by Band Back Together | Oct 15, 2010 | A Letter I Can't Send, Grandparent Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Loss, Parent Loss |
Dear Lucas:
The last time I saw my parents alive was the day after my wedding, Sunday, August 5, 2007.
My sister and I choose to remember them most on October 15, the day we were both notified of their passing.
Sometime between Friday, October 12, 2007 at 8:00 PM and Saturday, October 13, 2007 at 8:00 AM they died of carbon monoxide poisoning. They were 61 and 58 respectively. Too young to die.
My parents lived overseas and dedicated their lives to working at American international schools around the globe for 28 years. My father was the principal of a kindergarten through 12th grade school in Tunis, Tunisia and my mother was a third grade teacher. They died in Tunisia.
For those of you who don’t know, carbon monoxide is odorless, colorless and is the second-leading cause of poisoning deaths in the country. Carbon monoxide poisoning claims nearly 500 lives and another 15,000 require emergency room treatment. It can kill you before you know it because you can’t see it, smell it, or taste it. A water heater vent was damaged in my parent’s kitchen and it emitted carbon monoxide into their home.
It’s hard to be the one left behind to pick up the pieces and ask the unanswerable questions. It’s stupid to walk around angry at an inanimate object. Most of the time I just feel robbed. My parents were anything but done with this life. One week to the day before their lifeless bodies were found, they had decided to retire and return to the United States. They were anxious to see my sister, who had recently graduated from college, start her life and begin building a career. They looked forward to us both having grandchildren (they would have been amazing grandparents and would have completely adored you, not to mention spoiled you rotten!) and had a long list of things they wanted to do to their Arizona home and trips they were excited to take. It’s unfair that they were taken from us too soon. I miss them every single day and ache to hear their voices again.
I’m mostly sorry that you will never get to meet them in the physical sense.
I hope that among me, your dad, your aunt, and everyone who knew them, we will help you know them too.
Sometimes bad things happen to good people, but I will forever believe that the best is yet to be.
by Band Back Together | Oct 15, 2010 | Child Sexual Abuse, Healing From A Rape or Sexual Asault, Rape/Sexual Assault |
I joke about it. I try to keep it light. I can tell when I mention it that it makes people uncomfortable, and they offer their remorse, their sorrow. It’s not that I don’t mind, I just don’t want it. It’s easier to joke about it, to laugh it off as something that just happened, not something that changed me into who I am. Sometimes, it’s harder to laugh. There are too many broken and damaged parts.
When I was fifteen, something was stolen from me. Something that was mine to keep and give out to whomever I chose. That right was taken away from me in a flurry of rage and hatred by someone I knew long ago. He stole it from me viciously and without remorse.
He raped me.
This shouldn’t have happened to me. I lived on a Marine Corps base. I was a good girl. Things like that don’t happen to girls who go home before their curfew, to girls who are saving themselves, to girls like me. It just doesn’t happen…or so I thought.
He followed me on my walk back home one Saturday night, and I, thinking I was safe, took a short cut through the woods near the train track by my house. He attacked me when we were surrounded by trees, knocking me down into a nearby sandpit, nearly breaking my already weak back in the fall. Held me down. Hit me. Hurt me. He used pressure on the damaged parts to keep me there.
A train passed, and I prayed there were passengers.
I started waving, frantically, trying to scream as he covered my mouth, I could taste the blood he was forcing back in. “Please, God, let someone see me, let someone notice.” We were so close, I could feel the wind rushing past covering my body with cool air on that stale, summer’s night. And then. Black.
Not long after, I woke up. Damaged and broken. My head hurt and was bleeding, my clothes were torn and strewn about. Next to where I laid was a brick splashed with blood. I limped the short distance home as quickly as possible. I was terrified, I had no idea if he was still around, watching me. I didn’t want to take long enough to find out.
My house stood, the only house in the area, the porch light shining a welcoming yellow glow. I tried to run, but was in too much pain. Inside, the lights were off, my parents had gone to bed. I quickly limped to their bedroom, and hidden by the cover of darkness reported I was home and going to take a shower and then bed.
In the shower, I tried to scrub away the pain, scrub away the smell and the shame. I cried. I tried to cry it down the drain. I discovered that pressure on the damage parts relieved stress. I pressed. I contorted my back to make it hurt. I sighed and was reminded I’m still alive, no matter how much of me felt dead.
