Death. Grief. Panic Attack.

Death.

Over the past twelve years, I’ve dealt with death. The death of my father. The death of my mother. Unrelated and separated by almost a decade, I was just coming out of the effects of my dad’s sickness when the nightmare of my mother’s illness and subsequent trauma began.

Grief.

Everyone experiences it differently, often informed by the details and situations surrounding it. For me, it’s like a ten-ton truck hitting me right in the chest. Silly metaphors are so often overused in the vain attempt to describe the indescribable.

The randomness makes functioning almost impossible at times. I used to love springtime. Warm rains, wildflowers. Not too hot, just cold enough to still bundle up in sweaters and boots. Lazy days spent just reading. Now it feels like living in a Huxleyan world — the high-functioning nature of society and daily life just a cheap veneer covering the horror underneath. April and May. The two most inner circles of hell. Years have passed, but the pain and trauma are just as strong, maybe stronger. I randomly cry, choking and trying to get air past the weight on my chest. It hurts under my skin. It hurts in my bones.

Pain.

Clawing from the inside up into my throat. Like a torturous mimic of a hug, making it impossible to breathe. Embarrassing, uncontrollable sobbing — the sweet feeling of release followed immediately by the sickening butterflies of despair in my gut. Despair because I know it’s not going away any time soon.

It’s not the pain of losing my parents. That pain, the pain of not having them in my life, has transformed with time. I have learned to exist without them, to not acutely feel the label of orphan and all that word defines. What crushes me, what continues to leave me a blubbering mess, is the trauma that came with it. The core of it is in the memories of what I witnessed and what I had to do. In the overwhelming feeling that I had failed big time. That I let my dad suffer. That I killed my mom.

Abandonment.

In losing my mom, I lost the last piece of what I had always defined as a family. Over time, reality had slowly chipped away at the fairytale picture of my family I had in my head growing up. A big, close extended family. Generations of support and love. What a joke. My mom’s illness and death tore away the last vestiges of that. The reality? Scapegoating. Lies and psychological torture dragging out over several years. Silence. In the end, only my little sister stood by me.

Panic Attack

I tell myself I’m being overly dramatic when it hits me. When I feel that dizziness, that suffocating weight, the simultaneous stutter freezing of my heartbeat, I know that’s just me repeating what others had told me over the years — that by having strong emotions, something was wrong with me. Which, of course, just adds fuel to the attack. Fear feeding on the pain. Repeat. Maybe it’s true, but it doesn’t stop the feeling of drowning. It doesn’t make it any easier to breathe.