We Fly With Our Own Wings: Marika's Story

Marika's Story


In 1995 I was a freshman in college. When I came home for Christmas break I had headaches for the entire break and slept a lot. I never knew something was wrong, I just thought I was a typical college student. After I went back to school, I quickly developed other symptoms, I lost my appetite, I had numbness in my face, I had no energy, extreme fatigue, I would be completely out of breath after walking up 5 steps. So I decided I needed to quit that semester.

My mother came to pick me up two weeks later. When she saw me she knew something was really wrong. I hadn’t really seen it yet because I was around all the same people everyday and they hadn’t seen any change. My skin was a pale shade of grey and I was exhausted. On the drive home it finally hit me that something was really wrong. It is a family tradition to sing songs in the car and after just singing one line I said, “Mom I can’t breathe.”

The next day I went to the doctor and got some blood tests done. What they were testing for really freaked me out. Two days later they called and said we had to go to the emergency room. I had to have a bone marrow aspiration. They took a hollow bore needle and twisted it into my hip bone, then took a syringe and with that sucked out the bone marrow. It was very painful. The process is similar to trying to suck silly puddy through a straw. It was Valentines Day 1996.

That night they called and said I had leukemia.

I went to the hospital that night. It was almost a relief to know what was wrong with me, but I still didn’t feel better. I just wanted to feel better. I spent the next month in the hospital getting chemo. I lost my hair, vomited a lot, these were new and frustrating things for me. I was on steroids, had surgery, more chemo and then, finally, I got to go home.

My parents were taking turns watching me, my dad made me some lunch, I took a bite and feel asleep. I remember waking up when my mom came home and the next thing I remember is being put on a stretcher by two men in my bedroom with my parents standing over me. They said I had some seizures and they were taking me to the hospital. In the ambulance I had a stroke. The left lower lobe of my brain had a clot in it and then I had a blood clot in the center of my left eye.

I woke up in the ER and everything was very surreal. I felt this wwaaaaahhhhhh noise all around me. My mom and dad were there and the room felt a lot bigger than it was. Then the neurologist came in. As he started to talk to me I saw rainbows in the corner of my eye and I felt my eyes roll over to look at the rainbows. The next time I woke up I was in the oncology floor of the hospital.

That was one of my lowest points. I spent the next month doing all these treatments and I still felt terrible. I couldn’t see out of my left eye, I lost a lot of strength in my right side and I couldn’t really move my right side. I told my mom that I was done. I didn’t want to do this anymore. She looked at me so strong and said, “Ok, well, you know what that means.” I looked at her and said, “Huh?” She came over and sat on my bed and said, “Well, that means you die.”

I said I didn’t want to do that either. We sat there for a while and talked about what all this meant for me and my life. That night I was alone in my room. I had taken a nap, which is what I did most of the time in the hospital, and I woke up to this beautiful light up to my left. The head of this body of light was very white and the body was very blue. I didn’t really register what this was at the time. For me it was this beam and very warm and humble, very ethereal and quiet. Something from that light gave me this wisdom and strength that I have never felt or seen again. It hit me: No fucking way am I going to die. I have too many people to meet, too many places to go, I hungered for knowing more, seeing more, experiencing more. I knew from that moment on it wasn’t going to end for me.

Once I made that decision I never contemplated death again. It was a whole 360 for me. My life changed. No matter how bad it got, yes, I was scared sometimes, but I never feared death again. Before that moment I had feared god and feared death.

For the rest of the year I was in treatment. The big IV chemo and I was vomiting 10 times a day during the worst of it. I took everyday for that day and never looked forward, never looked backward. I had to be the person I am inside cause I had a second chance. I never had the opportunity to be who I knew I was in my heart and now I did. It was like I had a second lease on life.



When I got better I went back to school. I had pretty much lost all my closest friends so I made new friends. One of the struggles I faced when I met new people was no one had the same perspective on life as me, everyone was so caught up in frivolous things, the things we don’t need to spend time and energy on. It drove me crazy.

In my junior year I lived with 6 girls, and I still had to give myself weekly injections. All the girls would gather around and were really fascinated that I still had chemo to do. I was on chemo for three years total. I had pills to take, and a shot in the leg once a week. It sucked. I was so grateful that I was treated when I was treated, because I probably wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Even now in my day-to-day life I still realize that I’m here for a reason.

