One of the most traumatizing painful times in my life happened tonight twenty years ago. February 13th, 1985 was the night my dad died. I’m not going to go into a lot of details of what happened since I do on my main site. I guess the feelings have really changed over the years since it happened. The first year it was a lot of guilt. My dad had a nice collection of old coins and I’d say a week or two before he died he showed them to me and I kept telling him that when he died I wanted those coins. When you remember something like that at 11 years old after you lose your dad it can lay some heavy guilt on you. There also was the fact that he absolutely loved to take me Trick or Treating and the last year that he was alive I told him that I was too old to have my Dad going with me and I went off with a friend. I also revealed to them that I didn’t believe in Santa Claus anymore and his final Christmas was just a plain one with no Santa antics; which was something he loved. I felt extremely bad for taking away two of the things that he loved and kept thinking if I only knew I would have let him take me Trick or Treating and I would have pretended to still believe in Santa just for him. So I dealt with that for a while.
Within six months of him dying (he died of a heart attack) I began having real bad chest pains. I remember the pain extremely well, and whether it was real or not, it felt real. I don’t know if it was anxiety attacks, panic attacks or what. So for a few months I seriously thought that I was going to die of a heart attack. Shortly after that I began experiencing real bad headaches which were eventually diagnosed as migraines. I would assume these were triggered by what I had went through plus the fact that I left everyone that I had known in school and wound up in a new place in a new school and lost my dad all in a couple weeks time.
The next thing I went through was fear. After I realized that I wasn’t going to die, I became deathly afraid that I would lose my mom next. When you’re living your perfect life and then it gets ripped up like that, you don’t know what to expect next. I would worry whenever she would go somewhere and always thought she wouldn’t come back. I dealt with that for a few years until we had moved again and I got into high school. When I got into 9th grade and I had a good three years that stayed the same without any major changes I started to simmer down some. The migraines went away and some of the overwhelming fear went away.
Even though most of the pain went away, whenever a holiday would roll around I would always get a little choked up. I wouldn’t start crying or anything but I would just remember. Things like shooting off fireworks in the driveway or listening to old Gene Autry records at Christmas would pop into my head during those times. A lot of times I would wonder what it would be like if he were still alive. Graduation was tough since I always thought he would be around for that.
Recently if I have thoughts it’s not what if he was here, but where would I be if he hadn’t died? I doubt we would have moved, we wouldn’t have had a reason to. I would have finished school in Tomah and I would have never met anyone that I know now and I may have not gotten into the internet or web design or anything like that. But minus all of that I still wonder how different life would have been; would my life be better off or worse off.
Of course I find myself now at 31 thinking about my dad who died when he was 37 and my own mortality keeps coming into my head. In my head I only give myself six more years to live even though I know I don’t have the problems that he had. I also look at my life and think that when he was 26 he was married and had me and I’m 31 and still single and childless and am currently at a dead end in my job right now. I know part of the mortality comes into play because I am now in my 30’s which is an age that I never really thought I would reach. I didn’t think I’d die beforehand or anything, I just never contemplated turning 30. It was a blast to turn 21 but that 30 really sucked. I also always have that creeping thought of what is the point really? Regardless of what you do in life and how hard you try and how much you succeed; you’re going to die. Whether you’re someone living on welfare in a trailer park or you’re Bill Gates or even the Pope, one day your number will be up. Sometimes I just wonder what it’s all about.