I was 18. The night my dad died. After a very short battle with cancer he died at 3 am. After he was gone I went into the waiting room and sat down, I watched the sky get lighter and the sun come up and realized I wasn’t waiting for anything, no one was coming to talk to me. I got up and went to a coffee shop and watched people drive by, I watched the people waiting in line going about their day normally as if they didn’t know the world has ended earlier that morning. I stood up and clenched all of my muscles, and shut it all out.

For the next 6 months I didn’t cry once, any time feelings crept up on my I’d clench all my muscles and tell myself “it’s just like college, he’s not here but he’s just a phone call away.” I actually thought I was skipping grief, but I was losing a massive amount of weight, had completely isolated myself and with what felt like a fear of pure physical strength number myself into not feeling the loss of my dad. I maintained a state of total dissociation for months, and completely lost myself.

One day I came home from work and caught my reflection in the mirror, I didn’t realize it before but it was actually the first time I’d made eye contact with myself since that night. The disassociation snapped like a twig and I just collapsed the floor, screaming. I screamed so loud and for so long that my mom called an ambulance and I was sedated and admitted for 72 hours round the clock monitoring. I tried to kill myself twice during that time, almost succeeded he second time. I didn’t even feel like a human being, being called my name felt perverted and wrong because I was completely broken from the person I used to be.

It’s been 10 years since I that episode. I’m ok now but the trauma from the nervous break has honestly been worse than the death of my dad. I’ve never really been the same, there’s always a break between the person I was and the person I’m now. I miss my dad everyday, and I miss the person that died that day with him.