Have you ever had big goals in life that you wanted to accomplish? I think everyone does some are just more outgoing about it. She had minimal goals in life one was to have her own beauty salon, yeah she accomplished that and was very successful. My mom had one other goal in life, which was to watch all of her kids graduate, too bad she did not watch one of her kids graduate. My oldest brother was a dropout, my oldest sister is only one year older that me and all my mom watched her accomplish was elementary school barely, although my mother never watched me do anything astonishing. This fact always crosses my mind whenever I am working and I want to give it all up and throw it away, I just think to my myself “do it for mom she's still watching me” if I never thought this I would not be where I am today. 

My family and I started to notice my mom acting strange. She would not want to eat dinner and she seemed odd when it came to talking about each other’s day at the dinner table. She started to argue with my dad a lot more, I could not hear what was being said because they kept it pretty confidencial behind closed doors. While they were debating about whatever the topic was my sister and I would mostly be watching television together fighting over what channel we should watch. My mom had a girls weekend and my sister and I decided when she comes back she should still be happy, so we wanted to clean up the house for her. While we were cleaning up we found a couple of liquor bottles in some odd spots. We took it very lightly until we found about ten different bottle close to empty. After this happened we became very concerned. We were very angry at this, to the point to where we raged. I remember my sister and I just breaking the bottles while throwing them into the garbage can. After this occurred my sister and I felt very down about our self and our lives we did not want to go to school, did not want to play with other friends, and we had very low self esteem. My sister and I confronted Mom about this and told her “we know what is going on, and if you would like to ful-fill your goals in life you are gonna have to stop what you are doing”. She did not take it seriously and acted like she did not know what we were talking about, so we got a lot more seriously and told her “ it was either us or the bottles? ’’. Turns out her choice was not us. She started to get really sick and neither my siblings or my dad could do anything about it. My dad told her that it was not healthy for his children to she her that way. After my dad said that she moved out, there was a house for rent down the road and she knew the owners so she moved in as soon as possible. She was not working so she sold her wedding ring, the tractor, and things we got her for Christmas so she could pay for bills and food. For my tenth birthday she came to the party that was at my dad’s house. I could not stand looking at her in this way especially in front of my friends. I had so many thoughts going through my mind of what everyone was thinking of me.
 

My mother has now gotten worse. She had to leave her own house to a nursing home at the age of thirty five. My dad tried to help her as much as possible no matter how ignorant she was. This has made me realize how great of a dad I have. When I was younger I never knew what my dad was really like, because my mom would get me up in the morning tuck me in at night and I never got to see him much, also because his work was not at the house. When I was around age nine I stayed up one night and stared out the window and noticed that my dad did not sleep inside the house, he would work literally all night and sleep on the couch in the garage. I felt that was not fair at all. In other words my dad was and still is a very hard worker.

We would frequently visit my mom while she was in the nursing home. I would cry every time we visited. It was the hardest thing in the world to do, although I have never told anyone that. My mom lost lots of weight, was crippled, decrepit, and looked as if the worst had got the best of her. I asked my dad what was wrong with her? Why is she in this position? He had to tell me the truth, he told me “ Your mother loves you more than the world. Do you know that?” I agreed. My dad continued on “ She has made bad decisions, she was an alcoholic now her liver cannot take it anymore”. I was so young that I only remember what you would learn in Red Ribbon Week. I knew that when you drink too much you start to look different, I did not pay much attention during that. The family and I went to visit my mom again not know it was going to be our last. This time I did not cry. Who knows maybe it was the morning before? Maybe it was what to come that night? That whole day was a blur. All I remember is that it was a Saturday. I woke up the next day with a terrible awakening. My dad was on his knees beside my sister and my bunk beds telling us the bad news in tears. I returned to school eight days after this experience. My friends at school got told by teacher what has happened, thankfully they were very supportive of what just occurred. I went to school normally although I didn't want to talk much about it. I could tell that all my friends were a lot more careful around me with what they said and how they worded things.

  About five weeks after the death we had the funeral. Far worse than watching her die, I had to watch everyone that loved her feel miserable and I held it in as much as possible no matter how bad I wanted to cry out in sorrow, hearing all of my friends and family quietly sniffle behind made this act a lot harder to keep up. The event ended and we went to dinner with mostly family from the funeral we laughed about things she did as a kid and how she had a attitude. Everything that I reflected on the outside looked happy as if nothing had happened, although the inside of me was wanting to be alone. My friends really were the ones that made me forget about the bad things in my life and only know the good ones. My three closest friends are people I owe a lot of thanks to, these three girls have made me more outgoing and make me feel better about myself. I play all of my sports with them and we all keep each other going, even when we were younger. This is how I overcame my mom’s death.