I grew up with good parents. I felt loved, cared for, special, everything a child should feel from their mother and father. First and foremost, I was Daddy’s little girl. He was the apple of my eye and I, his. My mom was my best friend in the whole world and there wasn’t a thing I couldn’t tell her. My brother and I always came first. I don’t know what it means to be a parent, to be responsible for molding a tiny human’s mind and outlook on the world, but I do know that your child should always be number one.

My dad was a roadie for a bunch of 80’s bands: Kiss, Whitesnake, The Cult, Ozzy Osbourne, etc. He was tech savvy and did all the lighting for their shows. Something that comes with being on the road is partying, and partying also comes with personal preference. Maybe some people get pressured, maybe some people start small and work their way up, or maybe they just dive right in. However it works, it happens. Both my mom and dad did their fair share, and it took two aborted mistakes before me for them to say, “It’s time to stop.” My mother, especially, was VERY open and honest with me. There wasn’t factoring in my age or mental capacity when releasing information. I found out a lot of things about them before I probably should have, but what I took from that tidbit was I was good enough for them to be parents.

Years went by, they gave me a baby brother, and we moved on to be a happy family. It was sunshine and rainbows, but we didn’t see the dark clouds starting to form over my daddy’s head. He lost his mother to cancer and his best friend in the whole world to a hit-and-run accident. Now to us, it was normal to watch them have a glass of wine after work. The not-so-ok part about it was the fact that we were unaware of the whole box getting emptied in one night. I can remember my mom being drunk a couple of times. There was a time she was drunk at dinner, practically falling asleep in her chair. I think she was probably drinking to deal with my dad’s storm that was brewing. We didn’t see the storm in the forecast, but looking back at it, there were so many red flags. I probably didn’t notice because A) I was a child, and B) my dad was the most entertaining person. It probably didn’t look “that bad” to everyone else. He worked outside a lot in his work shed, garbage barrels filled with bottles and cans. We lived on 13 acres at the time, so he also shot his guns in the backyard. We had bonfires from time to time; he loved playing with fire (*red flag*). I remember we had fireworks in the backyard once and he lit some firecrackers and held them up to his face as the fuse was burning down. He had not one care in the world. Yeah, that’s worrisome, but not enough for anyone to say anything.

The clouds started releasing some rain and the fighting started. “You get out of the f***ing house!” “No, YOU get out of the f***ing house!” started to become more and more frequent. I remember most times my mom tried to get my brother and I to leave, I’d refuse and stay back with my dad. There was a time she had left with my brother and we were sitting at the living room coffee table eating pizza. Supreme thin crust was his favorite. I didn’t care for it much but I ate it anyway. I distinctly remember him looking up at me hazily and saying, “We should burn the house down.” I don’t know how I remained so calm but I just said, “No, Daddy. We can’t do that.” Then he just went back to eating his pizza. I can only recall ever leaving with my mom once. I just didn’t find him scary or to blame.

He only ever got arrested once for their domestic disputes. The cops came to take him because, naturally, it wasn’t my mom’s fault. I couldn’t tell you who initiated the arguments or who was worse than the other. I didn’t want them to take him away from me. I can recall clinging to him in the driveway. He was only gone for about one week, and he was there to pick me up from a friend’s house. I ran into his arms so fast. Nothing like being reunited with the apple of your eye.

It started raining harder on a Saturday morning when I was at an age where sleeping until noon was incredibly important. John, my brother, kept waking me up saying my mom needed me and I told him to go find out why. He didn’t know, just that she needed me now. I didn’t get up for him, but I did get up when my mom was yelling up the stairs for me to come down NOW. With my attitude, I got up and sleepily went downstairs to see my mom over my dad’s sleeping body, smacking him in the chest and yelling from him to wake up. I can recall my eyes getting wide and seeing the froth around his lips. My mom started CPR and instructed me to call 911. I did, they came, and was taken to the hospital. My mom told us that he just accidently took too many sleeping pills, but I’m thinking that was code for “Almost accidently OD’d.” From there, it started to pour.

He got really bad one night, October 8^th to be exact. John and I were sitting on the couch outside their room watching TV. I watched them go in and out, arguing, he called her a whore. I think at that point she gave up and just came and sat with us on the couch. He came up to John and I after a while, kissed our foreheads, told us goodbye, and started walking to his room. My thoughts immediately went to this hand gun in his night stand. I asked my mom if he was going to kill himself, and then the gun went off. I have never let out a scream from the depths of my body like I did that night. Instinctively, you run. A gun went off, so you just run. It doesn’t make sense where you’re running to, you just go. He didn’t shoot himself, though. He had just fired it off at the wall. He then crouched behind the bed, using it as an arm rest and pointed the gun at my mom. I just remember it being clear for us all to get to the car and go to the neighbor’s house. My mom banged on their door and rushed in with “John’s got a gun.” My brother and I hid in their bathroom while my mom called the police.

