Beyond the Darkness Read online

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my parents and stepparents for your love and for your courage, selflessness, and support in the telling of some of our darkest hours together so that others might benefit.

  To my sister, Toni. I am so grateful that we came into this uncertain world together. I marvel at the goodness of God to have blessed me with a lifelong friend and confidante. I can endure anything with my hand in yours.

  To my children, who had the courage to come into my life. You are angels sent from God, my teachers, and the source of my greatest joy.

  And to my husband, Richard, for your patience and long suffering. Because you have stood by me through the torrents of life, ours is the greatest love story of all.

  Table of Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  Foreword

  While on tour with my book Embraced by the Light, I am very often asked " What did you learn about Hell?" Fortunately for me, Hell was not a part of my experience, though I did witness Satan's anger at my decision to return to earth so that I could complete my mission.

  Now, whereas my experience was positive, some others have not been so fortunate. Some near-death experiences did not go toward the light as I did, but instead they were drawn into a place filled with fear and darkness.

  This revealing book by Angie Fenimore is a great example of the brushes with Hell that I have heard others try to describe. It touches on many truths that I have a firm conviction of after having my own death experience. Beyond the Darkness shares with us Angie's discovery that "just as God and Jesus Christ are real, a being of darkness, Satan, truly exists." And that "God loves us and calls to us." but "He cannot force us to choose the light." We are given, as we come to earth, our free

  We all have the will to choose the right or the wrong—negative or positive. Remember, the choice is ours—to choose the light or the darkness—even for those who have experienced death. My prayer is that we all choose the light.

  May you find out more about the light as you read this account of a woman's journey into the darkness and learn of the love that brought her back safely into the light and the love of God.

  Macooa ("A Piece of My Heart"),

  Betty J. Eadie

  PROLOGUE

  It would overwhelm me every January and June—that terrible state that I came to think of as "the cycle." It would begin with a sensation of emptiness, which would soon be filled by obsessive ruminations: Grownups do terrible things to little girls . . . their filthy, selfish, poisoning hands, defiling . . . filling me with toxic hate.... To shut out the thoughts, I dimmed my senses, fuzzed out my emotions, until I was consumed by a profound apathy, barely able to concentrate on life going on around me or to care about my husband and my two young sons. So locked up in myself, I would start to feel suffocated, choking, desperate to break out of the prison of my anxiety and despair.

  The counselors I saw would spin theories about the timing, but therapy brought me no relief. My horrible secrets were so deeply buried in me that everyday life was almost a parallel, an entirely separate reality from my internal world. Even as a child I had believed that I inhabited two different spheres, convincing myself that I had been abducted by aliens from outer space and ensconced in an exact replica of my house, my school, and my world, peopled by cloned impostors who pretended to be my family and friends. Later on, I abandoned the science fiction scenario, coming to think instead that the alien being existed inside of me, an evil presence that I despised but was powerless to expel.

  And so in January 1991, deep in the darkness of the cycle, I penned a note for my husband, Richard, my sister, Toni, and my sons: "Richard, keep my wedding rings and give each of the boys one of my pearl earrings. Please, always tell Alex and Jacob how much I loved them and that this is not their fault. I can't do this anymore. Something is terribly wrong inside of me. Toni, take the silver earring. I'm sorry that I have nothing else to give you. I love you. Please understand. I just cant do this anymore. "

  •

  The only way out I could see was to take my life.

  ONE

  When my own troubles started, I looked back to life with my family, struck by the sense that I was passing on problems that had plagued us for generations. My dad had grown up on a farm in Indiana during the Depression, the fifth of nine children who had to share one toothbrush, two beds, and their rigid father's wrath. Dad remembers that nearly every day he had to cut a switch or bring the lard paddle to Grampa in order to get a lickin', even for trivial offenses. He would be similarly overbearing, though not as harsh, with his children from his first marriage. My mother's family was also troubled—her father drank, and her mother left her twin daughters to fend for themselves. In turn, my own mother would try to escape her life, and so in time would I. Even the story of my parents' meeting, which on the surface sounds romantic, seemed to set the stage for future sadness. They had met in a little coffee shop in Indianapolis. My mother didn't have enough change to pay the cashier, and so my dad covered her bill. My father had just been through a divorce and lost his teenage children to his first wife. My mother was looking for her ticket out of a difficult home—someone to take care of her—and my dad was looking for someone to take care of. And so in short order, I was conceived, when my mother was still just a child herself. She was only seventeen.

  By the time I was born, they had moved to a tiny trailer in Phoenix, Arizona. Right from the start, I was the light of my daddy's life. By then he had mellowed, gaining a greater dimension of tenderness and affection than he had been able to express with his first family, and since my mother knew nothing of caring for a baby, it fell to him to love and pamper me. I squalled every moment that I wasn't being rocked, and so Dad rocked me and rocked me. Finally Grandma Carver, my mom's mother, came and put an end to that nonsense. Dad says it broke his heart, but the two women let me cry and made him go to bed because he was spoiling me so badly.

