God Bless This Mess(17)

I sometimes still question if I’m in a really bad dream. You see tragedies like this on TV, but it doesn’t happen in real life. Now that I’m older, I can’t imagine what that was like for my parents, to have to tell their six-year-old and four-year-old that their beloved aunt and cousins were dead. How could that be my family? Our life as we knew it changed after that. Everything changed.

After the murder, everybody from my dad’s side of the family grew distant. We simply couldn’t all be together, because that meant facing the void and emptiness that the tragedy had left behind. Holidays together, family gatherings of any kind—they just went away with that side of the family. They just stopped.

My dad was heartbroken, and distant, and resentful. He’d lost his baby sister. He had lost his mother just before that, and a best friend before that, and his father a year before that. He was so broken. His anger, I think, mostly came after this all happened.

My brother and I lost a future full of family memories and celebrations.

I no longer held the luxury all children should have, to live in blissful imagination and protection from the realities of the dark world we live in.

I’d lost my innocence.

I experienced something so traumatic at a time when I didn’t even know what trauma was. As a child, it’s impossible to understand or recognize the feelings you have. You just learn how to survive. But I was so scared. I started waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, believing fully that someone was at the door to hurt us. I wasn’t scared of monsters under my bed; I was scared of someone being in my closet, sneaking into my window, breaking through our front door to kill my family. Not a monster. A man. And it wasn’t because someone showed me a slasher film before I was old enough to handle it. It wasn’t because I stayed up past my bedtime and watched an episode of Criminal Minds. It was because the things that happen in those movies and TV shows happen in real life—and they happened to my family.

We had a long driveway to our house, and for years whenever I saw a car come up that driveway, I would freak out and scream for my mom. I didn’t want to open the door. I didn’t want her to open the door.

I experienced all sorts of disturbing thoughts and fears, intense sadness, and what I would later recognize were regressive behaviors. I grew increasingly clingy, and my parents needed to constantly reassure me that I was safe. I stopped going to sleepovers; I refused to go to summer camp, not because I would be homesick but because I was terrified of what could happen. What does happen. Bad guys aren’t always the ones who get slayed at the end of the movie. They are people you know. People who knock on your door.

Throughout the rest of my childhood, bedtime was a big struggle for me. My mom had to go through all kinds of rituals to get me to calm down and close my eyes. Rituals that I hoped would keep us safe.

First we said our bedtime prayers: “As I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and if I should go before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to keep and take, amen.” If that sounds a little different from the way you’re used to hearing it, it’s because my mom thought that “if I should go” was gentler than saying “die” to two kids who’d now experienced the brutality of murder in their own family; and adding “my soul to keep” instead of just “to take” sounded gentler somehow, too.

The thing is, when I said that prayer, I meant it. I was living with the harsh fear and example in reality that I could die, because Robin and Trent had died. I knew how real death could be, not just when someone is old and has lived a long life, but when they’re younger than my dad. When they’re a family member. When they’re cousins. When they’re Robin and Trent. When Robin was the exact same age as me.

My parents didn’t believe in therapy, so neither my brother nor I saw a therapist to help with any of this. We just dealt with it, as a family.

The prayer at night wasn’t enough. Even though I loved God and believed that praying would keep us safe, I needed my mom to call in backup. I saw how Sleeping Beauty was protected by her fairies, and my mom said fairies gave mommies “extra fairy dust, to help little girls go to sleep.” And every night after the prayer, my mom would throw the invisible fairy dust around the room to protect me and help me fall asleep to sweet dreams.

We also called on the help of dream catchers. I had terrifying dreams almost every night, and one day when I was at a little festival at school, I found out what a dream catcher was. I insisted I needed one to help the bad dreams go away, and my mom was happy to buy it and hang it up. But just one didn’t seem to work. So we bought three.

I also started to look for dream catchers wherever I went. And when I saw one, I thought of my aunt and cousins, and how they were watching over me.

The only way to make it through all of this at such a young age, though, was to believe in something so much bigger than me. Without my faith in God, and in heaven, I’m not sure I would ever have slept through the night again. I still have trouble sleeping now.

A few years ago I was diagnosed with narcolepsy, which isn’t the joke they make it out to be in TV comedy shows. It doesn’t mean I fall asleep mid-conversation or plop my head on a table and go out cold in the middle of dinner. It means that even when I think I’m getting a full night’s sleep, I’m not. I never get the deep sleep that humans need to feel fully rested. So I’m tired pretty much all the time.