I had never been afraid of my daddy. There wasn’t ever anything for me to be afraid of. I was his brown-eyed girl and all I ever saw was the sun rising and setting on him. This was the first night in all my life that I was 100% afraid. Any little thing would make me jump, and to this day, unexpected loud noises cause me to hear the screams in my head. It flashes me back to that awful, awful night and I can feel the vibrations of the noises in my chest. Being in the presence of a gun makes me uncomfortable. My chest becomes extremely tight, and I feel panic start to consume me. Medically, this is classified as PTSD.

He had a closet in his office that always remained locked. The police obviously needed pictures of evidence for their divorce. They found about 16 guns, spoons, syringes, etc. The main drug that was found was meth, and it wasn’t just in the closet. It was hidden in the crevices of vanities, the shed in the backyard, the crawl space in the basement, everywhere. How do I know that? My open and honest mother showed me these pictures, because she thought I needed to see it; I just needed to know. He went to jail for about one month, I believe. His sister, my Aunt Kathy, bailed him out and that’s where I started to notice the unstable relationship between her and my mother.

Supervised visitation started every other weekend at the neighbor’s house for two hours out of the day. The first time, he dropped down on one knee in tears, holding his arms open ready to embrace John and I. John ran to him, but I hid behind my mom. He pleaded for me to come to him. Thinking about that day now breaks my heart into a million pieces. Supervised visitation eventually turned into unsupervised visitation, then overnight stays. If we didn’t want to go, we didn’t have to. I had just started dating my first love when all of this started to form, and there were weekends that I traded for puppy love rather than weekends with my daddy. Going through that toxic relationship knowing what I know now makes me regret that so much.

My mom’s brutal honesty with us started to make my dad think that she was poisoning us. He was right, to a certain extent. I’m not quite sure how different things would be or would have been had she kept most things to herself. As a 13 year old kid, John only 8, the thought of our mother “poisoning” us never came up. He was changing. He didn’t touch alcohol anymore, there wasn’t one time after the incident that I saw him drink a beer. The worst thing he did was smoke cigarettes. I remember every time I spent the night at his house, he would run to the gas station and bring me s’mores coffee. It was little things like that that I just didn’t cherish. To be honest, I didn’t even realize just how on-track he was with his life at the time. Before all this craziness, he would get home from work at 4pm every day, and no matter what I was doing, I would get up and go greet him at the counter where he would drop his keys. After the craziness, that seemed to disappear and I couldn’t even make the effort to call him once a day. His effort to be a good day was at an all-time high and I just didn’t even notice.

He was sober for two years and did it with ease. He got a really good job and would go to New Orleans for work every now and again. He was out of town one week and I hadn’t spoken to him much. I was at cheerleading practice and my neighbor, Terry, came and pulled me early. It was October 30, 2007, which also happened to be my boyfriend at the time’s birthday. She told me we were going home to do a party for him. I could not imagine how she was feeling or what she was fighting, because she was sent to get me by my mom. We got home and everyone was sitting on the couch. This was not a freaking party. John and I sat down and my mom looked at us and said, “Your daddy had a heart attack.” Naturally, you’re shocked and instinct tells you to ask if the person is okay. Her eyes watered and she barely got out, “He didn’t make it.” I cannot even fathom the despair of having to tell your children their dad is dead. The courage and strength it took to hold it together, put your own heartbreak aside, and watch your kids crumble to the ground has got to be indescribable. John said curse words we didn’t even know he knew. Just straight anger out of this 10 year old. To describe what I felt is almost impossible, and even having to relive it as I write it… It’s just, paralyzing. It’s like having someone punch through your sternum and grab your heart with a glove covered in nails, and relentlessly ripping it out; tearing and breaking every connection it has to your body. Then, it’s replaced with a heavy weight that festers and resonates throughout your whole body. To summarize, it f*****g hurts. To have someone TAKEN AWAY from you when you aren’t ready is like feeling the pain of dying in an accident, but not actually dying. I was a 15 year old girl who still needed her Daddy. Who was going to put my heart back together when stupid boys broke it? Who was supposed to walk me down the aisle at my wedding? Who was going to fix my broken things, or kill the spider that made its way into my room? This was the day my shattered heart became unrepairable.

He had been complaining, you know, of chest pains to a co-worker. The thing about death is, it makes you think about what you possibly could have done to alter fate. What if I HAD called him every day? Would he have told me about his chest? If he did, could I have convinced him to go to the doctor? Could this have been prevented? I’ll never know and neither will anyone else, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still thought like that. His co-worker had also said that he talked about John and I a lot the day before it happened. Kind of like his subconscious knew his body was almost done, or maybe it was his soul, making sure that some sort of affirmation of love got back to John and I. I believe in science and in evolution, but I strongly believe in souls and their connections to one another. He had the heart attack in his hotel room and had hit his head on something whilst falling down. When he didn’t show up for work the next morning, the red flags started appearing. It had been a week between time of death and the funeral, which was held in Ohio. Our family got a private viewing the day of the service, and my mom made me look. I didn’t want to, but she was certain that it would help with closure. This was one of those times where she was just flat out wrong. He was a blue-ish purple color from it being so long, with a little gash on his forehead. That image is, unfortunately, burned into my memory.

