Shownotes Transcript
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And I didn't know really what to do. Because when somebody hurts you, and then they're like, now you have to take care of him. You're responsible for him. I didn't know how to feel. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation. A presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 155. What if you had to pull the plug?
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My mom said that she was just in a coffee shop. For about an hour, she heard this guy talking behind her. He had this big black mohawk and she just thought he was the coolest person ever. She was just fascinated by his voice. She just loved his voice so much that she wanted to talk to him. And finally, she got up the nerve to turn around and talk to him. They moved in together about two weeks after that. It was really quick.
My mom was told that she couldn't have children, so she never really worried about getting pregnant or anything like that. And three months later, she became pregnant with me. They lived together the entire time my mom was pregnant, but my dad really wasn't good at being tied down or staying any one place. He was in a boys group home when he was young because his mom couldn't deal with him.
And she didn't know how to raise him because he was such a troublemaker. So she put him in a group home from the age of seven until 15.
He ran away from that group home when he was 15 and he didn't trust anyone. He didn't want to be tied down by anyone, so he didn't have any relationships. He didn't have any legitimate jobs. He didn't have any legitimate apartments or a car or anything like that. He was a transient. He slept on couches. He lived in trailer parks. He worked on carnival rides.
About three weeks before I was to be born, he was arrested and put in jail for first-degree burglary. And he was in jail until I was four. I actually have no idea what happened to my dad after he got out of jail. My mom says that he stayed with us for about two weeks, and he just disappeared again.
I have a picture of him with me at my kindergarten graduation. I don't remember it at all, but that's one of the only pictures I have of him and one of two pictures I have with him. When I was probably about seven or eight, he kind of just showed up and he came to our house and again he stayed with us for about two weeks.
And it was, I just remember feeling so weird about it. Like, I was really used to not having a dad. I remember that she made us get a bunch of stuff together and put it in garbage bags and pretend we were taking the trash out and tell him that we were just going to the store. And we went to the store and used a payphone to call my grandma to pick us up. And then she called the cops to remove him from our apartment. And that was the last time I saw him as a kid.
I know that my whole childhood, my mom was really scared of my dad, and I know that I felt scared of him too, but I couldn't remember a definitive reason why. People told me that he was schizophrenic. My mom believed he was schizophrenic. He was diagnosed as such.
So it was really just me and my mom my whole life. She was disabled. We lived in Section 8 housing because she wasn't able to work. We also moved a lot. We probably lived in 12 or 13 different apartments by the time I was 20. A big part of the reason that we moved around a lot is because she had a string of abusive boyfriends. She never picked anybody good.
and a couple of the times that we had to move was because she was running away from someone. My mom is chronically ill, so she has a lot of autoimmune diseases. She also has diabetes and heart disease, just a lot of very debilitating, immunocompromising diseases. So she's not able to work or drive or go to school. Basically all I remember of my mom is her being sick. I don't really ever have any memories of her being healthy.
and I saw a lot of things that kids aren't really supposed to see. I've seen my mom almost die in front of me multiple times. I've had to call 911 for her more times than I can count. I've seen her in a coma for more than a week when I was like maybe nine. There's a lot of really traumatic things and also being poor and growing up in the neighborhoods that I grew up in. Basically, the doctors think that I was trying to block out trauma
and accidentally blocked out basically my entire childhood. So there's a lot of things that I don't remember, especially from the younger years. Probably around 11 or 12 was the first time that I realized that I wanted to die.
I didn't tell my mom for a long time. I don't think that I admitted my depression to my mom until I was a late teenager, mainly because my mom had been through so much. Anything that I felt couldn't compare to anything that she had been through, and I had no right to tell her that I was sad.
She did everything in the world she could for me. So to tell her that something wasn't right with me was like an insult to her. It was like telling her that she didn't do good enough, that I was messed up anyway. And I never wanted her to feel like she failed. I don't think I really realized how sick she was mentally from all of the trauma that she's been through until I was older. At the time, I just knew that she was in a lot of pain.
And because she was so sick, a lot of the time there was things that I had to do to take care of her. And that expressing my pain would only hurt her more. And that I couldn't explain to her how I felt without feeling guilt for it. As I got older, it got a lot worse. And I ended up starting to self-harm when I was about 15. That was my way of dealing with my depression.
