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Savmote@icloud.com

Inside the Insanity

by Savannah Mote

(June 18th, 2026)

This is not the polished version.

This is the version w/ dirt under its nails.

The rough draft.

The evidence.

The beginning of the end.

The end of a very dark hole that I’m not sure has light on the other side.

Picture this…

You’ve been begging for help for years.

You go to hospital after hospital, trying to explain something you barely have the words for. Everyone keeps telling you you’re fine, or dramatic, or crazy, or it’s all in your head, or just too high.

But your body keeps screaming.

Your mind keeps spinning.

You stop knowing which part of you is just trying to survive.

My name is Savannah Mote and this is my story.

I wasn’t born insane. I was built this way.

Piece by piece, lie after lie, loss by loss.

8 hospitals, 2 real doctors, a body that felt like a crime scene, and a mind that felt like a prison, but became my only witness.

Before the hospitals, before the drugs, before the labels, there was a little girl trying to survive a household already consumed by its own demons to even notice her fighting off mine.

I don’t remember a version of myself that felt safe…

Learning young that adults could be dangerous, love comes with terms, and no place to call home.

The moods, the voices, the footsteps.

Learning to read a room before I learned to understand myself. Staying quiet, when to disappear. Acting “normal.” Pretending I wasn’t being eaten alive.

By 16, my life started breaking away from the life I was supposed to have. I was moving place to place, trying to figure out why I felt so different.

Nobody asked what happened to me. They only asked what was wrong with me.

That question follows me everywhere:

What’s wrong with you?

Why can’t you just be normal?

Why can’t you get it together?

Nobody saw the little girl underneath of it all. The one who was scared. The one who was tired. The one who needed someone to notice she was drowning.

So I became good at surviving.

Not living.

Surviving.

There’s a difference.

Surviving is waking up exhausted. Surviving is making jokes when you want to scream. Surviving is acting like you don’t care, because caring costs too much.

Surviving is letting people think you’re crazy because explaining the truth takes too much energy.

Then came the drugs.

And I know people will read that sentence and think they understand the story.

You don’t.

For some people, drugs are fun. For me, they became the reason to keep going. A way to become numb. A way to shut off the constant replay of my life events in my mind.

Little did I know they weren’t fucking around when they told us to say no to drugs.

But they became the only way to survive the things I didn’t know how to say out loud.

My body started falling apart.

I had a tumor in my stomach. A real one.

Not anxiety. Not drama. Not something I made up.

A real thing living inside my stomach, making me sick, scared, like my own skin was betraying itself.

I had a surgery, lost my job after. I lost my stability, time, money, and more of the person I was trying to become.

After that surgery, my body hasn’t felt bearable.

Then came the throat problems.

The mucus. The “tonsil” stones. The ears. The pressure. The dizziness. Knowing something was deeply wrong and no one could hear the panic in my voice.

Hospital after hospital.

Explanation after explanation.

After drugs and alcohol were mentioned, their ears stopped working.

I was honest. Basic labs came up normal, and when I showed back up, I had already been labeled a drug addict problem, but my body kept screaming:

“YOU NEED HELP NOW!”

I changed my lifestyle completely, minus the drugs and alcohol.

Eating organic, buying plant-based, taking health shot after health shot. I was noticeably getting better.

And then the grief came in like a wrecking ball.

My Grandpa died.

My Grandma died.

My Aunt died.

My mother got sick too and died.

All of them, under one year, died.

My relationship with my mother was not simple.

That’s the part people don’t understand. You can love someone that ruined you. You can miss them and still be angry. You can grieve the person they never were or the one you needed them to be.

When I lost my mother, I lost the chance of things ever being different. I lost the hope she was going to do better, or at least the acknowledgment of all the damage she caused, not only my life, but my sisters’ too.

There was no magic pause button.

Life kept lifing.

Bills.

Rooms.

Rides.

Phones.

Hospitals.

Men.

Family.

