Shell’s Perspective

Hello everyone! Jay spent some time this weekend writing this post for you. We both have been busy trying to get our schoolwork done so we can get out of school early and have more time to write our book and post on our blog. We are almost done with school! In the meantime, Jay wrote this post and her caption from the musical Hamilton says it all, “Dying is easy… Living is harder”. As a mom, watching Jay struggle and learn how to live with grief has been hard to watch because I can’t protect her from the pain. At the same time, I am over- joyed to be able to have front row seat to watch her grow. It has been an honor and pure joy to watch Jay grow into an amazing young woman. Her strength, wisdom, clarity, kindness, courage, power, energy and determination are powerful qualities that she carries with grace and her passion for life that make this world a better place. I hope you enjoy her perspective of life after watching her father die. I am so proud of the women she is becoming; she turned her pain into power.

Jay’s Perspective

When you’re young and dealing with witnessing the death of a loved one as close as your father, so much happens during and after that it feels like you’ve already lived a full life. Someone told me on my sixteenth birthday that this was an exciting part of being a teenager, but I didn’t see what could possibly be so exciting about it. I always joke I’m ready to retire, but the fact is – I’m seventeen. My life is just beginning. This sounds exciting, but to me it used to sound exhausting. Honestly, my youth still seems exhausting and tedious at times. I watched my father die a slow, painful death. I was there for fifteen months of watching my father constantly be sick and in and out of the hospital; now I’m supposed to be excited to go out and start my life?

For the first few years after my dad’s death, I had a really hard time with this. How was I supposed to go start a life when I saw my dad’s life end in an instant? Yes, I know he was sick for fifteen months, but it still only took him less than a second to die. One minute he was alive and suffering in his hospice bed; he was holding my hand and laboring for breath. Then he heaved a big breath in and simply never breathed out again. His eyes glazed over and his life was over, just like that. Despite all the hospital visits, all the chemo, all the radiation, it just took one second for it all to end. There was a cruel simplicity to death. Of course, it’s physiologically complicated with the order in which the organs such down and so on… But there’s still that one cruel second in that process where suddenly, you no longer exist.

I’m so grateful I was there and got to be with my dad in his final moments. I would have been upset if I couldn’t have spent this precious time with him, and to this day I take great comfort in knowing that he died while holding my hand. At the same time though, his death caused me to live in a constant state of existential crisis. Why should I go out and live my life and do stupid teenager things when it will all eventually end in death? Why did it matter? I didn’t just watch my dad die, I watched the after effects. When I was twelve, I watched how people stick around for the first few months and then seemingly vanish, never to be heard from again. I saw and still see how nobody wants to talk about my dad, or how they get uncomfortable when I talk about him. No matter how funny the story about him is, there’s always a moment when the entire mood of the room drops into uncomfortable silence. He’s dead, and I guess it reminds people of their own mortality. But if nobody talks about him and acknowledges that he was here, then what was the point of his ever existing? And if that’s the case, I would wonder, then what’s the point of my existing if I’m just going to die and be forgotten like my dad?

My solution to the problem was simple: make such a big impact on the world that people would have to remember me. I figured if I made a big enough impact, I’d live forever in history books. I know it’s not exactly perfect logic, but keep in mind that I was about fourteen when I found the cure to existential crisis. I thought that even if the only thing keeping my memory alive was a bunch of future freshman students being forced to write papers on my contributions to the world, at least it was better than nothing. The only alternative I could think of was love and family, and what happens when those people die and there’s no one left to tell stories about you?

I thought my solution was brilliant, but here’s the problem with my plan: trying to change the world forever is hard. I put a lot of pressure on myself to be the best at everything after I adopted this way of thinking. I basically made my life a living hell. Nothing I did was good enough for me. I love to perform, so I put pressure on myself to be so good that my legacy would last forever. I stopped giving myself room to learn and make mistakes. There is no room for mistakes when you’re trying to be the best at everything! This attitude made me slowly start hating performing because I took all the fun out of it. It was made even worse by the fact that no one was doing this to me; I was doing this to myself at all times. If I couldn’t get that one note right in that one song assigned in a musical theatre class, how was I going to win a Tony award and go down in history? I thought I had to be absolutely perfect at everything at my very first try. This is such a destructive and dangerous mindset, because I know now that mistakes are how we learn. But at the time? My thought process was: mistakes equal failure, failure equals mediocrity, and mediocrity equals an unfulfilled life and then dying and being forgotten like you never existed.

