Personal Essay : Losing My Mother

My dad was a considerably strong sergeant in his time. During the Vietnam War, his last battle, he was taking cover behind an old abandoned shed when someone came around from behind and shot him four times in the back. Worst news ever, but worst of all was the month after when I received word that my mom was struck in an explosion and that she might not make it. I held out hope till the final word but deep down inside I knew that I wasn’t gonna see her again besides in her grave. After all the pain and anguish I was feeling, I knew I had to come back to reality and find a way to survive as a thirteen year old girl in a cold and bitter war zone.

My grandmother, who is the mother of my mom, passed away due to heart failure at the age of 87. Since I was 6 or 7 she had been living in our house. The reason for that was, my grandfather, that I was named after passed away a year before I was born, so she was alone, and she was starting to get old. Since she lived with us for so many years, she had been a very important figure in my life. I can honestly say that she was like a 3rd parent for me, and losing her, made me fell horrible and helpless. I witnessed how real death is because of her passing. Combined with puberty, my grief caused me to become depressed for a long time. As I’m looking back it sounds really extreme, but there were some days that I did not even leave the bed thinking that there was no point to our existence. Thanks to some psychological counselling however, I was able to overcome that mental

On January 22, 2016 my mom , Tara Nicole Coughlin passed away in Ormond Beach Florida. My mom was 34 when she passed away. It was a lot to handle. It felt sorta like I had lost the other part of me, the part that I thought I would never loose, the part that I thought would always be with me . It had felt like just yesterday I was on the phone with her and she was telling me the jobs she was going to apply for.

When I was a kid in Lakewood Washington I had always loved Halloween and going trick or treating. I was going to be a ghoul that year and I had just gotten home from school and I said “Mom, mom where are you.” and I see Torin my little brother in his crib crying my moms door was open and I walked in to look for mom and I see her dead in the closet hanging.

I'm trying to recall the people I met last night.  Please help to remember them.

Have you ever had that one person that you wished would just disappear? I have, and that one person, well, she was my sister. I was two years older than her, and I began to take care of her when our parents died. They died three years ago, when I was eighteen, and they left my sister, Jess, to my care.

Slightly pushing you out of the way I run to our mother who’s laying on the kitchen floor with a needle in her arm. She told me that it was her medicine, that if she didn’t have it she would die. How ironic. I never told you because I didn’t want you to pick up on the lie. You were always smarter than me even at a young age.

“Help!” I scream at the top of my lungs, although I know that nobody has the ability to help me. I was asking for help, even though I knew that if someone were to, they would die.

Trying to be strong-minded, I asked to go back to school three days after my dad 's death. I remember getting on the bus and everyone 's eyes were on my siblings and I. Life had gone on the same around us, but yet everything in my family 's life had changed drastically. I remember when I first sat down and the girl in front of me named Zoey turned around to speak to me. She was several years younger than I and lacked a filter as so many innocent children do. She looked at me and asked, "How did your dad die?" I remember immediately feeling overheated and while I had been trying hard to act like nothing had changed, I felt that a bus had slammed into me again. I felt sadness the most in my dad 's death; but I also felt a strong sense of

First I was sitting on the big couch and my Mother’s phone rang. So I got up off the couch and quickly ran to the phone. I looked at the phone number and it reads a name, not a phone number. Who was calling, it was my Nana. I said “Hello,” “Madison, can you put your Mom or your Dad on the phone,” Nana said. “Dad is not here, but here is mom, she is in the laundry room and here she is, bye.”

My father passed away when I was 14 while in Nigeria for a business trip. When we received the news, my mother and I were in our home and our family came to deliver the news to us. My mother was devastated and stopped eating for a while after she found out. Moreover, my brother was not home when we found out. When he returned home, the

Experiencing trauma is an awful thing. Experiencing it as a child is a lifelong journey of healing. Something that has created me into the person I am today is my profound relationship with death. As overwhelming and terrifying as this topic is, I have come to terms with it. As a child, I lost my Mom at the age of four. This was most definitely a life-altering experience. Being four years old and watching your Mom get sick, dying slowly in front of your eyes makes you really think twice about life. My Mom died due to a rare disease called “GSS” which is an acronym for Gerstmann–Sträussler–Scheinker Syndrome, that runs in her side of the family. Her Dad died from it too, passing it on to her. This illness took 4 lives out of my family tree.

She follows me into the dining room, unaware of the hell on earth we're about to experience.

One morning I was woken up very early and my dad sat on the edge of my bed and was crying. When I asked what was wrong he told me my grandpa Tony had died. When he told me it took about 5 minutes for it to hit me and then the tears started rolling. If I remember correctly I was 9 or 10 when this happened and never really experienced loss before this. A couple hours later my Mom told us we would be going to Los Angeles soon for a funeral. I was born in Los Angeles and haven't gone there in a while so it made me sad to go to the city for a funeral of all things.

However, losing your mother is the toughest of all our losses in life. Sadly, I know this from personal experience. Images of my mother flashed in my mind. I thought of how her passing left me with a deep sense of loneliness. And still today I long to talk with her again, to see the spark in her eyes each time we laughed. To hear the sound of her voice or feel the comfort of her