My First Experience With Death & The Weird Way It Stayed With Me
An uncovered connection that feels vulnerable to share
- ***Trigger Warning: Death, Infant Death, SIDS***
- I honestly felt my heaviness in my chest while writing this.- LC
Intro
My husband has a bone to pick with me. I never close the drawers all the way. I could never tell him why until my daughter asked me about my first experience with death.
Birth to Death
Growing up in a trailer with four kids meant something was always going on. That something at this time was that one of our cats had birthed four kittens! From that day on, we kids were always toting kittens around like our newest little toy babies. We didn’t ask permission. Just took them on whatever adventure we were having that day. We didn’t even realize they were not all going to stay ours.
We had just moved into a new trailer so many of the rooms were still bare. One day, one of my younger brothers wanted to cozy up the cute kitten. You see, we loved stuffing ourselves in close corners and pretending we found “hidden rooms,” and whatnot, as kids. We found comfort in crawling under the bed or hiding in blanket forts.
These are all relevant elements that led to me having my first experience with death.
A Roller Coaster of Emotions
I was partially unpacking and partially running wild around the old trailer when I spotted some drawers that were unlike any I had seen before. They were built into the wall. Imagine a young spirited girl freaking out about drawers that seemed to be magically protruding out of the wall. Like, you didn’t even have to move dressers in?! It’s the small things at that age.
I opened the first drawer to expose aesthetically pleasing lightly colored wood in perfect rows, just waiting to hold all my goodies. I loved the emptiness of it for some reason…or maybe that’s just how I feel now. Then the second. Then the third…where I found one of the baby kittens in the drawer.
It was the cutest white kitten. I started laughing at the cute little baby sleeping in the drawer. I picked it up (squealing about the cute baby) and instantly dropped it. To my shock, it wasn’t the warm fuzz my mind was expecting. My mind just processed that “it didn’t move.” It didn’t bend. It was hard. That was the first instant shock. It was something that didn’t make sense in my mind.
I dropped it, and it “thudded” into the drawer. An unnatural thud that seemed to echo through the room. I had never felt or seen anything like that before. I yelled my stepmom’s name and she came in. I was shocked as to how “she just knew.” Didn’t they have to check for a pulse? Do cats not get C.P.R.? I was still wondering later that night, “How did she just know?”
My dad came in and told me that the cat was dead because it had suffocated. Apparently, one of my siblings had closed the kitten in there to be cozy and cute, unaware that it would suffocate. We buried the kitten in our yard and I honestly don’t remember what happened to the rest of those kittens.
The next day, I told my friends about what had happened. When I went to tell them that we buried the kitten in the yard, I accidentally said “We buried the kitten in the drawer.” My mind was still scatterbrained, and I had nightmares about finding that white kitten. I never wanted to go by those drawers again.
The Duplex Apartment
Sometime after the kitten incident, my dad lived in a grayish-blueish apartment with my stepmom and brothers. My sister and I lived at our mom’s house. My dad came to tell us that our baby brother had died of SIDS. We never got to go to his funeral, because my dad did not know where my mom lived at the time of my brother’s death. Therefore, my sister and I never got to have the traditional closure in the form of a wake or funeral. We barely knew my baby brother, since he died at six weeks old.
My dad and stepmom moved out of the grayish-blueish apartment because they could not handle living where my brother had died. I watched them carry things out of the duplex apartment. I never even went inside of the apartment. Just saw things being carried out of it. However, every time we would pass by, someone would point and say,
“Right there, past those doors is where he died.”
“That is where they woke up and found him dead.”
My Nightmares Return
Soon after, I started having nightmares. In my nightmares, I was young again and I was in “that apartment.” All I could see in the apartment were old drawers. It’s almost as if I was dreaming in a deep vignette, the borders completely darkened, but the drawers in focus. The drawers were the same grayish-blueish as the exterior of the apartment, which makes it all more disturbing.
In my nightmares, when I opened the drawer, I found my dead brother in the drawer. Replay what had happened with the cat but with a six-week-old instead.
You see, the cat memory was the only experience I had with death. Being young and never have seen a dead person before, along with not being able to attend my brother’s funeral, somehow made my brain mix these two incidents together.
I realized that it had manifested in my 30s, being married with kids, and I still do not close drawers. I always leave a little crack (without even thinking about it). I have tried to start closing the drawers now that I have uncovered this connection,
but isn’t it weird how there is always a why behind our behaviors?
Rest in peace Snowy and Aaron. I hope y’all are cuddling and playing with one another somewhere truly magical.
