Loss
Loss is something that permeates all of our lives in measurable ways across time. Though there is a type of loss that not everyone experiences; traumatic loss. Traumatic loss is the loss you don’t see coming. The loss that shatters your world. The loss that isn’t digestible or avoidable. The loss that makes your world stop. The loss many people think they will never recover from. Loss from trivial to earth shattering, is central to the human experience, and we all continue to construct meaning out of it. Everything comes to an end at some point. Suffering from loss goes hand in hand with the discomfort induced by change beyond our control.
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The psychological impact of traumatic experiences include trauma reminders (which many PTSD individuals avoid) and loss reminders, which is when a survivor encounters reminders of their loss bringing on feelings of sadness, emptiness, and longing for the loved one’s presence.
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“I can’t keep doing this…” I said to my mom as we got into the Rav-4 in my grandparent’s driveway. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes and the frustration with the world rooted in a tightness in my chest. “Okay.” She said, “We don’t have to.” This answer brought no relief. It did not change the reality of the current situation; my grandfather had reached his last progression before we would have to truly say goodbye. Nothing about this is fair, I remember thinking to myself as we began our drive to Ann Arbor to move me from the apartment I got dumped in to the house I would spend senior year living with my best friends in. I felt the fat man on my chest getting nice and comfortable on my chest as we drove. I felt guilty for not wanting to see my dying grandpa, but I could not handle it anymore.
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In the fourth state of matter she doesn’t refer to her husband or dying dog by name and I think this is intentional, it emphasizes the insignificance of this loss in comparison to the loss of her coworkers who she references by name. We all experience loss in unique ways throughout our lives; whether it is through heartbreak, life change, or death.
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When I came to college I started to refer to my emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend as “my crazy high school boyfriend”, his name was no longer worth saying or reinforcing in my brain, not worth remembering. When I graduate in May and leave Ann Arbor, the boy who dumped me Junior, will become “that frat guy I dated in college”. The people that you name in your narratives are intended to be perceived as relevant to the present moment from which the writer is writing or the reader is receiving the story. I think losing a dog or losing a relationship; being abandoned by someone even; is fairly common and digestible by the common person. However, I think traumatic loss is not something people experience the complexities around. There is more yearning, searching, loneliness, and emotional distress associated with traumatic loss. There is a difference between losing a dumb boy and losing your greatest male role model.
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In my life, I have known loss and grief in what I feel is every conceivable way. I have experienced the traumatic loss of a parent, I have experienced the anticipatory loss of a grandfather, I have experienced the loss of a relationship with someone I thought was my soulmate, I have experienced the loss of myself in someone, I have experienced the loss of my virginity with the wrong person, and I have experienced the loss of many friendships.
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The normal response to loss: grief and its symptoms attenuate naturally over some period of time dependent upon the closeness of relationship and circumstances around the loss. However, complicated grief is a chronic, debilitating condition that forms out of acute grief and requires thoughtful clinical intervention. While to date, the DSM-5 does not diagnose complicated grief, there is a host of research supporting its incorporation into the diagnostic criteria manual. Additionally, traumatic loss differs from general loss in that ““A death is considered traumatic if it occurs without warning; if it is untimely; if it involves violence; if there is damage to the loved one’s body; if it was caused by a perpetrator with the intent to harm; if the survivor regards the death as preventable; if the survivor believes that the loved one suffered; or if the survivor regards the death, or manner of death, as unfair and unjust.” (Wortman & Larack, 2015). Complex, traumatic, or complicated grief can manifest into PTSD in some cases and change the way individuals process their relationships forever.
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Everyone kept saying how losing my grandpa to ALS was so different than when we lost my uncle Joe 13 years ago, how it didn’t hurt the same, how it wasn’t as heart wrenching. I didn’t agree, but I put on a brave face for everyone. I wouldn’t break down until the next day when I walked through my grandparent’s home, where I grew up, and truly allowed myself to feel all the loss I’d experienced over the last 3 years because of an awful disease. I was so tired of feeling loss. It is the worst feeling in the world, yet it seems to pervade all aspects of my life. And once you’ve experienced the deepest loss that is traumatic loss, every loss thereafter is that much more amplified by your body’s past experiences. It makes everything scary, especially loving others. It changes your entire perception of the world and relationships.