  Most of my "memories" are family stories that were told and retold over the years. It's part of our family legend that when I learned to stand, to talk a little, and to sleep at night, I would wake up my dad in the morning. Standing in my crib, I would shake the bars and holler, "Da! Da! Da!" until he came to rescue me. But once I learned to climb, I no longer waited for Daddy to free me from my crib. One night he woke up at about three a.m. to an urgent pounding at the front door. When he answered, I was with a nice police officer who said that he'd found me playing in the dirt. From then on, Daddy would check on me periodically throughout the night to be sure I was safe in bed, not wandering down the street with a stray dog, which was another distressing habit of mine.

  Still, I managed to slip out now and then. There was a night when my panicked parents found me missing from my crib and woke up half the neighborhood to search for me, with no luck. Terrified, my parents went home to call the police, but when Daddy turned on the living-room light to dial the telephone, he found me—there in the fireplace, fast asleep with my blanket. I must have heard that tale a thousand times.

  Now when I think of those stories,
I have to laugh. It's almost as if I were trying to escape my life, even then!

  While I was Daddy's little girl first, I had three favorite companions. Two of them were my imaginary friends, Ega and Ebber, and the third was my blanket. (I have to count my blanket because I spent so much time with it and because I loved it so much.) Dad says that I would have tea parties with Ega and Ebber, but what I remember especially was their handy ability to take the rap for minor misdeeds. For example, on the coffee table in our living room was a pair of little wooden shoes that Daddy had brought back from Europe after the war. I loved those little shoes, and occasionally I would slip them on my feet and sneak out of the house to play. When I got caught, I always blamed the escape on poor Ega and Ebber. Those two friends disappeared about the time my little sister, Toni, arrived but I continued to cling to my blanket. Thick and red, it had once covered my parents' bed. It was my greatest source of comfort.

  My little family—Daddy, Mama, me, and Toni—were fairly isolated in Arizona. Except for a few dissenters in California and Michigan, both sides of my family—as well as my half-siblings from Daddy's first marriage, who by then had children of their own—lived in Indiana. I saw them only a few times during my childhood, growing to love them in an innocent, abstract way, without really knowing them. But I could see that, like my father, both sets of my grandparents had grown tender with age, more indulgent and kindly with us than they had been with their own children. I remember lots of laughter during visits with Mama's family. The grandchildren would take turns on Grandpa Carver's old tire swing until we got tired or the sun went down and we couldn't see to push each other. Toni and I loved our cousins and vowed that we would all be friends for life. Chasing fireflies with Toni and my cousins, while the grown-ups sat in lawn chairs drinking beer and gabbing, is still vivid in my mind.

  Daddy's family was more proper and stiff, but then they were all much older, except for Carrie and Chris, the twin daughters of Daddy's youngest brother. They were five years older than me. Carrie was born with a hole in her heart that had been patched when she was two, and so she grew up small and weak. Still, she and Chris used to give us piggyback rides around the old family farm. I remember clinging to Carrie's thin frame as she trotted across the grass, gazing across the road where acres of velvet corn field shimmered and danced in the breeze. Carrie made it over the dirt road and through to the corn, stopping to rest along the way, while Toni and Chris whizzed past. Bouncing farther down Carrie's back with each step, I started to worry that I might be dropped. Finally, I demanded to ride with Chris, regardless of whose feelings I hurt. Carrie was just too frail.

  The summer that the twins were eleven years old, Carrie was hospitalized. We were visiting in Indiana then, but I never realized how sick she was. I just kept wishing she'd get well enough to play with us. But instead, she had to undergo heart surgery, and to our horror, she didn't make it through the operation. I remember being as confused as I was grief-stricken. Carrie was the first person I had ever known who died.

  I remember Mama standing in Grandma Carver's living room ironing her white blouse for the funeral. "I want to come too," I protested, but Mama insisted that I was too young. "No," she said gently, "you and Toni are going to stay here with Grandma Carver." So I was left to wonder and worry: Did Carrie have to die? What did dying mean? Would I ever see her again?

  Mama must have been looking for some answers, too, because after Carrie's death she started dressing us up every Sunday to try out a different church. It was my first real taste of religion, and I loved it. At the Lutheran church, Toni and I made construction paper cutouts of Easter eggs and sang and heard about God. I couldn't have been older than five or six, but I still remember the peace and security that I felt when I was told that God loves me.

