I was not a typical teenage girl. I did not go to parties or hang out with friends, largely because I never had any. I did not flirt with boys or go out on dates. I never socialized with anybody else, nor did anybody socialize with me. To all of my peers I was an outcast, a different species from another planet that nobody wanted to discover. When I walked down the hallways they would pretend not to stare but I could feel their disapproving gazes protruding from the corner of their eyes. Sarabeth, my mother used to say, it is good to be different. Like myself, my mother was an outcast in high school. She was weird like I was, creative, bubbly, independant. We both possessed the same enthusiasm for the ambiguity that life offered. My mom and I never cared about what other people thought of us, because we knew who we were. We had our own voice and we did not listen to anybody else’s.
My mother, Amelia Smith, died when she was only thirty-five. She had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and when the doctors finally convinced her to have a hysterectomy, the complications that arose during surgery killed her. Mom was in a coma for four months until the doctors instructed my father it was best to take her off of life support; that she was not going to come back. Ever since my mother took her last breath, my father has not been the same. Our family has not been the same.
I never forgave the doctors for what they did to my mother. I was only eleven when she diagnosed, twelve when she passed, so I did not understand the magnitude of the situation until I was older. I will never know if my mother could have survived from radiation or chemotherapy treatments, but what I do know is that the surgery she had robbed her life--that the doctors forced my mom to have an operation she did not want.
So, naturally, when I found out I needed to have a hysterectomy as well at seventeen, I was conflicted.
I still remember the morning of that appointment with my family physician like it was just days ago. Whenever my menstrual cycle became disrupted, my doctor, Dr. MacPhee, ordered me to undergo several tests just because of my mother’s medical history, but I was not very worried. Other than the fact I was weird like her, I took after my father, so I thought the odds of me having cancer like her were very slim.
I was wrong.
Dr. MacPhee found precancerous cells not only in my ovary, but also in the endometrium of my uterus. Since I was only seventeen, they did not want to have to remove all of my reproductive organs in hopes that I could have a family some day, but they did not want me to die either. They started me on some sort of experimental drug called Norenepheryn with the goal of killing cancerous tissue without damaging healthy tissue like chemo does. The treatment was not successful. I was given two options: have a hysterectomy--the surgery that took my mother from me--or hope we could find a new experimental drug that would work. Surgery would give me the best chance at recovery in the long term, but that did not give me any comfort since these were the same odds given to my mother and, well, look how that worked out for her. After much contemplation, my father and I decided I should have the operation. My obstetrician, Dr. Nelson, injected a needle between my legs and extracted premature eggs from my ovaries and then proceeded to literally place my ovum in a freezer so that, if I desired, I could hire a surrogate later in life, implant the embryo, and have my own biological child.
Despite my fears, the surgery went smoothly. I was given a six week recovery time where I was to spend every day in bed doing school worked that I missed while receiving treatment. These few weeks were when my dad’s self deterioration severely escalated.
While my mom was sick, Dad became hers and my rock. He took a leave of absence from work so he could take care of her instead of hiring a twenty-four hour nurse. For five months, while watching the love of his life slowly and unsuccessfully fighting an illness trying to kill her, he plastered a smile on his face, taking her bony hand in his, and singing her favourite songs to her. He was so preoccupied with making her happy during her last months he ignored that inevitably, he was falling apart. After she died, I saw him cry for the first time. He would take showers three times a day because he thought the falling water from the showerhead would mute the sound of his sobs, but he was wrong. The only way to explain what I heard is to compare it to an avalanche that had buried itself on my father’s chest, suppressing his rib cage with ice, deflating his lungs with gusts of snow, creating a man I did not recognize.
It was not just me who noticed it; everyone in the community did. When I started attending church on Sundays by myself, as my father was too hungover from the previous night of binge drinking to leave the house, the priest would look at me pitifully, the choir offering their fake sympathies, the congregation ironically judging me about how my father chose to grieve. I was condemned due to everyone’s ignorance. They did not understand that my father was not a hateful man. My father was not an abuser. He was not lazy. Nor was he an addict. He was broken. Lost. Lonely. While I saw a man trying to forget about the loss of his wife, everyone saw a man feeling sorry for himself. But that is the thing about grief; it consumes every part of you, like when a dam breaks and the water escapes potently, ingesting all wildlife within its vicinity. My father did not want to be hit by the current, but he was demolished by it nonetheless.
Since my father had withered from the dad he used to be, I was numb. I did not know who I was, what my morals were anymore, who I was supposed to be, or who my mother would have wanted me to be. I so desperately yearned to be the person who rose and learned from the tragedy of having lost a parent, maybe even having lost two, but I did not.
Whenever our house was repossessed by the bank, the community labelled me as a lowlife. When, consequentially, my grades started to slip, teachers told me I was stupid. Whenever my father was fired from his job, everyone assumed I was impetuous and duplicitous. In reality, I was struggling. I was hurting so gravely I started to hurt myself because I felt that is what I deserved; everybody treated me like a nobody, so I started to believe that I was.
