How Losing My Dad as a Kid Devastated — Then Elevated — Me
I don’t remember much from my early childhood, but I’ll never forget the night my mom, with tears in her eyes, woke me up to tell me my dad was gone. He was 29. My mom was widowed with three children the day before her 29th birthday. I was eight.
To be honest, his death was somewhat of a relief. He had been living with brain cancer for 15 months post-diagnosis and the malady had picked him apart in every way imaginable. The mood swings were extreme, the delusions and hallucinations were intense, and the grand mal seizures were violent. We all wanted those things to stop. They finally did.
Over the next few years, I was severely withdrawn, anxious, and resentful. I was jealous of my friends who still had their dads in their lives, and I tried to avoid situations that reminded me that I didn’t have my dad in mine. I started to obsess about my own mortality and the concept of death. At age 9, I developed shingles, a serious viral infection that can be triggered by stress. A year later, my 4th-grade teacher thought I was having seizures in class, which, given my family history of brain cancer, was not taken lightly. After a host of medical tests and brain scans, it turned out to be a mild case of Tourette syndrome with involuntary facial tics.