  Our best friends, Mary and Susie, who lived next door, were devout Catholics. They went to Catholic school and attended mass at a tall, ornate church that was both ominous and compelling. Whenever we passed it in the car, I would peer out the window, mystified by the impenetrable fortress. When we were invited to attend Mary's first communion, I was thrilled that finally I'd get to enter the wrought-iron gates and see what lay inside the forbidding stone walls—secrets so profound that my friends accepted them without question.

  But the mass itself baffled me. I followed along as everyone stood up and sat down, trying to make sense of the mysterious service with its strange words and complicated rules. When it was time to go home, I had more questions than I did before we arrived. How disappointing! I wasn't even sure if the Catholics worshiped the same God as the Protestants.

  My next round of religious experiments started when I was seven, after we moved to Las Vegas. The only girl in the neighborhood close to my age was Shannon, whose family was Baptist. Mom and Daddy had taken to sleeping in on Sunday mornings, so for a while Toni and I tagged along to church with Shannon's family. Later, feeling tremendously grown-up and independent, we got to ride the church bus by ourselves to Sunday school and services. I loved Sunday school, especially the Bible stories and prayers, but the service was something else. The part when the preacher got up and wailed scared the daylights out of me.

  When school started, I made a new friend, Terilyn. She belonged to our car pool, which brought about my introduction to Mormonism. On Wednesday afternoons, her church held "Primary," which was like Sunday school, with lots of singing, stories about Jesus, and prayers offered by the children. Since we drove right by their church on the way home from school, Terilyn started inviting me to come along to Primary. I was drawn to the Mormons' bright, simple chapel and their conception of an accessible, loving God. I liked being able to learn about God during the week, so I could skip the scary Baptist Sunday service altogether.

  One afternoon in the car pool, I mentioned that I didn't really know what to say in a prayer. Terilyn's mom explained that when we talk to God, we should always say thank you for our blessings, and we should end the prayer by saying, "In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen." The formula was that simple, which was such a big help! It freed me to talk to God, and now He became a real presence to me.

  I was fascinated by God and had a desire to know Him in the close, personal way that so many of my friends knew Him. In the process of getting there, I was certainly adopting quite a religious collage, but going to church gave me a real sense of belonging. I loved it when the congregation sang, "He's got the whole world in His hands." I took it literally and felt so comforted by the idea of being in God's embrace.

  TWO

  My mother's searching, meanwhile, had gone beyond exploring churches. She had started taking psychology classes at the college. Having married so young—and having terrible fears of being out in public—she had never braved higher education. At school she made new friends who encouraged her to see a Dr. Ryefield, who could help her overcome her phobias. He was a therapist in Vegas who held group therapy sessions and ran a year-round retreat in the mountains north of the city for people who had serious problems. At first her therapy seemed to be helping. It wasn't long after Mama started attending "group" that she got a job and a car of her own. She had a beautiful voice and was an accomplished guitarist, but she rarely shared her talent with anyone except our family because she so feared performing. But now, though, when she and Daddy went to parties or had people over to our house, Mama would take out her guitar and sing. For the first time she was able to stand being the center of attention. In fact, she really seemed to enjoy it.

  That's when Mama and Daddy started fighting. It seemed that every time they talked about Mama's therapy, the discussion turned into an argument about her independence. It was the early 1970s, a time when so many people, especially women, were reaching out, looking for different ways to live. "That damn Ryefield," Daddy would growl, sure that Mama's therapy was to blame for her newfound ambitions.

  "This has nothing to do with him," Mama would insist. Stabbing her finger into her chest, she would say, "I need to do something for me."


  I still remember the fight that marked the crisis point in their marriage. Toni and I were sitting together in a stuffed orange chair watching TV. I tried to ignore my parents' verbal scuffling, but their anger scared me—not even so much the force of it, but what it seemed to mean for my family. I could feel the approach of disaster.

  Mama was hurtling a round of demands at Daddy, along with a string of psychological theories. Toni and I looked at each other and then made a dash for the back door.

  It wasn't until the following Sunday afternoon that we found out what had been so volatile. Toni and I were playing in the living room when Daddy called us to come out to the back porch, where Mama was sitting at the picnic table. Mascara stained her cheeks, and I knew she had been crying. It seemed that she had been crying a lot.

  Toni and I plopped down on the bench next to Mama while Daddy took the bench across from us. When he took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, I could tell he was about to cry. I had never seen him so upset, and anxiety seemed to rise in my throat. My daddy had always been my rock-solid anchor, the one who calmed my fears. I flashed on waking up crying from a nightmare during a bout with the flu, and Daddy jumping out of bed to comfort me, twisting his leg and breaking his ankle. Unable to walk, he had crawled to my bedroom, then yanked himself up with his one good leg so I wouldn't be scared by the sight of him on his hands and knees. Turning on my light, he hopped two steps to the foot of my bed and sat down and gasped, "Uh-oh, Angie, I think I'm sicker than you," before he passed out from the pain.