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Traumatic loss can result in the development of PTSD because there is so much complexity around healing from the trauma while coping with one’s grief. Additionally, with PTSD comes altered cognitions and negative assumptions about the world, themselves, and others in that one now perceives the world as unsafe, unpredictable, and unjust. It is common to ruminate in these events and try to find meaning or explanations for the devastation.
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I went into my Junior year thinking “The doctor gave him three years, he won’t make it to 2020”, I remember my PTSD activating in October when we had an entire-family celebration (over 50 family members) because everyone said it’d be their last chance to see Ralph, and I remember making the conscious decision to stay on campus over Thanksgiving break with my boyfriend and his family for the holiday and OSU game anticipating my grandpa being gone and a desire to avoid my grief. However (and ironically if you know my history with traumatic loss), I did not lose my grandpa in 2019; I lost myself in someone who didn’t care.
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PTSD is comprised of 3 different categories of traumatic stress reactions: 1) intrusion (i.e. intrusive thoughts, images, nightmares, feeling something terrible will happen again), 2) avoidance & withdrawal (i.e. emotional numbing, detachment, depression), 3)physical arousal (i.e. difficulty with sleep, concentration, irritability, hyper arousal, and hyper awareness).
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Two days before Thanksgiving, on the 13-year anniversary of waking up in a bed with lamb sheets wrapped in a feather pottery barn duvet to the police at my grandparent’s front door to notify us that my uncle had crashed my grandpa’s Dodge Charger into a fire station, I woke up on a towel in a bed with no sheets. I had spent the last 4 days taking care of my sick boyfriend following a date party that ended with me in a closet having a panic attack. He spiked a fever on Friday, on Saturday and Sunday he couldn’t keep food down or control his bowels so we went to the hospital to rehydrate him, I texted his mom updates and she made sure she had my burrito order all the way from San Diego. On Monday he was still struggling to control himself and I ended up on the couch. On Tuesday, I ended up stripping his sheets around 2am. By 4am I crawled back into bed with him, fever finally broken, and fell asleep on top of a terrycloth towel. At 10am I woke up in his arms and he said for the first time in days he was horny, so I got on top and we had sex. He told me he loved me afterwards and I made the bed then fell back asleep.
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Anxiety is the body’s psychological and physical response to perceived threats and stressors, gearing up for fight-or-flight (a system chronically dysregulated in PTSD individuals) by activating the heart, lungs, and muscles for your attack or retreat. Anxiety can result in muscle tension, digestive problems, headaches, dizziness, edginess, fatigue, and shortness of breath. The physical symptoms of anxiety may also exacerbate into panic attacks in extreme situations.
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“There’s a fat man sitting on my chest” I tell my roommate as I struggle to fill my lungs with air in our kitchen. This humorous segment is what I tell people when I’m having a minor panic attack. It’s not a full-blown panic attack with hyperventilating and crying. It sits right below the surface, so that you are functional, but extremely uncomfortable and unable to find relief. Many situations can insight the fat man to take a seat on your chest. You could be going through the phone of the boy you’ve been dating for five years and find texts to his mother about his relationship with another girl and he could hop on top. You could walk into a bar and see your ex-boyfriend all over a girl and he could drop that ass. Or you could hear the news that your grandpa just died and he can relax with a nice 3-month plop down on your sternum.
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At 11:30am I woke up again to him in the living room working at his computer, clearly behind thanks to his 4-day stomach bug. I sat down next to him on the bean bag chair and cuddled up to him, I had missed his affection and needed some reciprocation after the days I’d spent cleaning up his bodily fluids. He didn’t reciprocate, the fat man prepares his squat stance. My throat lurched into my chest and went dry. I looked at him, confused. “Do you want me to leave?”, I asked, “I don’t want you to leave”, he responded, the fat man takes a seat. I looked at him again… “I don’t need to stay somewhere I’m not wanted so you can drive me home that’s cool I have to work anyway” I spit back at him. We were both exhausted, hadn’t been apart much in general that semester, and I hadn’t left 820 in 5 days. We got in the car and started driving down East University towards South U. We turned left onto South U in front of the Engineering Arch and approached the stoplight on State Street in front of the Union. He stopped. I looked at him and said halfheartedly “Why does it feel like my entire world is crumbling out from under me?”, looking back I was fishing for him to say nothing was wrong and my anxiety was playing tricks on me like so many times before, but he didn’t. He looked out the driver side window and said “I don’t know but I feel it too”. The fat man makes himself comfortable on my chest.
