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Rachel Smith
I swear it wasn’t real. It was like watching a movie from your front porch. I remember seeing them zip up the body bag and put him into an ambulance…
… we weren’t close with the family, but they lived right next door in the house that used to belong to a family we really liked, but had moved to Kalamazoo. The night that it happened, the daughter from the new family came to spend the night. Her parents were going to a neighborhood party.
He died from mixing prescription medication and alcohol. In his sleep. Next to his wife. We woke up to see the ambulance. The mom had called another neighbor before calling 911, then ran to our house to ask my mom what to do.
Experiencing this showed me that grief is handled differently by different people, and you can’t really judge how others deal with things. After the Dad died, the family just packed up and left. They couldn’t afford the house anymore; the Dad was the one who brought in money. A couple years later I remember hearing the voice of the mom in the house next door. She was back, without her kids, in in the same house but now it was being paid for by four random guys. That was the last time I ever saw her…
I was so young when this all happened but I think that was a good thing in a way. Like, I’ve lived since then appreciating every moment I have with my friends and family because I learned early on that you never know how much time you have with someone.”
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Addi
Pino
Being with my siblings is probably what got me through it. I was 10 years old when I was adopted by my mom. Before that I was in foster care for a year and a half. I was taken from my birth mom when I was 8.
Before we were taken away, I would stay home from school to watch my younger siblings. I missed so much school that the principal came. Me and my younger siblings hid. I don’t remember this but apparently the house was trashed. There were cockroaches everywhere and just an 8 year old taking care of a 4 year old and 2 year old.
We had visitations with my birth mom when I was in foster care, but one day she just didn’t show up. That’s when we kind of just merged over to Mary’s. We were being fostered by her at first, but within two months she adopted us. All of us.
My older siblings had it rough because they were teenagers when all this was happening. Going through teenage stuff. I was at the age where I was kinda like whatever.
What’s that phrase? Everything happens for a reason. It happened so I could meet Erica Halick in Mrs. Perry’s third grade class. If I hadn’t got adopted, who knows where I would be. I probably wouldn’t have gotten an education. Probably wouldn’t be in college.”
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Erica Halick
I understand everyone’s battles are there own battles but I just feel so stupid saying an ACL tear or a break-up are the worst things ever. I haven’t really sat here and thought about this, but I spent so much time ruminating about my injury. Just rethinking things over and over. But when I went through the break-up, I never had that same feeling of going over things. Now that I do I realize the break-up was so much worse.
I guess it’s just relative to what your doing at the time. When I tore my ACL it really just shocked my world. But that was before him. The break-up was just so much more deep and there was just so much more that went into it.
It just feels bad to say ‘oh a break up is the most traumatic thing for me’ but, like, it was just so much more difficult than that and honestly only a few people in my life will ever understand that.
Before him I was confident, Jesus loving, but kind of scared of everything, I felt on top of it. Then I went into it with him, totally immature, naïve, believing every word he said, because why wouldn’t I? I was a Junior in high school. It was really good for a while. When he went to college though I started to get nervous because he had all these girls he’d take pictures with. Then summer after senior year was Cassandra. I loved that his family was so amazingly supportive, I was always at his house. I was at his house and I remember seeing the texts between him and Cassandra. That was the first time I’d been that upset. Crying, shaking.
We were back together after that, until it happened with another girl a year and a half later. Everything changed after that. I was a year and a half into college and hadn’t established relationships with anyone other than him. I lost everything I believed in. I was with him from my Junior year of high school to my Sophomore year of college. Those are transformative years, and I didn’t get to transform into anything but him.
He told me I wasn’t enough and then stayed with me. He cheated, and when we broke up he told me he had been moving on since before our relationship had even ended.
I think I’ve learned what a healthy relationship really means. Not letting other people’s opinions define me and what I know is right. I always had this need for perfection before all of this. I let it all go. Everything.”
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Megan Graham
Okay, so the event is not a lot in itself. My mom worked a lot when I was young, and my dad left when I was in fourth grade. My sister moved out of the house in high school when my mom was extra crazy. She would follow my sister to school and would wait for her outside to sign divorce documents. All I remember is that my sister would get out of class, and my mom would be at her car. Like how scary is that? I don’t really know where my other sister was at this time.
I think the traumatic experience was just being home alone like all the time. I remember that I would sit on the couch for like a week and just watch T.V. and I wouldn’t eat. My mom would say like “Oh are you anorexic” but no I was just scared. It was like paralysis. It was like you know how you have that fear that someone will break in? Like every little sound is scary? I was 11 years old. I remember being super anxious to ever be home alone. I watched so much T.V. Like all of I Love Lucy and Little House on The Prairie. It’s crazy because it’s hard for me to even watch T.V. now because I associate it with all that time I spent at home alone and how sad and scary it was.