Every night I stole a steak knife and I sliced my wrists until my arms were numb. Until there was so much blood covering the knife that it slipped too much and I would lose my grip. I sliced so much until I could forget who I was or where I came from or why I was so messed up or why my mother had to die or why I would never be able to carry my own child inside of me. Nothing ever made sense until that last slice that would be a little too deep. Just deep enough that I could escape from consciousness and dream of a universe where my mom could hold me and tell me she would never let me go back here, to hell.
But every morning I woke up, in the same bed, covered in the same red stains, with the same feeling of inimical emptiness in the pit of my stomach.
For months I sleep-walked through my life like a zombie. I stopped eating because I did not see the point of nourishing a body I did not want to live in. I went to school, and physically was present, but mentally I was not; I let my mind wander to the past when my mom would pick me up from school in June just to get ice cream. And even though I wore long sleeves in the warm months, or had to wear extra clothes to cover my weight loss, nobody noticed how much obvious and insufferable pain I was experiencing. Or maybe they did notice, but they just did not care. I tried not to think about the latter.
I had always wanted to be a doctor, to help people, but I lost all ambition. I stopped caring about my marks, about biology and other sciences that were once my passion, because I did not think I could survive long enough to even graduate high school. Part of me wished I had not agreed to that operation that saved my life, because this life I had now was not worth living. My father had already given up, dying from liver poisoning, and I was envious. It was so easy for him to escape the prison we were living in; he could stay home every day and indulge in whiskey while I was forced to go to school and work by Child Protection Services.
~
I wish I could tell you I pulled myself together. I wish I could say that I am now the doctor that I wanted to be when I was a child, or that my father got sober, or that I had a child from my own ovum, but I cannot. I succumbed to my grief, to my demons, and I took my life when I was eighteen years old. The act I committed was not out of selfishness, but to be rid this world of a being with so much darkness and despair that could not contribute to society. I write you this letter to show what not to do. I should have never let my grief intensify to the point where it was intolerable. I should have left the toxic environment that was my house before my father’s actions influenced my own. I should have used my mother’s passing as inspiration to live the life she would have wanted for me: to follow my dreams and be happy. I should never have let other people’s opinions sway my own truth of who I was, because when you listen to everyone else you lose your own voice. I lost my voice that I used to be proud of, and subsequently gained the voice of a devil who got off on watching me suffer until I could not endure it any longer.
I am not who my father became nor am I who they say that I am. I am my mother’s daughter, with a heart purely filled with a child’s naivety and oozing with positivity and weirdness.
Grief broke me. Mental illness broke me. Judgement broke me. I lost a backbone. I lost the motivation to fight. Please, my friend, do not let this happen to you. Do not let the avalanche suffocate you. Do not let other voices drown your own. Be different and find your voice.
My mother, Amelia Smith, died when she was only thirty-five. She had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and when the doctors finally convinced her to have a hysterectomy, the complications that arose during surgery killed her. Mom was in a coma for four months until the doctors instructed my father it was best to take her off of life support; that she was not going to come back. Ever since my mother took her last breath, my father has not been the same. Our family has not been the same.
I never forgave the doctors for what they did to my mother. I was only eleven when she diagnosed, twelve when she passed, so I did not understand the magnitude of the situation until I was older. I will never know if my mother could have survived from radiation or chemotherapy treatments, but what I do know is that the surgery she had robbed her life--that the doctors forced my mom to have an operation she did not want.
So, naturally, when I found out I needed to have a hysterectomy as well at seventeen, I was conflicted.
I still remember the morning of that appointment with my family physician like it was just days ago. Whenever my menstrual cycle became disrupted, my doctor, Dr. MacPhee, ordered me to undergo several tests just because of my mother’s medical history, but I was not very worried. Other than the fact I was weird like her, I took after my father, so I thought the odds of me having cancer like her were very slim.
I was wrong.
Dr. MacPhee found precancerous cells not only in my ovary, but also in the endometrium of my uterus. Since I was only seventeen, they did not want to have to remove all of my reproductive organs in hopes that I could have a family some day, but they did not want me to die either. They started me on some sort of experimental drug called Norenepheryn with the goal of killing cancerous tissue without damaging healthy tissue like chemo does. The treatment was not successful. I was given two options: have a hysterectomy--the surgery that took my mother from me--or hope we could find a new experimental drug that would work. Surgery would give me the best chance at recovery in the long term, but that did not give me any comfort since these were the same odds given to my mother and, well, look how that worked out for her. After much contemplation, my father and I decided I should have the operation. My obstetrician, Dr. Nelson, injected a needle between my legs and extracted premature eggs from my ovaries and then proceeded to literally place my ovum in a freezer so that, if I desired, I could hire a surrogate later in life, implant the embryo, and have my own biological child.
Despite my fears, the surgery went smoothly. I was given a six week recovery time where I was to spend every day in bed doing school worked that I missed while receiving treatment. These few weeks were when my dad’s self deterioration severely escalated.
