It started with a ringing of the telephone

My childhood and teenage years were pretty typical of the 80's & 90's; I grew up in a single parent house and never knew my father. I was always told that he'd been an alcoholic and heard horror stories about situations that had occured, but having never been invited to spend even a summer with him, I was not given an opportunity to know otherwise.
I am fully aware how lucky I truly am to how 'vanilla' I had it. I had a pretty innocent life, save for the bullying in school that made me hate life. But I never got touched by bad uncles. I was never groped by a priest in Sunday school. In fact I graduated high school still a virgin, still considered a feat in '96 LOL
My mother ALWAYS made sure I had a roof over my head. Even when she was in mental institutions for her depression... Okay, that part was not so normal. We'll get into that later.

My life would change irrevocably in the early morning hours of an August day, 1994. It was now just me and mom in the house, my sister Joanna was living with her boyfriend; I'm pretty sure we had both picked up our phones automatically as we tried to rouse ourselves from sleep. I remember it being an Operator, asking my mom to either patch someone else through or to call my uncle directly. The phone call was to inform us that my only brother, Julio had decided to take his own life. He was 28 years old at the time.
I was turning 16 in under a month.
Suffice it to say, I have no concept of what a 'sweet 16' Birthday is supposed to look like.
My mother was never the same after that. My family was never the same. I have never been the same...
My brother and sister had grown up together, they were only 3 years apart. They had, I'm sure, the classic sibling fights, chokeholds, farting, silliness of growing up so closely in age. I was 13 years younger than Julio and had a relationship with him, but not a close one.

Just too young to understand

The whole point of this is to be honest. I had no idea at 15 years old the true magnification of what I had just lost.
Fast forward 6 months, JUST 6 months and my father dies of a stroke. I'm not entirely sure I was ever really told the details, it's all so foggy now. But now I've lost 2 people I never knew very well to begin with. THIS is where it gets hard.
Again, at 16 years old I grappled with feelings I didn't know how to deal with. Most people at least have memories, momentos, something to remember their loved ones when they die.
I have cards. I have a keychain and a muiscbox from my brother that survived all these years; I have SO FEW memories...
You don't underatand at 16, but the older you get the more you begin to see and understand more of the world around you, the more you seek to understand other people. This is where I started to get angry with God.
The older I got, the more I felt cheated by what was taken from me before I could grasp the importance of family.
The older I got, the more I questioned: what music did my brother enjoy? My father? What where their hobbies? What was their passions? Did they cook? Did they hunt? Did they fish? What was Julio's favorite movie? I knew he liked motorcycles and had owned a Harley Davidson. What about my father, what did he drive? What was his favorite? Was he into cars? My brother had taught me to play chess when I was younger, but who had taught him?

THESE are the skeletons which become hard to bury and you somehow end up dragging these neverending questions around with you. What happened, Dad? Why didn't you ever invite me to come stay with you? Why didn't you ever try to get to know me? YOU were the adult, why didn't you try harder? Why do I own all of 8 cards for 16 years of Birthdays, Chrsitmases, misc, or no reason at all? My Birthday was only 2 weeks after yours, did you forget?

These 2 deaths were the start of many subsequent losses, most of them family, but also some friends.
They remained hard to put to rest for many years. It's difficult to get closure from people who's lives were miles away. There was no goodbyes. No last 'I Love You's'. I had 2 family members taken from me before I had an opportunity to really know them. I was angry for a very long time feeling so robbed.
It was especially hard to forgive Julio. I tend to compare our lives, and still get angry for him giving up so soon, when he never had to experience the loss I did. For as of now, I have lost them, and mom, both grandmothers, our grandfather, and my sister Joanna succumbed to her alcoholism 4 years ago. Let's not forget the 9 miscarriages I've suffered but survived in trying to have a family of my own... sometimes, I do truly feel cursed.
You didn't experience, suffer or survive any of that, Julio!!! What was so hard at 28 that you seemed to say 'fuck it'?
See? A liitle bit of that anger still surfaces now and again. I'm working on it.

Thanks for following me a little further into my story and my world.
Hopefully you'll be interested in more to come, I look forward to getting this out.
Much love.

Link to part 1
https://steemit.com/mentalhealth/@nicoleperdue42/the-journey-from-depression-to-hope-part-1