I never got a chance to forgive him. I never got the chance to look and him and say, “You know what, Daddy, it’s okay. I love you and it’s okay.” He messed up royally, but the effort, correction, responsibility, and accountability he exhibited afterwards out did that flawlessly. I carried that guilt with me for a long time. The best thing about sleep is that you don’t have to think or feel (unless you’re having a nightmare), so I did that a lot. I couldn’t handle school. I wasn’t eating. Depression started to sink in. I was skinny, pale, and just blah. I looked like a vampire who hadn’t fed in years. I tried to fill the hole in my heart with the toxicity of my relationship, which just made it worse. The best way to explain anxiety or depression, for me, are as followed: 1. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, but without the strange and unusual things on the way down. Just simply free-falling, or floating, lifelessly down a pitch black hole. Or, 2. The way the black matter takes over Peter Parker in Spider-Man and turns him into Venom. Grabs you, consumes you, takes you down, and turns you into a completely different person.

Through the first part of the grieving process, I was extremely sensitive. Little things made me cry, overwhelmed me, but then it turned into anger. Anger I didn’t even know I had. This was the point of mine and my mother’s relationship that turned into “besties”. There was a lack of guidance, parental wisdom, and structure. She was more worried about being my friend and making sure I liked her than she was about being a parent. I became that girl in high school that was fearless, and didn’t mind being feared. I basked in the “you don’t wanna f*ck with Cebuly” comments. I loved it and it subconsciously fueled my angry, little fire. I was unnecessarily mean to people who didn’t always deserve it. Not that I’m not holding myself accountable for my own actions, but I was being taught to grab life by the ass. I was being taught that it was okay to be a bitch and stick up for myself, even though how I was doing it wasn’t productive. I would go from 0-60 when I was mad, and all I would see is red. When I would be mentally and emotionally abused in my relationship, I didn’t hesitate to make it physical when I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening to form words. When actions and words were hurting and stinging as much as they were, I think the only retaliation I had in comparison was the attempt in physical damage. That was the fearless part of me that exhibited itself as a defense mechanism. Whenever I got pushed to that level, it would always end in an anxiety attack.

My romantic relationship(s) through that time in my life were very complicated. There was one that was just Hell on wheels, and another that started out okay but became not-so-great in the end. I became a savior for those that I loved so, so deeply in romance and in friendships. I wanted to be that good thing in their life that made them better. As selfless as that may sound, it’s probably one of my selfish qualities. Human beings as a species are just selfish by nature, some just more than others. Being controlled, cheated on, and made to feel that whatever I was doing wasn’t good enough did not help anything about my mental state. It was also something that I never really 100% tried to walk away from. I took the apologies and the spiels of “it’ll change, I promise” and looked at it as loving someone doesn't mean that you just give up on them. PSA though, when you’re at the ages of 13 through let’s say 20-21, it’s okay to give up. You’re just a kid. While some people do, in fact, marry their high school sweetheart, it’s okay to put yourself FIRST and know what’s healthy for you and what isn’t.

In their (small) defense, I was a very broken person and I was trying to not only cope with anger, but I was trying to fill my emptiness with something. No teenager or kid has the mental capacity to successfully handle that for someone, especially when you’re still trying to figure yourself out. I was made crazy and took some people down with me. Nonetheless, that does not make mental, emotional, or physical abuse okay from either party. There are no excuses or justifications for that, or any for making someone feel like they aren’t worth it.

I was pushed into therapy when this first happened by my mom and then prescribed anti-depressants. Not only did I hate talking to someone who didn’t understand, who wasn’t there, I LOATHED anti-depressants. They worked for my brother, and that was fine, but they aren’t for me. I would just flush them down the toilet. I didn’t (and still don’t) believe in those medications because I don’t think I should take a pill to make myself happy. It makes me feel like that the happiness is fake and it makes me feel like I couldn’t do things for myself. I’ll tell you what I did like (and probably still do if I took them): Narcotics. I started to get really awful migraines and my mom would just hand a couple to me. She always had them. Sometimes I would take them even when I didn’t have a headache. I would take them to help me sleep and I would take them when I drank. They make you feel good. Looking back at it now, I wouldn’t necessarily say I had an actual “problem”, but I most certainly had the potential for it. I was right on track with it.

I started having meltdowns when I was drunk or not sober. I think the constant anxiety attacks that usually came at the end of the night was what made me realize that addiction is hereditary. I don’t know if it’s an actual quality that’s sewn into our DNA or if it’s something your brain just subconsciously throws in there because it’s all you’ve ever watched growing up. I’m at the point now where it’s hard for me to even take an Ibuprofen because it makes me nervous. Which leads me to the point that addiction is a choice. I do not feel remorse for people who say they can’t help it and aren’t doing anything to fix it. I understand that things are capable of taking over your body and your mind, I 100% understand that, but you’re only letting it win by not trying to get it out.

If you've made it this far into my story, I appreciate you sticking with me. I know it's lengthy. You know that saying, "If it leaves and comes back, it's yours. But if it leaves and never comes back, it was never yours to begin with?" I feel like I experienced that. I lost my daddy down a dark road, but he came back to me. He was my heart, then he was taken away from me before I even had the chance to appreciate it. You'd think it would could only get better from here, but it didn't. See you next week.