139: What if your father disappeared? 49:46

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The worst thing that anxiety does is make you think that you have control to change something. You know, like if I can constantly be in control of everything, then nothing bad will happen. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation. A presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 139, What If Your Father Disappeared?

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. My dad was born in 1958 in Mexico City. And he grew up in a small town in Chihuahua State called Santa Barbara. He was a twin and they were number 7 and 8 of 14 kids.

One older brother in particular was horrible, like just abused him relentlessly, just beat the crap out of him every chance he get, verbally like berated him constantly. My dad talks about just spending his day hiding.

My dad had a really, really bad stutter when he was younger. And remember, this is like the 60s in rural Mexico. So there weren't a ton of people that like knew how to help someone with a really bad stutter or, you know, just speech problems in general. So he just had a really hard time just, I mean, existing really because he was teased so much he couldn't really communicate with his peers.

When he was 12 years old, one of his school teachers cornered him in the classroom just after school and raped him. When my dad would tell the story of what happened, he would always word it as we had sex. And I just think that is so sad that like he couldn't even like say that he was victimized. He felt like it was somehow his fault.

You know, I think he carried a lot of shame around that, obviously, as all victims of sexual assault carry with them.

Within the year, he left and moved to Juarez, which is a border city bordering Texas. And Juarez has a really bad reputation for just being a really tough place. So many murders, crime, drugs. It's just a really tough place. And that's where he went when he was 12 years old. I think he just kind of left and everyone was just like, okay, bye.

because he got really kind of lost in his family. And I think, I mean, there were 14 kids. That's a lot of people. I don't know. You know, he kind of had a hard time. He was stuttering. And I just think that they just didn't know what to do with him. And so they kind of just like ignored him.

His oldest brother had already moved out of the house as an adult when he had run away from home or left home. So I know he found him and that brother helped him quite a bit. He was always nice to him. But for the most part, he really was just all by himself, a child. It's so sad.

I don't know what kinds of things he had to do or see or, you know, be a part of in order to survive on his own, especially during those first few years. He bounced around from city to city, just kind of finding work wherever he could. About 17 or 18, he ended up

finding a job on a ship of some sort. And he was able to travel around. So like they went to Brazil and like spent a lot of time in Brazil. He was able to learn Portuguese. They were there for so long. So he's fluent in Portuguese. They did the same in Montreal, spent a bunch of time up there. So he's fluent in French also.

And then after just kind of bouncing around, working on the ship for a while, he ended up in San Francisco and literally rode on the outside of a train and rode to Salt Lake City. And that's how he ended up here. Those formative years, the teenage and, you know, where you're kind of trying to figure out who you are, he was fighting to stay alive. And I think that really impacted the kind of person that he became later.

In 20s, mid to late 20s, he met my mom working at a Mr. Mac, which is like a suit store, like suits and, you know, things like that for men. And they were married in 1988. And I was born in March of 1990. I was...

an only child for four years and then I have three siblings and they are four, five and six years younger than me. So they are all really close and I'm kind of by myself in age at least. I was a really quiet child. My mom always talks about how like good I was, like well behaved. Like I just kind of, I was really shy and I just, I always was just right by my mom and

I listened to everything she said. I hated to get in trouble. I just wanted, you know, everyone to be happy and everything to be okay. From the beginning, even when I was four, when my little sister was first born, I always kind of felt like I was other, not an outcast necessarily, but it was always like I wasn't one of the children. I was separate. And, you know, I always really felt pretty alone for most of my childhood.

In February of 1997, I was six years old. I was turning seven in a month. It was my little brother's birthday. He was turning two years old. We went to the fire station and looked at the fire trucks. And we were with like a lot of people, like cousins and family friends. There was a lot of kids around. It was just kind of a big, like fun, you know, party. Everything was fine. We got up to go and we couldn't find my sister, Emily.