While my mom was sick, Dad became hers and my rock. He took a leave of absence from work so he could take care of her instead of hiring a twenty-four hour nurse. For five months, while watching the love of his life slowly and unsuccessfully fighting an illness trying to kill her, he plastered a smile on his face, taking her bony hand in his, and singing her favourite songs to her. He was so preoccupied with making her happy during her last months he ignored that inevitably, he was falling apart. After she died, I saw him cry for the first time. He would take showers three times a day because he thought the falling water from the showerhead would mute the sound of his sobs, but he was wrong. The only way to explain what I heard is to compare it to an avalanche that had buried itself on my father’s chest, suppressing his rib cage with ice, deflating his lungs with gusts of snow, creating a man I did not recognize.
It was not just me who noticed it; everyone in the community did. When I started attending church on Sundays by myself, as my father was too hungover from the previous night of binge drinking to leave the house, the priest would look at me pitifully, the choir offering their fake sympathies, the congregation ironically judging me about how my father chose to grieve. I was condemned due to everyone’s ignorance. They did not understand that my father was not a hateful man. My father was not an abuser. He was not lazy. Nor was he an addict. He was broken. Lost. Lonely. While I saw a man trying to forget about the loss of his wife, everyone saw a man feeling sorry for himself. But that is the thing about grief; it consumes every part of you, like when a dam breaks and the water escapes potently, ingesting all wildlife within its vicinity. My father did not want to be hit by the current, but he was demolished by it nonetheless.
Since my father had withered from the dad he used to be, I was numb. I did not know who I was, what my morals were anymore, who I was supposed to be, or who my mother would have wanted me to be. I so desperately yearned to be the person who rose and learned from the tragedy of having lost a parent, maybe even having lost two, but I did not.
Whenever our house was repossessed by the bank, the community labelled me as a lowlife. When, consequentially, my grades started to slip, teachers told me I was stupid. Whenever my father was fired from his job, everyone assumed I was impetuous and duplicitous. In reality, I was struggling. I was hurting so gravely I started to hurt myself because I felt that is what I deserved; everybody treated me like a nobody, so I started to believe that I was.
Every night I stole a steak knife and I sliced my wrists until my arms were numb. Until there was so much blood covering the knife that it slipped too much and I would lose my grip. I sliced so much until I could forget who I was or where I came from or why I was so messed up or why my mother had to die or why I would never be able to carry my own child inside of me. Nothing ever made sense until that last slice that would be a little too deep. Just deep enough that I could escape from consciousness and dream of a universe where my mom could hold me and tell me she would never let me go back here, to hell.
But every morning I woke up, in the same bed, covered in the same red stains, with the same feeling of inimical emptiness in the pit of my stomach.
For months I sleep-walked through my life like a zombie. I stopped eating because I did not see the point of nourishing a body I did not want to live in. I went to school, and physically was present, but mentally I was not; I let my mind wander to the past when my mom would pick me up from school in June just to get ice cream. And even though I wore long sleeves in the warm months, or had to wear extra clothes to cover my weight loss, nobody noticed how much obvious and insufferable pain I was experiencing. Or maybe they did notice, but they just did not care. I tried not to think about the latter.
I had always wanted to be a doctor, to help people, but I lost all ambition. I stopped caring about my marks, about biology and other sciences that were once my passion, because I did not think I could survive long enough to even graduate high school. Part of me wished I had not agreed to that operation that saved my life, because this life I had now was not worth living. My father had already given up, dying from liver poisoning, and I was envious. It was so easy for him to escape the prison we were living in; he could stay home every day and indulge in whiskey while I was forced to go to school and work by Child Protection Services.
~
I wish I could tell you I pulled myself together. I wish I could say that I am now the doctor that I wanted to be when I was a child, or that my father got sober, or that I had a child from my own ovum, but I cannot. I succumbed to my grief, to my demons, and I took my life when I was eighteen years old. The act I committed was not out of selfishness, but to be rid this world of a being with so much darkness and despair that could not contribute to society. I write you this letter to show what not to do. I should have never let my grief intensify to the point where it was intolerable. I should have left the toxic environment that was my house before my father’s actions influenced my own. I should have used my mother’s passing as inspiration to live the life she would have wanted for me: to follow my dreams and be happy. I should never have let other people’s opinions sway my own truth of who I was, because when you listen to everyone else you lose your own voice. I lost my voice that I used to be proud of, and subsequently gained the voice of a devil who got off on watching me suffer until I could not endure it any longer.
I am not who my father became nor am I who they say that I am. I am my mother’s daughter, with a heart purely filled with a child’s naivety and oozing with positivity and weirdness.
Grief broke me. Mental illness broke me. Judgement broke me. I lost a backbone. I lost the motivation to fight. Please, my friend, do not let this happen to you. Do not let the avalanche suffocate you. Do not let other voices drown your own. Be different and find your voice.
Sarabeth
It is your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself, that determines how your life’s story will develop."
-Dieter F. Uchtdorf