Drugs.

Dogs.

Messages.

Survival.

I had Nacho, and losing him was another piece of my heart being handed away. Animals feel safer than people. They don’t ask you to explain the pain in a way that makes sense. They just know when you’re broken and sit near the pieces.

And that’s what this book is.

The pieces.

Not all in order and not all nice and neat.

This is the version where I tell the truth.

I was not born insane.

I was born into chaos, raised by survival, broken by a broken society. I stitched myself back together by the part of me that refuses to lose.

Shout-out for my father teaching me the Motes don’t lose. You don’t give up. You put your big-girl panties on and get the fuck up.

So before you judge a book by its cover, read the story.

The Scar

I still have the scar.

A pitching machine.

By the time I came along, softball was already part of our family. My dad had coached my sister first, and somewhere along the way he just… never stopped. When it was my turn, I slid right into the same dusty fields, the same dugouts, and the same folding chairs that had already become our second home.

Kindergarten turned into first grade, then second, then third. Before I knew it, softball wasn’t just something I did.

It was what our family did.

Dad coached. My sister coached too. When my mom was sober enough to make it, she was the dugout mom. Dad eventually became the league manager, and somewhere along the way we won five out of six championships.

People thought I was a lot better than I actually was.

Dad knew better.

He knew every weakness I had. He knew exactly where I struggled. He knew I wasn’t the superstar everyone thought I was.

But you’d never know it by listening to him.

To him, I was the kid everyone else should be watching.

He bragged about me like I was the best pitcher in Texas.

He signed me up for pitching lessons. He stayed after practice to throw “just one more bucket.” He never made me feel like I wasn’t enough.

He just believed that if we kept showing up, I’d get there.

Looking back, maybe that’s all any kid really wants.

Someone who believes in them a little more than they believe in themselves.

One practice, I was pitching while the machine threw to the hitters because, truth be told, I wasn’t good enough to pitch live all the time yet.

I stepped just a little too close.

The pitching machine caught my arm.

I remember the sting before I remember the blood.

The moms started yelling.

“She needs to come out!”

I looked down at my arm.

Then I looked at my dad.

He didn’t tell me what to do.

He just looked back at me.

I shook my head.

“Nuh uh.”

“I’m finishing practice.”

So I did.

Probably stubborn.

Definitely bleeding.

But I finished.

I still have the scar.

Most people would see a tiny white line.

I see a little girl who would’ve played with a broken arm if it meant making her dad proud.

Dad had one phrase he’d yell almost every game.

Especially when I was struggling.

I’d stand on the mound, take a deep breath, look toward home plate…

…and then I’d hear him.

“DON’T SUCK!”

If you didn’t know us, you’d probably think he was being mean.

He wasn’t.

That was our thing.

It always made me laugh.

Even when I wanted to cry.

Especially when I wanted to cry.

Somehow those two words took all the pressure off.

They reminded me that softball was still supposed to be fun.

By the time I got to high school, Dad wasn’t my coach anymore.

He was finally just another parent in the stands.

At least officially.

The truth is…

I never stopped looking for him.

Every time I stepped into the batter’s box…

Every time I walked onto the mound…

My eyes found him without even thinking about it.

I still wanted to know what he thought.

I still wanted to make him proud.

There was one thing that never changed.

If I accidentally hit a batter…

I couldn’t help it.

I’d laugh my ass off.

Not because I wanted to hurt anybody.

It was one of those nervous laughs that escaped before I could stop it.

The harder I tried not to laugh, the worse it got.

I’d glance over at my dad expecting him to be shaking his head.

Instead…

He’d just grin.

Like he was thinking,

“Let the kid be a kid.”

No lecture.

No yelling.

Just that little smile.

Even after he stopped being my coach…

He never stopped being my biggest fan.

The car rides home told the story before either of us ever said a word.

If we’d won and I’d played well…

The truck was loud.

We’d replay every inning.

Every strikeout.

