The Lightning Strike That Burned Through My Family

One spring night in 1984, lightning sizzled through the phone line, into the handset, and entered my mother’s eye. It coursed through her body and left a web of burned veins when it departed, blazing, from her thigh. Taking that call with her feet on the side of the bed saved her life, doctors said. If the lightning had grounded, she’d be dead. I was born exactly twelve months later.

As a child, I often heard the tale of my mother getting struck by lightning while I rifled through photos of her charred body lying on the same tweed couch where I spent afternoons watching Sesame Street, but no one ever told the whole story. It was erased from family lore. I didn’t learn about my father’s betrayal or its resulting fallout—which lasted almost forty years—until I was a senior in college, during one of my parents’ fights.

Stuck in my childhood bedroom, buried in the familiar desire to escape, I heard my mother scream the truth laced with anecdotes I wish I could forget. Still, it took another thirteen years, my parents’ inevitable divorce, and a midlife episode from my father for the rest of the story to emerge in fits and starts. At thirty-five, I learned my origin story for the very first time: I was a lightning baby.

The night my mother was struck by lightning, my father found her––the woman he was planning to leave, the one he’d already betrayed––unconscious on the bed. Witnessing her brush with death changed his mind, and he decided to stay. Their marriage became a lesson in obligation: When two people, both young, marry quickly and spend years devoting themselves to what feels like a mistake, sometimes one person’s pain is no match for the other’s, and chaos ensues. If children unwittingly enter the scene, like my brothers and I did, the risk of that pain getting catapulted from one generation to the next is high. Who knows––if the inspiration for your birth is chaos itself, in the shape of a lightning bolt, maybe that risk is even higher.

Lightning brought my family together in those early days, a cauterizing blast sent to seal our fate, but eventually, it also tore us apart. Once, not long ago, when I went feeling around in the dark for threads of connection with my mother, she confessed wanting to leave my father while pregnant with me. The marriage wasn’t happy; she felt lost; she would never trust him again. She wonders now if she might have been a better mom––less angry––if my father hadn’t been in the house. But as a twenty-four-year-old in small-town South Carolina, becoming a single mother felt unthinkable.

I am largely composed of fire.

At the moment she chose to stay, I began, in the womb and unaware, what would become a long and dedicated attempt at serving as my family’s glue. We lived in conflict, endless and unpredictable––at the dinner table, in the back seat, between church services. Without realizing it, and sensing things could unravel at any moment, I tried to tuck the loose threads in. Diffusing tension where I could, trying to talk people down, I joined the screaming chorus when nothing else made sense.

“You make me sick!” my mother shrieked at my father one Sunday afternoon, her voice piercing and curdling the air. We’d heard those words often, but my brothers and I still sat upstairs silently, trading fear in our eyes. I was seven years their senior, so I extended a hand and invited them into my room. I wanted to offer what no one had ever given me: the opportunity to feel safe.

*

The National Weather Service reports that one in 15,300 people will be struck by lightning in their lifetime. In a given year, the odds are one in 1,222,000.

Every year in the United States, thirty to fifty people die after lightning enters their bodies and leaves, because the electricity ravages their hearts. Ninety percent of people struck survive but with varying degrees of disability.

Lightning-strike-survivor stories published by the National Weather Service list aftereffects like headaches, ringing ears, dizziness, heart problems, pain disorders, and memory loss. Three in fifty survivors report newfound psychic abilities. If lightning enters the skull, neurological injury is likely, so some victims live with brain damage and personality shifts. Many confess having emotional issues, from minor irritability to uncontrollable rage.

A surprising number of survivors report getting struck by lightning two, sometimes three times, as if their first brush with electrostatic discharge transformed them into living, breathing lightning rods just waiting for a storm. In 1984, my mother became one of those people––one in a million.

So what does that make me?

*

By the time I reached adulthood, I’d finally gained some agency, the freedom to choose peaceful environments and a respite from the tumult, but along with that came decisions about engaging with family I didn’t want to make. As a twentysomething, I forced myself home for holidays even when the tension felt excruciating.

Clipped greetings and forced smiles occasionally gave way to affection, some semblance of a happy family, and I mined those moments and willed them to stick. Always the dependable and dutiful daughter, I kept showing up at Christmas for years after my brother quit.

I have long possessed a sort of creative fire, occasionally misplaced but always there, sparking and shaping my days like a blazing, ephemeral guiding light. When I was young it fed my imagination and kept me reading, drawing, scheming. It was often misunderstood in my evangelical community, which valued rigidity and humility over self-expression, but it still led me to believe I could do improbable things like become a professional opera singer. Sometimes, I imagine that alchemizing fire deep in my chest stems from the lightning that seized my mother’s body so shortly before it carried me. But there’s another side to fire, one that’s less appealing. I can be impatient, even unkind, which taught me that where fire sparks, it also destroys.

Recognizing the darker of my lightning traits––and remembering where I learned them––led me to a question: Was my mother angry before lightning assaulted her body, or did that otherworldly event leave her permanently simmering with heat?

There were always whispers, hints about anger smoldering in my grandfather that might have gotten passed down to her. My father’s sister, long obsessed with family dynamics, had a theory of her own.