Emily would just escape. Like she'd just run out into the neighborhood, taking her clothes off as she ran. Like neighbors up the street would just call and be like, we found Emily. When we were trying to leave McDonald's, I don't think like right away my mom went straight to panic. It was kind of just like, Emily, she's like missing again, you know? And I don't remember like what happened after that because we decided to go to the car. Like I don't know where she thought Emily was.

we were walking across the parking lot to go to the car. And I looked over, like, there was a bunch of people kind of like in a circle, looking at something. And my mom said something like, oh, somebody got hurt. That's sad. And I like, you know, I was like looking at it because it was this big pool of blood and the blood was like moving on the concrete. It was really,

It was really weird. I'd never seen blood like that. And so I like kind of couldn't stop looking at it. And then I could see the person that was laying on the floor and I could see her shoes. And I realized it was my sister. The world just kind of like stopped. And I heard my mom, just this like shriek. And we went over and she was just laying just completely covered in blood. The only thing that was kind of not covered in blood was her shoes.

She was crossing the parking lot and a guy in a... It was like a big pickup truck. The truck was so big he just didn't even see her at all. She went down. I mean, he didn't even feel it. It was like he drove away and saw her in his rearview mirror and then he stopped. Luckily, someone that was walking down the street...

kind of saw what happened and ran over and started giving, like, performing CPR. And if that hadn't happened, I mean, she probably would have died, like, right there. And when we went to the hospital, they still only gave her a 4% chance of living.

She was three years old. She spent seven months in the hospital. She was hit in the back of the head is where the it's called the cerebellum and it controls all of your like fine motor skills. Like she had to learn how to swallow again, which a brand newborn baby knows how to swallow and she had to learn how to swallow. So like she had to learn how to do everything again.

I don't know that I believe in miracles, but a religious person might call it a miracle. She's fine. She survived. She drives. She has a job. She can walk and talk. She can't ride a two-wheeler bike because she doesn't have the balance for it. And she's blind in one eye, deaf in one ear. One side of her face is paralyzed, but she's alive.

When she was laying on the ground in the parking lot, my dad like lost it. He flew off the handle. He was like, like I remember seeing him leaned over the hood of a car, just pounding on it with his fist, screaming, just wailing this like pain. It was flipping out like he was pushing people. He was screaming at everyone. He was just screaming.

freaking out. And I mean, my mom was perfectly calm. She said she didn't even cry that day. She was just, you know, take care of business. But my dad really kind of lost his mind. And it was bad for a long time, not just while we were like at McDonald's and immediately after, but like, you know, in the years after he really just shut everyone and everything out.

My mom kind of threw herself into like work mode. Like she had to be at the hospital during the day and then she'd come home at night. My dad would go to the hospital at night and she'd be with us. And during that time, he ended up actually having an affair. And by January of 1998, they were divorced. I think in the 90s, PTSD was really reserved for veterans or adults.

Now today, we know that it doesn't even have to be a huge thing that can traumatize you, but seeing your child laying in a puddle of their blood, I mean, I can't even, I don't even want to go there in my head how that must have felt because it was literally life-changing.

So my mom's family is really religious. They're Mormon. And so my dad was going to church for a little while. And so I think they probably talked to people like church leaders and stuff, which I'm sure helped to a certain extent. But, you know, there was never a professional involved, which I think if a professional, you know, a mental health professional had been involved with both of them, I think we might be having a very different conversation today.

I think the emotional toll of the accident that it took on my mom, you know, trying to like keep everything happy and everyone, you know, in the family together. And she just didn't have any emotional space to nurture a husband that also needed a lot of help. And I think that he really resented not having anyone, you know, to like turn to and talk

In my dad's case, I think it was like compounded with the other traumas that he'd had in his life and he just couldn't cope. I was never like good at making friends. I've always just been very introverted and to myself. But after the accident, it just moved, I think, into unhealthy territory. I didn't feel like anyone really had anything.

for my problems, you know, because it's like I had a girl be mean to me at school, but my sister had part of her brain removed. So like, how does that compare? It doesn't like, you know, and I don't, nobody ever told me that my problems were irrelevant. But as I moved into school,

puberty area and I got really like, you know, the emotions that come with that time in your life. I started to just get really resentful of my entire family, especially Emily, which still is a problem that I deal with today. I still find myself being really resentful.

Like, she just doesn't process situations the same way that we do. You know, like, if you say something to her that bugs her, like, a normal person might be like, ugh, and kind of roll their eyes, you know? She'll completely fly off the handle and just scream at you and like, shut up! Like...

completely lose it. And it's really hard to remember in the moment that that is her injury. And I still struggle with that today. You know, we'll get in arguments and I'm like, oh, and it's like a couple hours later, I'm like, okay, it's her injury. Like it's, she literally physically cannot do things any differently.