Every big hit.

Dad would tell the story like we’d just won the World Series.

By the time we pulled into the driveway, I almost believed we had.

If I’d had a bad game…

The truck got quiet.

Neither of us liked those rides.

I stared out the window wishing I could play the whole game over again.

Back then, I thought the silence meant I’d disappointed him.

Now that I’m older…

I think he was just hurting because he knew I was.

Years passed.

Softball became tournaments, pitching lessons, dirt-covered uniforms, bruises, and weekends that somehow disappeared at the ball field.

Without either of us realizing it…

Softball had quietly become our language.

It was how we spent time together.

How we celebrated.

How we argued.

How we laughed.

How we loved each other without having to say the words.

Then, before my junior year of high school, I quit.

People thought I was just quitting softball.

I don’t think that’s what broke my dad’s heart.

I think he knew we were losing something neither of us knew how to replace.

The practices.

The tournaments.

The long weekends.

The truck rides.

The laughter after a win.

Even the silence after a loss.

Sometimes I still catch myself rubbing that little scar without even realizing it.

Funny how something so small can carry so much.

It isn’t a reminder of the day I hit a pitching machine.

It’s a reminder of a dad who believed in his daughter before she ever believed in herself.

And even now, when life gets hard…

I can still hear him.

“Don’t suck.”

It makes me smile every time.

The Hospital Walk

I don’t remember overdosing.

I remember pieces before it, but not enough to arrange them into anything honest. I know my mom called 911. I know they pumped my stomach. I know I almost died.

But that isn’t the part I remember most.

The part I remember is waking up.

My sister had braided my hair before she left.

I don’t know why that detail stayed with me more clearly than everything else. Maybe because it meant she had been there. Maybe because when I opened my eyes, she wasn’t anymore.

No one was.

I woke up alone in a hospital bed with my hair neatly braided, like somebody had tried to leave proof that I had been loved before disappearing.

I didn’t have my phone. I didn’t have my shoes. I didn’t have a way home.

I used the hospital phone to call my family.

No answer.

I called again.

Still nothing.

I called Casey.

Nothing.

I kept calling people because somebody had to answer eventually. Somebody had to realize that I was alive, barefoot, and standing in a hospital after nearly dying.

Nobody did.

The hospital staff told me I had to leave.

I tried explaining that I didn’t have my phone. I didn’t have shoes. I didn’t have anyone coming to get me.

It didn’t matter.

I had survived the overdose, so as far as everyone was concerned, the emergency was over.

I walked outside barefoot.

I don’t remember how far I made it. I just remember the pavement under my feet and the realization that I had called everyone I belonged to, and not one person had answered.

Eventually, a police officer stopped.

He asked where I was going.

“Home.”

He looked down at my bare feet, then back at me.

I told him the hospital had discharged me. I told him I didn’t have a phone or shoes. I told him nobody had answered.

He gave me a ride.

A stranger in uniform was the only person who stopped.

That was the day I learned that surviving and being saved are not always the same thing.

The Day That Officially Broke Me

January 20, 2024

This was the day that finally made me feel everything I had been trying to stuff down.

It was my oldest cousin’s wedding, and it was beautiful. What made it ugly was my mother.

We all got litty titty before the wedding. My sister, my father, my mother, and me. My dad and I could handle alcohol better, in my opinion, but my mom showed up wearing a white, or as she called it, “cream” dress.

Right then, I knew trouble was coming.

She talked during the vows. She kept drinking. Then she fell onto a table.

That was when I got pissed.

This day was supposed to be about my cousin and her mom, my aunt. My aunt had bone cancer, which was understandably fucking up everyone involved. But somehow, my mom still had to become the center of attention.

Once she fell on the table, I said, “Nope. Time to go.”

There was no more choice for anyone in the matter.

My youngest cousin, her husband, my sister, and I helped get her out. On the car ride home, she screamed at all of us, and it continued once we got back to the house.

