This still reads like a bad story to me, but its all true. Slight backstory: parents divorced when I was 2, lived with my mom until I was 15, she was an alcoholic, spent the remainder of my childhood with grandparents.

So here's the events that led to me "growing the fuck up" (I would put it that way with or without the OP's title here).

In 2009, my Dad died at age 54 of a massive heart attack. I was 19. He and I weren't very close. He, for whatever reason, had decided franchising was a good model for parenthood. Before he had me, he had my half sister (who lives in Alaska now), then me, and after divorcing my mother he re-married a third time and had two more (wonderful) children, my half brother and half-younger-sister. I had always felt he was a stranger in my life, and had rejected the notion of going to live with him when my mother became very bad with the sauce. However this decision on my part led to a helluva fucked up emotional situation when he died. Regret was a major emotion I experienced every 5 minutes of every day. It sucked, but I was beginning to get over it by 2012. That was the year my Grandfather, 72, died of heart failure. He had suffered from diabetes, and after he retired he was forced to go on dialysis from kidney failure. Soon, circulation issues arose and the doctors began to amputate body parts. Over the course of 3 years (from 2009 to 2012), they slowly chopped off first his toes, then his fingers, than his foot, the one leg, then the other leg, all in different operations. My grandfather was a Marine, and he was tough. But this broke him. I watched the most father-like figure in my life go from being the touhest son of a bitch I ever knew to an ashamed baby whose ass I had to wipe. The night he died, he had called me to come over because "he was feeling sick". When I showed up, he simply asked me to cover him with the blanket. I lived 30 minutes away, so I was frustrated and upset with him for having me drive 30 minutes at 9:30PM at night on a wednesday. 3 hours after I left for home, he was dead. After receiving the call from my grandmother, I drove back to their home at 2am and watched the paramedics perform CPR on my dying grandfather for nearly 20 minutes. I remember the sweat pouring from their heads...

Anyways, after losing my real father and my surrogate father, I was struggling to keep it together. Thats when my mother died. 2013. In a drunken argument with a boyfriend/roommate, the man, a complete scumbag(I could write paragraphs on the level of scum this man really was/is), decided to punch my mother in the face over a fight over car keys. Her head hit the ground and she hemorrhaged over the next 7 hours. By the time the paramedics found her, the pressure from the brain bleed had already crushed half her brain. They said she would die within the next 48 hours, and if she did by some miracle survive, she would be a vegetable. I watched my Mom breathe, moan, sigh, and whimper as her body deteriorated for 4 days. Three times in the last day we had the nurse check her pulse when she stopped breathing. But then suddenly she would gasp and take a deep breath. Her body wanted to live, but the brain was dead.

I honestly don't know how this comes off, Ive never really talked about it before. But life has many creative ways of fucking with you.... somehow you just keep going if you're lucky enough to be a strong person. I learned to put up emotional walls early on in life and they definitely helped me, but now I can't make it through any single cheesy, even remotely, sad moment in film, music, or literature without breaking down a bit inside and sometimes physically crying. But I live a fairly normal life, and my girlfriend, who has stuck by me through ALL of this, is now my fiance, set to be wed next year..... life goes on.