In between then and now doesn’t matter. He went to jail, but not for my pain. My story was discounted by the charm of the man. I grew up. I learned that the best way to hurt him was to let him know I was stronger than him. I quickly learned to joke and laugh at it, about it. It’s the easiest way to talk about it.
Sometimes, when we’re in bed, my husband will ask me questions, partly out of his own curiosity and to try and help. I laugh, I joke. I speak softly protected by the darkness of our bedroom as he puts pressure on the damage parts to help relieve the pain that stays.
He puts pressure on the damaged parts to remind me I’m still alive.
by Band Back Together | Oct 15, 2010 | Fear, Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, Sadness |
My little girl, Jillian, due Christmas Day has been diagnosed with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome.
I feel like everything has caught up with me today. Emotionally and physically, I’m just worn out. I’ve tried to be strong for the last six weeks but… I feel like that’s slipping away.
I’m starting to realize that I need to be honest with myself: Yes, I’m optimistic. Yes, I’m hopeful. Yes, I believe we’re making the right decisions. But I’m also hurting. Deep down, this just hurts.
Through all of this, I’ve had amazing people come forward in support for us. I’ve met some people who have gone through this and other things parents shouldn’t have to go through, too. And while all of that makes me feel better, it can’t heal the hurt. It doesn’t get rid of the guilt I feel and it doesn’t ease the pain. It doesn’t make it go away and it doesn’t answer any questions. I’d like to say that my heart is broken, but I’ve been shown now, twice, what a truly broken heart is. I’d like to say that something positive has to come out of this, and honestly I do feel that way, but why does there have to be so much pain first?
I’ve asked myself a million times why this is happening? Why does this have to happen to my family? Why do all of my kids that have to go through this? Why does it have to be MY kids? Why does it have to be JR? And why does it have to be me?
It’s not like I’d wish this upon anyone else. But I wouldn’t wish it for myself, either. It all just seems so unfair. I hate to host my own pity party- truly I have tried my best not to- but really? Two babies with heart conditions? Wasn’t one enough? And why three or more surgeries this time?
What did I do to deserve this? Was there something that I was supposed to learn after Ethan’s surgery that I didn’t? Some lesson that I was blind to; that maybe if I’d understood would have changed all of this? Did I want a little girl too much? Did I wish too hard for another baby to make my family complete when I should have been happy with what I had? Why do I have to excitedly yet apprehensively count down the weeks until she is born? Why do we have to try to put on a happy, brave face everyday when really we’re mad and scared and hurt inside?
Why do we have to face the fears that our baby might not come home with us?
I just don’t get it.
The rational side of me says that it’s just something in our DNA. One of those crazy things where you have to have two parents who carry a recessive trait and twice now that recessive trait has been expressed.
But then there’s the other side of me. The side that asks all these questions and wants answers that aren’t based in science. Who cares if it’s genetics? The fact still remains that this is happening to MY family. The truth is, it will be MY baby that I have to watch fighting for life- again. Something so many people take for granted. I don’t blame them. After all, that is how it’s supposed to be.
A newborn shouldn’t be required to fight for their life. Ever.
by Band Back Together | Oct 15, 2010 | Cancer and Neoplasia, Grief, Loss, Parent Loss |
Cancer might not have destroyed my childhood, but I sure grew up faster. I knew from the time that I was six that my dad was going to die. My family never hid Daddy’s sickness. Even though my parents were divorced and my dad went on to remarry when I was seven, we were always very close. I have great memories of my dad and he will forever be the one I compare all men to.
Nobody will ever be better than my own dad.
My dad was diagnosed with cancer when he was sixteen. It started in his jaw and he went through countless surgeries, had many teeth removed, radiation and chemo (all beginning in 1966 when cancer was very hush-hush and nobody talked about it).
Eventually my dad wound up having half his jaw removed. The cancer showed up again, this time in his lungs. Over the years my dad underwent countless surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy treatments.
My dad didn’t have “Lung Cancer” and to be honest, I don’t know what he had, but he would get tumors that would grow in the pulmonary artery. Chemo would shrink it, but the bitch kept coming back. My dad never quit smoking though, and he made me promise I would never pick the habit up (which I have stood by and have made my own kid promise to never smoke either).
According to my aunt, my family believes that my dad got the cancer after cleaning up some land for some extra money. Years later, that land was found to be a toxic waste site. To this day there are efforts to clean up that land to make it profitable for the city where my dad grew up.