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Our brain and body are one, as is accepted by any neuroscientist and psychologist; however, experiences change your brain, sometimes temporarily and sometimes long term due to the plasticity of our brains and it’s construction. Experience changes your brain. The cingulate gyrus plays a central role in functions related to grief, including attention control, weaving memory and emotion, self-observation, and integration of thoughts and feelings. The brain has 1,100,000,000,000 neurons, total, Each with about 10,000 synapses (connections to other neurons) firing about 10-100 times per second and sending signals across your brain even faster with profound complexity.
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I froze. My heart sunk all the way into the deepest part of my stomach. I stared at him as he kept driving towards my apartment. “What?” I asked as he pulled into the church parking lot next door to The Varsity. He didn’t respond. I didn’t stop looking at him, tears welling up in my eyes, I asked him point blank “Do you want to be with me or not?”. He didn’t respond. I leaned towards him, eyes big, shocked, sitting in front of the boy who said he was going to marry me, that I was the one, whose family I’d flown out to San Diego to meet, a family who was in the air as we sat in his Ford Escape on their way to host me for Thanksgiving. I asked again “Do you want to be with me or not?!” my voice shaking. He didn’t respond, so I got out of the car. I went up to my apartment and started pacing. I couldn’t breathe. What was happening? I called him. “What the fuck?! Do you want to be with me or not?!” I cried into the phone, “I’m just not happy anymore” he uttered back to me. My sobbing intensified, “Is this for real?! Your parents are coming like are you serious?!” I continued to sob, trying to catch my breath, hoping he would say he didn’t mean it and make the hurt leave my heart, “I’m sorry. I think it’s for the best, I can’t keep doing this.” He said back, to which I responded “You’re a fucking coward for doing this over the phone, and you’re a horrible person for doing this two days before thanksgiving when my entire family is 600 miles away” and hung-up. I called my mom, she booked me a flight after speaking to him. I went to work. I packed my bag. And out of principle, I made him drive me to the airport. I sobbed. I didn’t understand. How could he not be in love with me anymore? How could he not feel it? Was it all fake? I begged. I pleaded. I hyperventilated. I vomited. I changed my clothes. I went through security. I boarded my plane. And I went home for what was my Grandpa’s last Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving I only had to “make it” 12 days until I’d be back home for Christmas. I made it. Once again I went to the airport, crying again, reliving my breakup from two weeks before, feeling the traumatic loss experience of my father and my uncle welling up inside me. Everything hurt, yet at the same time I felt nothing at all.
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“Grief is mediated by a distributed neural network that subserves affect processing, mentalizing, episodic memory retrieval, processing of familiar faces, visual imagery, autonomic regulation, and modulation/coordination of these functions.”- Functional Neuroanatomy of Grief: An fMRI Study. Am J Psychiatry 160:1946-1953, November 2003. Harald Gündel, Mary-Frances O’Connor, Lindsey Littrell, Carolyn Fort, Richard D. Lane
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I handled the ALS diagnosis the summer before I started college at the greatest university in the world, grappling with the fact the person I had spent my entire life watching college and professional football with was now going to be wheelchair bound and would never get to see a Michigan game. I handled my grandfather’s denial as he refused to use walkers and canes until he absolutely had no other choice. I handled my grandmother’s frantic phone calls or texts when he would fall and she couldn’t get him up by herself. I handled him being wheelchair bound and his body changing and deteriorating into someone much different from the tall, strong man I had known my entire life. I handled the cough assist machine and the compression socks. I handled wheelchair van rentals so he could meet my college boyfriend and I handled watching him struggle to feed himself, something he never stopped trying to do until the bitter end. I handled him in diapers, my family struggling to clean him, all the hard-nitty gritty stuff I never anticipated dealing with a grandfather who hadn’t even turned 65 yet. It was around Christmas my Junior year when I couldn’t handle it anymore.
