Dear Nikki,

This is hard for you to read and that is understandable. It is difficult enough for me to write. I wonder what will go through your mind when you read these letters? Will it hurt, or will a sense of relief finally wash over you? Am I doing you a favor? Part of me believes that you needed this, the other part of me believes this will trigger some form of mental breakdown. However, I trust your mental stability to still be intact by the end of this letter. You, surprisingly, handle tragedy awfully well. I have faith that you can overcome any obstacle that life throws at you. I once heard a quote that went like this, “When life gives you lemons, make grape juice, then sit back, and let the world wonder how you did it.” I do not believe I could find another quote that suits you as well as this one does. How did you do it, Nikki? In the wake of adversity, somehow your persona never falters. You carry yourself with integrity, while your mind teeter-totters on the curb of I-can-not-take-this-anymore Avenue.

I think it has something to do with the maturity in your eyesight. You have seen so much, that acceptance comes rather easily. I remember when you first saw someone die. It was tenth-grade year and you had just returned home from school. You and your mother sat at the kitchen table, while your brother and your aunt were in the backroom. You both knew what they were up to as if it was ever a secret. Heroin is the one thing you hate the most in this world. You have seen it take more than it deserves.

You went to the bathroom, do you remember, Nikki? Do you remember that loud thump and your mother's’ screams while you were in the other room? Do you remember the scene you walked into? I know you do, how could you forget? How could you forget your brother's body on the ground, as his breathing became nothing less of a gargle? How could you forget his body shaking, his leg repeatedly dribbling on the ground? How could you forget the purple hues that seeped into pale skin and drool that poured from blue lips? Truth be told: you can’t and you didn’t. You just do not want to remember. You want to forget and you can not. You can not forget the panic that overtook your mother's face. You can not forget your father with your brothers head in his lap as he tried desperately to revive his first and only son. You can not forget the ambulance injecting him with that syringe. You can not forget the pathetic content that coated your brother’s face as the ambulance whisked him away to the hospital. You can not forget running down the street barefoot trying to run away from the memory you just witnessed. You want to, but you can not.

Of course, they were able to bring him back, they were able to fill his eyes with the same violent life that ended moments before they came. Apparently, some hearts are able to bounce back. I feel you received a dim reality of death from this memory, for not everyone can come back. Yet, since then, you have witnessed true that a heart can stop, but in the same instance the heart can beat again. It seemed quite simple to you. Die, come back. Die, come back. Die, come back. Perhaps, death is more than a heart stopping. Death is more permanent, whereas a heart stopped is easily reversible. You have witnessed many die and you have witnessed just as many return the following week with bloodshot eyes and new track marks tracing their forearm.

You know addiction front and center, you know the consequences of each sniff, snort, smoke, and injection. You have seen it. You have shielded the needle, you have counted the prescriptions, you have sold your own medications to a father that you have seen shake and cry from withdrawal after withdrawal, and you have even surrendered your own little bit of money just for the scavengers to leave you be. You are not innocent. You hold some responsibility for their actions. I wish I could say you did not contribute to any of their mishaps and poor way of living, but you have. Blood is thicker than water, that is what the world has told you over and over and over again. No matter how many times they slammed your head into the wall. No matter how many times they pushed you and kicked you while you lay on the floor crying. No matter how many times they pulled you out of a chair by your hair. No matter how many times they screamed out that you were a liar, a bitch, a whore, and the reason for their suicidal thoughts, you still decided to love them. For blood was thicker than water and you had been taught to never let that theory slip your mind.

