Chapter Four
To say that the rest of my fifth grade year was unbearable would be a huge understatement. I found it completely impossible to function correctly, and that only led to more and more problems. I would go days in a row without sleeping, and whenever I did sleep it was only for a couple hours at a time.
It always felt like everything around me was a haunting memory of that night. Even the smallest things like the one red plate in our cupboard that Josh and I used to always fight over would end up reminding of Josh and bring back flashbacks of his death, which often led to full blown panic attacks.
My breakdowns were very frequent, even in the middle of class. Of course this resulted all of the kids thinking that I was an absolute freak, but I couldn’t blame them. I kind of was. I lost any friends that I had and I would spend recesses hiding out in various classrooms to avoid getting made fun of. I spent a lot of days hanging out in the principal’s office because neither of my parents were able to take me out of school early when I really needed to go home.
After about a month of countless complaints from the school, my mom finally got around to taking me to a psychologist and signed me up for counseling. At the time I was completely against getting help or talking out my problems to anyone, but looking back I feel kind of bad for making everyone’s lives harder by resisting so much. I don’t remember too many details about the first few months of counseling. I just remember that anytime the counselor mentioned anything that reminded me of Josh or the incident in the slightest bit, I would go into a full blown panic attack, and I continued to refuse to talk about it with anyone, even my parents.
After awhile these symptoms allowed for me to be diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and severe anxiety. I was definitely one screwed up kid. It was only a few months after my diagnosis that my teacher had me kicked out of public school because no one could handle my frequent outbursts any longer. Around that same time, my dad also lost his job. I didn’t really understand everything that was going on with my dad at the time, considering that I was too distracted by my own mental instability to realize the fact that my dad had turned to heavy drug usage and had become a major alcoholic.
My brother’ death had taken a huge toll on him, and he become noticeably more withdrawn. He just wasn’t his old self after the incident. He no longer joked around, watched football, invited friends over, worked on cars or even smiled. Growing up and watching my dad exponentially decay was like watching my hero turn human in front of me.
I used to think that my dad was invincible, as I guess most little boys think their dads are. The reality that my dad wasn’t perfect hit me pretty hard when I had to watch as he became just an empty shell of the man he used to be, and everything that I thought he was.
My dad was fired from his job as an accountant for repeated accounts of showing up to work completely intoxicated. To make the matter worse, he never even told my mom about losing his job in order to ensure that he would be able to continue freely blowing all of our money on cocaine, heroin, alcohol and various other drugs.
My mom had to find out about my dad losing his job on her own when she and I went to surprise him by visiting him at work one day. We got there only to be told by one of his coworkers that he had been fired a month before. My mom took me with her to try and find him and figure out where he had been going during the day for the previous month.