My dad worked hard even though he wasn’t supposed to do physical labor and when he would get sick he would be down for days, sometimes weeks. That didn’t stop him from moving back to NY when I was ten and buying a house on three acres in upstate NY, building a barn and putting up fence so he could have his own little farm. Nope. Nobody stopped my daddy. I’m fairly certain that if his doctors had known what he was up to, they would have committed him. My dad became a farmer when he was thirty-six. He raised cows, pigs, goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits, a horse named Rusty, and had an enormous vegetable garden.
I remember going with him to a chemo treatment when I was eleven or twelve. His chemo treatments were done seventy miles away in Cooperstown at the hospital there, so my dad, the trooper, made a day of it like it was just another day in his life. He had his chemo and then we walked around Cooperstown and then drove the seventy miles back home. Just another day.
I remember the last summer I spent with my dad. My stepmom took the kids to the store or something and my dad was watching TV. He called me into the living room and wanted me to sit with him. He looked at me and told me he was dying. It broke my heart. In my heart I had always known Daddy was sick but I will always remember that day. We sat there crying together. It was very emotional.
My dad died on February 25, 1991. He was forty-one.
I was fourteen.
Daddy died of pneumonia in the hospital. I had spoken with him two days earlier on the phone for our weekly Sunday afternoon call. My grandma, aunt, uncle and my dad’s cousin had gotten the call late at night to get to the hospital because he was fading fast, but they didn’t want me to see my dad in that condition. They didn’t want me to remember him that way so I wasn’t told anything until 6:00 the next morning when the call came.
I crumbled.
I fell apart.
I knew it was going to happen one day. I had expected to have my daddy longer, not to lose him just as I was learning about life.
Nobody at home understood what I was going through. Most of my friends took off, not knowing what to say or do. My best friend, the girl I knew I could count on for anything, was the one who stayed… the only one. The one who I am still best friends with to this very day.
My gram, Dad’s mom, died five weeks later of colon cancer that was diagnosed not six months earlier. I think she just gave up after she lost her youngest son.
After my dad died, my stepmom deeded their house back to the bank, took their three kids and moved to California to be with her oldest daughter.
Without telling me.
I will never forget calling on Christmas morning to wish them Merry Christmas and getting the this number has been disconnected message. I sat and sobbed. I frantically called my dad’s cousin who couldn’t believe that this woman didn’t have the guts to tell me she was moving. She didn’t have an address or a phone number for her because she hadn’t contacted her.
I didn’t hear from my stepmom until 3 ½ years later when my mom passed away unexpectedly. She wanted to play mother-figure to me and at the time we got along fine, cordially. I didn’t see my siblings for eight whole years. My sister would call now and again to say hi, but we never got the chance to be close. My brothers don’t talk to me at all.
I don’t speak to my stepmom.
My kid has my dad’s middle name as his first. I wanted to name him after my dad outright, but my stepsister went and did that first. He wasn’t even her dad. I tried the reverse, but it just didn’t sound right.
I miss my dad every day. It never gets easier. The pain changes but it never goes away. I see my dad in my own son every day, in his mannerisms and his kindness… in his temper, too.
He lives through my son, yet I still miss him so much.
by Band Back Together | Oct 15, 2010 | Postpartum Depression, Postpartum Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (P-OCD), Postpartum Psychosis |
It’s cliche.
I’m standing in the middle of a room, screaming at the top of my lungs and no one notices.
I’m surrounded. Surrounded by a husband and family who love me. Friends, both on-line and in real life. But no one ever says anything.
I want to yell, Can’t you see how much pain I’m in? Why are you ignoring me?
WHY? WHY? WHY?
Do they think I’m just asking for attention? Do they think I’m faking it for pretend sympathy? Do they think I could fix it but I don’t because then I would have nothing to talk about?
I didn’t choose this. I didn’t choose to feel helpless and alone. I didn’t choose to have to battle with myself every single day to just get out of bed.
I have to talk myself into getting up. Talk myself into feeding myself breakfast. Every single day is broken up into tiny increments. Small goals to achieve. I say to myself, I have to make it through this hour and then it’s time for a nap. Just a couple more hours and then the husband will be home. One more day until the weekend.
I fight the urge to cry and do nothing but lay on the couch. I fight the urge to go into the kitchen, late at night, and pull a knife out of the block and put it to my wrist.
No one wants to hear me say this. No one cares.
I keep screaming. And screaming. And screaming.
All I hear in my head is the screaming.