Tonight is the 10th anniversary of my mother’s death. I can hardly believe I’ve gone this long without her.

My relationship to death has always felt strange to me. I accept death as a reality–as being written into the contract of life–but even though it’s already touched me (numerous times over) about as closely as it can without my own life ending, I’ve always had a sense that it’s a thing I mostly only know how to process intellectually, and not emotionally. I can accept that people die; I’ve accepted that people I love have died. I’m just not sure that I have ever really, viscerally and fully experienced the way that death and loss make me feel. It’s taken me close to a solid 10 years of therapy to realize that my default response to any trauma is disassociation, and who knows how much more work needs to be done before I might actually be able to change that default response.

When I was a young child, I disassociated from the (low-level but constant) trauma of my parents’ acrimony toward one another by living mostly in a world of pretend; I spent hours in my room or out in nature, exploring imaginary worlds populated by dozens of characters (presumably of my own devising), creating endless adventures for myself and my chimerical friends. Sometimes, it was a group exercise, enlisting my brother and/or whatever other kids lived in the neighborhood at the time, but first and foremost, these were safe places I created for, and within, myself. Of course, I wasn’t consciously aware at the time that I was escaping from an environment which felt hostile or unsafe; I thought I was just keeping myself occupied. (My discovery several years ago of the fairly new psychological diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was a self-explorative bellwether in processing these concepts.)

I actually continued using my imagination in this way well into my teens–until at least the age of 15 (which, perhaps tellingly, was also the age up to which I remained a chronic bedwetter). By that point in my high school career, forced socialization (and the determination of a few concerned and dedicated teachers) had begun to crack my shell of self-defenses and distorted self-concept, and as I slowly allowed myself to trust a select few of my peers and form friendships, I felt less of a need to retreat into fantasy.

Fast forward to the mid-2000s. I had already been living in San Francisco for a handful of years when I began my first ill-advised romantic relationship with a person I had truly fallen in love with (a serial drama which took over 3 years to fully run its course). Naturally, my mother was wary of this relationship and of this man I was dating…and she wasn’t afraid to tell me. I, of course, was sure that I knew what I was doing. However, the pursuit of that relationship drove a wedge between my existing life history (in which I was still very tied to my childhood and my relationship with my mother) and my nascent identity as an independent adult (including an “adult” love relationship), which reached its first major conflict culmination when I decided for the first time not to go back to Alabama for Christmas. I knew that this choice deeply wounded my mother, but I reasoned that this particular apron string would have to be cut some time, so I may as well go ahead with it. Nevertheless, it set a series of events in motion; and when she came to San Francisco to visit during Pride of 2007, at the end of the trip she declared “I’m never coming back to San Francisco”. At the time, I assumed that was merely a statement born of anger; in a short amount of time, it became clear that it was closer to a premonition. Within six months, she began displaying a cluster of mysterious symptoms which would eventually be diagnosed as pancreatic cancer.

It should be noted here that, by this point, the romantic relationship which had opened the rift between my mother and I was rapidly disintegrating. One source of conflict and complication in this case was crystal meth. My use had strayed from occasional to (thanks in no small part to the enabling desires of my boyfriend) regular, and as the relationship fell apart and my mother’s health declined, my use became even more frequent. Obviously (in retrospect), meth became the tool with which I numbed myself and disassociated from the realities of what was happening; somewhere along the line, I had begun to substitute drugs and alcohol for the self-created fantasy worlds of my childhood.

Another thing that took me years realize is that my memories around these events and their timeline became more fragmented and blurred: one popular definition of disassociation by an expert in trauma disorders includes the terms “amnesia, depersonalization, discrete states of consciousness with discrete memories, affect, and functioning, and impaired memory for state-based events”. I wasn’t aware of these effects at the time, because I was just trying to make it from one day to the next and to cope with the parts of my trauma that were right in front of me. It’s only been long after I emerged from such fog that I have become aware of the severity and indeed, the very realness of my disassociation.

Which brings me to another major point/realization I wanted to share: namely, that death and loss remain very triggering for me, and any proximity to them still results in some degree of withdrawal and disassociation. Unfortunately, mere awareness of this tendency in and of itself does not seem to help in lessening said tendency; it only helps me to remain a little more cognizant of the pattern as it’s recurring.

What’s very unfortunate to me about all this is that I feel it’s affected me quite negatively in regards to my ability to support or comfort others who suffer the loss of loved ones–especially when those loved ones were loved by me, as well. In short: I think I suck at grieving, and I feel frustrated by how ineptly I believe I relate to the grieving processes of other people. It is, in many ways, a handicap in my capacity to aid and support those who I’d most like to.

As I’ve slowly become clearer around all these factors over the last decade (which also included the death of my father and the pattern/cycle of trauma around that event), it’s really only in the past two years that I’ve started to feel like I’m emerging from a haze of half-awareness…but that emergence has included a rather substantial amount of guilt: guilt over my unresolved issues with my parents, guilt around my responses to their deaths, guilt over how my disassociation has negatively impacted my relationships…but most especially, guilt over my (at least perceived) failings in being able to be there for my friends when they too have suffered through loss and grieving. I feel like I’ve pushed away when I should’ve pulled in, and while I can compassionately view my responses as much more automatic than intentional, that doesn’t erase the consequences of my lack of support.

So…ten years later…where does this leave me?

I miss my Mom. So many of the best things in my life began when she was no longer in it: my career with the Thrillpeddlers, my marriage, the fomentation of my San Framily. There are so many of my loved ones who I wish she could have met; so many personal triumphs I wish I could’ve shared with her. Nevertheless, I can only accept that this is the way things are.

I do think, however, that the best way I can honor her and my father is by living my life to its fullest, and by remaining engaged and present as my life is happening. CPTSD and its symptoms don’t just magically disappear overnight. My process of retraining my brain and my responses still has a long way to go. But today, ten years after she left this world, I can say resolutely that disassociating, detaching, and numbing are not behaviors or defenses that serve me. And I try every day to rededicate myself to deprogramming myself from those tendencies.

I’ll only get one shot at this life, and I want to be here for it, just as I want to be here for others. So I also want to apologize to anyone I’ve hurt through my actions in the last decade, and to anyone who did not feel adequately supported by me in times when it was needed. I do believe in retrospect that I was doing the best I knew how to at the time…but now, today, I think I know how to do better, if you’ll let me.