You know, it didn't help that my parents, after the accident, fought constantly. Anytime they were in the same room, they were at each other's throats.

Honestly, at the time that when my dad left, I remember just thinking, like, you know, I wish Emily would have died. If Emily had just died, our family would have stayed together, which obviously is not fair. It's obviously not how it would have been. A death may have affected everyone even worse.

But at the time, that's where I was. And I didn't ever tell anyone that I, you know, never told anyone that I was struggling with it as much as I was. I just sort of went to my room and I went into my music and I stayed alone as much as possible. By May of 1999, they were remarried.

After they got remarried, nothing ever got any better. Things just really deteriorated. My dad completely like checked out. I like I literally don't know why they got remarried. I don't know why he wanted to come back and be with us because he would come home after work and he would get on the computer and

And I mean, he wasn't on this planet. He wasn't even in this universe. He was completely somewhere else. So I don't know why he felt like coming back to our house and like living in the same house would fix anything or improve anything. He would have been a lot better just doing that in an apartment alone. But they thought it might be better for us. I was so angry that everything was...

just as it was. And I didn't feel like I had anyone to tell that to. So I went into junior high and high school with just so much anger at my family. I wanted to do literally anything in the entire world to get me out of the house. I just did not want to be at my house. I wanted to do anything to get out of the house.

In 2004, I came home. I was in eighth grade and I came home from school and my mom was in the kitchen all by herself and she just told me that my dad left. It was then he moved to Las Vegas.

as volatile and unhealthy as their relationship was when I was younger. After he moved to Las Vegas, I don't know, everything just kind of shifted. Like they suddenly got along so well.

All through high school, we would go for like spring break, fall break, in the summer. You know, he'd come up here for Christmas and we would all drive down to Las Vegas to see him. And we would all, including my mom, stay in his apartment with him. We would all together go to dinner. That time is probably the most quote unquote normal and healthy that my family has ever been, which is like weird because my parents were living in different states. Yeah.

He sent $2400 every month for like six years. That's a lot of money. And he had to have his own apartment and his own car. Anything my mom said she needed, he sent her money. It wasn't even a question. She even said that they used to just talk on the phone just like they were friends. He had a lot of problems, but he really was a good dad.

When he moved to Las Vegas, he called me every day, almost. And I was so annoyed. I could not wait to get him off the phone. I think I especially took things out on my dad. I really didn't learn anything about how hard his childhood was until well after high school. Like, you know, the last thing he needed was such a shithead teenager talking to him the way that I did.

I didn't want to go to college, so I didn't work very hard in high school. I kind of just got through until I could move out and be on my own. My ultimate goal was just to leave the house, leave the house and never come back.

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In 2010, I was 20 years old. I was living in a house with a bunch of other girls in Salt Lake City.

I was working super early shift. I started working at six o'clock and got off at two every day. And really, besides going to work, my life and my job was just party time.

I discovered smoking pot when I was about 18 and I loved it from the first second. It was the only thing that let me not think about anything that was going on besides what was right in front of me. I didn't want to be in my body anymore. I wanted my mind to be

I mean, I hadn't dealt with all this crazy traumatic stuff that had happened to me. And I was trying so hard to just wash it out. It's honestly amazing that I survived, that I didn't do something that would get myself killed.

I really did not talk to my family very much at all. I think during this time, I would go weeks, even like months without talking to my mom. She didn't know the extent of what I was doing and, you know, how far down the well I was. My dad stopped calling me and I didn't even notice.

He was a tailor, so he would make custom suits, and he made a lot of wedding dresses and prom dresses and stuff like that. He was exceptionally talented, and he could work so fast, and he really was a skilled tailor.

These kind of rich dudes in Las Vegas would get these three-piece, you know, five-piece suits that were custom made for them for a few thousand dollars. He was making so much money. And this was, you know, 2004 to 2010 was right before the recession, which is, you know, everything gets really good. So he was doing really well. And when the recession hit, it hit Las Vegas specifically really hard.