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I was prepared for loss that fall, but I wasn’t prepared for losing who I did. I was finally home, single and ready to heal. I was met with my grandpas new breathing machines that were forcing air into his barely functioning lungs through his nostrils and completely changed the structure of his face. This was when I stopped being able to handle it. Coincidentally, I met someone at the beginning of my winter break who I thought would just be someone fun to spend time with and help me get over my devastating breakup, he turned out to be a genuinely great guy and spent Christmas eve at my grandparent’s talking to my grandpa the entire night as if he wasn’t struggling to understand him or weirded out by his machines and deformities. I acknowledged that my grandpa wasn’t doing well, but he wasn’t at his last progression. Over the winter semester (pre-COVID) I struggled living in my apartment where I’d been dumped, I struggled to maintain a new relationship long distance while I grieved my old one, and I struggled with the updates on my grandpas progression. It was mid-march when COVID sent us home, and it was mid-march when my grandpa experienced his last progression. He was no longer able to swallow as solid foods, communicate effectively, or feed himself. Three things, if you know my grandpa, he would never have wanted to live through. I knew when I saw him at the end of April that this was going to be it. These are all the things I thought about as we drove 8 hours to Ann Arbor. There was something cleansing about that trip. A reset happened. I no longer was in a state of grieving my relationship, I was back to anticipating my grandfather’s passing.
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Many situations evoke the fat man sitting on their chest. And many times, he does not quickly stand up and go about his business, he tends to take a while to stand, but then again so do we. The fastest way to get the fat man off your chest is to take a big breath in, puffing your chest out, and then letting go off all the breath and with it letting go off all the hurt, loss, anxiety, etc. Sometimes he likes to do squats and some days he’s sitting on you and the next he’s standing up even though all you’re doing is applying to 20 clinical psychology PhD programs (lol). He’s a fickle man. But he’s a reminder that we’re alive, that we’re living in our discomfort, and powering through it. No matter how long he stays, we know he will leave at some point because feelings aren’t permanent and they aren’t facts.
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My new boyfriend came home from college the weekend I returned from my cleansing move in Ann Arbor; I was in the bathtub after a walk with him when my phone rang, it was my aunt Jeannine. The fat man took a seat, was this the call? I didn’t answer. It wasn’t, she just wanted a suggestion on a teacher gift. A week went by, my grandma had sent a text to my family members that they should come and spend time with my grandpa and say their goodbyes, so on Saturday I went to have dinner with him, I couldn’t take it. I watched my grandma feed him and I listened as he couldn’t get out the words to tell me he loved me. I hugged him with every muscle in my body as I knew he couldn’t hug me back because all of his had atrophied. I couldn’t handle it anymore. I needed him to go. I needed this to end. I went home, greeted by my uncle tony, my boyfriend, and a joint we headed to my sun porch off the kitchen where my parents were. My phone rang. It was Jeannine. I handed the phone to my mom. She looked at me and nodded her head, “Grandpa’s dead.” I just stared.
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“Psychological shock” or “acute stress response” is defined by psychologists as when someone experiences a surge of emotions alongside a corresponding physical reaction to a unexpected stressful event.
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“Okay. Let’s go. I’ll change my clothes.” I walked down into my room and closed the door. I looked at myself in the mirror and started to sob. I took a big deep breath and turned for my closet. I walked inside and grabbed my grateful dead T-shirt to change into and collapsed. It hurt. Like someone was sitting on my chest. I took another deep breath. I stood up. I changed my clothes. And I walked upstairs. I got in the car with my mom and drove to my grandparents. We waited for all the siblings to arrive. We held my grandma. We said a prayer over my grandpa’s body, finally at peace, unrecognizable to me as himself. I took his St. Joseph medallion off his body and around my neck and I tried not to cry as my uncle (my mom’s oldest brother) hugged my grandpa’s lifeless body.