I still have the recording. I listened to it while writing this because I wanted to make sure I remembered it correctly.

My dad was yelling about how nobody could get the fuck out of the past. My mom was saying she was ready to die. Eddie, my first fur baby, was barking and trying to protect her. He may have even been biting at me, but he knew my mom needed backup against all of us.

Then God got brought into it.

My mom started saying that none of us understood because her sister was dying. That was when my sister stepped in and reminded her that she had been there when I overdosed, when neither of my parents could be found.

She knew exactly what it felt like to almost lose a sister.

My mom claimed she had been there because she was the one who called 911. She said she saved me.

Maybe she did call. Maybe that call saved my life.

But that doesn’t mean she was there.

I always thought my dad would come to the hospital no matter what.

He didn’t.

My sister did.

My sister, who had spent her whole life trying to be more than just my sister. She tried to be a mother figure, a protector, and a friend.

In the recording, my sister yelled, “They brought her back to life!”

My dad said, “I was ready to go to the hospital. You said no. We’ll go tomorrow.”

Then my mother said that my dad had told her, “If she wants to live like a piece of shit, she can die like one.”

I still don’t know whether he really said it.

But hearing it hurt either way.

That was when I stood up and screamed:

“SHUT THE FUCK UP. I almost died. You weren’t there, and you weren’t there. Who cares? I almost died. Y’all don’t give a fuck.”

Caleb

Names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

Caleb worked at my best friend Mara’s father’s restaurant. It was called The Lantern, which feels almost cruel now, considering what came from that place.

Mara was sixteen. Caleb was thirty.

At the time, I did not fully understand what that meant. I knew he was older, obviously too old, but I was young enough that grown men still seemed capable of explaining away almost anything. Caleb was especially good at that. He could arrange words around the truth until the truth became difficult to recognize.

Mara was sleeping with him. She was also seeing a valet driver named Tyler, but he belongs more to her story than mine.

My story really began after rehab.

I was supposed to stay for thirty days, but I ran away on the twenty-ninth. When I came back, I learned that Mara had slept with Evan.

Evan was never officially mine. We had never really been together, but for years I believed I would marry him. Even now, he remains one of the most important people in my life. He has always had a girlfriend, and somehow we have always continued talking through every version of ourselves. At that age, though, I did not have language for complicated love. I only knew betrayal.

My best friend had slept with the person I thought I would eventually marry.

So I slept with Caleb.

It was not a decision made from desire as much as destruction. I wanted to hurt somebody, or hurt myself, or prove that nothing mattered. Caleb was there, and he knew exactly how to make himself appear misunderstood instead of dangerous.

I called him the child rapist later. At the beginning, I believed his version of the story.

He told me he was not the person people said he was. He made himself sound persecuted, falsely accused, unfairly judged. He was already involved in a trial, but I was too young and too damaged to recognize how carefully he was editing himself for me.

Eventually, I moved in with him.

We had a house. He had a Jeep Wrangler. We were not homeless, but he would load me with Xanax and Adderall, hand me cardboard signs, and send me outside to beg for money. I stood beside roads pretending to have nothing while the life we already had waited for us at home.

Meth and GHB became part of everything. They turned ordinary thoughts into commands. A small task could suddenly feel urgent enough to cross the state for.

One day, we decided we needed a single slab of hardwood flooring from Austin.

We were in Dallas.

There was no reason it could not wait, but meth does not understand the word tomorrow. GHB does not understand consequences. Together, they made every impulse feel like a mission.

Before we left, Caleb went to sleep. I stayed awake doing meth.

By then, I had started hiding it inside a highlighter. The bottom could be pulled out, leaving a small hollow space where I kept it so Caleb would not use mine. We had hidden the pipe inside part of the covered parking area at the condo complex, shoved into one of the overhead tubes where I could no longer reach it. So instead of smoking the meth, I ate it.

When Caleb woke up, we started driving toward Austin.