My mom talked to him and he told her that he needed to find a new job. He just said that he had to quit his job that he had now to look because he didn't want to, like he wouldn't be able to go out and look for a job while he was still working. She said he didn't sound worried. He didn't sound like, you know, it was this big problem. It was just sort of like, FYI, I have to find a new job.

She reminded him that the house payment was coming up at the beginning of August and, you know, he was like, I know, I know, I know, I'll get it all taken care of by then, don't worry. At the end of July, she called him again just to check in. She hadn't heard from him, just to like see how the job hunt was going.

He said he hadn't found anything. He was stressed about not being able to make the house payment and like sort of worried, but it wasn't like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? It was just like, you know, it's tough out there. A lot of people are trying to find, you know, work. A lot of people are out of work. At the beginning of August, she called him and it went straight to voicemail.

He didn't call, so she called him again, called him again and again and again, and just started leaving voicemails with increasing frequency. It wasn't until mid-August, so it had been like two weeks of her calling and calling and calling, that she called and the number had been disconnected. Beginning of September, she got a bill from a storage unit saying that, like, you cleaned out your unit, like, appreciate your business, there's a balance left.

My dad was a really simple guy. This would not have been furniture or anything like that. The only thing that we can think of that would have been in his storage unit would have been sewing machines.

These sewing machines are like industrial machines, so they're like, you know, five feet long by like three feet wide. Just, you know, like to clear out that storage unit. I mean, where would he have put those? So that's super weird because why would you take those out? And then late September, some people showed up at our house in Bountiful to repo his car.

My mom finally called the Las Vegas Metro Police Department and filed a missing persons report. I think right off the bat, they just didn't really care about this. Like this is like a lady from Utah claiming to be this man's wife. And he has cleaned out his storage unit, taken off with a car that was supposed to be repoed and left his apartment as it was.

They checked the hospitals and stuff, but I really think that that's all they did. I don't think that they, you know, talked to last known. You know, I don't think they went to his work and talked to anybody like that. And I mean, my poor mom, she was by herself still with three kids to take care of at home. And I mean, she suddenly had to be the sole financial provider for everyone and figure out how to make this house payment.

She didn't have like a ton of time or resources to like get down there and like start searching or anything. You know, he was kind of prone to taking off. So I think at first that's what she thought it was. But there's no way that he would have gone a month. He would have let two house payments go past without even being like, you know, I'm sorry. Like, this is what's going on. This is where I am. There's no way he would have done that.

He wouldn't have just abandoned us and left us high and dry. He wouldn't have. There's no way. After a month when she didn't hear from him, she called me and told me. And I mean, I was like, okay, like I didn't really get it at first. It was like, what do you mean he's missing? He's not missing. That's something that happens to other people or like on movies, like real people in the real world don't just go missing. You can't just disappear.

I carry a lot, a lot of guilt for how I reacted, like when she told me, you know, like I said, she was a single mom. Now she had to figure out how to pay, you know, all these bills that she wasn't having to take care before. I, on the other hand, was 20 years old. I had my own car. I had a really good job. I had tons of extra money that I was spending on like who even knows what.

I should have been the one to light the fire under the police. I should have been the one to be there and like get it all figured out. And who knows if I had gone down there in the months following and, you know, tried to talk to people, gone to his apartment, gone to his work. I mean, who knows?

Not even a year later, like six months later, the detective from there called her and informed her that based on the evidence that they'd found, they believed that he had taken off on his own free will. He's an adult. He's allowed to go wherever he wants. We're closing the case. So they closed it. So there wasn't even a missing persons report open for him for a really long time.

Right around the same time when she had filed the missing persons report, she had called a couple members of his family. So his sister, Vicky, lives in Salt Lake City. He had another brother that lived in Salt Lake City and then one who lived in Las Vegas, who was actually the horrible brother that abused him all of his childhood.

So my mom ended up asking if he had seen him or, you know, whatever. And he said that he would go to his work and to his apartment and, you know, see if he could find some of his friends that he knew and see what he could find out. They said that he had told them that he was going to work on the strip with his brother. Well, I'm his brother and I work on the strip and he is not working with me. So that wasn't true.

