[Serious] Was there a moment in your life that changed you into who you are today?

Possibly?

The issue is I was a kid so I can't know for sure if who I am is caused by it or if I'm exactly as I would have been.

I saw my father die when I was four. He had a heart attack. He and my mom were awake in the early hours in the living room and he said he had some chest pains. My mom asked if he wanted her to call an ambulance but he just said he would get an aspirin and see if he felt better.

He goes into the bathroom, shuts the door, and falls backwards dead. He likely died instantly, and from what we saw he wasn't there.

At this point my memory starts because I wake up to the sound my mother screaming and crying and smashing on the bathroom door


The bathroom door was replaced the night before and my dad hadn't put the new knob in. He bought the wrong one apparently and was gonna fix it the following day. You could see inside of the bathroom door through the knob hole but the door was shut tight. When he fell backwards his body pushed the door into the frame of the doorway to such a point where it jammed in-between the spacer. It took two EMTs to bash the door down


So she's smashing on the door and literally screaming in a way which cannot be put into words. The purest and most agonizing reverberation of terror which I can ever really say I've heard.

She runs to call 911 and I walk over to the door (I'm 4 at the time) and look inside the knob hole. I see the back of his head against the door and I stick my hand inside the hole to touch the top of his head. No idea why I did it but I just did, I was 4.

At that point my mom starts screaming again after hanging up with 911 and I walk into the living room as she's still screaming. At this point she doesn't even look like she's screaming for a reason, it's like her brain is caught in this loop and she just keeps screaming the same thing over and over again. His name, and to please talk to her.

I grab her hand and I sit her on the couch and tell her "Calm down, everything is going to be okay, help us coming"

Again, I was 4. No fucking idea what I was talking about but I just said it. She calmed down for a moment but then jumps back up and runs for the bathroom and begins pounding on it again.

The EMTs eventually arrive and after that my life happens. The memory sits in this part of my brain which sort of acts as the crest of my early childhood. Each phase of my life has a few memories which encompass my new phase, that one was early childhood into kid-hood.

/r/AskReddit Thread