“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign,” I repeated to myself as I awoken. The haunting nightmare had been on repeat for the past 2 weeks. My shrink tells me it is because of my experiences as a child but I am struggling to come to terms with how I am meant to be handling it and why it was me that this happened to.
Losing my mother when I was eight and having an abusive father, I was always feeling abandoned and alone. When my mother was here I was able to comfortably breathe in the place I once called home. Although I no longer live there, now days I refer to it as hell. When my mother was alive it could have been referred to as heaven as the softly spoken sound of her voice, and the light scent of her vanilla perfume was enough to make anyone feel safe and loved. After her death the smell of death and assault filled the air and if there was no human living there it could have passed for a graveyard.
Her death was the most difficult thing I have ever experienced as not even a day later the mood of our house changed from a glowing star to a blunt, miserable rock. It was my father’s behavior that had the greatest change. Before my mothers death he barely spoke to me let alone hug or touch me, but after her death his behavior shifted from ignoring me to noticing my every move. It began with him touching me in ways that felt wrong. As a young child I was not to know this wasn’t right. He would assure me that every little girls fathers were permitted to touch their daughters as he did to me. It was the day he raped me I knew something wasn’t right but as a young child I did not know this was not right. There were days when I was bruised and unable to move so my father told the school I was suffering fro...
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...outside lead to my Vitamin D deficiency. My foster parents were concerned for my health and admitted me to the psychiatric hospital. I could tell it was harming them to leave me at an unfamiliar place but they felt it was the fair thing to do.
They still regularly visited me and every time they would tell me how I glowed brighter then the most beautiful star. This helped to lift my spirit and encouraged me to continue with my weekly meetings. I became familiar with the hospital and it proved to be more comforting then I could have ever imagined. Although I was comfortable in the dimension outside of my body I still felt the feelings of emptiness and negativity towards myself.
The nightmare of him locating me still sits at the back of my mind but I know that the security of the hospital will keep me same from him, but not from myself and my thoughts.
We all deal with death in our lives, and that is why Michael Lassell’s “How to Watch Your Brother Die” identifies with so many readers. It confronts head on the struggles of dealing with death. Lassell writes the piece like a field guide, an instruction set for dealing with death, but the piece is much more complex than its surface appearance. It touches on ideas of acceptance, regret, and misunderstanding to name a few. While many of us can identify with this story, I feel like the story I brought into the text has had a much deeper and profound impact. I brought the story of my grandmother’s death to the text and it completely changed how I analyzed this text and ultimately came to relate with it. I drew connections I would have never have drawn from simply reading this story once.
I walked into the room on New Year’s Day and felt a sudden twinge of fear. My eyes already hurt from the tears I had shed and those tears would not stop even then the last viewing before we had to leave. She lay quietly on the bed with her face as void of emotion as a sheet of paper without the writing. Slowly, I approached the cold lifeless form that was once my mother and gave her a goodbye kiss.
father did not die a ‘complete’ death and that haunts him. This pain is shown in a unique way
I have felt the pain of the loss of a Sister; have felt the pain of the death of my Mother, and felt the death of my Father. I know how it feels. I experienced it. It is painful, looking at those old kind folks who bore you; who took care of you; went through all kinds of sacrifices and pains just to look after you for years and years, until one day the child stood on one’s own two feet, and then … there they are, the parents, helpless and lifeless in front of you.
Since I did not know anyone else was my mother. According to my sister, we lived in our house alone, without any guardian guiding, or caring for my siblings and I. We ate our meals at my Aunt Gloria’s since we did not have any food at our own house. Moreover, It was a norm in El Salvador, the male to abuse their wives and children. Our cousins were our bullies; they saw their own mother abused by their alcoholic father. I asked my sister Yenis recently, “Why our cousins bullied us?” She said, “When you did not finish your meal, they would force you to finish your meal by smacking you.” When I was slightly older, I remembered I was standing on a ledge my grandfather build to prevent landslides. When I was standing on the ledge, I was thinking about how tall the ledge was, I looked to my right at my cousin when he pushed me, forcing me to fall down to the bottom of the ledge. I remember going in and out of consciousness. My grandfather picked me up from the ground and brought me inside my grandmother’s house. During the time, my grandmother clamored at my cousin, Yessica, to get warm water and rags. I remember feeling the warmth of the blood dripping down the back of my head. My grandparents did not take me to the hospital with the limitations they possessed. As a neglected parentless child I became withdrawn and
I heard a blood-curdling scream and I jumped. I felt silent tears running down my heavily scarred face, but they weren’t out of sadness. Mostly. They were a mixture of pain and fear. I ran into the eerie, blood-splattered room and screamed as I felt cold fingers grab my neck. Before that night, I didn’t believe in the paranormal. Now I sure as heck do. I had been chased out of my house after a fight with my step-parents because I wasn’t doing well in school (I had dyslexia), and I had taken shelter in what seemed like a normal house. I realized what I had gotten into after the sun set. The doors locked without a sign of anyone going near them. A cold draft filled the room I was in. The house turned into a horrific scene, and I knew I would never get out alive. It was the Asylum. There’s a rumor in our town, a rumor that started when someone made the observation that everyone fit in. No one was considered strange, homeless, an outsider. That doesn’t seem possible, you think. In my town, there are tons of people with no homes, or people that don’t belong, you think. Well, think again. Those homeless people? Think about how many there are. They fit in with each other. Those people that don’t belong? Once again, they fit in with each other. But then, you
Soon thereafter my parents split up and I could feel their discord; like vibrations of hate upon snapping wires. They seemed to become somehow physically incapable of co-habiting the same spaces. It was as if something physiological that was once inside them was taken from them. Stolen was that strange organ that makes people feel the sincere need to be near someone else. As I grew older I began to observe my mother and her bizarre behaviors. Her anxious isolations and her pill bottle like a Xanax Barbie stuck to her hand. She was always so far away from me. I would sit and wonder where she would go; off to some corner of her mind where up was down and all the wrong in life was right. She was safe behind a closed door; in silence and stillness. I was always alone; and always lonely, with my mother in the next room. She may as well have been a million miles away from me. The older I got the colder the hugs became; it was like she was tired of faking it.