After school I worked for Harley Davidson. I loved the company, but I was not fulfilled. I always left myself open to new opportunities and one day I was waiting for a friend to pick me up and I got bored, so I took a walk. I literally walked right into the nursing school at Marquette. I saw a ‘School of Nursing’ sign and I followed it. When I got there I just went upstairs and ended up talking to the dean, just making conversation. The next year I started the Masters program, which is nursing combined with a masters degree.

The first day of class they talk about what nursing is, what it means to be a nurse, what the profession is all about. I was in class, crying! I looked around and I was so excited, this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, no matter what. There are so many things you can do as a nurse. It was overwhelming and I felt so at peace. I thought, I’m taking good care of myself and I get to give back to the people that gave to me. What better way to live the rest of my life?

There was no other logical place for me to work than where I was patient. I called the manager of the floor where I was a patient and she remembered me. So it was kind of a given that I worked with the oncologist that was my oncologist, I also worked with social workers that are still my social workers. It was a little uncomfortable for some people but it just seemed right. And it was hard. To be there in that capacity and to be taking care of other people while I probably still had a lot of work to do inside myself.

Before I got sick I was so lost. I had no idea what I wanted to do. My leukemia was, by far, the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. The times that it makes it worth it are when as a nurse I’ve been able to help someone be ok with where they are, with their disease. I’ve had teenagers and adolescents have moments of total breakdown. They were sad and crying, just lost and frustrated with their situation. And in these moments I have told them my own story. I have told a handful of kids and parents what I’ve been through. I want them to have a little bit of hope and faith and to be ok with where they are at. They can see somebody that has made it and they realize that there is a possibility!

I remember the first time someone asked me about death. When I was sick I had gone to a company dinner party with my parents because I couldn’t be left alone after my seizures. I walked into the kitchen to get some water and a boy about 7 or 8 years old walked into the kitchen as I walked out, I said, “Hi,” but he just stared back at me. Finally he pointed out that I didn’t have any hair and he asked me why. I thought the most basic explanation would be because I was on medicine that makes my hair fall out. And his next words were, “Are you going to die?” My immediate reaction was, no, I’m not. How could you explain to a child that there is a so-and-so percent chance that you will die and a so-and-so percent chance that you won’t.


-Marika, Houston, March, 2008

You Tend To See Things A Lot Clearer When You Are About To Die

A couple years back while on a plane listening to this song I thought long and hard about the time I almost lost my life. This song was one of the inspirations for my project "We Fly With Our Own Wings." Last year I did not win a grant that would have allowed me to complete this project but at Fotofest this year one of the members of the jury who was a reviewer asked me how the project was going. I told her that I had put it on the shelf for a bit, that it is was just too painful to continue at the time. We spoke for a bit and she left me with the overwhelming feeling that I need to continue this work. I am. Stay tuned for new work shortly.


"Victim"

I don’t hear a sound as I lay on the ground
These fears building inside of me
Tears fill my eyes as I look to the sky
This bullet is burning inside of me
I cant get up cause I feel that I'm stuck
In this puddle of blood that surrounds me
No one is around and I still hear no sound
Oh, lord somebody help me, help me
So here I lay flat with a bullet hole in my back
I think back I should have just walked away
Dry heave and then I cough
This shit is just pissing me off
If I'm gonna die, let me die
The man who tries his best in the one who is left to rust
And I think back I should have just walked away
Dry heave and then I cough
This shit is pissing me off
If I'm gonna die let me die
So here I here I lay flat with a bullet hole in my back
If I'm gonna die, let me die.

-District 9

Work In Progress: We Fly With Our Own Wings

Alan's Story

Every time I think about my father, the first thing I remember is how he died. Crime in Nigeria is and always has been high but no one ever thinks that they will get robbed. The house I lived in was very big and “Nigerian Thieves” liked big houses. To prevent theft, my house was adequately fortified: six dogs, Alsatians of course, a seven-foot gate and bars on the windows. I thought that no one would ever break into the house. That was until it happened.

Four armed robbers broke into our house at three in the morning. Demeji, my older brother, heard them first and he ran into my room to wake me up but I was not there. I had woke up minutes earlier and was using the bathroom. “There are thieves in the house,” he said from the other side of the door. “Get out of there quickly and meet me in Daddy’s room.” I rushed out of the bathroom and ran to my father’s room where I saw the rest of my family trembling with fear. Dimeji and my father were looking out the window. The four robbers were in our front yard and they (my father and mother) were arguing whether they should or should not use the gun my father had bought. Dimeji wanted to use it but my father suggested otherwise. This was because only a week before, one of our neighbors had fired his weapon at some armed robbers and, after he ran out of bullets, the men broke into the house and cut off all his fingers.

