Seven Days

Preface

A week after my sixteenth birthday, my father said six words to me that changed my life.

He pulled up to the front of the home I lived in at the time, met me in the driveway, and said: “It’s your mother. She’s dead, Dian.”

Four gunshots. One of them hit the wall between her bedroom and my two-and-a-half-year-old brother’s room. One hit the floor. And two hit my mother in the stomach.

She died in minutes. Actually, I read that on the death certificate months afterward. My grandparents thought I was too young to know any of the details. Even at sixteen, I knew that, had I been older, they still wouldn’t have talked any more about the incident to me.

I had no one to talk to. My grandmother was guilt stricken because she’d said no when her daughter told her she wanted to leave her boyfriend, Steven, and move back into her childhood home. My grandfather believed my mother got what she deserved; after all, she hadn’t been strong enough to leave him sooner. My uncle was heartbroken at losing his only sister, and learned to keep it all inside—when you’re heartbroken, no one else wants to hear about it. My father was stunned at losing his former wife, the mother of his only child, and looked to God for a reason. And me? I looked around and tried to make sense of it all. Would anything have changed if my grandmother had said yes? Did my mother really deserve her death because she was too weak to leave her boyfriend? Should I keep my heartache to myself because no one wants to hear about it? Should I ask God what to do?

When my mother died, I lost her completely. But this story is not about her death.

I spent the next decade and a half wondering when and how my father would die. Not dreading his death, but wanting to know the “when” so I could control the “how.” At least, how I would deal with it.

My mother died unexpectedly, abruptly; my father gave me time to adjust. Time to say good-bye.

He gave me seven days.