The Daughter of Death

Miserable life of the suicidal

One day I just wanted to die. Throw all of my problems away, leave it all behind and just end it once and for all. I thought this would be the end and I wouldn't need to bother anymore. But now... I wish I had never done this. If only I knew before I actually did it... If only I knew.

My life wasn't pretty. Since my father died, I felt responsible for his death, because I actually was, even though my therapist tried to convince me otherwise. Somehow my mother's words were more convincing, they... hit me more. Just like she had been hitting me every time she was drunk, yelling at me that it's all my fault and I'm the only reason why he died in such a way.

They told me it was an accident, but it was just my stupidity. I was always kind of a slow kid, I could never keep up with others and my clinical depression was never helping my case. The reason why my father passed away was because he burned to death due to an accidental fire at his workshop, where I was helping him with his metalwork. He left his burner on after heating up a piece of metal that he wanted to attach to his newest piece and some detergent's fumes caught on fire, covering him in flames. In panic I wanted to put it down, so without looking I grabbed anything that had liquid in it and poured it all over him... My eyes grew like the fire that swallowed him whole. Turns out I doused him in a highly flammable diluter that he used to clean his tools from paint.

In this moment my mother came to bring us sandwiches. As soon as she saw the blaze she dropped the plate she was holding and started screaming in horror. I didn't know what to do and felt completely helpless and terrified... Recalling every detail of this scene still sends shivers down my spine.

Me and my mom tried to put down the fire, but no result. Because of all this we completely forgot to call any authorities, and nobody came to help us in time... If our neighbors didn't call the firefighters, probably our whole house would have burned to ashes, so at least we had a roof over our heads, but what is a home without the one you loved who kept everyone at peace?

And yes... about that.

My and my mom's insurance covered both the damage and therapy for both of us, but unlike me, she has never attended it. She decided to cope with this situation her own way and that's how she started drinking. Every. Day.

All I remember from that period of my life is a daily routine of waking up to a disgusting smell of spilled alcohol and burned out cigarettes, going to school, coming back to meet an empty home without my dad's welcoming smile, with nothing but cigarette gulls on the dinner table instead of a delicious meal made by him, then after eating something, if anything, I would go to my room and get stuck in my bed for hours and only realise that after mom came home from work in the evening in silence, only interrupted by the sound of opening bottle of vodka. Then after a while she would come to my room and yell at me for doing nothing, criticize me for everything, leave to drink more and come back to shout more, then I would snap and yell back at her and because of it she would go livid and beat the shit out of me and only stopped if I slapped her in the face in self-defence and out of helplessness just to hear right at the end that this was all my fault - starting from that argument and finishing it off by blaming me for my father's death. And then... silence. Silence broken by her sobbing in her empty room and my accumulated thoughts, haunting me every single day.

The only thing that broke the routine was a visit at the therapist once a week, every saturday. This woman would always counter everything my mother said about me and give me some bullshit advice to either meditate or find any kind of coping mechanism that works for me. I never really told her about my situation at home and I don't know if she was suspecting anything. If I had visible bruises or scars on me, I would have never told her about my situation at home and only found newer and newer excuses to shut her mouth and stifle her curiousity. Whenever she asked about my mom, I'd always paint her an image of a happy family that we were before my father's death and tell her we're fine. Why would she want to know anyways? Why should that be her business? Especially that most probably her only advice to stop it would be to "meditate it off".