I would get really angry, I had rage issues, and I would take it out on myself physically, like I would hit myself or I would scratch myself when I got really mad. If I was in an argument with somebody and I couldn't yell at them, I would just like scratch myself until I would bleed. And when I was about 16, I started burning myself, mostly with lighters and whatever I could find, and it turned into cutting.
As strange as it seems, it didn't really seem negative to me. It always seemed like a positive thing. It was always a place to go that made me feel better. Because I know how to deal with physical pain. You clean it up, you put a bandage on it, you make yourself feel better, you watch it heal, and you like physically watch yourself healing and you're like, oh, I'm getting better. Like,
it felt good to me. And it was also something that I had control over because my entire life, I never had control over anything that happened. I didn't have control over how sick my mom was or where we were going to move next or the next person she was going to date that was going to be awful and abusive to her. But I had control over when I hurt physically and how bad I hurt physically. My mom was a cutter for 16 years and she stopped when she had me
She wouldn't do it around me or anything, but her arms were covered in scars. And my entire life I saw that. And as I got older, I knew what that was. And I was like, hey, maybe this is a way I can stop feeling so bad on the inside. I ended up being a cutter for eight years.
By the time I got to high school, I stopped caring about school. I was so anxious all the time that I started failing everything. I would wake up every day feeling physically nauseous, and for the longest time I didn't know what that was, and I would just skip school. Over a period of three years, I missed hundreds of days of school.
I ended up dropping out of high school when I was 16 because I was so far behind. They said I would need to stay three extra years to graduate. And I ended up getting my GED and I began working a year later. I wasn't caring for myself. I was just completely letting myself go.
It was kind of strange because I was still working at a fast food place, but other than that I would come home and just lay around and smoke pot and smoke cigarettes and play video games and just kind of wasn't really there. I was just comfortable being kind of nothing. I was suicidal this entire time basically since the first thought came up in my mind. It's always been there since.
The cutting, in a way, was kind of my way of, like, hey, you can't commit suicide, but you can hurt yourself. It was like that thing that I gave to myself because my mom was very suicidal. She always wanted to die. And then as soon as she had me, she chose me over that. She decided that she couldn't die because she had me. So I basically made a promise to myself that no matter how bad it got...
I couldn't leave her because it wasn't fair to take my life from her. So I've actually never attempted suicide because I never wanted to leave my mom. I didn't have almost any positive thoughts about myself. I didn't feel any self-worth or self-love. I had a boyfriend who lived with me and my mom. He wasn't the greatest person. I was basically paying for both of us to smoke pot and
I didn't like myself at all. I have my own mental health issues and I think that they were at their peak then and looking back from now, I think that's the worst person I ever was. When I was 19, my mom and I moved again and it was probably to the nicest neighborhood we had ever lived in. It was still Section 8 housing, but they got a better job.
had a lot more self-reflection. I realized a lot of things about the person that I was, and I didn't want to be that person anymore. I started going to community college. I started finding a level of motivation. I started wanting better things for myself. When I was 20 years old, my dad messaged me on Facebook. Hi, this is your dad. I know we basically don't talk at all, but I'm dying. I only have six months to live.
If you want to get to know me, now's your chance. I didn't know how to react. I wasn't, I didn't feel anything. I was just kind of confused to an extent. Like, what do you mean? Like, why now?
Once it wore off, I kind of realized, like, this is for you, not for me. This isn't so I can see my dad. This is so you get to see me one last time. And I didn't know whether or not I should do it. I didn't know if I should give him that chance. But I also didn't know if I wanted to lose my chance. So my dad and I were actually never in touch. There was one time when I was 15.
He asked me via Facebook if I wanted to meet up with him. I said I would, but I didn't plan a specific date.
And then within the next two months, I started having panic attacks. And I'd never in my life had a panic attack before. And the first time it happened, I thought I was dying. I was like, oh my gosh, my heart is beating out of my chest. I don't know what to do. And one of the times it happened, it actually lasted for three hours and I went to the hospital.
