By: Jim Taylor

Marie-Lynn’s triumph


When a hurricane destroys a city, when a mudslide buries a village, when a forest fire torches houses and wildlife, we tend to attribute it to an “Act of God.”

        Based on insurance policies, you’d think God only does harmful things.

        But there is another side.

        You may have heard Marie-Lynn Hammond’s albums—or perhaps heard her singing on Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe program on CBC. A co-founder of Stringband, Marie-Lynn has since gone solo. Critics have called her “one of Canada’s best singer-songwriters”—even if she’s not as famous as Sarah McLachlan.

        Marie-Lynn is also an enthusiastic equestrian. On August 26, 2006, Marie-Lynn’s usually quiet horse suddenly and inexplicably began to buck—most likely because of a wasp sting. Marie-Lynn was thrown. She sustained five broken ribs, a fractured neck vertebra, and multiple breaks to her right collar-bone. Though she wore a helmet, she suffered a concussion, bleeding in the brain, and damage to a cranial nerve.

        She has no memory of the accident. “My memories end just before my horse began to buck,” she says, “and resume about 30 minutes later as I was being loaded into the ambulance.”

        Initially, she lost the sight of her right eye. Over the last year, and after endless rounds of therapy, most of that sight has returned, but with serious double-vision problems.



Try, try again

        On August 26—exactly one year after her accident—she went to another horse show. “I felt a need to revisit the scene,” she rationalized.

        A friend found her a very gentle horse to ride.

        “Originally I was simply going to enter a fun class, that didn’t demand any real riding skills,” Marie-Lynn told her friends, “but that class got cancelled. So I decided what the heck, I would enter English Pleasure (you are judged on how responsive and relaxed the horse and rider are at walk, trot and canter). The judge was informed of my situation, and told me if I felt unsteady or unsafe, I could simply come into the centre of the ring and sit out the remainder of the class.

        “We won the class! When I heard them call my number, I was stunned, and then thrilled, and then I began to get all teary, as did many of my friends watching, some of whom had witnessed the accident. And then they began to cheer and holler, and I realized in the most viscerally happy way how far I’d come in a year.”

        The judge assured Marie-Lynn that her disability had not influenced his choice: “He told me and others that I had won the class fair and square; he had not made any allowances for me.

        “Red ribbons are not something I’m used to getting, so this one is especially precious.”

        Whenever I read Marie-Lynn’s letters, I choke up. I get so used to hearing bad news that good news sneaks under my defences.

        I think Marie-Lynn’s triumph should be called an Act of God too.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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