We had run out of GHB, but we had already been taking it during the drive. I had meth keeping me awake. Caleb did not. The GHB began pulling him under.

At first, I do not think I understood how asleep he was.

Then I realized we were drifting toward an eighteen-wheeler.

Caleb was completely unconscious behind the wheel. His foot was still pressing the gas, or maybe the Jeep was on cruise control. I never knew. I only knew the vehicle was still moving, the truck was getting closer, and the person responsible for keeping us alive was gone.

I grabbed the steering wheel.

I screamed his name. I slapped him. I screamed again and again, louder than I thought a person could scream. I tried everything I could think of while holding the Jeep on the road. At some point, I grabbed a Sonic cup and poured the ice over him.

Finally, he woke up.

He pulled onto the shoulder beside a field of sunflowers.

The moment the Jeep stopped, I got out and fell to my knees. I kissed the ground and sobbed because I had been certain I was about to die.

The sunflowers were standing there beside the highway, bright and indifferent, while I cried into the dirt.

That should have been the moment I left.

It was not.

By then, danger had already become ordinary. Nearly dying did not feel like a conclusion. It felt like another terrible thing that had happened on a Tuesday.

The truth about Caleb arrived slowly, then all at once.

One day, I went through his phone.

I found naked photographs of children. Boys and girls who looked four or five years old.

Whatever story he had given me collapsed.

I told his mother. She believed me completely, but he was still her son. That was the impossible part. She could believe what I found and still look at him as her baby boy.

After that, everything erupted.

Caleb and I got into a huge fight. Somewhere inside the violence and confusion, my foot went through a glass window. The glass cut through my Achilles.

That injury became the door out.

I moved back in with my parents for about eight months. I left the house, the drugs, the cardboard signs, the hidden meth, and the man who had convinced me that the truth was whatever he said confidently enough.

There is more to the story.

There are parts I still remember in pieces: rooms, arguments, drugs, strange errands, moments when I almost died and moments when I did not care whether I did. Memory from that time does not move in a straight line. It flashes like broken glass.

But I remember the sunflower field.

I remember taking the wheel while Caleb slept.

And when I think about that girl now, screaming and steering at the same time, I realize she had already begun trying to save me.

Borrowed Happiness

I met him on his first day at P.F. Chang’s.

We’ll call him Ryan.

At the time, I already had a boyfriend. We had an apartment together. I was sober. I had a steady job. For the first time in years, I was actually doing really well.

From the outside, my life finally looked normal.

I’ve never been very good at letting things stay that way.

Ryan wasn’t overly emotional or affectionate. He wasn’t the kind of person who wore his heart on his sleeve. But there was something about him that pulled me in anyway. When we finally got together, it felt different. There was a passion between us I’d never experienced before. For the first time, I felt completely wanted.

Not long after that, I started using again.

It started with cocaine.

I told myself it would stay there.

It never does.

I warned him how bad addiction could get for me. I explained that once I crossed that line, it wasn’t something I could just stop. I don’t think he understood. Most people don’t. They hear the words, but they can’t imagine what they actually mean until they’re watching someone disappear.

Eventually, I got sick.

I couldn’t keep food down. I was throwing up constantly. I thought maybe the drugs were finally catching up to me.

Ryan’s mom took me to the emergency room.

She didn’t just drive me there. She became my advocate.

The doctors found a five-pound tumor wrapped around one of my ovaries. Because I didn’t have insurance, there wasn’t much urgency. I wasn’t actively dying, so I wasn’t exactly a priority.

She refused to accept that.

She asked questions I was too scared to ask. She pushed back when I couldn’t. She stayed beside me through the entire process until they finally agreed to schedule the surgery.

Without her, I honestly don’t know how long I would’ve waited.

After that, I didn’t just feel like I was dating Ryan.

Somehow, I felt like I’d been adopted by his family.

His dad was hilarious. The kind of guy who could make an ordinary Tuesday feel entertaining. They made me feel welcome in a way I wasn’t used to.

