Shine A Light On Me

Finally, I returned to Oklahoma. I mistakenly thought I would have things back under control, after being removed from the situation in Houston. I expected my mood to improve but instead found that things weren’t going back “to normal” as I’d hoped them to be. I was different, even if I didn’t want to admit it. 

One of the novel side effects of losing someone to a terrible disease is how much it suddenly puts all the little things into perspective. Anything you ever once considered a problem pales in comparison to someone starving to death. Living so long in that nightmare, I now had a tendency to get irritated hearing people complain about anything. I was mad all the time.

I knew everyone probably felt bad for me and was worried about how I’d finish school. I hated that it put a giant awkward spotlight on me, more pressure, more weight. I knew I probably made people nervous or worried about how to act around me, but I wanted to be normal again. I didn’t want to talk or think about what had happened.

My mind became a haunted house where I was busy running through an endless maze along with ghosts and monsters. The words “pancreatic” and “cancer” stayed out of my mouth. My mind refused to acknowledge that either of those words even existed. That was the shape of my monster, words, pictures, and memories. 

One night in the kitchen, I opened the cabinet for tea. There was a box of raspberry tea sitting on the shelf. Instantly I saw flashes of my dad, all of those nights, raspberry was his favorite. I felt a vice squeeze me of all my energy. Weeping in silence, muscles strained, I motioned at Jon to get rid of it.

Sleep was another problem. I was having chronic nightmares, almost daily. The anticipation of sleep was a battle in itself. Away from the world, alone in my thoughts at night, uncontrollably my guard would be let down. It got to the point where I was laying in bed at night, wincing, sweating, waiting for the memories to flood back in. All the things I saw, heard, and smelled vividly came back. It was like jellyfish swarming into the room, each passing over me, stinging and burning, searing through my skin, with memory after memory. 

Nobody knew what I was going through. Nobody knew that this was happening. I didn’t dare confide it to anyone for reasons I will never know other than desperately wanting to be normal again. Jon slept peacefully next to me while a weird strange ritual of secret suffering began. I was so far gone into this process that it never occurred to me it wasn’t normal or that it might be serious. It’s strange how embedded you get into things until you aren’t really thinking at all. 

When I did sleep, I had nightmares about my dad being sick. It was as if I was right back in the house, every emotion, every detail, like I had never left. Sometimes the nightmare was that his arm or leg was massively swollen or that he was in pain and I’d frantically be trying to help him. I’d wake up feeling my body strained in agony all over again, only to be immediately reminded he was gone and there was nothing left to hope for. 

For almost two years I would dream about our routine, that he was doing okay, then wake up to know none of it was real and remember for the hundredth time he had died. I often woke up feeling more exhausted and tired than when I had gone to sleep. The nightmares were almost daily. My mom disappointingly reported that she had not been able to dream of him. 

•

The sleep problem was getting to me. I was exhausted and not coping with my new life. Whatever mild beliefs I had of a higher power vanished and were replaced with a corrosive bitterness. I was lashing out at Jon over everything, mainly because I was tired. One night, in the first month back, I completely came apart. All of the trauma of seeing my dad the night he had fallen bubbled up to the surface for some reason. 

It was a memory that I hated and had buried as deep as I could all those months before. Now it was torturing me daily. I started to sob but it was more like a scream, “I saw him on the ground! Do you know what that’s like? Do you know what that does to you? He looked like a wounded deer, that was my dad. I saw his eyes looking up at me, like an ANIMAL! Nobody ever told me something like that could happen! NOTHING IS OUT THERE! There’s JUST NOTHING!” I was almost screaming. Jon desperately attempted to calm me down, hugging me as I cried. Months later it occurred to me that maybe I was having some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. That first summer was the worst. I cried a lot in desperate hope it would alleviate the pain I was going through and magically heal me. A few weeks later on my birthday I wrote:

“There are a lot of things on my mind all the time. There are a lot of things that others can’t relate to. Everyday I remember things I rather forget. I see things I don’t want to see anymore, I can hear them, smell them. I don’t expect anyone to understand what it is I’m going through.

All the things that I used to find enjoyable, don’t last long. Nothing lasts. It’s exhausting. The good feeling that usually comes with special things plummets quickly. It makes everything seem pointless. I’m tired. Everyone is trying to be nice but I would rather disappear.

I feel fractured. I wake and find that the pain is greater than I knew, farther than I could see, sharper than I could possibly prepare for. It keeps unfolding like a path of enormous heights that I go through in the dark. My split cage, like someone tore a hole through my body. My chest hurts, my mind is not what it should be.”

During that summer I was beginning to struggle under another anxiety, the idea of it all happening again. My mind and heart raced at the idea of Jon or my mom getting cancer, having to do it all over again. The thought made me crumple onto the bed, crying and terrified. The unexplainable and invincible euphoria I had experienced the months after my dad died, vanished. I was now perpetually scared, I was afraid of the cancer. I now was afraid of dying slowly, to a torturous disease. 

•

I had a conversation with myself a hundred times, to confront what scared me, to question what I was feeling. If I had the chance to do it all over again, would I have changed anything? If he was alive again and I had to relive the entire experience once more, would I do it? Knowing what I knew now? Amazingly, the answer was always yes. I would, in a heartbeat. It was unfathomable that the thing that destroyed me, would never for a second make me regret being there with him. It didn’t make sense, as miserable as I was. I could handle the physical act of being there for my dad but I had zero clues as to how to go on afterward.

When people looked at me they saw a normal person. They couldn’t see a gaping wound, a giant half of my body missing. The bloody wound felt real. This isn’t a flowery exaggeration for dramatic effect. It felt exactly how you move stiffly after getting a fracture or cutting your hand. There was a radiating and pulsing wound inside my upper body. I felt that pain everyday,  as if a monster had ripped out my neck and chest. I was still walking and speaking, though I should have been dead. The monster had done this and no one could see it. I looked fine on the outside. Everyday I portrayed the person who was okay.