I realized that I was having these panic attacks because I had so much fear at the thought of meeting my dad. So I decided that I wasn't ready and I couldn't do it. And then I never really responded again. And he didn't respond either. So I thought, oh, well, he doesn't really want to meet me that bad anyway. That was the last time I talked to him until he messaged me when I was 20.
So when he contacted me when I was 20, I definitely felt that sense of anxiety. But I had also at this point in my life, I had dealt with a lot of my mental health issues. I had been in therapy. I was a lot better controlled with it. I had a girlfriend at the time and I told her and I told my mom and I was like, listen, I don't know what to do.
We never really knew my father. Even my mom was only with him a matter of months before she got pregnant. And then before I was even born, he was arrested. So she never got to know him really either. We didn't know whether we could trust him. So when he first said he was dying, my mom's initial reaction was, well, is he really dying? How do we know he's sick? Maybe he's lying. Maybe he wants something from you.
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I did make the decision to see him because I kind of thought, even though I was scared, that I might never get this chance again and I would always wonder what he was like. I did make my girlfriend and my mom go with me. We went to a coffee shop. I was freaking out. I was so scared. I was shaking. I was absolutely just terrified to see him.
We sat down in the coffee shop and he just stared at me, which made me really nervous. And then he looked at me and he said, "Well, don't you want to ask me any questions?" And I was, I just froze kind of. I was like, "I don't know what to ask you. I can't even believe this is real life right now. Like the fact that I'm looking you in the face, I don't have words. I didn't have questions."
Like you think you're gonna want to say all these things and confront this person, but once you come face to face with them, you have nothing to say. He just had a really, really tiny duffel bag and I knew that it was everything he owned. Like that's all that he had to his name because he always lived wherever he could. I remember it surprising me that that was his entire life and I was kind of in awe of this person.
realizing I'm related to this person, like I came from him. And the funny thing about my dad actually is that I look identical to him. I don't really look like my mom. And so looking at him is like looking in a mirror. It was mostly just uncomfortable silences and just staring at each other.
I don't think I had any strong emotions. I was just kind of there, kind of like dissociating in a way. Like is this real life? Is this person really in front of me? Almost that entire day I was in shock that it was really happening. We exchanged phone numbers. We would text periodically. He stayed in some shelters and stuff and then he found a group home and he moved into that group home
I was in college and I was working, so like I was really busy. I had to go to school, I had to go to work and everything, but a couple times a week maybe I would try to see him. We didn't really do much. I would usually just drive him back to my mom's house. It took a little while, but eventually my mom was like, okay, I guess he can be in my house. My mom smoked cigarettes too, so we would all have a little family smoke session. We would all go outside and smoke a cigarette together.
And I guess, unbeknownst to me, my mom and dad started getting closer? And I guess that they were texting and emailing and calling each other when I was, like, at school and asleep and stuff. So they were talking. I thought, like, my mom hated my dad. She wanted nothing to do with him. And then the one day she was like, oh, you know, Patrick can sleep here. That's okay. Like, I was like, oh, okay.
So a couple of times he slept over on the couch and I remember one day I came home from school and my mom and my dad were laying on the couch together, cuddling, watching some movie. And I was so confused. I almost legitimately turned around and walked back out of the house and walked back in to like make sure it was real life.
And I think the strangest thing that happened is they like had this realization that they still loved each other and that they like had always loved each other. And I was so confused because my entire life I thought that she hated him. For a couple of months, it just kind of went like that. Would come over sometimes. I was scared to ask him serious questions. My dad is very intimidating. He has this really weird, dark sense of humor.
The one time I did ask him about him being schizophrenic because schizophrenia can be genetic. So my entire life, I was afraid that I would one day be schizophrenic. I actually used to be very paranoid about it when I was a kid. And so I asked him if he was schizophrenic and he laughed so hard. And he's like, that's hilarious. He said, I'm a lot of things. Yes, I have mental illnesses, but that's not one of them.
