What I discovered when I was forced to sit with the sadness I’d been avoiding for decades, and how I found myself on the other side.
For much of my life, I felt like a passenger in my own body, but a few years ago, after reaching my breaking point when my grandfather and then our oldest dog Rocky both passed away within a few short weeks of one another, something inside me started to change rapidly.
Before that point, I’d been managing. Yet, this moment, holding my grandfather’s hand as they pulled the plug, and then doing the same with Rocky, as his kidneys failed soon after (when we decided the kindest thing we could do for him was to let him go), ended up becoming a tipping point (one that sent all of my carefully balanced dominoes tumbling down).
Up until that point, I had been good at pushing uncomfortable emotions, especially sadness, away, but losing my grandfather, who was very much my person from a young age (who had always been good to me), broke something free inside me, causing the dam to break, leaving me drowning in an inescapable sadness and crushing waves of repressed childhood memories and emotions.
Being the eldest grandchild in the family, born to a young mother, I experienced lots of loss and death in my early life.
I got to know and lose members of our family that the others in my generation did not.
When my grandfather passed, it was as if the sadness of all those losses that I’d not felt in childhood, when the events happened, could no longer be kept down.
Wounds and memories (that I didn’t know I had) kept bubbling up and spilling into my life, intrusive flashbacks, bringing emotions I’d not been able to hold when I was younger, up over and over again, crashing onto me, and drowning me like mile-high ocean waves.
The other thing that became overwhelming during this time, in addition to the sadness, was an intense fear of abandonment, one I didn’t even know I had, and it was all-consuming.
I was afraid everyone in my life would leave me, but I didn’t understand where this fear was coming from.
By the time I hit middle school, I’d lost four great-grandparents and one great-great-grandparent.
Logically, I knew I’d lost people, but when I was younger, I’d not felt the weight of those losses (and had thought there was something wrong with me because, while everyone around me was sad, I didn’t cry, because I had felt numb).
My great-great-grandmother on my grandmother’s side went first, and I still don’t remember much about her passing, other than one day she was there, and the next thing I knew, she wasn’t.
The first loss I remember, when I was a little older, was the loss of my great-grandfather (my grandmother’s father). I remember visiting him as he lay in a hospital bed, and soon after, he was gone.
Next, my grandfather’s father left us. I don’t remember much about it… by this time, my memories had already started to chop themselves up.
I think there was a hospital involved, but even now, that many of my memories have become more easily accessible to me, I still can’t clearly recall much about my grandfather’s dad’s passing.
My grandfather’s mother was next, after the loss of her husband.
She was able to do home hospice, which I do remember seemed to stretch on and on, with my aunts, mother, and grandparents taking turns caring for her at home.
My cousins, sister, and I spent a lot of time in the spare bedroom of the house while other family members worked together to take care of my dying great-grandmother. This loss I remember clearly, because the night before it happened, I found myself frantically pulled to go to her, but it was a school night.
My mother was trying to get me to do homework, which I refused to do.
When she told me we couldn’t go that night, but we “could go tomorrow if I still wanted to visit,” the words landed on me like a ton of bricks.
That night, I struggled to sleep more than usual.
I remember how strong the pull to my grandmother had been, feeling helpless that I couldn’t get to her.
My mother probably thought I was trying to get out of doing my homework, a reasonable assumption, because getting me to do homework had always been a struggle.
The next day, we found out my great-grandmother had passed in her sleep, and the main emotion I felt was anger (at my mother for not listening to me when I had begged her to take me to see my grandmother the night before).
I held onto that anger for a long time, and somehow, once again, the sadness of the loss didn’t come.
Everyone around me was crying, but I didn’t cry.
“What is wrong with me?“ I remember thinking, “I loved my great-grandmother, why don’t I feel sad?“
The next loss in my life happened when my grandmother’s mother passed away in a nursing home several hours away. This loss I’d not been as close to, and was much less of a surprise, because my grandmother’s mother was over 90 years old.
By that time, as the years had passed, I had become an expert at not feeling, so I didn’t think much of the numbness that followed her death.
