Through the darkest valley (Video)

The horror of Dec. 19, 2014, is still raw for Paula Smalley.

That Friday, she and her husband, Craig, had gone to see their friends in an R.E.M. cover band at WorkPlay downtown. Craig said it seemed like half of Homewood was there that night. 

The show ended around 11 p.m., and the Smalleys exited among a crowd of people walking to their cars. As it began to sprinkle, Paula laughed at “what a 46-year-old woman” she was for popping up her umbrella.

A friend stepped under it with her, and they looked left, right and then left again before stepping out to cross the street.

The next thing Paula remembers is looking up at Craig and him telling her she would be OK but that she had been struck by a car. No one else had seen the car coming either, Craig said. He had watched the collision out of the corner of his eye and witnessed the car immediately driving off. 

By 5 a.m. the next morning, the doctors told the Smalleys that a rough journey lay ahead, but that Paula would recover. 

The impact had shattered bones in Paula’s body literally from head to toe. She would spend the next three weeks at UAB, first in the trauma unit and then at Spain Rehabilitation Center, and then another seven and a half weeks at friends Laura and Scott Williams’ house in Homewood before returning home. 

On Sunday, Paula’s niece Kelly Dorough, who runs Homewood HomeTees with her, had come to see her before she went into surgery.

“Can you even believe this, Kel?” Paula had said.

Dorough smiled. It sounded like something Paula would say. It offered a glimmer of hope. 

The night of the incident, Paula had been wearing a tight scarf and a new J.Crew down coat she had found at a consignment store. Although her bones were broken, she was not scratched and her neck was not damaged. Paula now sees the coat as a physical representation of how God was her “blanket of protection” in those tragic moments.

Living through darkness

Still, the days ahead were horrific. In Paula’s words, she “broke her face” and fractured ribs, her tailbone and her pelvis. Her head injuries caused vertigo, and it would be three months before she could stand on her feet again.

The pain was not just physical. It was mental and emotional. Paula’s tears never seemed to stop, and she was unable to wipe them herself.

Even on Feb. 3, almost two months later, she felt “a very dark existence” when returning to the orthopedist. As they pulled up her X-rays, she plugged her ears like a child and looked away. She didn’t want to hear as the doctor reported to her husband and sister. It wasn’t until her May 26 appointment that she felt brave enough to see them. It wasn’t denial; she just wanted to move forward.

Craig never left her side, nor did her sister, Donna Purcell, who left her Lake Martin home with an overnight bag on Dec. 19 and wouldn’t return for months, sleeping at Paula’s house each night with Paula and Craig’s two high school-aged daughters.

“Prayer just sustained them,” Paula said later of her daughters Maizie and Sally. “The girls did exceptionally well. It could have knocked them down, but they took care of themselves.”

Two thoughts stuck with Paula on dark days. She never questioned why it was her who had been hit, and she never believed that what happened was part of God’s plan.

“It’s just something that happened,” she said. “It’s evil firsthand, and I suffered a broken heart from it. Until Jesus comes again, we will experience brokenness.”

A counselor and friend of the Smalleys, Gordon Bals, met with Paula every Sunday and listened as she cried and cried. She was feeling crazy because she hated something so deeply, he told her. But good would come of it, he assured her.

“That gave me permission to hate something so terribly and know that I wasn’t crazy,” Paula said.

People didn’t know what to tell her, but Bals gave her tools for the grief she was experiencing. The way Paula and Craig see it, the experience made her both stronger and softer.

“She is softer having been hurt and broken, but stronger through God’s ability to resurrect and restore,” Craig said. “She is stronger as when we are broken, we can find that God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness.”

People on all sides

Faces on the Smalleys’ path through the weeks and months after the incident became the blessings that accompanied the horrors.

“I felt like the people we came in contact with were handpicked for me,” Paula said. 

On one of the first days, Paula was upset when her sister and husband couldn’t go back into surgery with her. A tech with her took her hand and told her, “I will be with you the whole time. You will not be alone.”