Richard, my younger brother, and my cousin Peju were hiding under the bed but Dimeji and I could not fit underneath. My father ran to the windows and started screaming. “Ole! Ole! Ole! Ole! Ole!” (Yoruba for thief) he shouted, and did not stop until his voice was hoarse. When he saw that no help was forthcoming, he turned to us and told us to remain calm. He assured us that if we were cooperative, we would all live. We believed him so we sat and waited for the men. After about five minutes of waiting, we heard the men coming down the hall. “Where are you all?” one thug asked. “We are here,” my father said back to him,

They turned around, saw us and then advanced toward us. They entered the room and looked at the four of us. (Richard and Peju were under the bed.) My mother and father were sitting the closest to the door and the men while Dimeji and I sat at the back of the room praying (with our eyes open) to God to spare our lives. The men looked around the room and then focused on my father. They told him to stand up and when he did, they shot him once in the stomach. He fell back on the bed and screamed. My mother grabbed some bed sheets and tried to wrap my father’s wounds up while the men ransacked the room.

Over the next half-hour, they emptied the contents of all the drawers, pulled out all the clothes from the cupboards and then began checking under everything. When I saw this, I remembered where Richard and Peju were: under the bed. I stared to move from my position to try and lie down in front of the bed. One man saw me moving toward the bed and he screamed at me to stop moving. He threatened me and when he saw that I was not listening to him, he began to strike me with the butt of his gun until one of his men had to pull him off of me. Although I was battered and bruised, I took some satisfaction in the fact that I had saved Richard and Peju from a possible violent attack.

At four o’clock in the morning, they left our house. As Peju and Richard crawled out from under the bed, my mother ran over to the neighbor’s house and had my father driven to the hospital while she recovered from her own shock.

My father died a week later from multiple gunshot wounds. After my mother told me I went into my room and started punching and breaking everything. I cried for days and days. It was so unfair. He never did anything to anybody.
Two days after his death, we were visited by a police officer. He talked to us and asked us if we could identify the men if we heard their voices or saw them again. My mother quickly said, “No” and asked the man to leave. When he left, my mother sat in a chair and buried her head in hands. I asked her why she was so frantic and she said:
“That police officer was one of them.”





I always assumed my dad would be around to see my children. The world didn’t stop when he died. Nobody else cared that he was gone, I thought people would take time out to help. That’s when I realized that no one is going to look out for me except for me and my family. If you don’t move on from these situations they will eat you up.

I thought I was going to die that night. I thought my time had come, that this was the end. I was too young to think that and I try to live my life to the fullest these days. I don’t have a lot of what ifs about that night because if we shot first I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. There was no reason for them to keep us alive. Everyday I am grateful just to be alive.

I came to America a month after my father’s death. We left everything we had, we left our past there. We all moved into my brother’s apartment in West Philadelphia. I had to sleep on the floor. I felt worthless. I had nowhere to go. We weren’t those people. We weren’t sleep on the floor people. We shouldn’t have been doing that and we were forced to do that. I had no idea what was going to happen. I just sat there and thought about the situation everyday. It was so fast and so slow at the same time.

I didn’t let things get the best of me. I know that that was not what my father would have wanted. I finally got into a high school and it was a pretty smooth transition. It could have been a whole lot worse. Germantown Friends School (a private school in Philadelphia) was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I went from the floor to school everyday, but it was nice to just have friends again. It was night and day between my new life here and my life in Nigeria. My new environment was great; my new friends helped me out and made life a lot easier.

In some senses I know I will never be who I would have been if my dad had been alive, I’m a completely different person. At times I feel selfish because my life is a lot better now and that I traded my father’s life for this. I know he is looking out for me because things have been O.K. He would have done anything for us and that’s what he died doing.

My father died for us. He died trying to save his family, he gave us life and he gave us reasons to fight. He is my motivation. He is my motivation to make it and to do something. No matter what there is always going to be something to fight with in life and he is my motivation through that, he is the reason I am where I am. Everything has two sides, I will never be the man I thought I would be, but I might be the man who my dad thought I would be. Since he died I feel like I am living for him now. He is me. I have become the person who tries to find the good in everything because I know it can be a lot worse, things can get better if you stay and fight.


