Eden Onpeng

Tag: trauma

  • We Were Bold, We Were Six

    We Were Bold, We Were Six

    The apex of the tall metal slide towered over our heads as it breached the clouds. It took forever to climb the stairs to get to the top, and by the time I made it, I looked down at the ground, now comprised of a smattering of colors and moving shapes. I trembled. If I fall…

    I spent the first six years of my life in inland Northern California. During the winter it would rain and then the puddles in the soccer fields would freeze over, creating a smooth, matte surface. My first-grade classmates and I would take turns jumping on the ice until the top layer cracked like a the surface of a creme brulee, soaking our shoes and socks with icy, brown water.

    School rules forbade us from going to the end of the field, where the fence overlooked a large swimming pool with multiple lanes. Whenever the teachers on duty caught us venturing towards the fence, they would grab a megaphone to call us back with threats of yellow cards or (gasp!) red cards.

    On some mornings a thick coat of fog would wrap itself across the field and we kids would mistakenly think it would disguise our presence as we hurried toward the fence, only to hear a teacher’s voice sputter angrily from the megaphone.

    At six years of age, I had already experienced moments of terror and tension at home–getting beaten by my mother, and watching her beat and scream at my dad and grandma. My father groped me but at the time it seemed like a normal thing within the family, under the banner of playful affection from a Chinese father. The weight of this experience wouldn’t catch up to me until later, as I underwent puberty.

    At school, away from hitting hands and groping hands, I was able to enjoy the moment with my friends, exploring the forbidden edges of the world, and pressing our feet on ice to see how much it could hold before cracking. We were bold, we were six.

  • We Would Be Sand Dollar Rich: a memoir

    Work was far from my thoughts as I wandered along the sand on a Wednesday morning, a week after my sister had killed herself. Waves curled and flattened against the shore as I ambled forth, my eyes cast downward in search of calcium-rich remains of mollusks. This morning, the beach—not the city named after the beach, but the actual beach—was deliciously lonely, with only one or two people out on the southern shore, and a few people fishing on the pier.

    Then I saw it—a round disc, face-down in the wet sand. I picked it up and groaned with disappointment.

    The front center of the sand dollar was broken like a sinkhole, exposing its hollow heart to the world, as dark, watery sand gushed out.

    So close to perfection. And yet…

    I wanted something whole.

    I dropped it back to the ground and continued down the shoreline, between the water and row of tidy rental properties. At some point I found another sand dollar with the five-point grooved star intact on its front center. And then I found more sand dollars, broken and whole ones alike. I kept the whole ones in my linen blazer pocket for safekeeping.

    Where were all the people on this sunny Wednesday morning? The kids were probably at school. The adults were at work, or pretending to be. And with the signs telling visitors to KEEP OUT OF THE WATER due to sewage contamination, others were avoiding this beach.

    As for me, I was here to say goodbye to my sister.

    Victoria died in her dorm room at college after taking a toxic substance. It wasn’t even a fun drug so I couldn’t say that at least she died having fun, or doing what she loved. It wasn’t fentanyl mixed into cocaine. There was only one reason to take it.

    I later learned she had spent lots of time scouring forums for information on how to do it. Did it matter if it was the pain that began her journey to find the end, or the pain that led her to finish it?

    I researched online to learn what my sister might have felt during her last moments.

    As it took effect, she might have felt short of breath, panting for air but without relief. Perhaps she started to vomit in her body’s effort to reject the substance, or developed a throbbing headache. Then the dizziness and lightheadedness set in. At some point she lost consciousness. Her organs began to fail, and finally, her brain, starved of oxygen, died. By the time they found her, her blood had turned chocolate-brown and her skin and nail beds had turned blue due to the oxygen deprivation.

    Did her life flash before her eyes during her last moments, before she sank into oblivion?

    She was two months away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology.

    My sister was quiet and kept a very light online footprint. But in the wake of her sudden death, people came forth to remember her: her fiance and his family, our family and its broken dynamics, our extended family, our friends, and her club mates at school. There are probably others whom I will never know, people who cared about her.

    The funeral was open casket. I looked at my dear, sweet sister, and realized: this is no longer her. Victoria, wherever she was, was no longer here, in this gloomy funeral home filled with grief, love, pain, and religious people who used her death to criticize today’s young people for suffering under “modern values” of freedom and independence, and to talk about sin, heaven, and hell. I found none of the sermons comforting.

