My heart goes out to anyone who has had a death in the family, and had a loved one stolen away too soon. Experiencing a death as a child, especially, you are exposed to such a wrongness of having outlived someone who you believed would be in your  lives forever, or at least until you are an adult yourself. In particular, my heart goes out to those who lost one or both of your parents, leaving you feeling so alone, so abandoned. I understand the detachment, the aching sadness, the guilty relief and the anger: the responses to the trauma which feel so normal at the time, but will follow you for the rest of your life. I understand the weight of the burden you are forced to carry; a burden of grief and bitterness and resentment to a parent who should have been there for your middle school graduation, your high school graduation, your college acceptances, who should have been there when you feel you are lost and just want their shoulder to lean on. 

       I watched cancer take my beautiful, vivacious, and so-full-of-life mother over the course of seven years. My mother died of incurable adrenal gland cancer. She was in the 40% of patients who survived five years, but once the cancer reached her brain, her condition rapidly ravaged her body and mind, so tired after years of fighting an incurable disease. At the time, I recognized a subliminal need to be able to control something, anything. My initial trauma response, I believe, was an emotional detachment. My second? I believe I had some sort of obsessive anxiety disorder.

 Flashback to elementary school, most likely fourth grade:

       I count one, two, two, two, twotwotwotwotwo, four, four, fourfourfourfourfour fluorescent lights above: I march in tandem with the rest of the fourth graders (left-right-left-left-right). I blink up at the lights; cycle repeating. Two, two, two, twotwotwotwotwo, four, four, fourfourfourfourfour. I skip one this time; I’ve already used it. The even numbers march, jumble between themselves as I count a single light panel as many times as I can before I’m forced to abandon my count, and start on the second light. One fire extinguisher. Four red exit signs, staggered on a diagonal down the horseshoe-shaped hall. Sixseveneighteighteight signs on the wall, oneoneoneone promoting the school name. The fourth graders perched anxiously in the gymnasium: twotwotwotwotwo panels per column, oneonetwothreefour… forty-sevenforty-seven- forty-seven columns. Mental math, quick! Quickquickquick what is forty-seven times two ninety-fourninety-fourninety-four, what’s forty-nine times four?  Once I could climb my multiplication tables, the tricky eights and sixes giving pregnant, anxious pauses in my overactive mind, and I’d finally be safe. 

       It was a game, the counting. Starting soothing, turning frantic, I counted my way until there was nothing left to count.

        As I got older, I forgot to count the cracks in the sidewalk or the flickering electric lights. I never found ways of self-soothing: as I breached eleven, I forgot about my frantic number game altogether. What were my stressors? What caused my counting, and why did I never make the connection between the lack of control and my mother’s sickness?

       Around the time I was counting the light fixtures in the ceilings, I had discovered sex. Sex should have been an open topic in my house; both my parents were dancers. We had photographs of practically nude dancers with faces thrown back in orgasmic release plastered on our walls. Coffee table books filled with images of dancers; books about dance techniques, boxes of pictures of my parents in tight dancer costumes, lit up on a stage. We had books about massage, complete with detailed diagrams, no nudity censored, and books about yoga and tai chi. Not to say that my family was promiscuous or overly graphic, but a certain comfort and confidence in the vessel of your body exists in the dance community which is rarely seen anywhere else, I believe.

       My father, for all his open-mindedness, being a dancer himself, retained the gender stereotype of being uncomfortable explaining sex and sexuality to his young daughter. My family had moved from our home in Texas to a smaller town in Maryland at this point, to be closer to my father’s new job and my mother’s intensive care at NIH. My mother gave me my first -of many- sex talks in our busted white Avalon. I would scramble to the passenger seat and my mother would turn off the ignition. I’m not sure what prompted the initial talk, as an ever-curious child, I probably asked bluntly. My dad peeked through the blinds in the dining room, at the two-thirds of  his family sitting engrossed in conversation in the car under the darkening sky, and wisely decided to stay put.

       “How do butterflies do it? How do pandas do it?” Every animal I could think of I asked about, and somehow my mother’s normally stretched patience never wore thin and maintained it's elasticity for just one more question.

       After my sex talk(s), I developed an obsession with sex. I blame access to the internet for perpetuating my obsession.

       I grew up with no screens. We didn’t own a TV, I didn’t have a device until required for school. As many children inadvertently do, I discovered porn. The images I say played on the screen in front of me burned into my frontal lobe and stayed there, incessantly replaying, rewinding, replaying and replaying and replaying. Images of sex was branded into my closed eyelids, and began to consume my mind. I didn’t obsess over sex the way I counted: sexual thoughts were not a method of self-soothing but an unwelcome invasion which affected my ability to focus in school or interact properly.

      I confided in my father, sitting on the swingset on a hot July day, sleepily pumping my little legs back and forth as my thighs plastered to the seat.

       “I see sexual images”.

       “Oh”.

       “I hate it.”

       “That’s yucky. I’m sorry.” was probably how the conversation went. My father thinking about his eleven-year old daughter’s sexual awakening was an uncomfortable thought, so he let the thought glide out of his mind. In my father’s eyes, I had a strong creative vision. My parents were dancers. Dramatics were to be expected. My father, for all the good he does, was unable to accept that his daughter might need some help, because he himself pushed down any thoughts but the present. Being ten, there wasn’t much I could do to ask for help, or figure out how to remotely articulate that I felt overwhelmed by repetitive thoughts which drowned out the emotions I felt that I should be feeling.  

       Having never made the connection between my cyclical thoughts and my mother’s sickness, I feel mildly silly. I hesitate to self-diagnose myself. There are those who may be reading this who have been diagnosed with a condition as a result of family trauma, whether it be a death or anything else. Who am I, to try and create a space for myself amongst those who have had it worse than I had? That is the denial talking. I drowned my emotions of my mother’s sickness in thoughts which made my head spin, consumed my mind, and left me unwilling to process grief. 

       I was driving to a coffee shop the other day. It was Memorial Day: the day that my mother died. (Fitting for a dancer, my family has a flair for the dramatics.) Suddenly, the tears rose in my throat, and poured down my gaping face. I have cried only a handful of times since my mother died. Sometimes, the pain hits me all at once, unexpected, and entirely out of the blue. On Memorial Day, I felt fine. I set out to my favorite coffee shop, my computer in my backpack with the intention of slamming through late homework assignments. And then the tears came.

       To anyone who has lost a parent: my heart is your heart. Whether you blocked out the emotions and your mind went whirling in directions unplanned as mine seemed to do, or whether you lived painfully in the moment, or whether you don’t feel much of anything at all. Whether you feel relief or guilt for feeling relief or if you feel so heartbreakingly alone, I understand, and I hope you know you are never alone.