-Alan, Philadelphia, May, 2007

Work In Progress: We Fly With Our Own Wings

Robin's Story

I was in a wine bar with some friends having a drink when we heard some gunshots outside. This guy walks into the bar saying he has been shot and right after him a man with a gun walks in and shoots the guy again. The gunman then grabs me by my hair and takes me and the twenty or so other people at the bar back to the kitchen. He throws plastic ties at me and orders me to tie everyone’s hands up. As I am tying people up he pours kerosene all over me and pulls out a red barbeque lighter, starts flicking it and yells, “Motherfuckers are gonna burn tonight!” At that point I realize this is a life or death situation.

I have never have seen anyone filled with so much anger as he was. When he then grabs me and says, “You are coming with me,” I immediately think he is going to rape me. He instead uses me as a human shield as he shoots at the police who have arrived outside as he holds his gun to one side of my head and the lighter to the other. He starts talking to me and asks what are you, I tell him I’m Hispanic and we start speaking in Spanish. He tells me not to worry and that I’m going to be O.K. His whole thing that night was that he wanted to kill white people. I don’t feel comforted when he tells me this and I think that I can somehow diffuse his anger as he starts telling me about his son in Brooklyn.

He then decides he wants to speak to the police. At some point between fumbling with the phone, holding me, the barbeque lighter and the gun, he puts the gun in his belt. A woman who gets loose from her hand ties sees him doing this and when he puts the gun in his belt she tackles him from behind. I suddenly feel myself falling. We all end up on the floor and he is still somehow holding on to my neck with all his strength. The police rush in, I hear a gunshot go off and the next thing I know his blood is all over me. No one died that night but three people were shot.

We all gather outside and the police put us in this bus because they don’t know exactly what he poured all over us or what we have been exposed to. They take us to the hospital. After they clean me up a doctor tells me I have 45 minutes to decide if I want to take an AZT cocktail because they think he has AIDS. I end up taking the medicine. The situation gets even worse now as I have to wait 9 months to know if I am HIV positive. After two weeks of taking the cocktail I get really sick. It turns out my liver almost explodes as a result of the cocktail so again I could have died. A decision is made for me to stop taking the cocktail and that I would get tested every 6 weeks. My first test is negative but the HIV scare is far worse than the whole hostage situation. I thought to myself how could I have lived through that whole experience and still possibly get a death sentence? After 9 months I finally learn that I was not infected with HIV.



I was twenty when this happened. I am twenty-five now and I’m a lawyer. In dealing with this it would have been easy to compartmentalize the experience and just put it away. At times right after it happened I would have random memories of that night. I gave a lot of time to myself. That summer I would sit on my couch for hours and just think about that night and about myself as a person. That opened the door for me to think about my life in a different way. I had conversations with myself and I told myself I wasn’t going to pain myself because of what happened. My initial reactions were why me, why would this happen to me out of all the random people and random bars on a Saturday night. I quickly realized though that this was a life changing experience and I could choose to feel bad for myself or I could choose to accept it, deal with it and move on. At some point all those thoughts translated into an amplified sense of purpose. I allowed myself to think about things that I have never thought about before, I thought about what my reason for being here was and it put my life and career in a new perspective.

The twenty-first year of my life was amazing. I think that coming off of this experience I discovered a new found energy. I got a tattoo that year that says in Latin, “She flies with her own wings,” and that is how I plan on living my life. To me this translates into the independence and strength that I have. I know that I can do things on my own. I know that I can achieve the goals that I set for myself, and not without hard work and lapses along the way, but the whole thing for me is about rising above.

One of my biggest fears is to be vulnerable. I draw my greatest strength from my most vulnerable experience in life. It was and is painful but I know that I am fortunate to have lived these past few years with a sense of purpose that I don’t think people my age have. I am more in tune with myself and this has provided me the ability to put my strengths where they need to be. It has given me clarity and allows me to focus more on the things that are really important. I know myself better. Things are just easier to deal with now.

I am fortune to be able to go through life knowing that I have a chance to do what I thought was unfinished. It surprises me sometimes just how much this experience is a part of who I am. I remind myself of how far I’ve come. I always considered myself a strong person but this was proof. In the face of something that is absolutely insane, something you would see in a movie, I would never have thought I could have gone through that experience, deal with it and move beyond it.

I don’t see myself as a victim. I see myself as someone who has lived through an awful experience and was able to rise above and use the anger that was directed at me and translate it into something positive within myself. I go through life knowing that I am privileged to be here and I need to make sure that I act in accordance with that privilege, not only in the way that I treat people but also that I appreciate the opportunities that I’ve been given.

