is how I learned to overcome, forgive, and love.
For a time, I perched myself on a flat rock, comparing my life with the Guyandotte River. Just as its tributaries replenish it daily, changing it in some small—sometimes great—degree, so have the day-to-day occurrences of life changed me. Like the ri
