The Death of My Sister and How We Handled It

No one would ever imagine that a doorbell ringing would be the worst thing to hear. In my family, a doorbell rang that would change the course of my life forever. My family has never been one of stability. One might say I came from a ‘broken’ family. My parents tried to combine two families into one, but unfortunately things did not work out. My mothers’ first children would not accept my father, for he brought a lot of negativity. My mother was not perfect either; her previous marriage fell apart and she was clinically depressed. Just in this small description of my family, I would have to say we are very low on the strong scale, putting us at crisis prone equaling a one. With this in mind, one could see adding a crisis into this mess would just weaken us even more, for we would not know how to cope with it.

Unfortunately, a crisis did in fact enter my family when I was young, which altered my childhood. Without going into much detail on the subject, my sister Jo’Anna was murdered. This sister was my mother’s first child. After this crisis, my mother shut down. After the funeral took place, she still had eight other kids on her plate. My mother went into a shock and did not come out of it for years. In this result, two of my siblings went to live with their father across the country, two others moved on to college life, and the other two moved out fending for themselves. The only children left at home were the ones that could not leave, my sister and me. As the years went by, my mother still mourned over the death of Jo’Anna and never let her go. Her anger at the situation fell upon us. My dad was constantly working. So that left me and my sister in the house with a mother that is unable to cope with the loss, and has develope...

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...filled my heart and I did not want to admit to someone else let alone myself that I felt this way. If I would have done so, many of my problems might have been solved earlier in life.

Lastly, one needs to look at all possibilities to resolve the crisis. To be honest, we did not look at what we could do to resolve it. At the time, nothing could bring back Jo’Anna and that was that. But we could resolve the emotions that came from the death. If therapy would have been done to begin with, maybe my life would have been happier and had a mother figure in the early years.

In closing, the death of my sister appeared to shape my life to what it is today. We did not handle the crisis in the correct manner, though that is how life is. One ring on the door bell will change your life, for better or worse, it is just how you handle the crisis that determines your fate.