Nancy was only four years old when her grandmother died. Her grandmother had a big lump on the lower right hand side of her back. The doctors removed it, but it was too late. The tumor had already spread throughout her body. Instead of having a lump on her back, she had a long stitched up incision there. She couldn’t move around; Nancy’s parents had to help her go to the bathroom and do all the simple things that she use to do all by herself. Nancy would ask her grandmother to get up to take her younger sister, Linh, and herself outside so they could play. She never got up. A couple of months later, an ambulance came by their house and took their grandmother away. That was the last time Nancy ever saw her alive. She was in the hospital for about a week and a half. Nancy’s parents never took them to see her. One day, Nancy saw her parents crying and she have never seen them cry before. They dropped Linh and her off at one of their friend’s house. Nancy got mad because she thought they were going shopping and didn’t take her with them.
The ride home had been the most excruciating car ride of my life. Grasping this all new information, coping with grief and guilt had been extremely grueling. As my stepfather brought my sister and I home, nothing was to be said, no words were leaving my mouth.Our different home, we all limped our ways to our beds, and cried ourselves to sleep with nothing but silence remaining. Death had surprised me once
Let the stream begin. Some body, some things, life and me, communicated the idea to talk now, not to leave it, to stay, and face up to the past, the places, the people, the pain, the many reasons why I left my home and family, all those years ago, to become a drug addict, an alcoholic, a wanderer, move nomadically from house to house, year to year, to live inside a prison, real and imaginary. I met hell. I met the devil. I met them both inside my head. I found out the hard way that humans could easily imagine evil. The path forward comes from the push to write and to deal. Yes, I felt happy in between the miserable spaces. My family helped me to survive and still do now, even more so than before. Without them, I would not exist, for in the darkest moments I realised that they kept me breathing. I want the virtual picket fence, ideal partner, children and career. They may or may not eventuate. Now as I regroup, look upon me with sober, straight and clear eyes, I can have anything. I walk to a lake, to sense nature, to allow the anxiety to live on these pages, to take shape, and mould into a form that speaks atonement.
It was new years day, and the sun had just arisen when I felt this feeling inside me saying, what am I doing here, but even more importantly, how would I get out. The realization was scary, but I know that without it, my life would not have been at where it is now. I feel that with this experience, my mentality grew and now I see the world in a different way. It all started in high school, where I felt that all the attention I got during that time was for the façade that was reverted to the people, and not the real me because no one knew the real me. I had to lie about everything I had done and who I am just because one lie lead to another. The area I grew up in has really impacted my life in both positive and negative ways. For one, it helped
There once was a girl who lived a happy life until the age of thirteen. Everything changed that day because that 's when her mother started emotionally, mentally, and verbally abusing her. The girl wanted nothing more than to be loved by her mother but that was not the case. Her mother thought that she was nothing than a worthless piece of garbage on the street. Every day the girl 's mom had something negative to say to the girl whether it was that she was stupid, worthless, or even someone who nobody wanted around. Every day the girl wished to be accepted by her mother, but she knew deep down that would never happen. The girl battled anxiety and depression disorder caused by her mother 's years of torture and abusive ways. The girl was on
Imagine growing up without a father. Imagine a little girl who can’t run to him for protection when things go wrong, no one to comfort her when a boy breaks her heart, or to be there for every monumental occasion in her life. Experiencing the death of a parent will leave a hole in the child’s heart that can never be filled. I lost my father at the young of five, and every moment since then has impacted me deeply. A child has to grasp the few and precious recollections that they have experienced with the parent, and never forget them, because that’s all they will ever have. Families will never be as whole, nor will they forget the anguish that has been inflicted upon them. Therefore, the sudden death of a parent has lasting effects on those
Two years and four months ago I died. A terrible condition struck me, and I was unable to do anything about it. In a matter of less than a year, it crushed down all of my hopes and dreams. This condition was the death of my mother. Even today, when I talk about it, I burst into tears because I feel as though it was yesterday. I desperately tried to forget, and that meant living in denial about what had happened. I never wanted to speak about it whenever anyone would ask me how I felt. To lose my Mom meant losing my life. I felt I died with her. Many times I wished I had given up, but I knew it would break the promise we made years before she passed away. Therefore, I came back from the dead determined and more spirited than before.
As I walked in to their bedroom, I found my mother sitting on the bed, weeping quietly, while my father lay on the bed in a near unconscious state. This sight shocked me, I had seen my father sick before, but by the reaction of my mother and the deathly look on my father’s face I knew that something was seriously wrong.