Our lives change on a daily basis. Every choice we make and everything that happens to us sets us on the path that will get us to where we will eventually end up. A quote from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" sums this up pretty well: “There's moments in your life that make you, that set the course of who you're gonna be. Sometimes they're little, subtle moments. Sometimes ... they're not. I'll show you what I mean.”
When we lose someone close to us everything around us, everything within us changes. We are no longer the person we used to be before the death of a loved one. It is said that when we lose someone, we move through seven stages of grief: anger, denial, bargaining, guilt, depression and acceptance.
Anger/Denial
October 2, 2010 2:30 a.m. I am woken up by the sound of the phone ringing, it makes me worry. Calls that early in the morning are never a good sign they are always someone calling to let you know that someone is sick or in the hospital. My dad answers the phone.
“Bueno?”
He speaks then it all goes silent.
The silence is broken by the sound of the phone dropping to the ground. My heart drops with it. A sound I’ve never heard before fills the house: my father is sobbing. This is the first time I have ever heard my father cry.
My Tia Rubi was my dad’s youngest sister. She was 35-years-old, She had long, black hair that she often wore up in a bun, big beautiful brown eyes and a laugh that would brighten up every room she walked into. I shut my eyes and pretend to sleep. It’s what I’ve always done, whenever I don’t want to deal with something I sleep. I lay in bed but the thoughts going through my head don’t let me doze off. Every time I close my eyes I see her face, I hear her laugh. I can’t help thinking that an hour ago everything was fine and now everything had changed. An hour ago she was alive, an hour ago she was getting out of her shift as a nurse, an hour ago I knew I was going to see her again. The world as I knew it crashed around me and I was left among the debris trying to put it back together.
My mind flashes back to the last few times I saw her. I close my eyes and I see her standing in the doorway of my grandparents' house the day of my cousin’s wedding. She was wearing a dark brown dress, her long, black hair pulled back in a bun. My mind jumps to seeing her dancing with my dad that night. If he had known that was the last time he was going to hold his sister in his arms, he would’ve held tight. He wouldn’t have let go.
I open my eyes trying to scare away those thoughts but it’s futile.
My mind then goes back to the day she had me and a few of my cousins spend the night at her house. I think about how we watched movies all night, I think about how she made fun of me for being such a sore loser when my cousins beat me at the games we played. I think about how she took us all for breakfast the next morning. Her voice echoes in my head. Her voice is a sound I never want to forget. but right now all I want is for it to stop being so loud, to stop reminding me of what I have lost. I hear her saying my name, the way she always said it.
“Guadalupe Rojas.”
She was the only person in the world that could say my name like that and not make me feel like I was in trouble. She was the only person in the world who could say my name like that at all.
It has been six years and 28 days since she died and I have yet to let anyone say my name like that. In fact I flinch every time someone tries. My aunt was the first person close to me that I had ever lost. Now that I think about it, that’s probably why I didn’t handle it very well. I didn’t cry because I believed that I had to be strong -- there were too many people falling apart, and I had to keep them together. Instead I became angry. I was angry at God for not listening when I begged Him to bring her back. I was angry at the world for taking her away. I was angry at my middle school for not allowing me to travel to Mexico and say goodbye to her. I was angry at her for dying. I was angry at myself for feeling like I hated her. She was dead and I hated her for it. I didn’t know how to deal with the pain I felt, so I convinced myself that none of it was real. I convinced myself that my aunt was still alive and I was going to see her when I went to Mexico. Six months after her death, I traveled to Mexico, I never realized how good of a job I had done convincing myself that she was still alive until that day. When I arrived at the airport in Mexico City, I thought I saw her among the crowd. My heart stopped, the world began moving in slow motion. For a brief second I was convinced that I could reach out and hold her. Then reality hit me like a freight train. My heart shattered into a thousand pieces. I have yet to find all of them. It was then that I realized that sometimes your heart needs more time to accept what your mind already knows. Sometimes it needs to break in order to begin healing.
