Empath: Into the Shadow, Chapter 3

Notebook Entry of Subject #10

I’ve almost always had mental health problems. It runs in the family and at a young age I was diagnosed schizophrenic, but even before that label I showed signs at a young age. I think it was mainly due to me finding my father dead when I was five. He committed suicide, hung himself in the backyard from a tree. For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why my parents slept in separate rooms. My father would take the couch in the living room and she would sleep in their bedroom. I was so young I didn’t realize that they were always fighting because of marital problems. I always thought it was because of me and in a way it was or will always seem that way to me. I was an only child and I found out years later my parents got married because of me. After only a few months of dating, my mother got pregnant. She and my father thought about abortion but didn’t have the money.

They decided to ask my mother’s parents for the money because neither of them were ready for marriage fresh out of high school. They decided to ask my mother’s because my father lived with my grandmother Rose who was a single parent and could barely afford to keep food on the table for her three kids after my grandfather died in a car accident before I was ever born. But my other grandfather wouldn’t have it. He was a Christian Bible thumper that went to church everyday and considered it a great sin. I can only imagine what the argument was like where he forced them to marry on the threat of not paying for my mother’s tuition for college and kicking her out of the house. The marriage was held immediately a week later so I wouldn’t be born out of wedlock. I know my parents weren’t meant for each other, I realize that now but that didn’t excuse my mother from cheating once she met someone when she started going to college when I was in preschool.

I think that’s what really tore my father up inside. When my mother told me the truth nearly ten years after his death she had cried and I yelled. I stormed out of the room. But how did I really blame her? I mean, if they weren’t meant to be together? That doesn’t excuse my father’s actions either, especially with his drinking. I know it probably turned into a loveless marriage after I was born but neither of them ever thought about divorce because of me.

Maybe in my mother’s mind, she wanted divorce and she eventually remarried the man she met at college, my stepfather. The night she told me, when I was 16, she also gave me some of my father’s poetry he wrote for her when they were in love. I know he loved her deeply. I don’t know when he found out and can’t remember what age he started sleeping on the couch but when I was very young my father had an old fat cat, all white, that would sleep with him on the couch. I loved that cat and played and pet it all the time. Its name was Melody. My father named it that because he had once had dreams of being a musician but never achieved anything more then playing in a local band in high school. I have fond memories of my father playing his guitar for me and singing, but I was really young, maybe a toddler, and they're blurry.

Somewhere over the rainbow, he sang to me all the time before he fell into a depression and started drinking heavily. I have that song memorized and my mother said she heard me sing it sometimes and it would make her cry but it always had an opposite affect on me. I had forgotten all about that song until one day it showed up on the radio when I was about nine or ten. I didn’t realize at the time. My father used to sing it to me until my mother told me at sixteen. I sing it all the time and it almost always makes the voices go away. Sometimes I wish I could remember my father's voice singing it, but I was so young that it’s been too long to remember.

Melody, his cat, died a few months before he killed himself. One day, she just wouldn’t move from the couch and kept crying. I never did find out what was wrong medically with other than that she was fat and old. But they went to the vet and didn’t come back with her and when I asked my father about it, he cried. He said she was gone, hopefully to a better place. I hugged him and told him don’t cry daddy but I began to cry with him. I think that cat was the final straw that eventually made him take his own life. Melody visits me sometimes when I’m lonely. In fact, she was my first visual hallucination. When I went to the hospital for the first time after months of hearing voices when I was thirteen, she appeared out of the corner of my eye at first at Kid’s Peace. I asked one of the other kids what was with the cat and they said, “What cat?”

By that time, I had forgotten all about Melody and it wasn’t until I was given my father’s poetry when I was sixteen, three years later, that I realized when I read a poem about her he had wrote. (Haha, yes my father wrote a poem about a cat, but they had a very special bond.) For three years, this cat would show up. Whenever I was in the hospital, I laid on my back and saw her lying on my chest like she had on my father's when I was younger. I’d try to stroke her sometimes and my hand would go right through but I would do it, anyway. Whenever I see Melody, she’s always purring and I think the first time I saw her I didn’t recognize it was the same cat because she wasn’t old and fat. In my hallucination, she’s almost still a kitten and is skinnier.

Once I realized I was hallucinating my father’s cat, it all seemed to make sense — why I saw her and why I had developed schizophrenia. It’s funny. I can remember certain things from my childhood but I can’t remember my father hanging from that tree even though I was the one that found him. I had gone out into the backyard to play and saw him. My mother told me I started screaming, "Mommy!" I had never known I’d been the one to discover him until that night my mother told me the truth. I can imagine how it tore her up inside and the shame, but a part of me can never forgive her as I blame her actions partly for my father’s death. Yet she wasn’t the one to tie the noose around his neck or make the slipknot.

I push my fingers into my eyes. It’s the only thing that slowly stops the ache. I started to notice a voice telling me to kill myself and cut myself when my head hurt and the voices started. It was louder than the others and laughed at me. I started to appease the voice by following its orders, which led to one suicide attempt and cutting myself throughout high school and middle school. I started at first doing it in places where no one would see and it gave me some kind of thrill. It was like a drug and literally is. We learned about it at Kid’s Peace and it does something chemical in your brain from the pain. It helped the emotional pain I was feeling from all that I couldn’t remember from my childhood. I mean, for Christ’s sake my mother hadn’t even told me about my father’s suicide until I was sixteen. It can all go back to those first few years that are blurry in my memory. I had that buried all inside me for so long and my mother later once told me she believed schizophrenia ran in my father’s family and he might have had it, or she suspected.

I hear that negative voice all the time. I eventually started saying, "Yes, Master," back to it and that made it seem happier so I continued. I became its willing submissive host for the longest time before my suicide attempt, which happened a month after I learned the truth about my father. In my mind, the voice was telling me things like "Kill yourself. If you do it, you will meet your father again in limbo. You will be with your father forever." Limbo was where my Bible-thumping grandfather told me my father had gone when I was younger. I had never understood exactly what it meant until I looked it up on the internet after my suicide attempt. I never knew my grandfather was basically saying my father was in hell from committing suicide. I don’t know how my grandmother Gabby still lives with that man. She is so quaint and kind. The side of her spiritual beliefs seemed different from her husband. It was like my grandfather was the Old Testament and his wife the New Testament. My other grandmother Rose passed on in her sleep from a heart attack when I was ten and never saw retirement. I would see her sometimes on the weekends maybe if she wasn’t working when I was little. Even she hadn’t told me the truth about my father’s death.

My grandmother Rose made the best meatballs. The one time I asked a few weeks before she died where Limbo was and that grandpa John always said that’s where my father had went. My grandmother Rose who had black hair just like me except one white streak simply just frowned and her eyes got watery. She said maybe a part of my father was in Limbo but that she would always believe a piece of him made it to heaven as well. She believed a part of him finally found peace. She was smiling and gave me a big hug with tears running down her cheeks and kissed my forehead. That was the last time I ever saw her and I remember vividly and sometimes hear her voice. It’s faint and just a whisper. I’m sure my father’s is in there somewhere too but I’ve forgotten which one. Her death was basically the end of connection with my father’s side of the family. Neither of my uncles ever tried to contact me after the funeral. I’ve thought the voices in my head were alive or some were once alive at least. Spirits, maybe ghosts, but some told me they were living. I always believed the Master was a demon. I’ve been crying writing this, but Melody is rubbing up against my leg. Even if she is only a hallucination, I’m happy for her and some of the voices. I wonder sometimes if this cat is a spirit or if it’s just a way of me to remember those few fond memories of when my father was alive. Maybe it’s the part of him that finally found peace.