You had been taught to never put yourself first and instead, always try your best to keep your family together. To care for them and never disappoint them was your only desire. “You can not choose family,” is what they told you. You are to accept them for who they are and not try too much to change who they are. You have to love family because, in the end, they are the only ones who will always be there to stand by your side. Perhaps, the same individuals repeating these frivolous theories did not account for the dysfunctional families that exist all over the world. Telling someone to love others simply for their faults is not very efficient. It gives a false sense of love. At one point you can not tell the difference between love and putting up with someone. You are told to love someone no matter what and that is how people get burned. That is how people die of a broken heart. That is how people love with irrationalities. That is how people remain in unfaithful and abusive relationships. We have simply resonated love with a sense of being “stuck” with that particular individual. We have manipulated the idea of loyalty and acceptance to an idea of not caring for our own well being. Instead, our warped view of love has us surrendering all our energy into others. You see, they have always built up this idea of a family. They built the idea that no matter what happened within a family, you should stand together and do your best by each other. What happens when you are the only one in the family doing so? The only one trying to care, trying to do the best?

I wish I could tell you this was the end of the memory. I wish I could tell you that the rest of the day went rather well and you dined on homemade chicken and dumplings while falling asleep to Donnie Darko or some cliché reality television show. Instead, I have more to remind you of. The ambulance left, but it would not be long before they returned. Your aunt lingered in the halls, eventually residing at the kitchen table. Her head bobbed up and down as your mother criticized her poor decisions. Your aunt tried to convince you both that she was not high through slurred words and fluttering eyelids. As if anyone would believe someone who could not even bring a cup of coffee up to their mouth. Her condition worsened as you accompanied your mother. She turned the same shade of lilac you had previously witnessed only an hour ago. Your mother only sighed, she was tired, Nikki. This was the first sign that your mother was tired.

Your aunt drooled onto the floor, as her posture became limp in the wooden kitchen chair. You held her head in your hands, Nikki. You held her there in your hands, sitting her up as you gently dabbed her freckled forehead and purple hazed cheeks with a damp washcloth. You tried holding in your misery as a way to be strong for your mother, but you could not stop the tears from falling this time. How do you remain calm and sensible when you hold the hand of someone dying under your touch? Her breathing became occasional gasps, as you cried over the phone with 911. This was the second time they would be here. The second time you would have to see them and explain to them the situation. They arrived and she was still in your hands. You left the room this time as they took her away.

You were strong, Nikki. You might not believe it, but holding her hand and standing with her was strong. You could have left her to fend for herself and just wait around until the ambulance arrived, but instead, you stood there with her. It does take courage and it does take dedication. Just remember, a family does not have to be that way. I hope you remember that family is more than blood and that the life you lived before is not an example of loyalty, but an example of manipulated definitions. There is more to it, Nikki.

Your father has overdosed as well, they needed to restart his heart more than once. Maybe, he will learn one day. However, if holding your dying son in your lap does not teach you anything, then perhaps hopes of recovery is lost. You have seen these people come back from the hands of death time after time. Perhaps, they are immune. What a silly thought as that. An immunity to death? That would have been mighty handy in the death of your mother.

You are dreading this one. This is another memory that you can not bear to read. I have been avoiding it in this letter, but it needs to be addressed. You have no closure, no sense of grief. Do you remember July 6th? Do you remember sitting in the window of the hospital room, while you called the preacher of a church you had not attended since your earlier childhood? Do you remember pleading with your mother to hold on for just one more day?

Your day began at 3:00 in the morning on July 6, 2014. You woke up to loud screaming. “God, help me. Help me, please,” was all you could hear amongst the silence of a dark room. The voice was so loud, so cracked, so broken. It was the most pain you had ever seen your mother in. Sometimes, I wonder, could you have seen your mother die peacefully in her sleep had your family not have scavenged and dispersed her pain pills? Out of everyone, she was the only one who needed them. You did not speak, as she was already surrounded by others trying to calm her. You simply watched as you reminisced in the previous day where you remembered her calling you her sweet little princess. Those are the last words you remember her saying to you. The rest of the details on the transition to the ambulance and the hospital are not very important to the memory, as it was only a worrisome hour that consisted of tears and panicking. You had been to the hospital so many times before, but never like this. Never had it looked so dim and hopeless. Never had it smelled so empty and lost. Suddenly you were able to account for the white walls and speckled tiles. Suddenly you realized what everything really meant and what those repetitive color schemes really stood for.

