“He was standing in the driveway looking very frazzled. ‘You know the one thing you told me never to do?’ He was determined to beat this addiction. ‘This is not real, this cannot be real.’ I was in shock. My beautiful boy was gone. And the signs began.”
‘Please don’t blame yourself, Mom.’ He wrote his goodbye letter. How could I have missed this?’: Mom loses son to suicide after meth addiction, sees ‘amazing signs’ from him
‘My father secretly recorded videos of me naked. I wanted nothing but my mother’s love and support. ‘Get out of my house,’ she told me.’
“I wouldn’t allow him to have power over me any longer. I stood up and walked out of the house. No one followed, no one cared. I had angels flying over me that night.”
‘My daughter was fed a cashew. She had itchy ears within 5 minutes, but was still playing. It all changed moments later. She started blacking out.’: Mom shares daughter’s severe nut allergies
“It snuck up on us so unexpectedly and quietly. I expected to see choking, gasping, hear wheezing, see her grabbing at her chest and neck area. It was actually very silent.”
‘He introduced me to his parents as ‘the woman he wants to marry.’ Our marriage shocked them. When I held our baby girl in my arms, skin to skin, everything was perfect. Until it wasn’t.’
“He wanted to bid on me but didn’t have enough money at the time. He couldn’t go home with regret. He walked over to me.”
‘I am about to call you.’ My heart pounded. ‘Are you able to take in a newborn baby boy?’ I looked at my husband. ‘I guess we are doing this!’
“Her excitement was oozing out as she exclaimed, ‘The day is finally here!’ Yes, the day we had all been thinking about, fantasizing about, and trying to plan for, was finally here.”
‘There’s good news and there’s bad news,’ my dad told me. ‘They found out what’s wrong with Mom.’: Family comes together to care for mom with dementia
“After 2 years of troubling behavior with my mom, and doctors assuring us there was nothing wrong, we finally had concrete answers. Dad’s voice caught in his throat and tears welled in his eyes. He said the word we most feared.”
‘I woke up in a different country, in a tattoo parlor, after a night of drinking. I have no idea how we were allowed on the plane. All I had was my passport.’
“I had no luggage, and was wearing my clothes from the night before. That night changed everything for me.”
A Letter To The Overlooked Bereaved Dads
“All the nurses direct their attention to mom, but as you stand tall next to the woman you love, inside you are broken. As you hold your significant other’s hand, not one person in the room notices your eyes swell with tears. But I do.”
‘Mrs. Fey, I’m sorry for getting in a fistfight during algebra, then calling you the B-word for breaking it up. And what did you do? You showed up at 7 a.m. to work with me one-on-one.’
“My parents were divorced, my father was addicted to painkillers. He was in jail most of high school. My mother and I weren’t getting along. None of this justifies how I acted, and it wasn’t your problem. You made my difficult life bearable.”
‘She wanted to crash a wedding, toilet paper a house and travel. I remember looking at her sitting there, thinking, ‘She will not be here much longer.’
“I will never forget the day she called me and told me. She was sorry and she didn’t understand why it was happening to her.”