Photo by Greg Latza.Īs a little girl, my great-grandmother found lightning terrifying. My faith is greater, and my perseverance is greater,' she says.A lightning strike beyond the Badlands. She also travels as an inspirational speaker, sharing her story. 'That happened to you, it does not define you, is what I tell people.' I want to help people redefine their pain, to help them find the tools to not let that define who they are,' she says. 'I care about people surviving the traumatic experiences of their lives. Her second book, 'Destination Heaven and My Journey Back to Life,' a memoir of her life, will be released at the end of March. That desire inspired her to write her first book, 'Life After Lightning: A Journey of Spiritual and Self Discovery.' Published by Mount Vernon-based Diamonstudded Treetoes in 2013, it is a collection of poems, vignettes, and tools for overcoming obstacles that Peterson has gathered on her journey. 'What I'm doing to help others makes it bearable.' 'I've had to overcome astronomical things in my life,' she says. I can't imagine living anywhere else during this recovery time,' she says.Īlong with her family and community, her desire to help others with their recoveries is what has kept her going. 'This community has been so amazing to me. In Lisbon, the community she now calls home, friends and neighbors have brought meals after surgeries, checked on her after storms, and offered their acceptance and friendship. It helps heal the sting they feel if she doesn't remember them, or doesn't remember the things they once did together in the island near Juneau on the Alaskan panhandle.
'You're the keeper of my memories,' she tells people from her childhood in Hoonah, Alaska. 'And I learned to believe in myself again as we were teaching them.'Įven now, words can be hard to come by, and a lot of her memory from before the strikes is garbled. 'I learned to walk again, chew again, talk again,' she says. Last year, she was able to bite into an apple for the first time.Īs her two children learned the ways of the world, she relearned skills she once took for granted. For years her jaw would not open fully after being broken from the fall the first time she was struck. She still has debilitating headaches that can come without warning. Still, though, she often retreats to the basement during tornado season. She has slowly learned to let go of her fear. She had to stay indoors until the clouds passed. In the two decades since then, Peterson met and married her husband, a native Iowan, and moved to Lisbon in 1995.įor years, gray skies would induce panic attacks. 'Before, I was just damaged physically, but the second time emotionally damaged me,' she says. She survived - 90 percent of all lightning strike victims do - but not without physical and emotional scars. When the bolt hit, it threw her backward across her living room.
So, when the rain rolled in, she stood on the threshold to her house, the door open, barefoot, the rain on her face. 'My doctor told me, Beth, you're a soldier, go home and watch the storm,' she says. The second time she was struck, Peterson still was living in Georgia trying to overcome the fear brought on by the first incident.
That being said, there's a one in 144 million chance that any one person will be struck twice in their lifetime. Just like we learned in high school, just because a penny lands heads up once doesn't change the chance of it landing heads up again. The law of probability tells us that the chance of being struck again doesn't change after someone has been struck once. Then, almost exactly one year later, on July 19, 1993, she was hit by lightning a second time.Īccording to the National Weather Service, the chance of being struck by lightning once in a lifetime is 1 in 12,000. 'But I was told, my child, you will help many.' 'He told me there would be pain if I made that choice,' she says.
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