He was joking about how his batshit crazy mother thought that he was schizophrenic, but she didn't know what she was talking about. He really didn't like his family, especially his mother. I think he held a lot of resentment towards her for putting him in a group home when he was a kid. I'm not schizophrenic, but I have borderline personality disorder.
and I have antisocial personality disorder. He was trying to say, I'm not schizophrenic, I'm not as crazy as they say I am, but I kind of think that he might not completely understand what antisocial personality disorder is, because that's a very, very serious psychological disorder. A lot of serial killers have that disorder. It can be like a lack of empathy disorder,
Around that time, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and that was a big reason when I was younger why I was so full of rage and why I turned to self-harm. And that also is genetic. I've been in therapy since I was a little kid, but when I was younger...
I was really, really ashamed of a lot of the symptoms of my mental illness, specifically my rage. I was really angry, really outwardly angry, mostly towards people that I was the closest with, like my mom and my significant others and my family members. And I never showed it to authority figures like teachers or anything because I was afraid of them.
So when it came to therapy, I was honest about being sad, but I wasn't honest about being angry. So I was never diagnosed as borderline because I wasn't honest. When my dad first came back into my life, he told me that he had six months to live. Even once we started getting to know him, we didn't really know if that was true. He kind of looked sick,
He was a smoker for over 25 years. He was anorexic most of his life, and like I said, a transient. So we couldn't really tell if he was any sicker than normal. We kind of, in a way, forgot that he had said he was sick.
About four months after I started getting to know him again, a lot of feelings of anger started showing up for me. And I had every right to feel angry. He wasn't in my life for 20 years. I don't remember what it was, but he said something in a text message about my mom. Like he's making some kind of joke and I just got really mad. And I kind of decided that I needed a break from him. And so for about two months, I really didn't talk to him much.
One random night in January, my mom got a phone call. This woman was just talking super fast and acting all frantic. And I was like, what the heck was that about? She's like, that was one of Patrick's roommates. And she said he's in the hospital.
They don't really know what happened. He was sitting on the floor and his face was turning purple and he was grabbing his throat like he couldn't breathe. And he said, call 911. She also said he hasn't smoked a cigarette in two days. And again, if you know my dad, he hasn't not smoked a cigarette for even a day in over 25 years.
And my mom starts getting ready. And I'm like, where are you going? And she's like, well, I'm going to the hospital. I have to go see him. And I was like, you need to calm down. I was like, I'll bring you to the hospital in the morning. And I looked at her and I really believed this when I said it. I was like, everything's going to be okay. And the next morning we woke up and she woke me up and said they had to put Patrick in a coma.
They had to put a respirator on him because he couldn't breathe on his own. And he was trying to rip it out of his throat. They had to induce a coma so he would stop trying to hurt himself. So we went to the hospital and he was just not lifelike. He's just laying there, hooked up to all kinds of machines. We went home that day, still not really knowing what was going on.
I knew enough to know it was kind of serious. And so my father has two siblings. So I messaged both of their Facebooks in a group message. And they both sent some generic typical response, like, thank you for letting us know, whatever. Because he hadn't seen his siblings since he was a kid either.
We went to the hospital again, and we were standing at the nurse's station in the ICU. We're here for Patrick. I'm his daughter. They were like, oh, okay, well, you want to wait just a minute? His sister's going to be here any minute. And I was like, I'm sorry, what? And she's just like, yeah, his sister Terry, she's going to be here any minute.
Okay, and she looked at me with like this confusion on her face and I was like, oh i'm sorry I don't I don't mean to be rude. I was like i've never met her and she's like, oh Well, is that her right there? And it was like a movie like I turned around and there was this woman walking towards me two women actually It was this person That i'm related to my aunt terry who i've never met and she's like, oh my gosh alana And it was this whole moment. She hugged me and we cried and
And I was like, oh my gosh, I have another aunt. We all went into the ICU together to see my dad. The second day he was in the hospital, I got a phone call. And they're just like, we're taking care of your father. He was never married. And you're his only child. So you're next of kin. You have to make all medical decisions for him. Do you understand? And I said, um, I guess so. And they said, okay.