My mom says there is absolutely no way in hell that my dad would have gone to work with Enrique. Even if he got desperate, he would have tried to find something else before working with Enrique. He went to his apartment and talked to a bunch of friends. Nobody had seen him. That's about as much investigating as was done. The hospital, the morgue was checked and his horrible brother asked around for him.

I mean, his car is missing. His car has never been found. You know, where's that? Where are his sewing machines? I mean, he had to have gone. He had to have done something with them. You know, these are big, expensive machines. I mean, we're talking like $2,000 to $5,000 a piece. And in his storage unit, he probably had four or five. I mean, that's a good chunk of money.

He had a Nissan, a 2003 Nissan Pathfinder was his car. Not even one of his sewing machines would have fit in the back of that car. So how did he, you know, how did he transport them? Like, there's no record of him getting a U-Haul.

I don't know what day was the last time that a human person saw that him. Like, that's one of the most important things. Like, when you talk about a missing person case is they were last seen here, here, here, wearing this. Like, if you, you know, we don't have that. There's no way to get that information.

Those first couple days after the last time he's seen are really important. And I mean, between when the missing person report was filed and the last time he was spoken to was a month. And now it's been nine years. I mean, we're completely stuck.

As smart as he was, I certainly would not classify him as like a criminal mastermind. Like the amount of planning and preparation that it would take in order to disappear and like not be found is really astronomical. I mean it's like I don't think he would have had the means or the connections.

to make this big elaborate disappearance and go and live another life somewhere. He may have been more involved with gambling than he was willing to admit to anyone. I remember being in high school and being down there with him and walking through the casino and he'd stop and be like, I'm just going to do a couple quarters on the slot machine. In hindsight, it's like, was that...

An addict, like just needing to have a minute of gambling, but he was with his daughter so he couldn't do what he really wanted to do. You know, so somehow he got involved with gambling and he owed money to the wrong person, sold the sewing machines off and made a fair chunk of, you know, cash to give to them right away in his car. You know, maybe he won a bunch of money and was leaving. Someone robbed him or killed him like that.

He got a lot of work doing custom suits for like outside clients. And a lot of those clients were like a lot of the big like mucky mucks from the casino industry, right? So I think that interacting with maybe some people online

like that also maybe could have gotten him into trouble. At the beginning, I kind of had considered that maybe something had happened and he'd gotten involved with, I don't know, the mafia or something, I don't know, and had had to take off. In the first few years, it was like, oh, he'll, you know, he'll come back, he'll show up, it'll work itself out, it won't be that big of a deal. And I think that's what I told myself in the brief moments of like,

clarity when I wasn't trying to just drown it and ignore it. I think I just told myself that he would show up. But then, you know, in 2012 is when I met my husband who helped me put my feet on the ground a little bit more. And I kind of realized like, he's probably not coming back. Like this is probably worse than I thought.

I definitely started getting more anxious after the case was closed. If I were to accept that what the police said was right, that the case was closed, he took off on his own, he's an adult, he's allowed to go wherever he wants. If I were to accept that, then that means that my dad not only left our family in the form of divorce, but he completely abandoned us. I almost would rather him be dead than that.

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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. Since 2012, I have spent a great deal of time wrestling with, I mean, borderline crippling anxiety.

A big way that my anxiety manifests is anger and irritability. You know, I started doing really poorly at my job. I was demoted. They kind of cut my hours, so I had to find another job. I couldn't sleep. I wasn't really eating. I wasn't taking care of my body. In the last year, I worked a lot, like, you know, 2018, I worked a lot with a

with a therapist with my anxiety. So now I know what was going on then, but at the time I didn't know it. But I would have these things. She literally called them anxiety movies because it's like a, it's a movie that plays in your head of something that you're scared of, but it's visceral. It's very, all of a sudden I would get this like picture of his face, my dad, and he was like,

tied up and like looking around with like a gag over his mouth like looking around trying to get out or sometimes he was like being beaten or sometimes he was already dead and I would just get these shots of his face and it was just close up like a like I had my face like two inches from a TV screen like right there you know

I have dreams where I am walking in a field down the street from my house and I find like his bones or like I find, you know, his clothes. And it was just constant. I mean, absolutely constant. And as a result of that, I was a really pretty negative and honoring person.

