Hope is Found at Family House
Linda Berry Brewington believes that SECU Family House was built just for her. “I feel God opened this place, just in time, just for me.” While she knows that the House was built for others like her across the state and country too, she feels a personal connection to the mission of the House. With serious, hopeful brown eyes, she will tell you, “My life has changed. Things came together for me here. This place has given me hope.”
Hope is what she has clung to for the past two and a half months. On March 14, in a rural area just outside of Southern Pines, Linda’s 18-year old daughter Selena suffered a traumatic blow to the head. Immediately after the trauma, Selena was taken to Moore Regional Hospital. Several days later, when more specialized treatment was required, she was transferred to UNC’s Neurosurgery Intensive Care Unit. Linda visited Selena at UNC every day, sleeping in nooks and crannies in the hospital that she could find, and dedicated herself to assuring her “baby” that they would make it out of this together.
When the UNC social worker assigned to Selena’s care team approached Linda about finding better sleeping arrangements at a new place called Family House, Linda resisted. “It was too far from my baby and I wasn’t going to leave her,” she explains. After the social worker’s persistence and when exhaustion began to take its toll on Linda, she agreed to try out Family House. She would give it a night and see what it was like. She liked what she saw and decided that Room 114 would be an okay place to rest her head for the next few weeks.
After staying at the House for over a month and learning she could still support Selena in the ways she needs to, Linda admits that she is grateful her stubbornness did not keep her from coming to Family House. For the first time in a long time, she says, I have been able to “look around and see that I am not all alone, by myself. I have found friends here and they have blessed my heart.” Linda’s Family House friends would agree that they not only supported her in her time of need but she supported them as well. A few share stories of Linda visiting their loved ones in the hospital and praying for them as if they were her own family.
Others recall that she helped in the kitchen preparing meals and encouraging them to stay strong and not give up. Anyone who met Linda knew that her motto was, “life’s hard knocks can make you bitter or better.” Linda and her Family House friends seem to have collectively decided to be better and not let their circumstances dictate their attitudes.
At the end of May, Selena was medically stable enough to be moved to Wake Medical Rehabilitative Center in Raleigh. There she will endure weeks of intense therapy and hopefully begin working her way back to recovery. Of course, Linda will be right by her side. There is no Family House there and Linda will be on her own, maybe even sleeping in waiting rooms again. However, she believes that the rest she received while at Family House gave her the vision she needed “to stay focused and upbeat for my baby.”
On the day she checked out and left Chapel Hill, there were no tears or sorrow. Linda passed out hugs, blessings, and cards to all she met while staying at Family House. She told everyone she saw how grateful she was and was quick to add that her claim to fame will be being the first Native American woman to ever stay at the House. “It was meant to be,” she says with pride.