Once I realized there was no way I could perfectly perform anything on the very first time, I wish I could say I developed a healthier mindset and accepted mistakes as a part of life. Alas, I did not. I thought I was a failure and would never be good enough, so what was the point? My mental health took a huge dip downwards. I thought my life meant nothing. Sure, I had my mom, but she was one person out of billions on earth. The world couldn’t care less whether I existed or not, so why did I? Life is full of trials and tribulations, and all for what? So you can work through your issues, die, and be forgotten?

This is when I started thinking about my dad a lot more. As I write this, I really wish I had developed a healthier mindset. This makes me really appreciate where I’m at today and how much I’ve grown, because at fourteen I thought I’d be better off just waiting for death. I was never suicidal, I could never to that to my mom. But I did wish that I had never existed at all. You know that lyric in Queen’s Bohemian Rhaspody? “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.” That was me at age fourteen and a little bit of fifteen in a nutshell. My dad probably wasn’t worried about his legacy. If I died young, then I didn’t have to worry about my legacy because I was too young to do anything substantial. Then I could avoid the stress of making a legacy and finding my way in a cruel, unforgiving world. I could stop missing my dad and papa because I would be with them. Maybe being dead provides a better perspective on life too.

Those were my darkest grief days. I’m not ashamed of it, but I really wish I had never adopted this idea of perfection or death. I was at a point where life seemed meaningless and my only hope for going forward was, “well, at least I’ll die one day”. Then some point in January after my fifteenth birthday, I don’t know exactly how or why, I just started to feel better about life. It was like a switch flipped. Looking back, I think all the darkness came from falling deep down a rabbit hole of grief. My darkness happened from roughly September 2017 to December 2017. My mom and I have a really hard time from September to December, because that’s when crucial moments in my dad’s cancer journey and my papa’s stroke happened. Once the grief pain let up in the new year, I think I was able to think more clearly. I don’t remember specifics, but I’m sure my mom played a role in it too. I didn’t tell her anything at the time because I didn’t want her freaking out, but I really wish I had told her so she could have helped me out of that funk sooner. I think her very existence just helped me adopt a healthier mindset though.

This wasn’t the last time I would demand perfection of myself, but I never took it to such extremes again. The last time I did this to myself, I was sixteen and in an honors college class plus a college literature class, honors high school classes, and advanced musical theater classes. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you demand perfection from each section of your life, things get pretty hectic. I don’t know if I told my mom this time or if she just saw how I was riddled with anxiety, but she was directly involved in helping me not letting me get too dark that time around.

I’m seventeen now, and so far I haven’t had those feelings since  spring of 2019. I’m trying to keep it that way. I know that death isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for life, and I’ve learned to acknowledge the things that make life worth living. Yes, life sucks sometimes. Trust me, I know. But we have control over our mindset and how we choose to live our lives. Perfection isn’t everything; it’s dangerous. All we can do is just embrace the things we love about life and try to surround ourselves with goodness as much as possible. I’m still learning how to not be over-critical of myself. Maybe that will be something I’ll always have to work on; I don’t know. But I’ve even learned that it’s okay to say phrases like “I don’t know” and not be a frazzled mess looking for answers. I’m okay just enjoying time with my family, looking for the good in the world, and laughing as I make mistakes and learn from them. I’ve learned from my mom that I can control what I do and don’t allow in my life, and that’s had a powerful impact on my mindset.

I’m not perfect. I will never be perfect, and no one ever will be perfect. It’s unattainable. I used to think this was crazy talk, but it’s true. We don’t have to put all this pressure on ourselves and be miserable in life just to be remembered in death. Lack of perfection does not mean we can’t be fantastic and wonderful with our mistakes and imperfections. Mistakes are a part of life; I know that now. I used to think that family wasn’t enough to keep a legacy alive because those that knew you in life would die eventually and you’d still be forgotten. But you know what? That’s not necessarily true. My mom loved her grandpa so much that she still tells me stories about him, and I’ll tell stories about him too. He was an amazing man despite the fact he never made history. He fled Europe and survived both world wars. He made it through the Great Depression and best of all, he respected his wife and treated her as his equal in a time when that wasn’t exactly normal. He was just a man living his life, and his story is told to this day. Maybe I can be just a girl living my life how I see fit, and maybe that can be enough. Maybe a legacy doesn’t matter; we just have to embrace the time we are gifted, take charge of our lives, and try to enjoy our lives as much as possible while we can.

Aloha and gratitude,

Jay and Shell