I mean, I just was like on edge all the time, just feeling like something was about to happen all the time. The worst thing that anxiety does is make you think that you have control to change something. You know, like if I can constantly be in control of everything, then nothing bad will happen. And the only time it stopped was when I was drinking alcohol.

The only time that I got any sort of reprieve or was able to, you know, laugh and like feel okay was when I was drinking or smoking pot. I didn't tell anyone any of this was happening. I was completely alone. The only person who might know how I feel was my mom and I refused to talk to her. Honestly, I think I just, I felt like it was really heavy and

And, you know, this is like emotional baggage that weighs a billion pounds, you know? And if I try to put that on someone or ask someone to help me carry the load that they might not want to, and then they might leave. I think if you talk to a lot of my friends that I had during that time, they would probably say how much fun I was. They would probably say that I was, you know, I was the life of the party.

Once you know what you know about me, I feel like a big part of my identity is just pain. I don't think at that time that I was ready to acknowledge that. I still wanted to be the fun party girl. And so I just didn't tell anyone. So I met my husband in 2012, which was kind of the...

worst part, 2011 to 2013 was kind of the hardest part. And I met him in 2012 and he really is, he was the first person that I felt like I could tell my heavy stuff to and I

He didn't try to offer me a way to fix it or to like feel better. He just listened to me and he just sat with me and, you know, I really needed someone that was going to understand me. And I feel like he did that. 600,000 people go missing every year in the United States. Two thirds, three quarters of those, you know, good chunk are found right away. But, you know, and then there's the other chunk that is me. My family is my dad.

He just, you know, it's no remains. His car has never been found. They looked for like his social security number and did some checks and like tried to find some activity, you know, for him. And there's absolutely nothing. Even if we found by some miracle, even if we found his body, right?

It's going to be bones now. There will be nothing left. There's nothing to ever figure out. There's nothing to ever find out. I mean, this is just, we'll never know. I found a journal of his from 1998 when they were divorced the first time. So that gave me a little bit of insight too. It's really sad. It's really hard to read.

But like, that's about, that's about all I have. And what's even worse is that my dad didn't get to know me. You know, he didn't get to know me as an adult. And that's, that's that. Just this month is nine years. And I don't think that hope is very realistic. I think

That hoping for a conclusion or an answer or a reason is really counterproductive because that hope is going to be what crushes me if I don't allow myself to let it go. I need to kind of just let myself be pessimistic about this because optimism is excruciating.

The five steps of grief, you know? The last one is always acceptance. And what am I going to accept? I can't end this grief because the thing that I have to come to accept, I mean, okay, yeah, that I'm never going to see my dad again. You know, okay, I can accept that. I can accept that he's probably dead. Okay, I can accept that. But what I can't accept is that he is more than likely lying somewhere all by himself,

Just wasting away, becoming, you know, part of the earth alone. I don't want to accept that. So I don't think that I ever get to stop grieving. I mean, you know, grief is something that you live with your entire life.

And even if you lose your parent to, you know, natural causes at an old age, you still grieve them. It's still horrible. It still is really painful. And you still have to go through the steps and come to acceptance and learn to live with that grief. I kind of think of my grief as like a boil. You know, it like is a part of me, but it's exterior. I can't ever bring it in and accept it because it's not...

I don't know. I can't... What do I accept? I don't know what that is. I have to make up some scenario. I have to invent something that might have happened and choose to accept that. But what if that's not what happened? That's kind of the hardest... Kind of been one of the hardest parts. And I've done... I did a...

ton of really painful, challenging work with my therapist, trying to put a name to what I'm accepting, you know, so I can close my grief. And I, I've, I never was able to, you know, I, I still to this day haven't, I don't know if I'll ever get to that last step. And, you know, it's limbo.

If I were to find acceptance in, you know, some fictitious scenario, maybe I have to pick one of those horrible things that I saw in my mind. And I don't want any of those to be what happened. I don't want to imagine him all by himself, like scared and fighting for his life.

It's even worse because I was such a shitty teenager. You know, like if he's like his life is flashing before his eyes and, you know, he thinks of his family and he thinks of me. It was horrible. I was horrible to him. And I didn't know everything that he had gone through. I felt like I was the only one who had ever gone through things. And so I didn't I don't want to accept those things.