UAB physical therapist Robin Riddle’s care for Paula stands out most in the Smalleys’ memory. She worked with Paula for five months.

“I truly feel that these therapists get to know someone from the inside out,” Paula said. “They see the raw emotional side of you first, and then see your ‘normal’ everyday self after the healing begins to take place.”

A group of “prayer ladies” from their church’s prayer ministry, Advent House, were dedicated to sit and pray and listen to Paula every day. Kathy Logue would come daily to sit quietly nearby and pray. 

“People really just cared,” Paula said. “We were sustained on people’s prayers.”

The narrow doors and small rooms in the Smalleys’ Edgewood home were not equipped for wheelchairs and other equipment Paula needed, but friends from Cathedral Church of the Advent, where Craig serves as canon for pastoral care and counseling, changed that. A builder, David Tanner, spearheaded constructing a ramp up the hill that their house sits on to get a wheelchair in their home, as well as moving their laundry room upstairs from the basement and widening doors and the bathroom. People brought meals, and an angel painting appeared on her mantel along with a host of other items they found in their home when they moved back in at last.

“We need a new vocabulary to express our thankfulness,” Craig said.

The road home

When she left UAB in January, all Paula could think about were two things: her job teaching 4-year-olds at All Saints Episcopal Church, and spring break. 

She couldn’t return to teaching, but her physical therapist kept telling her there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t go on spring break. The home her family and friends rented in Rosemary Beach wasn’t handicap-accessible, but she went anyway, just two weeks after she had stood for the first time.

Every day that week was sunny and around 80 degrees. She sat on a bicycle while Craig pushed it.

“I felt like it was God saying, ‘I told you I would take care of you,’” she said. “It was the first turning point I felt in my mind.”

When she returned to her physical therapist two weeks later, Paula learned she was twice as strong as when she had left. From there, she skipped the crutches and the cane and went straight to walking on her own from the walker. The hospital bed went to the curb. And at long last, the Smalleys were able to return home. 

Paula was determined to make it back before cheerleading tryouts for her youngest daughter, Sally, started March 10, and despite the icy weather a week beforehand, she came home to a house in the midst of construction. But that didn’t matter, nor did the fact that her wheelchair and shower chair came too.

A few weeks later, another turning point came. She had saved the piles of get-well cards she had received, but it was time to move on. Her daughter Maizie encouraged her to throw them in the trash, and she did just that.

Little by little, Paula pushed through and didn’t miss the milestones she’d longed to watch her children reach. She went to see her daughters cheer at the final Homewood High School basketball games of the season. A friend drove her to Auburn to see her son off to Old South, and she got to watch her daughter go to prom that night. She walked up to the cabin she stayed in on a graduation trip with her daughter Maizie and friends — with no wheelchair and no walker. She went to a family reunion on Lake Martin and to cheer camp with Sally, a rising junior. On July 16, she and her family of five will drive to eastern Ontario to spend two weeks, just as they do every summer and just as her father has for the past 76 years. 

By May, Paula was two months ahead in physical therapy, and her orthopedist couldn’t believe Paula was walking into her orthopedist office. In Paula’s words, she has never been a “worker outer,” but May 27 was her last day at Spain. She had been going three times a week for physical therapy.

At We Love Homewood Day in May, Paula ran into Ivy Spencer, a physical therapist whose kids had been on swim team with Paula’s. Ivy offered to be Paula’s therapist when she left Spain, and in June Paula started seeing her twice a week at Eskridge and White. 

“That’s just Homewood to Homewood, friend to friend,” Paula said.

Doctors tell Paula now the healing should be complete after a year, but she’s not looking for a new normal. In her mind, there was Paula Before, and now there’s Paula After. 

 “I don’t take risks, I don’t do scary things, I don’t work out, but I lived it, I cried it, I went straight through it,” she said. “I just want it to be over.”

A lot of people recently have asked Paula if the person who hit her has been caught. It catches her off guard.

“We forgave that person early on,” she said. “I was never mad, I was just so sad… The tears have dried, the idea of it is fading, and I believe it’s because we went straight through it. I just wish it didn’t happen.”