I remember I would wake up and panic on the days I knew I would be home alone. Looking back at it now, I was depressed. Like I wouldn’t call it that at the time because I didn’t know what it was. But I was depressed, I was alone all the time. Whenever I was home alone I panicked. I remember being so relieved when my mom said she was staying home from work.
I tried to talk about that with my mom and sisters because it was pretty damaging and they were like “I don’t remember that.” When I think about it, my mom is really emotionally distant. She just doesn’t deal with her own emotions. She holds on to things. Like she holds on to all the stuff from her and my dads divorce.
It wasn’t one single tragic event it was all of those times I was alone. I remember my mom saying she was going to California for a week and just left me. I was old enough at that time to stay at a friends, but it was still awful.
I still get panicky when I’m alone. Its weird for me that even now I can’t disconnect from that feeling of aloneness. Thinking about going home this summer and being alone still kind of scares me. It seems kind of embarrassing because I just don’t know how to explain it. If I mentioned it to my mom now I still don’t think she would get it.
I’m independent now. So independent. And I am able to detach from this and look back and be like ‘oh, I don’t get anxious when I’m alone because I’m weak, it’s because of the awful time I had when I was young.” When my mom says stuff like “My parents were never here,” I understand why she acted the way she did, but it’s still not okay. I don’t talk to my family that much anymore and my family thinks that it’s all fine. They just don’t deal with their feelings that much. I’m trying to be better about it."
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Izak Fritz
I think the best way to describe my father is frustrating. 5th grade to 7th or 8th I lived with my dad and brother half the time, and at my moms half the time. It kinda sucked a lot. It just got worse and worse. When my mom actually still lived there, the backroom of the house had a fireplace, a couple lazy boys, but the roof was leaking so we stopped using the room. The roof started to collapse. Me and my brother were playing monopoly in that room and it started raining. It came pouring through the roof. It got on my monopoly game. We went to get my dad and he came storming into the room because it’s all our fault right? So anyways my dad runs upstairs, he lived in the basement at the time, and he runs in the room with the water and slips on the board and eats shit. Ian and I started laughing a lot, and that was when he, you know, hit us.
Another time, we had a kennel for my dog, and he was a savage. He would like bite through the metal of his kennel. One time my dad was gone and my dog was downstairs and I opened my dogs kennel and he came out and slammed into my Dad’s computer and knocked it over and it started making these weird grinding noises. I was like 10 years old and trying to make the computer work again and crying. That is the worst. When you know you did something wrong and you’re just waiting. He came home and he was so mad. Like white hot, just so much anger.
Looking back now, I realize how my dad would say “you guys need to be more responsible for the dog,” but that was his dog. My dad never trained the dog. We were like 10 and 6. We felt bad because we felt like it was our fault. I realize now it wasn’t. My dad was lonely after my mom broke up with him. When my dog died he tried to get the company that was responsible for the death to pay like $100,000 for “his best friend dying.” He literally tortured that dog.
I called my mom a couple days before I left and said “I don’t want to live here.” I just got up at like 5am and left and walked to my Mom’s house. I didn’t talk to him for like 3 months after that. I went back to get some stuff while my dad was gone, but my brother was home. He hit me because he was so mad at me for leaving him there. My brother continued to live with my Dad because he loved him. A couple months later my Dad’s house was foreclosed. My brother stayed with him for a while. He moved to my Mom’s later.
This is the thing I still have a big issue with: other people’s problems don’t matter to me as much because I have yet to come across someone who had a worse experience than me. I didn’t have food, my electricity was always out, I had to go to school smelling like cigarette smoke. How could I deal with trying to care or help with someone else’s problems when that is what you have to carry for the rest of your life. It’s not that I lost my Dad, but it’s that I lost my childhood. It’s probably why I act like a child now. I couldn’t do that when I was growing up.
But I think I learned from this how to not be a shitty Dad. It has given me a lot of perspective in what I want be. There are qualities about my father that I like, he always told me I was better than a 9-5pm job. Though he took that to the point of not working at all, he is very creative and persuasive, and has a good entrepreneurial attitude. I think those are good qualities, but he takes them to far and almost uses them for evil. I think I was apathetic for a while, but I’m getting better. I’ve learned a lot in the past 3 years about caring for other people, and about the things I want to do to be better than my father.”