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About 8 months after the dumb boy dumps you, you see him walking his new dog down the street and you feel nothing towards him, he becomes a stranger, no big deal. However, 4 months after losing your only paternal figure you can be walking down the street and suddenly be brought back to the day he was gone forever. Today I am reminded that while the fat man may need to rest his head on my chest sometimes, that I have the power to breathe him off of me.
To: Senior
From: Senior
(8/15/2016)
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Every person in the world can attest to a moment when they lost something; whether it is the loss of a possession or the loss of a loved one, loss is something that affects us all, and loss is something that has played a constant role in my life since the age of two.
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Quite rarely, I remember things about my father, nearly everything is a blur, although, I do obtain one crystal clear memory. It appeared in my dreams throughout elementary school. It’s dark in the apartment, lit by only a few lamps and the light from the television. I see my dad. It’s like looking in the mirror. We have the same facial expressions and the same eyes. Looking around his apartment I see the lava lamp, it sparks my interest immediately. All of the colors swirling around in one place astonish me. My dad finally emerges from the kitchen; with a white bowl of bright pink strawberry ice cream, I am elated. I was a shy little girl, so the majority of the night I hid near my mom and peered at my father from afar. Little did I know that this night would be the last time I would get to see my dad, the last time I’d be able to feel the father-daughter bond, the last time he’d pick me up and hug me to say hello, the last time I’d see him alive.
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I woke up on that hot morning in July 2002 to hear, “Alexis, Papa got in an accident, he’s in heaven with the angels now.” He was twenty-three. I didn’t want to ride in a car for months after he died. I didn’t realize back then what losing my dad meant; it meant I was never going to be a daddy’s girl, I’d never attend a father-daughter dance, my dad would never give me away at my wedding or hold his grandchild. Losing- wait, having a drunk driver kill my father affects me more now than it did when I was nearly three.
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In May of 2005 my mom took a job in New Orleans, it was to be a great adventure. That was until Hurricane Katrina came knocking on the door of our two-floor apartment parallel to Lake Pontchartrain. Packing my mom, her roommate, two dogs, a bunny, and a seven-year-old girl into a Toyota Camry was not ideal, but we did not have a choice. No one thought Katrina was going to cause the devastation it did. I recall being trapped in a Mississippi Hotel for three days when gas stations had run out of gas. I recall the electricity being blown, and food running out. I saw people on the news being rescued, but I was still unaware of what we had lost; everything. My memories: pictures, artwork, toys, clothes, furniture, everything. It was all taken away by yet another event I had zero control over.
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In 2006 I lost my uncle, an uncle described simply is the brother of your mother or father, in my case it was my mother’s brother, but he was more than my uncle, he was my brother. He was my best friend. A fifteen-year age difference creates a bond unlike any other, it’s the age gap between my brother Jack and I and it was the age gap between Joseph and myself. My Uncle Joe taught me many things. He taught me how to fish, how to face my fears, but most importantly to do what I love. When he looked at me and laughed, his curly hair that had grown too long, bounced with every laugh. His eyes lit up when he smiled. The countless things Joe and I did together are memories I will forever hold dear, but those eight years together were taken away in one split second.
Given that my mother was a single-teen parent we were living with my grandparents the night Joe was killed. I was in bed just looking at the stars on my ceiling when I heard Joe enter the house. I snuck out of my room and sat wrapped in my blanket in the hallway. He opened the fridge and drank the orange juice straight from the carton. My grandfather told him to stay home for the night, explaining it was late and Joe looked tired. Joe being the independent man he was at twenty-three decided to leave again. That’s the last time anyone saw Joe alive. A drunk driver crossed into his lane, forcing Joe to swerve to avoid hitting the drunk driver head on, but in return jumped a curb. The car flew into a building head on and he was killed instantly, at twenty-three, just like my father. Losing Joe crushed me. I didn’t know what to do without him. He was with me most every moment of my life and now he was gone. At his memorial there was a slideshow of pictures. I couldn’t bear it for more than a few seconds. I broke down crying and ran to my mom. We sat outside; crying with each other, knowing Joe was taken away too soon.
