When I was 13 I saw my father go down in the backyard. Shaking and foaming at the mouth. I wish I hadn’t see that. 30 years later can’t shake it.
While this isn’t something that haunts me, it involves me and my father and is appropriate for this thread. Given the fact that my car accident occurred just a few blocks from my parents’ home, my father was one of the first people to arrive at the scene. I had sustained a fairly bad head injury and was unconscious and there were emergency medical workers scrambling to stabilize me and find out how badly I was hurt.
It was a very grim scene at the sight of the accident. When it became known just how badly I was injured (badly ruptured aorta), they didn’t think I stood much chance of surviving. Those few minutes before I was air-lifted to a specialty hospital for emergency surgery, my father was there with me at the scene thinking he was going to lose his son.
Even to this day, I believe my father holds on to a lot of (totally irrational) guilt as to what happened to me (I became a paraplegic after the accident). I believe as my father he feels as though he should have been able to do something, anything, to keep these things from happening to me. I can’t imagine what sorts of images haunt his mind some nights but I do know the car accident that ultimately paralyzed me still haunts my father.
My mum died slightly less than two years ago, of pneumonia. It was frighteningly quick - Tuesday she was fine, but with an annoying cough, on Thursday lunchtime we turned off the ventilator and let her go. When she first went to hospital she was on oxygen and it was very difficult to have a conversation with her. I did manage to tell her that I loved her, and she said she loved me, but there was something else she was trying to say. I just couldn’t make it out. They put her under anaesthetic to tube her, but I had no idea she would never wake up again. My brother never saw her, she was already unconscious when he got to the hospital.
I’m haunted by the knowledge that I’ll never know what she was trying to say to me.
My dad died recently and it was unexpected by all, I was thousands of miles away and for the last few years he has been oddly alienating me(my wife says he talks like he is dealing with a customer when he would talk to me on the phone).
My mom has a lot of issues and problems and let a situation spiral out of control, like ignoring a black foot. It just haunts me I didn’t get to talk to him a last time or tell him I loved him, or get him help in time. On thinking of the issue I had a lot of personal questions I wanted to ask him that I’ll never get to now. It bothers me because he is the only parent I have that I really loved.
Wow, moving post. Thanks.
Was a dream many years ago in which I witnessed the stabbing of a young person at a local mall. The memory has been reduced to a slow motion blur after all these years but the feeling of watching that person die, bleeding on the floor I somehow internalized deep in my psyche. The sensation of that person fading to black I experienced viscerally, agonizingly so and rarely does a week go by after 20 + years that I don’t experience that “feeling” if only for a second.
Not exactly the worst, at least not compared to some of the other things here, but I have OCD, and a good memory. Obsessions can be agonizing, even if they’ve long passed, or have long been under control. But I’ve lived like that for a good deal of my life, now. After awhile, it’s like…the weather, or gravity. You can get used to living around them, unthinkingly, and it’s kind of hard to imagine not living with them in some form or another.
Second hand, the thing that came to mind was…serial killer (and pedophile cannibal rapist(!)) albert fish’s “confession” letter. And I ain’t linking to it.
Ugh. Oily bastard. He got The Chair, at least. It took two jolts. I’d hope it hurt, except he was a masochist. I guess one just has to hope it was terrifying. :mad:
I’m an accomplished person. I’ve got a bachelor’s degree, an excellent job, a supportive husband and happy marriage. We live below our means and are doing well financially. My family’s in good shape and I have a lot of friends and an active social life. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that I’ll never be good enough. That I’m a horrible failure and always will be.
I just want someone to be proud of me.
My sister died suddenly in 2006, when she was 29. I had talked to her the day before about her ticket to my college graduation ceremony. 4 weeks to the day she died, I was at work in front of my computer, and an email from her email account popped up.
I am a pretty strong dude, and my friends call me tough and what not. What I did next was not tough or manly at all.
I screamed at the top of my lungs, ran past my boss’s office screaming all the way into the parking lot of my work and proceeded to chain smoke cigarettes in a daze. Pretty much the entire office came out to see what the hell was going on, because I was the straight, logical, peace making, carefree dude that nobody expected anything like that from. My boss had to go onto my computer and figure out that her email address had been hacked, and what I was getting was a boner pill spam email.
I still get chills from that shit sometimes.
A childhood friend lost his left hand when a small jar of gunpowder blew up. It went off just seconds after my younger brother handed it to him.
The story you referred to in the OP. I read that Gene Weingarten story a few month’s ago after following a link from a discussion here about parents leaving their children in the car. The whole article was depressing but the thought and image contained in your spoiler stuck with me for days. I remember reading that part on my lunch break at work. I immediately started welling up at my desk and had to stop reading.