It wasn’t just death I was immune to when I was younger, but I also could watch sad and gory movies, detached and feeling nothing, watching films that made others squirm, avert their eyes, or cry (though this started to change as I grew older).
Eventually, by middle school, I began to view my detachment as a superpower, looking down on others who, in my mind, were weak because they were ruled by their emotions.
I rarely felt sadness in those days, though I did have lots of anger. Anger made me feel powerful.
Looking back, the year my grandfather passed was one of the most difficult years of my life.
The detachment I’d felt for most of my life had been slowly breaking down. Being stuck in a room, while my grandfather was unplugged and being forced to witness his final breaths, did something to me, accelerating the process.
The loss and the pain were inescapable, and after that, the memories of letting go kept replaying over and over again in my mind.
I found myself feeling like a scared and lonely, abandoned child, and kept hearing a distressed child’s voice crying in my head.
Despite being a grown adult, all I wanted was for my grandfather to hold me, as he had done when I was younger. Still, my grandfather was nowhere to be found, and it didn’t make sense to me that he wasn’t there anymore (even though I’d been in the room when he’d left his body and couldn’t erase the memory of what had happened from my mind).
It felt wrong. How could he be gone? I didn’t want ot to be true.
Other memories kept replaying in my mind, too.
One memory I’d always had, without understanding the significance, kept playing.
I was sitting next to my grandfather in his pickup truck, drinking an A&W Cream soda as we drove down River Road towards my grandparents’ house.
I remember telling him, “I wish I’d never been born,” and my grandfather had dismissed the comment. It had always felt like a core memory to me, but I didn’t understand why it was significant, other than that it showed I had a desire not to exist from a young age (I was probably about 7 years old at the time).
Most of my memories weren’t as clear as that memory was. Thinking back to it, I could smell this memory, taste the soda, and even feel the scratchiness of the seat fabric beneath me.
Eventually, the confusion about why this particular memory kept looping in my mind (along with the more horrific memory of my grandfather’s passing) gave way to curiosity, and I asked, out loud in desperation, “Why do you keep showing me this? What is it you want me to know?“ Then something hard to describe happened (but I will do my best to describe it).
Suddenly, the memory zoomed out, and I was no longer viewing it from the first person. I found myself watching it from above.
This memory, which I logically knew was from my own childhood, but I had felt nothing other than curiosity, shifted as waves of grief (that hadn’t felt like they belonged to me) began to crash over me.
For the first time, I began to feel and understand the emotions and the deeper context tied to this memory (that I’d always had but not understood – a deep sadness and grief at feeling abandoned by my grandparents, who up to that point, had always been there for me).
Around this time in my life, something traumatic had happened to me (but I’d not understood how much I’d been hurt by the event).
My mother had met her new husband, and we had moved out of my grandparents’ house (the only home I’d ever known, where I felt safe, with my own room and my grandparents’ love surrounding me whenever my mother was at work).
We had moved into a small one-bedroom apartment with my new stepfather (whose love I did not feel), where I now slept on the living room sofa.
Before this moment, I’d not connected the dots or understood how traumatic losing my grandparents and their home had been to me.
Suddenly, all of it came crashing back, and I felt the full weight of the abandonment and loss as I curled up in a ball, crying with the child’s voice asking, “How could my grandparents let them take me? What did I do wrong? Why did I have to go? Didn’t they want me anymore?“
Though the wounds were more than 30 years old, they cut me with a freshness that felt like they had just happened.
Repressed trauma and memories tend to hit like that. I knew it could happen, because it wasn’t the first time I’d processed an emotion from childhood as an adult.
That realization brought me to my knees. But over the next twelve months, that single moment unlocked a cascade of buried memories and emotions, each one forcing me to relive a childhood I thought I had outrun.
In the full essay, I take you through the brutal year of integration that followed, how I navigated the flashbacks, untangled my present-day triggers from my past wounds, and, most importantly, how I went from wishing I’d never been born to genuinely wanting to live.
Paid subscribers on Patreon and Substack have access to the full story.
This post was written with the assistance of Focused Space (a sponsor of the Neurodivergent Rebel blog).
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