When my mom died on December 2, 2012, it was the first many dark Sundays I would remember in vivid detail. From her struggling to breathe properly the Saturday before, and before that her just having minor aches and pains while waiting for dad to bring in Friday’s Domino’s pizza to the car, nothing in my almost-thirteen-year-old head could have conceived the deadly road which lay ahead of me. There was no time left for goodbyes. Having a pulmonary embolism takes the patients out in a short amount of time and leaves little chance for recovery. And the fact that the last thing she did before being taken away in a yellow stretcher seat with a gas mask was scream at me, “Don’t talk to me!”, because it literally hurt her body to speak, my impending introduction into my teen years was not at all like the Disney movies. 

My trying to comfort my father screaming while slamming his hat to the ground upon hearing about my mom’s passing, would be the beginning of the heightened toxic and unstable relationship between us, with my typically suffering from his violence, and my not being able to express my own anger even though I was everyone else’s smiling punching bag. Watching Tangled, a movie that all three of us had enjoyed on my father’s birthday the same year it came out, did not do anything to soothe me. I already could feel my heart hardening as needed to deal with the tragedy of my mom suddenly becoming dead. And no matter the doctors I talked to, the hope I grasped for in ragged pieces, or the strength I tried gaining from the gray clouds above me, there was nothing to stop the tears coming out of my eyes. 

They came hot, heavy, and never stopped for anything. My body knew what was happening well before my brain did, and my heart just knew that my mom had died while my father and I were talking to the doctor about the chances of her survival. Her abuse of me would be pushed back into the far corners of my mind for years to come, because despite her having her own trauma and not knowing anything except taking it out on me over unrelated matters, she had still been a good mother to me in other ways. My tween/teenage self did not know how to understand, recognize and claim the language describing the emotional abandonment as well as abuse practiced by my dead mom without being overwhelmed by more trauma than I could handle at the time. I remember begging the God I believed in at the time to not let any more horrible things happen to me and my family. But I had held the bible my mother gave me praying a similar prayer the night before she died. As the minutes turned into hours, and the hours turned into days, then months, and finally years, my level of faith dropped steadily as the tragedies of my life grew into a mountain always crushing the back of me. And for as much college gave me a brief glimpse of the joy I had found outside of my suffering, it all came back tenfold upon hearing the news that would forever change the course of my life. 

To be continued.

Jourdan Lobban