I could still remember my father’s screams as he woke up to her lifeless body next to him one morning. He cried out with such pain that I thought he had been hurt at first. Heath and I were only teenagers when we stood in the doorway to our parents’ room and saw our father holding our stiff mother in his arms and wailing with tears. There was nothing that could be done. It was clear she had been dead for hours.
The shock of the moment prevented me from crying. Instead, I took charge. I called 911 to have the police and paramedics come to the house even though I clearly saw that she was dead.
It wasn’t until the day of her funeral that I finally cried. When I saw my sweet mother lying in the casket and unable to hug me any longer. Unable to offer me advice about girls, or tease me about my grades. It wasn’t until that moment that the loneli
ness set in.
I didn’t intend to alienate my father or brother. I truly loved them. But as I managed to graduate from high school, all I could think about was getting as far away from our East Coast home. I applied to every college on the West Coast and managed to land a few interviews. Cal Poly drew my attention very quickly, though, and I accepted entrance there without talking it over with my family at all.
My father had assumed I would work with him; his anger toward me when I told him about college had probably been fear of being left alone. I was leaving him. I wasn’t going to be there to run things after he got old. Everything he had worked so hard to build was going to go to waste because I was leaving and Heath had long said he wanted to be a lawyer.
It baffled me why my father hadn’t been angry at Heath for not wanting to be in the family business, yet had been irate when I “went behind his back” and enrolled in college.
If I had been a better man, I wouldn’t have taken his words to heart. I would have known he was just a broken-hearted man who was losing someone close to him. But I hadn’t been a good man at all. I said things I would long regret. I said things that drove a wedge between us and prevented me from reaching out to him and him from reaching out to me.
Before coming to the treatment facility, I did call Heath, just to let him know where I was. I wasn’t looking for his sympathy, I was just relaying information.
“I’m heading to rehab,” I said in our phone call.
“Okay.”
“I’ll be away for a few months at Paradise Peak in Aspen.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” my brother had said.
“Nothing. I was just letting you know.”
“Fine. Enjoy your cushy resort. I’ll just stay here taking care of everything while you fuck up your entire life.”
He was angry. Heath had been angry with me since I left for college. Because I had left, he gave up his dream of being a lawyer to stay home and work in the mortuary business with our father. He had felt obligated not to leave Dad alone. Every chance he got, Heath tried to make me feel guilty for my decision.
But Heath could have gone to college, too. He could have followed his own dreams and I hadn’t forced him to stay home. Although I didn’t blame Heath for being angry, either; it was a messed up situation and neither of us seemed to get the happily ever after that we had been searching for.
When I dreamed, the past was so clear, but then I’d start to wake up and start gasping for breath and feel like I wasn’t able to breathe. It was like my body could still remember what it had been like to be underwater and almost drown.
“No!” I screamed as I woke up sweating and holding my chest.
I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t been breathing. As I woke up, my breath was labored and I felt dizzy from the lack of oxygen. My dream had been so real that I had actually been holding my breath. It had been happening frequently to me since I didn’t have drugs or alcohol to knock me out for sleeping.
My body was in a fight, and I felt like I was losing. My hands clenched my chest as I desperately tried to breathe but never felt like I was able to get much more than a tiny breath in. It was like torture. I was going to die, I just knew it, and no one would be there for me. I bet even if I actually died, my own father and brother wouldn’t bother to show up.
Before I knew it, my therapist, Jarrod, was sitting at the end of my bed trying to comfort me. I knew I was actually breathing and my breaths were labored, but I still felt the overwhelming feeling of not being able to breathe. The room was spinning. My hands shook. And Jarrod, with his calming voice, was all I had to focus on.
Therapists had never seemed that useful to me in my life. Even in the few days that I had been at the facility, I wasn’t all that sure I needed one. It seemed like they basically made me do all the work, but I had to pay them for it. But in that moment, as panic rushed through my body, I was happy Jarrod was there with me.
“You’re having a panic attack, Erik. Try to take a few deep breaths. Look at me,” his deep voice said.
“I…I…can’t breathe,” I managed to say.
“You can breathe, Erik. Look at me, take in a deep breath like I am,” Jarrod said as he inflated his lungs and looked me in the eyes. “Slowly, let your lungs fill up. Don’t worry about anything, don’t think about anything. Just follow me.”
His calming voice had so much faith in my ability to breathe that I even believed it. Soon I found myself pulling in a deep breath and letting it out again. We continued to sit there on my bed just breathing. Jarrod kept me focused as I took in breath after breath and let it out again. I felt my heart rate slow, my sweating stopped, and the shaking in my hands let up.
“Thanks,” I managed to say as I felt my body coming back to me.
“Have you had panic attacks before?”
“Not like that. I really felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was in a dream, and then before I knew what was going on, I woke up and felt like someone was choking me.”