    For several nights after the funeral, I had trouble falling asleep, because I kept envisioning her casket face: face gray, powdery, and flattened; her closed eyes and lips stretched out; eyes sunken in their sockets; and lips too swollen.

    She must have been so blue when they found her.

    The last times my sister and I hung out were last summer, right after I had stopped talking to my parents. I had realized my parents would never change, and that the same abuses would be covered up again, just like they were two decades ago. I couldn’t trust my parents to not repeat the old patterns with their grandchildren.

    To celebrate my sister’s twenty-first birthday, my husband and I took her out to a local brewery along the beach. We ate tacos and drank beers. “You can drink legally now,” I joked.

    Little did I know, she had been drinking heavily for years, possibly self-medicating for the pain she must have carried.

    Victoria didn’t talk much when we hung out. We would make little playful sounds, like “meow,” to fill in the silence. With all the stuff I had gone through with my parents, I still held out hope that maybe I had borne the brunt of the abuse, that maybe they had mellowed out with age, and were less cruel with her than they had been with me. They had me when they were much younger. They were just figuring it out. They beat my sister less, but beating is not the only form of abuse.

    But I had learned to play along. In order to function in the family, I had swallowed my hurts and denied the sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse our parents had wrought upon me—because otherwise my rage and pain would bubble over with each meal, each visit.

    I buried my memories and pretended my parents were just stern Asian tiger parents who had meant well but didn’t know how to love. I pretended that only the kind and non-abusive ones existed.

    In essence, I had two sets of parents in my mind: the abusive ones, and the safe, non-abusive ones from whom I yearned for approval. I could not reconcile the two. But even then, bitterness would simmer over at times. To preserve the peace within the family, especially while both my grandmother and siblings were living there, I kept shoving those feelings down. Because they were my parents, and it was safer to treat them as the parents I wished they were.

    I went through the motions of being family to my parents: Christmases, birthdays, parent holidays, weekend visits, etc. I hugged my mom who had made the entire household walk on eggshells with her violent rages, who had made me drink from her lactating breasts at the age of thirteen. I shook hands with my dad who had groped and slapped my ass all the way until I was sixteen or seventeen. I tried not to think about that. I would smile and make small talk with my sister who sat in the corner on her phone, who did not enjoy hugs, and who was probably suffering her own version of hell in that family but remained quiet because she did not trust me enough because I had played my role too well—

    What if, by being too scared to rock the boat, and by playing along for so long, I had normalized the dysfunction in my family? What if, by pretending everything was normal…I had made my sister feel alone in her pain?

    In pretending to accept what was broken, I had become part of the very dysfunction that bound the family together. All Victoria could see was what I was pretending to be—a loyal daughter, a peacekeeper, someone who could live with it. She didn’t know I was suffocating too.

    And now, in death, she felt nothing. But what did nothing feel like, when there was no more of you to feel or perceive anything? My brain went in circles trying to comprehend the concept of nothingness. Deep down I also hoped there was some sort of an afterlife, where an echo of her essence hung around, hopefully at peace. And maybe one day I would see her again. Or maybe we would both rest in oblivion while existing in the little trail of mementos we left from our lives, and in the memories of the people who loved us.

    I made it to the end of the beach, where the strip of sand narrowed until it disappeared beneath some rocks and water. Here, the waves rushed forward erratically. I jumped atop a large rock, narrowly missing a wave as it slammed against the face of a rock wall.

    During the last few weeks of my sister’s life, she had written that “my mom kept talking shit about my sister…Trying to pit me against her…Says that my sister should have no reason to hangout with me if she doesn’t hangout with my parents…My mom also told me to not introduce you to my sis lol.” I wondered what my mom had said about me to her over the years.

    It must have been hard for my sister to meet with me that last summer at the beach. Our sisterhood and friendship was a secret. We both knew my mom would be unhappy with her hanging out with me on her own. We were supposed to hang out again but she canceled, saying something had come up. We made other plans, but none of them worked out.

    A bird competed with me for shells, but it was looking for a quick meal rather than a keepsake. I found a few empty ones and stashed them into my straw bag.

    I had reached the end. It was time to return now.

    On my way back along the shore, I found more whole sand dollars and thought back again to that last summer with my sister at the beach, how we had combed the beach for shells and sand dollars but had found nothing intact and only broken pieces.

    I thought of her and her sun hat, her quiet smile, and all the things we knew but didn’t say to each other. My linen pockets were full and sand dollars stacked atop my hands like wide coins. If she were here, we would be sand dollar rich.