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I was blessed to be considered gifted, resilient, strong, and mature by the adults in my life throughout my childhood, that was until 2013 when a man looking down at his GPS, unaware of traffic stopping ahead, driving a tractor trailer, hit my mother, my brother, and myself. Following the accident, I had suffered a concussion, which in my mother’s words, “Took my daughter from me, and left me with a child I did not know.” My concussion exacerbated my anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, but most of all it took a huge piece of me. Prior to the accident I tested in the top ten percent of IQ tests, and following the accident I now tested in the average range. This loss of cognitive functioning deeply affected me not only educationally, but emotionally. The concussion also exacerbated attention deficit disorder, which I had never been diagnosed with prior. I started my freshman year a stranger in my own body, I felt like I was nothing without my gifted brain. I spent time angry and resentful of the driver, but also struggling with immense survivor's guilt. I had asked myself nearly every day for two years, “Why me? Why did I survive an accident?”
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I decided that I had to continue my passions for service, in hopes of touching the lives of someone, somewhere and making good of the chance God had given me. I told myself that there was a reason I was alive, and that is what motivated me to travel to Tanzania, Africa in the summer of 2015. For two weeks, I walked down a dirt road littered with trash and filled with holes to the school in which I taught a class ranging from five to twenty students per day. Teaching fourth graders my native language had me more nervous than I was to run for class president. Our broken English/Swahili communication with the help of a travel dictionary did not always work perfectly, but we communicated more through hand motions and body language than words. From the first day, I noticed a young girl wearing a skirt much too large for her slender body and navy-blue tattered sweater patched on the elbows; Caroline; shy and quiet, yet one of the smartest young women I could hope to know. Never truly complete without her best friend Rachel, these two girls were in class nearly every day seated together in the front left desk, both obtaining perfect written English. Caroline would hide her answers as we walked around checking their work; I found this extremely odd, but I soon realized she had anxiety and had concerns of someone judging her answers. She had trouble working with someone watching her, just as I did about twelve inches shorter and six years younger.
My last day at Patandi Day school was immensely emotional, smiles gleamed in every group picture at tea time. We dispersed to give hugs and say our final goodbyes; giving back the baby boy I held every day back into his mother’s arms for the last time, I turned around to see Rachel and Caroline in front of me. Both girls had tears staining their beautiful skin, while the whites of their eyes became bloodshot. That is the moment I broke down with them in my arms. Looking into the eyes of these beautiful girls made me realize I may never see them again, and that’s what stuck with me more than anything. Embracing them tighter than a straight jacket, I told them both they were both beautiful, smart, and had an immense amount of potential. I am photographed in those tear-filled moments with our hair a mess and our faces swollen, blotchy, red, and wet with tears. I couldn't eat after leaving the school, I could only write. I wrote for an hour with tears running down my face and my hair pulled back. Upon arriving back in the US I struggled for six months immensely with what I thought was reverse culture shock, but what I now realize was my PTSD triggered by the loss of Rachel and Caroline.
The following summer I traveled to Costa Rica, while the work I did was conservation and biological, the trip helped me accept my inter tangled web of grief, trauma, and loss. Telling my story I have just told you to my peers on the trip helped me find myself and accept that while trauma was something that defined me, it did not mean I was broken and being sad about the events did not make me weak. The world is an imperfect place; many times, it will knock us down and test our faith, I believe we cannot let our trauma define us, we mustn't allow a word such as trauma (synonymous with damage) to make us feel inadequate.