It's so unfair that a human being, a living, breathing person with a life and a family and people that love him can just vanish. Just wash, like, go into the wind. He's just gone. And it's not right for someone to just leave the world and not be mourned properly. Which, even if it, you know, we didn't have, like, a grave to go visit, you know, it's not necessarily about the grave. It's not about the spot. It's just, I just wish...

I just wish that in some small way that he could know that like we like we haven't forgotten about him. Like I haven't forgotten about him. He didn't just disappear and leave everyone's mind. You know, I think about him every day and I remember.

If an adult man who has, you know, makes his own personal choices and does everything on his own, whatever, he can just, I mean, just disappear. Like, that can literally happen to anyone.

If your dad dies of a heart attack, right? You might have anxiety around, you know, heart issues. So you might change your diet. You might like exercise a ton more so you can help yourself sleep better that you're not going to die of a heart attack. Because I don't know what happened...

I don't have that. Literally, you can imagine a way a human could die. Anything you can picture in your mind is a possibility. So what am I scared of? Literally everything. The world.

Today, now, I am on an anti-anxiety and depression medication that I will probably be on for the rest of my life. Right now, I'm on the highest dose possible. And I still, daily, I have to use anxiety tactics to move past really scary, intrusive thoughts to just live my life, to just go out and do things. I mean, everything's a threat. Right?

Little things that like a normal person's mind might be like, oh, like that was scary. I obsessed over that for months. I obsess over it and obsess over it and I make it darker and worse. And, you know, the world is I'm really working hard to try to see it in a positive light and see people and like see the good in people, see positive traits in people and, you know, things around me. But it's really hard.

You know, my dear husband has really forced me out of my shell a lot. We recently went on a cruise, which is something that if you would have asked me two years ago if I would go on a cruise ship, I would have told you hell fucking no. Like, I am not setting foot on that boat. I'm not going on the ocean. And I did it. So it's, you know, it's made everything a lot scarier and it requires a lot more inner strength to...

deal with the world around me, but I know I have to. I have kids. I have to be okay for them. I have to be healthy for my kids. I have no choice. I just really want to give my kids this just really stable, really normal, healthy childhood that I never really felt like I had. And now, you know, I have a little boy and a little girl. They're four and two.

And having a lot of anxiety makes me sort of a grumpy mom sometimes. And sometimes I speak a little more gruff than I want to with my kids. And it's really hard to manage really bad anxiety and deal with children who just want to run and do everything and make friends and walk down the street to their friend's house. And, you know, it's hard, but it's good. It's helping me to be realistic with things.

my expectations about what I can manage, you know, the constant vigilance. I've had to let that go quite a bit with my kids.

I'm very sensitive to the fact that like at the grocery store or something, if the worker is like kind of like short with me, you know, your instinct is to be like, that worker was rude. Like, you know, what's wrong with them? And the thing I realized, like, you never know. I mean, you don't like, what if her dad just went missing? Like, I know that's really projecting my own thing onto other people, but like,

You know, you never know. They can seem like the life of the party. They can seem like they're having a lot of fun and they can be shriveling up inside. It's so, like, cliche. They always say time heals all wounds, but...

Today, I can talk about this. I didn't really cry that much. I mean, four years ago, I couldn't have even said his name without breaking down and just collapsing and sobbing. So I'm improving. I'm learning how to carry this thing with me, although it's really heavy and I still feel like I

I'm afraid to make friends. I'm afraid to like widen my circle. I'm afraid to let people in because I feel like once people know something like this about you, they look at you and they see pain. And I hope one day, I guess my hope is that one day people can look at me and not see pain. And I know that's not today. It certainly won't probably be next year, but...

Hopefully one day I can exude happiness and not pain. Today's episode featured Alyssa Jenkins Perez. Alyssa's father is still missing, and at the end of our interview, she had the following message for anyone out there listening who may have more information on what happened to him.

His name was Roberto Hernandez Perez. He was last seen in Las Vegas, Nevada in July of 2010. He was 5'8 and about 200 pounds with black hair that was salt and pepper. He usually had a goatee that was kind of gray. If you have any information, call the Las Vegas Metro Police Department. ♪♪

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.