So we're going to need to call you every time we need to make a medical decision. We need to put an intravenous line in your father's chest so that we can feed him through a tube. Is that okay? And I said, yes. So from then on, every time they wanted to do anything, they had to call me. The past two months before this, I was really angry with him. I wasn't even talking to him, really. So I...
didn't know what to do. Like I could make the decision right there and then in that moment to walk away. I could never answer the phone. I could never go back to the hospital. I could just let him die. And I didn't know really what to do because when somebody hurts you and then they're like, now you have to take care of him. You're responsible for him. I didn't know how to feel. I
They explained it in more detail. They said, well, if you don't want the responsibility, you can sign over the responsibility to someone else. But it will first go to his parents. His mother doesn't live there and Patrick hates her. So there's no way he would want her to make decisions.
His father also left him, was never in his life. He's alive, but he doesn't even admit that Patrick is his kid, even though they look very much alike. If both of the parents signed over their right, it would then go to the eldest sibling, which is Sean, who's in Florida. And only then, if he signed over rights, would it go to Terry.
So basically the only option was for me to make decisions or for him to die right then and there. This person never took care of me. I was a little kid wondering why I didn't have a dad my entire life. He never took it upon himself to care for me. And now I have to take responsibility of his life.
As much as I kind of just wanted to walk away from the situation and just pretend it didn't exist and just not do anything at all, I don't think I could have forgiven myself had I walked away. I don't think I could have just let him die in pain. And I can't say I'm entirely sure what would have happened if I hadn't made decisions, but I think that there was a lot they couldn't have done. I think he would have died painfully. I think it would have been really bad if I had just walked away.
The first day I spent in the hospital with my mom and my Aunt Terry, it was all really strange because my Aunt Terry obviously cared for her brother and loved him very much. Even though Patrick had told me he felt abandoned by his family and he was angry with them and he didn't want anything to do with them.
And she was just sitting on his bed with him, crying and just stroking his hair and just saying, she called, his name is Patrick, but she called him Padarac. It was like her childhood nickname for him. She would just say over and over and over again, oh, like baby brother Padarac, like I'm going to bring you home with me. But it was at that moment when she said to him, I'm going to bring you home, that I knew that he wasn't going to walk out of the hospital.
There was like something in me that knew that he was gonna die. But I just let her feel that and be there. And we just talked. And she has four kids. So I had cousins. And growing up, I didn't have cousins.
So I grew up as the only child in my family. And all of a sudden she's like, "Oh yeah, you have four cousins and four second cousins and like there's all these kids and like I really want you to meet them." And I was just absolutely astounded. The next day is kind of a blur of all the same. I remember it being really weird though. Kind of staring at him and feeling like it wasn't real.
I mean, that's him, but he's not really him right now. Like, he's not awake. He's not conscious. I didn't want to touch him. And I don't know why. I just felt uncomfortable touching him. Like, I didn't want to hold his hand. I didn't want to hug him. Like, I just stood there. And my mom was really affectionate. She was, like, holding his hand and
sitting with him and talking to him. And I kind of realized through this process that Terry was a mess. My mom was a mess. They were falling apart. And I realized that I needed to be strong for them. It was kind of known at this point to all of us that he wasn't going to make it.
The breathing machine that he was on was keeping him alive. So if we kept him on it, he would be alive, technically. But there was no quality of living at that point. He had pneumonia in both sides of his lungs. And what we found out was he had cancer. But he didn't know what kind of cancer because he didn't actually have health insurance. And he never got treated for it. We had a meeting with...
The doctor is like, he's not getting any better. We need to make a decision. And he's like, well, his kidneys are improving. And immediately, Terry perked up and she was so excited. She's like, oh my gosh, he's getting better. Like, I can take him home. And she started freaking out. And then everyone started talking all at once. The doctor was still talking and my mom and Terry were talking and they were all excited. And I just said, stop.
And everyone just looked at me. And I looked at the doctor and I said, I want to hear it from you. Best case scenario, what happens? And he said, he survives and he lives in a facility for the rest of his life. He would never be able to take care of himself again. And I said, no, absolutely no way. My father would ever want to live like that. I was like, he doesn't deserve to live like that.
And everyone was so sad and so upset. And I was like, I'm sorry, but this is the right thing to do. He wouldn't want to live like this. Bring me the paperwork now. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.
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Again, this is unreal. Like I'm staring at a piece of paper that says that I can kill my father basically. Like if I sign this, if I put my signature on this, he's gonna die. I think in the moment that I made the decision, all my emotions shut down other than, I mean, I was sad.
