What My Parent’s Sudden Death Made Me Believe
It started with a hot pocket.
Alan died in our home when he was 39 and I was 12. It happened in the bedroom adjacent to mine. That night, I woke up to our dog barking and my mom screaming.
His body was on the floor as I gathered my dog into my room and shut out the noise of sirens, screams, and CPR attempts.
Alan was my stepdad, and one day, seemingly out of nowhere, his heart (or really his aorta) burst inside him from an aneurysm that had been there for years? months? days?
No one will ever know.
I’ve told the story of my stepdad’s death a lot. Most who know me, know when and how it happened. I tell it as some sort of narrative, with an arc — a beginning, middle, and end. I tell it as the omniscient narrator, not as an active participant in the story. It always was something that happened to my mom, my brother, or our family. But never me alone.
Twenty years later, I’m realizing it did happen to me, too.
He was my parent. He was married to my mom for most of my early childhood. We lived in the same house. He taught me how to play poker and the Hanukah prayer. He picked me up from school. I would join him for Take Your Kid to Work Day. He was my parent.
Sudden death is different than expected death, or at least somewhat expected death. The death of a grandparent, an elderly family friend, or someone suffering from an illness, these deaths also comes with grief and sadness, but sudden death rips both the carpet and the ground from beneath you.
There is nothing left to stand on. It forces us to change in an instant. There is no planning, there is no bracing, there is only the jarring, uncomfortable, terrifying unknown.
All of this happened when I was twelve — those “formative” years. I was learning how to use a tampon and support my widowed mom at the same time. Life felt so out of control, that I clung to the only control I could muster.
It started with a hot pocket.
I ate it the afternoon after his death. People were piled in our kitchen, they came with their fruit baskets and grief — it’s Jewish tradition to give anything but flowers.