Life settled down for a little while.

I recovered from surgery, went back to work, and tried to move forward.

Then I got fired.

Around the same time, Ryan’s brother and his girlfriend were living with us. She hated me.

One day, I walked out of my bedroom naked, not realizing his brother could see me. It wasn’t flirtatious. It wasn’t intentional. It was one of those awkward moments that should’ve ended with everyone laughing about it.

Instead, he told his girlfriend.

She keyed my car.

We got into screaming matches.

During one fight in the backyard, she started throwing my childhood in my face. She brought up my mom. Said things you can’t really take back once they’re out in the open.

Ryan had to physically pull me away.

After that, we mostly avoided each other.

Until one afternoon we came home at exactly the same time.

She threw a glass of water at me.

Then she made another comment about my mom.

I hate confrontation.

Not because I’m afraid to fight.

Because when there’s no one there to stop it, my whole body starts shaking. My brain immediately goes to the worst possible outcome.

So I packed everything I owned and left.

After that, Ryan’s family had a meeting.

Since he was paying most of the bills anyway, they decided we’d stay in his parents’ RV until his brother and his girlfriend moved out.

It wasn’t supposed to be anything special.

Just a temporary place to sleep.

Instead, it became my favorite place I’ve ever lived.

It wasn’t a huge RV, but it was nice. Cozy. Quiet.

I brought Nacho with us.

He loved it more than either of us.

Every chance we got, we’d take him to the lake. One day we rented jet skis. Ryan couldn’t rent one because of a DUI on his record, so I rented them for us.

I don’t know why that day sticks with me so much.

Maybe because for a few hours, nothing hurt.

Nothing was falling apart.

Nothing needed fixing.

Then there were the nights.

His parents had these blue LED lights inside the RV. We’d turn off every other light until everything glowed this soft electric blue.

He’d put on Dance in the Dark.

I don’t dance.

I don’t like drawing attention to myself. I don’t like looking stupid. I spend most of my life worrying about how other people see me.

But somehow…

With him…

None of that mattered.

We’d dance barefoot in that tiny little aisle between the bed and the kitchen, bumping into cabinets and laughing every time one of us almost fell over.

Nacho would start running circles around us like he thought he was part of the dance too.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more free than I did in those moments.

Looking back, it’s funny.

It wasn’t our RV.

It wasn’t even our house.

It was borrowed.

Temporary.

A place we were only supposed to stay for a month.

But somehow…

That little camper became the safest place I’d ever known.

If happiness has a shape, mine will always look like blue lights glowing through a tiny RV, Dance in the Dark playing in the background, a happy little dog spinning circles around two people who forgot, just for a little while, that the rest of the world existed.

I’m okay, and I know I’m going to be okay.

There have been a lot of thoughts lately. A lot of sitting with myself and realizing that most of the people in my life have become distant from me. Not because that’s what I wanted, but because they got tired of my shit. That was a hard pill to swallow, but I can finally admit that without turning it into another reason to hate myself.

At the end of the day, I have to take accountability for my life and fix what I can. I can’t keep waiting for somebody else to save me, understand me perfectly, or undo everything that happened. Some people failed me. Some people watched me fall apart and left me there. Both of those things can be true while I also admit that I made choices that hurt me and the people around me.

But I also need to give myself credit.

I’m not living on the streets anymore. I’m at a healthy weight. I’m not smoking meth all day, every day. I survived years of chaos while grieving my aunt, my grandpa, my grandma, and my mom. I did a lot of that alone, even when the people closest to me could see I was drowning.

For a long time, I was furious about that. I wanted somebody to admit they should have helped me. I wanted an apology big enough to make up for all the times I was left to figure it out by myself. I don’t think that apology is coming, and somehow, I’m not as angry about it anymore.

Maybe it had to happen that way for me to finally wake up.

