BACK TO SCHOOL!
After my wonderful, yet painful 10-month medical leave from Duke, I am once again in the process of moving-in (Have I mentioned it's my least favorite thing to do?) Classes begin in a few hours, and I'm looking forward to seeing familiar faces.
Lately I have trouble going to bed until the sun comes up. I am, once again, experiencing trauma nightmares and am terrified of shutting my eyes when it's dark out. The "psychotic" psychiatrist who harassed my mother still haunts my dreams. It's always a different situation but the same result. They're extremely graphic and usually involve the same few people. I was only 14 years old at the time but the things I witnessed and heard still feel like fresh scars. The older I get, the more I find myself analyzing the situation, dissecting the man's persona.
There are days that I just want to ruin his entire existence and then there are days that I feel like he's not worth my anger. Sometimes I'm afraid of him and other times I want nothing more than to confront him. For almost six months, I watched my mom, an amazingly strong woman, transform into someone I couldn't even recognize, someone who was actually, for the first time I knew of, afraid, at times paranoid. During the last six months of her life, I watched her life unravel. She lost all source of income, had to see her already absentee husband incarcerated, care for his baby (and her own daughters), feed us on the jar of coins we had left or with expired foods tucked away in the backs of our kitchen cabinets. All the while fearing the face of that deranged man and her impending death (or so he threatened). With a heavy heart, I watched my mom suffer and knew there was nothing I could do as a 14-year-old. Everyday I came home from school and went upstairs to my room--it was the only place I could break down without my mom knowing. I felt ashamed of myself because I never saw her cry. Somehow she always kept her composure around me, and her strength alone assured me that everything was going to be okay.
The first and only time I thought I saw my mother smile was on a Thursday morning--she dropped me off at school, excited about getting the house ready for my birthday party and told me she'd pick me up after practice for the Beauty and the Beast musical. She also seemed relieved that my father was finally released from jail. But it was the tiniest glimpse of a smile; it could have been my imagination just wanting to see her happy. The next thing I know, I'm on the bus for a band trip and get the phone call about my mom's car accident. At the time I had never heard of an ICU. I didn't know what it was nor did I care. I was hooked on the words "accident with an eighteen-wheeler." All I knew was that any accident with those giant, deadly trucks was usually fatal. After I hung up, the word coma echoed in my head for the seemingly endless hours that followed.
Everything wasn't okay. People kept saying "it'll be okay," "she'll be fine," but for some reason, I knew that wasn't the case. I just needed to see my mom's strength to feel that "okay" feeling, but at that point she couldn't show it to me. She never came out of the coma.
She was brain dead.
Sometimes, I feel like she escaped all she was suffering....sometimes, I just want to apologize for being the little teenager I was...sometimes, I feel selfish for wishing she was still here, to feel loved or accepted and get that assurance that I always have someone to go to when nothing seems to be going well. Sometimes, I just want to pick up the phone and call her to say "Mom, I'm okay" and know that she cares. Sometimes, I hate my birthday and blame myself for the accident. Sometimes, I feel like giving her those last few months back because living life in fear was no life.
But every single time I have those "sometimes," I feel more and more anger towards the people that made her last few living months a living hell. Namely, the man who, to this day, somehow holds control over my nightmares and robs me of my sleep.
I can still hear his voice, his threats, his fists pounding against the glass door.
I still wonder if my mom's death gave him some sick sense of self-satisfaction--and in those moments, I can still see his vile, smug countenance--
his haunting face.
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