“Your mom was never the same after the lightning,” she said once when I was in college. “She wasn’t as pleasant. Not as nice.”

One afternoon last spring, five years after my father left, I felt ready to take steps forward with my mother. I told her about the National Weather Service’s list of side effects for lightning-strike victims, proceeding with caution. But she nodded yes to each with recognition in her eyes.

That day, sitting in my backyard, almost four decades after being struck, my mother told me the extent of her injuries for the first time. There was an incredible headache. Confusion. Searing pain that lasted for months and, resisting medication, led her to morphine. The inability to discern right from left, which plagued her for years. Later, recurring migraines.

My mother’s pain was so intense that she would wake up crying at night, and doctors could offer nothing more than advice to take two pills and go to sleep, which never worked, she noted. Her knee ached with no explanation. She woke up with a cataract where lightning invaded her eye and Lichtenberg figures, or burns in the shape of feathery tree branches, where it exited up and down her thigh. Lichtenberg figures appear when a surge of electricity causes blood vessels to burst, and my mom’s took more than a month to heal.

I broached the next topic carefully.

“The National Weather Service lists personality and emotional changes along with physical ones,” I said, and I paused.

“Yes,” she said definitively.

There was no hesitation. My mom was anxious after being struck, she said. She was antsy and lived in fear. As she described her life after lightning, she started to cry. Since being struck, my mother has had premonitions about five or six deaths.

We faltered on the effect I saved for last, the one that haunted both of us in different ways. Anger. In that moment words failed us, but our eyes filled.

*

Lighting has shot through every piece of my life; it touched my mother, brought me to earth, and, for better or worse, made me who I am. On better days it almost seems like the universe, nearly diverted by my parents’ foibles, resorted to supernatural phenomena to get me here at this time, in this place. I find comfort in this: that wise and benevolent gods might have conspired with some creative organizational intelligence and a big storm to make my life reality. That the mysteries of the sky led me here, and within those mysteries, I might uncover a bit of luck. 

My mother’s body, one in a million, became a conduit for lightning, and, three months later, it became a conduit for me.

In ancient traditions of self-analysis like ayurveda and astrology, humans look to their physical makeup and the sky to better understand their personalities and potential. Universal archetypes, developed over thousands of years to express the human condition and passed down through storytelling, are embedded in our consciousness and offer insight, like a mirror we can use to search for our place within the collective. In both traditions I am largely composed of fire. Symbolically, fire represents heat, inspiration, and action, which, along with lightning, have shaped my life like a blessing and a curse.

Encountering rage at home as a child prompts a variety of responses, all disorienting, and each one exposing parts of yourself you didn’t know were there. Though I felt timid and fearful, sometimes detached, at home, I frequently slipped into the only means of response that felt anything like protection: fighting back.

“How does it feel to ruin our lives?” I screamed, more often than I care to admit.

I hurled insults at my mother, desperate to wake her up, deflect her wrath, bring her back from fury. In those moments it only pushed her further away.

As the National Weather Service puts it, “A person struck by lightning becomes part of the main lightning discharge channel.”

The same can be true for children in unhappy situations; they learn to mistake anger for power before they can even walk.

There was a famous ranger who worked at Shenandoah National Park in the mid-twentieth century named Roy Sullivan. According to several reports, Roy survived seven lightning strikes. He lived his life a walking magnet for the sky. Fellow rangers were scared to be near him when it rained, and his iconic park hats were known to spontaneously burst into flame during storms, so he carried a bucket of water everywhere he went. Eventually, Roy took his own life––not by standing outside in a storm, but with a gun. Lightning’s curse had become too much to bear.

Like many of its victims, I survived multiple lightning strikes. My mother’s anger, which may have been caused, at least in part, by her supernatural event, left aftereffects I never would have chosen. I burned hot. I burned out. Sometimes I hurt the people I loved most because I, like my mother, lived in fear. After years of looking within, and following in Roy’s footsteps, I learned to carry a bucket of water around to put my fires out. Today, I can see storms coming and seek shelter before they cause any harm.

My mother’s body, one in a million, became a conduit for lightning, and, three months later, it became a conduit for me. It may take a lifetime, or several, to understand the role lightning played in our lives, but for now I know I was shaped by my father’s choices, my mother’s pain, and my own attempts at being glue. The anger in our household made life hard, but without it––without lightning itself––I would not be here at all.

If the world is as enchanted as I sometimes think it is, maybe lightning is the cause, a kind of electric charge that helps me make meaning from the chaos. Despite its challenges, despite my family’s legacy of depression and anger, these repeated firebolts have given me a new perspective on myself. In nature, lightning destroys. It sets things on fire. But as it ignites, it inspires and creates conditions for new life. In this case, the new life is mine.

By examining these truths, the foundational darknesses of our lives pitted against light, my mother and I have been redeemed. Cleansed by fire and forced to reckon with ourselves. Seeds long dormant, almost lost on the scorched forest floor, have germinated and are beginning to bud. Revitalizing our biological roots, those impossibly tangled but vital, nourishing threads, has prepared us for growth. Everything is possible now: Together, we have chosen a future that is less controlled by storms.

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