That doesn’t make what happened okay. It doesn’t excuse anyone who hurt me, abandoned me, or made me believe I was impossible to love. It just means I’m done letting those things decide what happens next.

I still have a lot to fix. I still have habits to break, wounds to deal with, and parts of myself I barely understand. I’m not pretending I’m healed. I’m not even close.

But I’m proud of myself.

I’m proud that I’m still here. I’m proud that I can finally look at my life honestly without deciding that honesty means I’m hopeless. For the first time in a long time, I can see a light at the end of the dark hole I thought would never end.

And maybe that light isn’t somebody coming to rescue me.

Maybe it’s me finally finding my own way out.

08/18/2026

Before the hotels, there were thirteen days.

My parents picked me up from Austin, and I stayed in their house for almost two weeks.

My grandmother was there.

She was in her eighties by then, and there was something strange about watching an old woman reach the end of her life in a house where everyone else seemed committed to pretending their own bodies were indestructible.

There was drinking.

There were drugs.

There were cigarettes.

And there was an argument over whipped cream.

Grandma wanted some.

I gave it to her.

My mother woke up, took it away, and hid it.

So I found it and gave Grandma more.

It seemed very simple to me.

She was eighty-something years old.

Let her have the whipped cream.

My mother woke up again and started yelling, accusing Grandma of manipulating me into giving it to her.

But Grandma hadn’t manipulated me.

I’d made the decision myself.

I looked at her and saw someone running out of time.

I didn’t know exactly how little time.

None of us did.

So if she wanted something sweet, I wanted her to have it.

One day Grandma and I sat together while I smoked a cigarette.

She told me, “They want me dead.”

There are sentences that become permanent residents in your head.

That is one of mine.

I cried.

Then I told her I would get her out.

I said I didn’t know how, but I would figure it out.

I could find somewhere.

I could make something work.

The only thing I couldn’t do was choose for her.

She had to tell me she wanted to go.

She stayed.

I have thought about that conversation many times since.

Later, family dinners became part of our routine.

My sister, who I’ll call Kayla, her boyfriend Mason, and I would meet up with my parents.

One night we went to pick up tacos.

It is strange what grief chooses as scenery.

Sometimes the worst moment of your life happens next to something completely ordinary.

A bag of takeout.

Plastic salsa containers.

People deciding who ordered what.

When we came back, I went into my old bedroom.

Grandma was lying in the bed.

The same room where I had once been a child.

She looked like she was dying.

She reached for me and held onto me.

I cannot prove what she meant.

I can only tell you what I felt.

She was asking me for help.

I believed it then.

I believe it now.

I walked into the kitchen and told everyone Grandma was dying.

They were eating.

Talking.

Laughing.

I asked why nobody was doing anything.

The response was so casual that for a second it made me question my own eyes.

They acted like I was overreacting.

So I became angry.

And I walked away.

That is the moment grief likes to return to.

Not all the moments I stayed.

Not all the moments I tried.

That one.

Her hand on me.

And me leaving the room.

About seven or eight days later, my cousin called.

“Grandma’s dead.”

I remember saying, “What?”

My parents lived about ten minutes from us.

Grandma had been living with them.

And still, I found out from my cousin.

I woke Kayla and Mason.

I told them Grandma was dead.

They got up and went to my parents’ house.

I stayed on the couch crying.

I wasn’t there when the people from the funeral home came for her.

She had paid for her own funeral.

She had made arrangements.

Even dying, she had tried to take care of the details herself.

Later, there was a plan to take her ashes to Niagara Falls.

I wanted to go.

When I was invited, I asked for the date so I could ask for time off work.

I thought that was a normal question.

Somehow it became evidence against me.

My mother told me I didn’t care about Grandma, so I couldn’t come.

They went without me.

They spread her ashes at Niagara Falls.

Mason proposed to Kayla on that trip.

A goodbye and a beginning happening in the same place.

And I was absent from both.

There are photographs somewhere, I’m sure, where Niagara Falls looks beautiful.