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(2/10/2021)
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A lot of traumatizing things happened prior to, during, and following the submission of the essay above. For one, I was in the midst of a psychologically abusive relationship that no one could get me out of. You think you know everything when you’re 17, you think you know people so well, that you see the best in them, when in reality you’re kind of the worst. Looking back on my life from the present moment, I’m grateful for everything the pain has taught me because it allows me to be a better advocate and a better partner. I’m not alone in spending my adolescence in an abusive relationship; I have friends all over the country who can attest to the mental manipulation done to them by a boy they once knew. It’s becoming more prevalent in the mainstream media as well (see Kate: This Is Us). The scary part is, I couldn’t tell you how we go about preventing it in the future generations. My mom was sexually assaulted at 15 and spent her entire life trying to protect me from predatory men; yet, when I was 14, I ended up locked in a basement with a boy coercing me into preforming oral sex on him and I didn’t even realize how wrong that was until I got to college. I didn’t realize a lot of the horrible things that happened to me that at the time seemed like just a simple facet of life would continue to impact me for years to come. You don’t just get to put all those memories in a box and start a new life, trust me, I tried. The box may stay contained for some time, but things happen and POP goes the weasel. When your present activates your past it’s like opening Pandora’s box. For individuals who live with PTSD, many of us cope by compartmentalizing; which in many cases seems to create very different versions of yourself depending on which place you are functioning from. I firmly believe in experiential learning, and the fact is that my experiences taught me a great deal about hurt, trauma, and abuse and unlearning some of these things is a mountain I’ve only recently began to climb. The trek will be long, tumultuous, and life changing. Many don’t want to do the work, fearing it will be too hard and too painful. It is, hard and painful; but it’s also worth it. It’s worth it to know that I’m hurting now so I can love more later. It’s worth it to know that I’m healing now so I can prevent my child from hurting later. The work of healing is worth it, but the messy middle of doing the work is hard. Many days I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to acknowledge that I was taken advantage of starting in 8th grade, or that I was bullied virtually all of my life, or that I have lost some of the most important people in my life and I’m barely a quarter way through my life expectancy. My mom once said “If you had been through what Alexis has been through you wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning” and she’s right, but there’s not one singular event in my life that causes the hurt I experience when I can’t function healthily in my romantic relationships or make friends and keep them, it’s a whole lot of shit. PTSD comes from one event, Complex-PTSD comes from the compounding of multiple traumas that reinforce the maladaptive beliefs created by the trauma. But, if it was easy it wouldn’t me my life.
Grandpa
Let me start by thanking everyone for coming. My grandpa would have been so happy to see us all come together to celebrate his amazing life. For those of you who were at my mom’s wedding I’m sure you’re wondering how the kid who couldn’t get through her maid of honor speech is going to make it through a eulogy, but my grandparents asked and they shall receive.
There are a thousand things I wanted to incorporate into this eulogy to ensure I not only expressed the dynamic interconnected personality of my grandfather but also comforted his loved ones through my memories of him. I obviously only knew my grandpa for 21 years of his 64 years on earth, but (ironically) thanks to his ALS diagnosis in the summer of 2017 I started my freshman year at Michigan in English 125 with a co-authored paper about my grandpa’s insights on his life in regard to his diagnosis, so I thought it might me nice to share what we wrote together…
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My grandfather was the epitome of strength in our family. Starting his life as a first generation immigrant, learning English as his second language in elementary school his body and mind strengthened. From age seven on he always worked with his hands, whether drawing, working with tools, or building things. Although he often found himself in the face of adversity, he pulled through with resilience. He worked for a number different companies Engineering numerous designs and patents throughout his life. Fathering five children and being husband to a woman he absolutely adored for 45 ½ years. As recently as age 61, he climbed to the top of 80-foot trees and cut off branches and parts of the trunk, while balancing in a precarious position to avoid power lines. My grandfather’s body was strong, and his mind was even stronger; no one could outsmart, nor out lift this man.
His body was strong, until it wasn’t anymore. Nine months before his diagnosis he could not do electrical work over his head. He was tiptoeing to reach something in a basement when he realized that he could not tip toe fully on his left foot. It was as if there was no strength at all. He began the quest to determine what was wrong. After six months of minimal answers from doctors, the diagnosis was confirmed, one day after his 62nd birthday.
ALS: a neuro-degenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. ALS is aggressive, progressive, and there is no cure. He went from being the grandpa that chased my cousins around the back yard to leg braces and walking sticks… and His legs were only the beginning.