For five years you cared for your mother. You bathed her, you fed her, you cleaned her after she would soil herself from the inability to hold it in, you helped her in and out of her wheelchair, you helped her walk to and from rooms, you clothed her, you talked to her, you counted her prescriptions, you made sure she took each medication properly every day, and you watched her closely. She was the center of your world for five long years. However, looking back, they seem rather short. You did so much for her and so little for yourself. Sometimes, I wonder how you survived with such little personal care. You lived for your mother, there was not a single thing you would not do for her. No matter how ridiculous her request, she always received what she wanted. In your eyes, she was the most perfect being that could have ever existed and nothing could manipulate your perception of her. You depended on her just as much as she depended on you.

I remember how you had to wake up at 2:00 every morning to get your mother ready for dialysis. By the time you finished getting her ready, it was time to get ready for school. She kept you up rather late with long talks and hopeful endeavors for her future. Remember when she told you how she wanted to go for a bike ride when she got better? Or how she promised God she would become a preacher if he healed her every bone? Some promises go unfulfilled.

There were days that you would miss school just to keep her company. She missed you while you were away. She was alone and treated like a burden when you were away. She was less of a person and more of a sickness when you were away. So, you tried not to stay away. You tried to stay there with her. You avoided your own duties, responsibilities, and well-being just for her happiness. You even promised to take care of her pesky little chihuahua, Jack. Some promises go unfulfilled.

At the final hospital visit, her voice was absent. your mother did not move, did not speak, and only laid there quietly with her eyes closed. It was as if her body was the only thing left, as her mind and presence seemed vacant in the hospital room. I remember the tiny twitch in her fingers that occasionally filled you with flutters of hope. Nikki, some people do not come back. You learned this. You learned this and it was the most excruciating lesson you ever had to sit through.

Do you remember that constant line? That constant beep that filled your ear drums and echoed inside the white noise of your skull? This line was parallel, never to cross, never to spike, and never to show any kinds of viable life. She was the center of your world and your world had just collided with the inevitability of a tired life. She was gone and unlike the others, her heart was not going to beat again. It would take more than a syringe and a defibrillator to change that constant line that mocked immunity. You did not know how to cry for someone who did not come back, so you did not. You had this faux version of reality that people could come back from the dead. Yet, that is the very difference between a beating heart and a dead one. A beating heart can take a break and return, a dead one is gone forever. It will decompose like all the other organs and you will never recover from the lack of blood that no longer pulses through cyan veins. Everything stops in death. Remember the difference between them, Nikki.

Do you remember the loathing feeling in your gut when you returned home and saw your fathers girlfriend passed out on the couch from the consumption of your mother's pain pills? The same pain pills she needed to die in peace? The same pain pills she was missing and the same pain pills that would have kept her from screaming to God in the middle of the night? You have never hated someone so fervently. Your anger burned inside of you, creating a pit of despair that you filled with a dog named Jack. The same dog you promised to care for while she was in the hospital. Too bad she never returned.

Your guilt carried with you. You could not keep a promise to save her, to care for her. What could you do? You were fifteen years old and you believed the world was on your shoulders. You believed you were to be the one to save her, to be the one to help her last as long as she could. When she died, what was left of you? Your entire reason for existing was to care for your mother. Your days had consisted of her every need. Who would you cover up in the middle of the night when you saw the slightest shiver? Who would you kiss on the forehead whenever they shared with you their worries and tiresome complaints? Who would you love now? Was it really your fault that others stole from her? Was it really your fault that her days ended in pain? Was it really your fault that her heart ached for the care she could not receive while you handled the responsibility of school? Surely, you did everything you could. So, how did you still hold yourself responsible? Remember, Nikki, she died thinking you were her little princess, so, you must have done something right. Do not forget, you were her little princess and a little princess does not hold the faults.

These letters are difficult to write, but I hope they help you settle with your demons. I promise these letters will get happier as we go along. We need to discuss the bad before we can truly appreciate the good. Hang in there, sweetheart.

Until next time,

Au revoir!