FAITH & RECOVERY
Bedford native writes book about her trauma after a near-fatal accident
Jane Rubietta, a Bedford native, book author and frequent speaker to audiences in the U.S. and abroad, has published a book based on a near-fatal accident that led her to examine, as the title suggests, the role of religious faith in recovery.
The 200-page book is titled “Merge: The Road After Trauma Meets Faith.”
After graduating from Bedford High School in 1977, Rubietta enrolled at Indiana University and received a bachelor’s of science in business. She attended seminary at Trinity Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
It was a morning walk one day that changed everything. “December darkness fled before the advancing daylight,” Rubietta writes. “I zipped into a down coat for a brisk early walk. Breath fogged the air … commuters and school buses trundled past as I fast-footed down Church Street … the world reopened to possibilities … that did not include being struck by an SUV on that walk.”
Rubietta awakened days later in hospital, suffering, she writes, “fractures and breaks and a missing memory of what happened.”
No one called her struggles to retrain body and mind “trauma,” which Rubietta defines as “the ongoing impact of a crisis or event, not the event itself.” She wrote “Merge” to recognize and help others respond to trauma, to help close “a huge hole in health care in caring for the wounds of trauma.”
In a book review, the hospital chaplain at the University of Chicago writes:
“’Merge’ challenges the common image of healing as an absence of trauma. Through her reflections, scripture references, short semi-poems, and physical exercise, author Jane Rubietta helped me to come to the truth that suffering and healing are twins. They walk together and are born of the same mother – life.”