The Beginning

This is a test of sorts. A test of the mind, a test of matter, a test of maturity... I don't know. Something to see if anyone understands me, agrees with me, and/or maybe even learns something from me.

The Beginning: I've lived a hard but sometimes seemingly successful life. I grew up in a good family-support, structured home where we all spent birthdays and holidays together. In just over one-year of my teens, my parents, grandmother, cousin, family friend, my neighborhood employer, and a newly made friend, a police officer, either died or were killed. Seven funerals in 13 months. My family structure and support was ripped out from under me. I lost my family, my dog, my home, my friends. I felt I was cursed. I made new friends in high school, but never got too close for fear they would die too.

My father's death was planned, well, no, rather expected though. He had been battling cancer and diabetes for years and was actually supposed to die three years before he did. So we had time to plan, kind of. It still hurt like hell when he died. His death bed in the hospital was my confessional. I told him everything I had ever done wrong in my life and gave him my permission to get up and whip my bottom (and I mean WHIP), but just to get up; he didn't. He died five hours later.

We had to sell things after that to pay bills because somehow, under his medication-induced existence, he had the mental clarity to cancel the mortgage insurance on our three-bedroom, two-car garage ranch house and strip away a few others safeguards leaving us in desparate times. He told a family friend of his deeds and swore her to secrecy. Who needs enemies when you have 'friends' like that, huh? We lost everything.


My mother's death a few months later was sudden and very unexpected. Even though we knew she had been fighting cancer for some time, as teenagers we just didn't understand it was truly gravely serious. Although we say she died of a broken heart (he died two months before their twentieth anniversary, she died two months after), the real cause of death was the untreated cancer that was allowed to spread throughout her body, mostly her head, and eventually into her brain. She never got treatment because of her fears of chemotherapy side-effects. My dad needed her, sometimes to get dressed, other times to eat or take his meds. We were already key support for both of my grandmothers, if she couldn't take care of him, who could? She would have failed him and she couldn't do that.

With the mortgage insurance cancelled, we couldn't make the house payments and to change the name on the title, there couldn't be a lien on it. So we were forced to move out of our treasured castle and leave the neighborhood, friends, and memories behind. Since before I was born we always had a dog. My dog of five years and closest friend then was a Keeshond, a big furball that prefered being with me whenever possible and loved to run around our large backyard. As a very intuitive and empathic breed, she would stay near my father whenever I wasn't around. When we were moving out of the house, I was living with my grandmother and would come and go quite often to sort and pack pur things. These 'visits' pained me to the soul because before I found a new home for her, she would be there waiting to see me, wanting to play or just lay by my side. Whenever she'd see and hear me leave, she would run out of the house to the bank in the backyard where she could see the front and would bark and make whining sounds I continue to hear in my memory today. One of the saddest times in my life - she was always there for me: to play, run, take walks around our big block, do obedience classes, and cry on and I was abandoning her.

Our house quickly sold and we got money for it, but I lost nearly everything in my life. Money is no substitute for life. It cannot buy dreams, friends, happiness, inner peace, health, strength, or true love; it only gives illusions of them.