Dear mom,

Hi. I uh…

So, uh, well, I don’t know if you know this or not, but you died. In my arms. It was sort of…my fault. I guess. I mean, I killed you. I…I think maybe I was angry at you. Or angry at the world. I don’t know. I thought I was protecting you, but reflecting back, I don’t really know what exactly was going through my head. I am carrying a lot of guilt around about it and I haven’t told anyone about that morning. How do you tell people that you killed the closest person to you? How do you tell people that everything you love either leaves or dies? I mean, how do you tell people that you’re cursed? That I am cursed?

Grandma was on her way to be by your side. She was bringing her husband, you know, the same man you told me raped you repeatedly over your child years. I became angry. Grandma wouldn’t have listened to me if I told her to keep him out of your hospital room – that he was not allowed to see you. I was scared to deal with the upcoming conflict. I didn’t want to fight grandma in front of you. The doctors said you probably wouldn’t survive long enough for her to even arrive. And I had already been in hospital with you for days…I had to study for my final exams and had final projects to knock out. You literally picked the worst time to fall into a coma. I had just lost a boyfriend and was stressed about school, paying my bills, and finding a stable place to live. My life was in disarray…then you fell…and never woke back up. I waited while you breathed over life support, but when your brain disconnected from your spine, and life support took over, I panicked. The doctors kept telling me the same things, they didn’t know what was wrong with you, and that you were, for all intents and purposes, dead. They knew that just from pinching your finger? What if you weren’t?

Ugh, my chest is feeling so tight thinking about it. What happened? Why didn’t you wake back up? Do you even know what position you put me in? I had to sit in ICU dealing with your shitty life choices. Once again, like our entire life together, you left me to be the parent. You left me to take care of you and everyone else, when it was suppose to be you that took care of me. And when the nurses told me to make the decision to take you off life support or keep you on to wait for grandma, I had to make that choice – a fucking impossible choice. I take you off the machine, that means I give up and kill you. I keep you on, that means you may last until grandma arrives and then I have a moral dilemma of fighting to keep your stepdad out of the room.

Did I make the right choice to remove the machines before grandma arrived? Was it a selfish choice? It feels like it was. How shitty of me to take away the chance for you to die with your mother beside you. I felt as though…maybe I was enough, even though in reality, I was never enough in your life. I laid with you and sung to you the lullaby that you sung to me as a baby and held you until you took your last breath. I am so angry at you for that. I was and am so angry for you taking yourself away from me. You left a huge mess for me to clean up after you died. And no one gave me the chance to even grieve, because they were all so involved with themselves and all of their demands and needs. I barely got 5 minutes crying over your lifeless body when the nurses kicked me out of the room so they could harvest your organs. Then I was just left crying outside of the door, while my brother left to smoke a cigarette.

Then grandma and my dad showed up. I showed them the picture I took of you right before we took you off life support. How…morbid, right? Instead of grieving in the days afterwards, I had to make phone calls, let people know you passed, figure out what to do with my drug-addicted little brother who was trying to kill himself over and over again. Then it was the hospital saying I needed to come up with $700 to claim your body or else they would throw you in the trash. You don’t even want to know what I had to do to find that money.

Then came the death threats. Then came the year’s worth of voicemails and stalking from David, whom you so conveniently told where I lived at some point before you died. How dare you. After you died, instead of being able to grieve, I had to listen to recording of you being ganged raped and beaten and turn them over to police. I had to filter through tons of smut porn that David spammed me with to turn over to police. I had to have an armed police officer escort me to my classes and to my dorm every single day. I just wanted to be a fucking…normal…normal girl in college. Why did you make the decisions you did!? Didn’t you know the danger you put your kids in? Did you even care?

I have a lot of anger and bitterness towards you, but at the same time, I understand that you were broken long before this, and I cant help but still love you unconditionally. But, What do I do with this anger!? It just eats away my insides. I am always reaping the consequences of other people’s decisions. I love you. But I am so angry with you and I am overwhelmed with guilt for it. What am I supposed to do?

Nessie