-Robin, New York, April, 2007

Work In Progress: We Fly With Our Own Wings

My Story

As I lay on the basement floor with my hands tied behind my back and a gun to my head I thought, “I am going to die tonight.”

The night of December 21, 2003 changed my life forever. At the time I was fresh out of school and working at a sneaker store in the Lower East Side. It was a Sunday and just as we were closing two guys who had been in earlier in the day knock on the door. We buzz them in because they had put so many shoes on hold and we thought they might buy some. As soon as they walked through that door I knew something was terribly wrong. The older guy had some sort of ski mask on his face and before I could make sense of the situation he pulled a gun out and pointed it at my face. “Get against the wall,” he barked as he put the gun in my face, “put your hands on the wall and look at the floor.” He pulled plastic knot ties out of his pocket and tied my hands behind my back. Then he went through my pockets and pulled out my cell phone and wallet and dropped them on the floor. The younger guy who only wore a Yankees hat to cover his face tied up my friend who ran the store with me. We were then brought down to the basement and ordered to lie on the floor. As I put my face on the cold cement floor I began to drift away from reality. I couldn’t believe what was happening. “Where is the safe,” the older guy asked both of us as he dug the gun into the back of our heads. They had trash bags with them and they began to quickly pack them full of sneakers. The older guy would occasionally blurt out that he was a killer and that he had killed people over very little than this. As they ran around getting what they could the older guy would put the gun into the back of our heads and make threats.

The thought that I would die tonight quickly raced through my mind. I tilted my baseball hat up and over to the left so that when he shot me in the head perhaps the angle of my hat would throw him off and the bullet would only graze my head. From this point on it is very hard for me to describe in words what happened. I suddenly felt a powerful rush flood my body, I was no longer there on that basement floor. The muscles in my body relaxed. This wave whatever it was that had swept through me told me that I was not ready to die. No! It was not my time to die, what I was put here on Earth to do I had not yet begun. And as soon as it communicated that to me, it raced out of me just as quickly as it had come. When I opened my eyes and looked around the two men had gone.




From that night on I have devoted my life and everything I have to my art, doing what I now know I was put on Earth to do. That night has ended up being one of the greatest things to ever happen to me. It has challenged and taught me a great deal about what it means to be alive, who I am and how I live my life. Ultimately, this experience has become one of the driving forces of my art. Sometimes I remind myself that I shouldn’t be here, I should be dead and I think about this gift I have been given. Every minute that I am alive I try to make the most of that gift. I know what I was put on Earth to do and I must do it, I don’t have a choice, I will go crazy if I am not able to do this thing that exists inside me. I have given everything I have to pursue this dream that I am living. I have lost girlfriends, friends, I have racked up huge amounts of debt and have made many other sacrifices in order to live this dream. I would even die for it.

Last year I was photographing at dawn in a rough neighborhood. As I was under my dark cloth focusing, I suddenly heard someone very close to me. I pop out and find two guys with metal pipes in their hands at my side. We stare at each other. Nothing is said for several seconds. I wanted and needed the photograph that I was about to take and I was determined to make it, I said, “Rob me, beat me up, kill me or leave me alone,” and I returned under my dark cloth. When I was finished focusing I threw the cloth back over my shoulder and as I went to grab a film holder from my bag, I looked around and the two men had vanished. Perhaps that was a foolish thing to say and I was lucky, but I meant everything I said. I was not and am still not afraid to die doing this thing that gave me a second chance at life, to me that is the way I must honor this gift and if I do not live this way and by these rules I would be cheating this gift and my life.

Work In Progress: We Fly With Our Own Wings

Since I have started this blog it has focused primarily on writing and images. This year I have been working on two projects that are a combination of stories and photographs. I have shared some images from the series "All My Life I Have Had The Same Dream" and I will continue to do so on this blog. The other series, "We Fly With Our Own Wings," has at times been very hard to share and a challenge to stay focused on. The project is a series of portraits and stories of those who have had a near death experience (which I have had, I include myself in the series) and how that experience has been a nucleus for positive change in one’s life. This body of work explores the power of resiliency and the courage that reveals itself at the worst moment in a person’s life. I have collected the stories of what happened that night and then asked my subjects how that experience has changed their life. This series honors those who have refused to be a victim as it examines storytelling as a method of orientation, a connection between the past and present and a way to make sense of ourselves through experience.