But really, I just tried not to go into an emotional place. Because if I went into an emotional place, I wouldn't turn them off. I would try to save him. I would try to get more time with him. I desperately wanted more time with him. But realistically, I knew that wasn't going to happen. This is the right thing to do. We all went and sat in the room.
They said we're gonna come into the room six times, once every 15 minutes. And every time, we're gonna turn the machine down a little bit more. And at the end, the sixth time, he's gonna stop breathing. That's gonna be the end. So we sat there for an hour and a half.
And the nurse came in quietly, turned the dial down a little bit, and quietly walked out. And then 15 minutes later, she would come in and turn the dial down and walk out. And every time she walked up to that machine, you would get this little, like, feeling in your chest. Like, you couldn't breathe for a second. Like, this awful thing is about to happen and you want to stop it, but you don't know how or you can't. I was sitting right next to, like, the monitor. And I watched his heart rate going down and down and
At the very end of it, there was a part of me that freaked out inside a little bit. And I wanted to scream and be like, no, no, like hook him back up, like take all the machines and put them back on him. Like, don't do this. Let him live. Like, I can't lose him. Like, I can't do this. Like, I wasn't ready. But I knew that that wasn't the right thing to do. I knew I couldn't. After the final time, it was like 20, 30 minutes and he was still breathing.
really harshly like he looked like it was really hard to breathe and he was like really hopped up on morphine but he didn't look comfortable and my mom and terry were like this isn't right like we need to take the mask off so terry took the mask off and after that he took three shallow breaths and his heart rate like i was watching it go down down down and then it finally said zero and there was just that line and i was like his heart is not beating anymore
And I just kind of stared at him like, he's not alive anymore. That's a thing that just happened. His heart is actually not beating. He's not breathing. He's actually dead. Then I remember feeling him leave.
I was raised Buddhist and I believe in reincarnation. I also believe in ghosts. I do believe that in situations when people aren't ready to leave, they stick around, their spirit sticks around. And in this really crazy way, my entire life, I never knew where my dad was.
And I never knew for sure if he was alive or not, because I knew he lived like a risky lifestyle and I didn't know. But I always had this feeling that he was out there somewhere. Like I could feel him. I could sense him out in the world. And in that moment when he died, I felt him leave. We just kind of sat there and didn't really know what to feel. We all parted ways and I drove back to my house.
My mom, my aunt, and I just sat in my house for a couple hours and just, like, we really talked to each other. We were just, like, in each other's presence because we didn't really know how to react to such a loss because all three of us were connected to this person but really, really distant from this person. Like, none of us really knew him. It was, like, the strangest loss I'll probably ever feel in my life because how do you grieve someone...
You've never been around. It's not like losing a parent. It's not like if I lost my mom who's been there. It was just a strange, strange feeling for all of us. I didn't know how to stay home and grieve him. I didn't know if I was supposed to keep going on in the world and being a person. I didn't know what to do. So I went to class the next day. I needed real life to keep going enough times
that I didn't completely fall apart, but a lot of it I just didn't know how to react. I didn't know how I was supposed to feel. In the first couple of weeks afterward, I really felt kind of numb and I couldn't feel the things that I was feeling. I also wasn't really used to feeling grief. I had never had a loss this big before in my life, so I was learning how to feel grief at all.
So I really just went through most of my day feeling really dissociated and unreal. And then when I would think about it, it would be overwhelming and I would just be crying. Grief isn't supposed to look like anything, like it can be anything. But I felt, I don't know, I felt like there was something I was supposed to feel or a way that I was supposed to do it and I just didn't know how.
And I didn't know if I was supposed to be crying all the time or if I should feel bad when I felt numb. How long it was supposed to last or how able I was supposed to, like how capable I was supposed to be of doing things. The grief just felt like a giant hole.
The reason the grief was so painful isn't because I lost him then when I was 21. It's because I was grieving the relationship I never had. I was grieving the loss of him as a whole from beginning to end. For so many years, like, yes, I was sad I didn't have a dad, but for a long period of time, I just kind of blocked it out. I didn't think about it.