  • emerging from the grief cocoon and into springtime

    On the surface I seem to be getting by all right—I go to work, chitchat with my coworkers, wring my hands at meetings, and get things done. Then I come home, I make supper, I hang out and laugh with my husband and cat, and occasionally hang out with friends. The litter box is still changed, the laundry is still run, and the world goes on.

    But if you look closer, you will see that the grief has worn its mark on my face and body—my expression feels heavier, more solemn. I stopped wearing my false lashes. I grew my blond out and cut the colored ends. I stopped styling my hair in the mornings. I’ve pretty much stripped down my morning routine to the essentials. I gained a few pounds. I’ve grown white hairs but I attribute this to regular aging since my dad had a salt-and-pepper head of hair by his mid-thirties.

    During the late night, whenever I get a quiet moment to myself—usually after my husband has fallen asleep…I look into the mirror and see my parents—all the sacrifices, all the guilt, and the feeling of never living up to the ideal, overachieving, pure and chaste, and obedient daughter. Never enough.

    In the beginning I listened to a lot of YouTubers who talk about the dynamics of growing up with narcissistic abuse, such as Dr. Ramani Durvasula and Dr. Jerry Wise. Their videos were immensely helpful to me when I was in the throes of deep guilt and doubt—I kept asking myself, Am I the difficult one for feeling this way? Am I being unreasonable in my decision? Maybe it wasn’t that bad…I mean, it’s not like they left scars on my back from whipping, or broke any bones… Maybe it’s actually quite normal for parents to do those things to their children and demand their secrecy afterward, so maybe it’s actually quite common, but people just don’t talk about it… My brain was playing happy montages of normal moments I had experienced with my parents, as if telling me, See? It wasn’t ALL bad…I had to write down a list of all the things I experienced—Dr. Ramani calls it the “ick” list. Once I looked at the paper, the collection of all the things they did to me, I realized, absolutely not. It was not normal. And even if it were, it was wrong and very fucked up, and they must understand that to some extent if they demand so much secrecy.Subscribed

    A part of me was also scared that I would cave and return to the previous status quo, especially around Christmas. I kept getting nightmares of them showing up at my work, or in our house, demanding to speak to me, telling me about all the sacrifices they had made for me and how ungrateful I am, and downplaying all the things they did to me.

    I feared I wasn’t strong enough to maintain this unnatural decision to divorce myself from my parents. Maybe it would just be easier to go back to pretending we’re a happy family because family is so important to my mom and dad, and family was what they’d used to justify the secrecy. You keep secrets to protect your family, and to do otherwise is to be a homewrecker who is trying to tear the family apart. Other people wouldn’t understand. Only your family can…even though we do not talk about what happened. These were the rules of the house I grew up in.

    Winter was normal in a way, with the usual lovely festivities at the end of the year. But underneath the surface, my mind fell to doom and gloom amid the shorter days. My joy and energy, while present enough to participate and share the experiences with my husband, were stunted by the weight of the estrangement and the resulting loneliness. I withdrew from my outer social circles.

    I am also surprised by how everyday life seems to go on in spite of this inner turmoil. Perhaps I was alone even before the estrangement. I’ve been enjoying my weekends more—spending time with my husband and cat, writing, visiting the library, etc.

    So even though the grief continues beneath the surface, it has not wiped me out the way I feared it would.

    As the days get longer and the sun gets sunnier, I am ready for a change. I called up my hair stylist and I am going to get my hair colored again—I hadn’t done it in two years, and you know what? I think it’s time to move on from Sad Eden Era hair.

    While Dr. Ramani and Dr. Jerry’s videos were crucial in the beginning in helping me understand my feelings and why they were valid, after a while I found that the videos were pulling me back into that place of rage and bad memories, so I started watching other types of videos—writing videos, lifestyle videos, etc.

    Over time I have settled into this new normalcy. The waves are there but they lap quietly at my ankles instead of pushing me off my feet and twirling me in the water.

    I will not forget what happened to me, but I am focusing on my new life: everyday shenanigans with my husband and cat, my novel in progress, my day career, our friends, and all the things in between—soaking in the sunlight during my afternoon lunch breaks, hearing the sounds of the ocean and feeling the grains of sand between my toes, laughing at a silly joke with my loved ones… and maybe one day, I will look into the mirror late at night and see myself and feel enough.