Water rushing behind everyone.

A family standing together.

A proposal.

A grandmother being laid to rest.

If you didn’t know the story, you might think it was a beautiful family moment.

That’s the problem with photographs.

They don’t show who was told not to come.

They don’t show the granddaughter sitting somewhere else, grieving.

They don’t show the woman who once sat beside her grandmother and heard, “They want me dead.”

They don’t show the whipped cream.

They don’t show the hand reaching from the bed.

They don’t show me standing in the kitchen saying, “She’s dying,” while everyone kept eating.

And they don’t show how easily a family can decide what your absence means.

They said I didn’t care.

Maybe that is the deepest betrayal of all.

Not that they left me out.

That they took the love I had for my grandmother, something that belonged completely to me and her, and tried to tell me it had never existed.

The Things She Got Right

My mom and I fought. A lot.

That’s probably not exactly breaking news if you’ve read anything else I’ve written about her.

But there were days when we didn’t fight at all.

Movie days were like that.

We’d go to the movies together, load up on junk food, and somehow for those couple of hours none of the other shit existed. We weren’t mother and daughter with years of baggage between us. We were best friends.

We’d laugh our asses off.

And when I think about the best memories I have with her, those are probably at the top of the list.

There was something about sitting next to her in a dark theater that made everything quiet. No arguments. No tension. No waiting for somebody to say the wrong thing. Just us being stupid, eating garbage, watching a movie, and having fun together.

She also never missed Easter.

Every single year, she made us Easter baskets.

It didn’t matter how old we got. It didn’t even matter when we moved out of the house. We were still getting Easter baskets.

There are certain things your parents do when you’re little that you assume are going to disappear once you’re grown, and she just refused to let that one go.

I’m glad she didn’t.

And then there was the chair.

She had this chair she’d make me sit in with her.

Sometimes it was because I had homework and she wanted to proofread it. Sometimes it was because I was pissed off about something, frustrated, crying, or just completely over the world.

She’d tell me to come sit with her.

And I would.

She’d hug me, and somehow it always made things feel better.

That might sound small, but it wasn’t.

There are moments when you don’t need someone to solve anything. You just need somewhere to land.

For me, sometimes that place was that chair.

She also taught me one of the strangest little rules I still completely believe in:

You stop at lemonade stands.

Always.

If some kid is sitting outside with a folding table, a handwritten sign, and a pitcher of questionable lemonade, you stop.

Because it makes them happy.

And, according to my mother, it’s good karma.

So we did.

Every time.

We’d pull over and buy lemonade because she loved seeing how excited the kids got when somebody actually stopped.

That’s one of those things she gave me that stuck.

We got our nails done together too, although those days were a little less magical.

For whatever reason, a nail salon apparently had the power to turn us against each other before the polish was dry.

We’d go in planning this cute mother-daughter day and somehow end up arguing about God knows what.

So they weren’t exactly movie days.

But we kept going anyway.

And one thing about my mom that was absolutely undeniable was this:

She could be furious with us.

She could think we were completely wrong.

She could have already yelled at us herself.

But if somebody else called her complaining about something we had done?

Good luck.

Because suddenly she was our attorney.

She might have been ready to kill us five minutes earlier, but nobody else was allowed to.

That was her job.

And there’s something about that I understand more now than I did then.

My mom did a lot wrong.

I’m never going to rewrite that part of the story just because she’s gone.

But I also don’t want to rewrite her into someone who never did anything right.

Because that wouldn’t be true either.

She gave me movie days.

She gave me Easter baskets when I was way too old for Easter baskets.

She gave me a chair I could crawl into when the world felt too big.

She taught me to stop for lemonade stands.

She defended me, sometimes even when I absolutely did not deserve defending.

And she made me laugh.

A lot.

There were days when my mom was my biggest source of chaos.

And there were other days when she was my safest place in the world.

Both things are true.

That’s what makes remembering her so fucking complicated.