I had to like fully grieve the idea that there's all these questions that were never answered. There's all these things I never knew about him. There's all these things that I'm never gonna get to know about him. I never got to have those memories in the first place and it's like they were ripped away from me all over again. I actually don't remember the exact last words that he said to me because we were in that state of not really talking.
And I think he was trying to get me to talk to him. So he texted me a couple of times and he was joking around with me. And I actually felt a lot of guilt after he died because I didn't answer him.
I would go to my car almost every night and I would plug my phone into my aux cord and I would listen to music and I would just smoke cigarettes and smoke pot and just sit out there and think about him. And sometimes I would just cry, sometimes until 3, 4 in the morning. I was still self-harming at this time. I self-harmed until I was 24, which was only a year ago.
I always have had this strange thing though where I kind of made this promise to myself that I wouldn't self-harm because of other people because I knew that it would hurt them if they knew and I knew that they wouldn't know it was because of them even if it was but I just didn't want to do it because of somebody else. So I tried not to self-harm because of my grief but I did happen to still be doing it at that time. My
Aunt and I kept in contact. It was like we were each other's rock in different ways. Afterwards, we kept in contact. A couple months later, she said, the family would really like to meet you. We're a big family. She has four kids. They have kids. Her mom, which is my father's mom, my other grandmother, and she's like, I know this is a lot, but if this is something that you want to do, we would love if you would come here.
Eventually, I decided that I wanted to meet my family, and I actually got to spend a Christmas with my father's family. I met all of my cousins in person. I met their kids and my nana. Meeting my nana was really emotional because my dad only had negative things to say about her.
And I think it makes sense because in his perspective, like, this is the woman that quote-unquote gave him up because she couldn't deal with him and his outbursts and everything when he was a child. But, I mean, she has her own version of that story, obviously. But she is, like, such an intelligent person. And she's one of those people that has a photographic memory. And she told me all of these stories of their childhood and how my dad was as a kid and everything.
She's just like, when she saw me, she just cried. And she was so happy. She's like, I've wanted to meet you your entire life. And it was just like the most emotional, like three days I've ever had in my life. Like I got this entire family that I never would have had if he hadn't died.
seeing how close they were and how much they loved each other and how much they cared and everything and also seeing how loss can happen so quickly and can take people away from you it made me really appreciate my family and get closer with the people I have here too. I'm 25 now it's been four years since my father passed away.
I have my own apartment. I'm working on a psychology degree because I want to be a mental health counselor. And a big part of why is because of my father. The hardest thing about this entire situation was just the realization that his life and his health were in my control. And the fact that whatever happened from here on out was up to me. And thinking back
on my entire childhood and my entire life that how my life turned out was up to him and whether he wanted to be there for me and he chose not to be. And now I had a similar decision, basically, to take care of him.
as much as I could have walked away from the situation entirely, the compassionate choice and the right choice was to stay there and make decisions for him so that he didn't have to suffer anymore because causing him more pain wasn't gonna help me. It wasn't gonna help anyone. Letting him die and suffer wasn't gonna help anyone, but allowing him to die peacefully helped all of us. It gave us this like sense of closure.
that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This is the greatest loss that I've ever had. In a strange way, it's prepared me for loss and for grief of other kinds. And I think that he, for some reason, needed to be the first loss that I experienced because I wouldn't have been ready for the others.
My entire life, my mom has been so sick that the doctors said when I was young that she basically would not live to see me graduate high school. She was not supposed to be alive this long. Basically every day that she wakes up is a miracle. So my whole life I've been preparing to lose her and I know that at any time I could. So losing him...
helped me understand grief, how to deal with it, and how to accept loss. I always used to kind of scoff when people said that blood is thicker than water and all of that stuff because I never felt close to my family. I never felt that that was really important.
And losing him made me feel like it was really important. And it just made me reach out to people and be kinder to people and check up on how they were doing every day because I knew that at any moment you can lose somebody. Today's episode featured Alana Campany. You can find out more about Alana by following her on Instagram at I-L-A-N-A-C-A-M-P. This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by me, Witt Misseldein.
If you love what we do, you can join the community on our official Instagram page at ActuallyHappening. You can also rate and review the show on iTunes, which helps tremendously to boost visibility to a larger community of listeners. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay tuned. ♪
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