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I went on in the paper to discuss all of the things I prepared for at the time of his diagnosis. A wheelchair, a cough-assist machine, a ventilator, shrinking and swelling limbs, etcetera. It struck me that he was gradually going to lose his ability to function independently, and I was going to gradually lose one of the most important people in my life. At the time I co-authored a paper with my grandpa I didn’t realize how progressive and profound the loss would be. It wasn’t as simple as my grandpa no longer being able to run after me when I “snuck out without a hug goodbye”... It started with not being able to run after me, then he couldn't squeeze me as tight, until finally I was hugging him and just had to trust that in his mind he was hugging me back. While the disease took his ability to draw and write down his ideas for his inventions, he never stopped inventing. He just went from building driveable desks and playground equipment to imagining how he could help other ALS patients golf and feed themselves. My grandpa told me from the beginning of his battle with ALS that he feared feeling like he was drowning or couldn’t breathe when he died; it gives me peace knowing that this was not how he passed.
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The things that stand out to me about my grandfather are his love, his humor, and his mind. I am grateful that ALS could not take those things from him. Until his final days he still loved my family without end, smiled, and was trying to cure coronavirus. As hard as it is to imagine a world without my grandpa’s dorky songs, birthday voicemails, “barking spider” fart denials, Wizard of Oz lollipop guild impersonations, and Valentine’s Day roses it is harder to imagine him continuing to live an unfulfilling life confined to a wheelchair unable to move or communicate. My grandpa was in control until the very end through the strength of his mind. He knew when it was his time to go and he knew we would all be okay. It has brought me immense comfort over the last two weeks to know my grandpa was welcomed by Jesus’ light and my uncle Joe's embrace when he entered heaven. When my grandpa passed away I knew he was finally at peace and it would be selfish for me to be sad.
I sat on my grandparent’s porch I’d sat on so many times before with my grandpa thinking about everything he taught me when it started to storm. Growing up at 11185 I had run through the court in thunderstorms playing in the rain only to come home to my grandpa who would sit on the porch with me, wrapped in a towel with the rain pouring down.
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“When Jesus and the angels go bowling that’s the thunder, when they get a strike that’s the lightning, and when it storms really hard that means they’re celebrating someone getting into Heaven”.
Remembering this conversation we’d had so many times less than 24 hours after his passing sent me, I cried like a baby on that porch. I walked through the house my grandfather built; filled with memories of my childhood. His bedroom of course where I would sleep in between my grandparents with my grandpa’s arm draped over me because I refused to sleep alone. The master bathroom where I’d smell his Ralph Lauren Polo Blue cologne and try to flick his silver Zippo lighter in secret. The bedroom room where my Alexis hat rack held his hats from Michigan, the Cardinals, the Rams, Anna Maria Island, his fishing bucket hats, and his Hawaiian captain’s hat. The office where he used to work on his engineering projects rocking dual screen action with pictures of his family upon his desk. I’ll never forget his pencil holder carved and painted like a barrier reef. His suit coats are hanging in that room now, the suits he would wear to work every day and I can remember hugging when he arrived home after a long day. I’ll never forget the power of my grandpa’s hugs, the power of his advice, the power of his smile.
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My grandpa was an engineer, but he built far more than his jobs required. He built this family. The Vatterott’s. 5 kids. 3 spouses. 7 grandkids. A family that spends every holiday together, a family that travels together, a family that refuses to break regardless of how much is thrown their way. We survive, and we do it TOGETHER. While my grandfather was the engineer behind this family, an integral and irreplaceable component, the foundation he has laid will see us through the years to come. My grandpa passed knowing that we would all be okay because we would come out on the other side of losing him stronger and closer than before. He knew we would stick together, he knew we would not fall apart in his absence, he knew his legacy would be carried on and maintained by each and every one of us. I know my brothers and cousins will cherish the Grateful Dead and find comfort in their grandpa’s favorite band. I know my uncles will take my cousins and brothers fishing, golfing, and hunting. I know my mom and aunt will continue to be an oracle of his profound wisdom. And I know my grandmother will continue to embody strength and exemplify the kind of unconditional love we should all strive for. While loss hurts in the short-run, it brings us together and strengthens us internally and in our relationships in the long-run.
