Strange Time Of Year For Me

This is always a strange time of year for me because back on this date when I was 12 years old...my mom's boyfriend Larry Falzone killed himself in front of me in my kitchen.

After my mom and dad divorced when I was 12, she started dating this guy and he turned out to be a real winner let me tell you. He hit her all the time and was an incredibly mean drunk.

That day however we were all at my grandfather's weld shop and he had started yelling at me for some little stupid reason and I yelled back at him this time. * I didn't do that often because he took it out on my mom* My grandpa came outside and told me to get in his truck that he would take me home *We lived with him at the time* and my mom, little brother and Larry all went in my mom's van. They left a few minutes before us.

My grandpa talked to me on the way home and told me to just try and ignore him as much as possible so I was going to and when we pulled up at his apartment I got the door keys from grandpa and ran up the stairs *he was older and slower so he always gave me the keys to open the door*

When I got inside, the tv and radio were turned up really loud and Larry was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of peppermint schnapps and my moms gun in his hand. He held the gun up and for a few moments I thought he was going to shoot me and I couldn't move or talk but he just downed the liquor and pointed the gun at me and said, "This is all your fault" then he turned the gun on himself and shot himself in the head.

I was shocked, completely and utterly shocked and didn't move for what seemed like hours. But my grandpa came up the stairs, grabbed me and pushed me outside. I ran down the stairs and over to my mom's van where my mom and little brother were at and told her that Larry had hurt himself. She ran up the stairs and started pounding on the door but my grandpa wouldn't let her in and he yelled at me to get her down stairs so I went back up and tried but she turned around and pushed me down the stairs.

The police came and so did my grandmother *I'm guessing that grandpa called them* a little while later my grandparents took me to a corner and asked me what happened when I went upstairs. I told them and they both told me not to tell anyone what I saw. I was told to tell police and everyone else that when I got upstairs he had already shot himself and I didn't see anything.

I didn't understand why they wanted me to say that but I did what I was told and we never spoke of it again... my grandpa died a year later from cancer and my grandmother had a a heart attack after open heart surgery which caused her to have brain damage and she died a year later when I was 19.

When I was 18 I had a bit of a mental break down and tried to commit suicide by taking several handfulls of my grandmothers medications. I died for 3 minutes and was unconscious for 7 days. That's when it came out to my psychiatrists that I'd been living with what happened when I was 12 for so long. I never told anyone for 6 years and couldn't ask my grandparents anything because they weren't around anymore.

I was diagnosed with PTSD and a slew of other things including depression. I think that what Larry did and what I saw really had an impact on me, more than I even realized at the time.

The things that happen to us as kids really do impact how we will be and react once we are adults, I know it has for me.

So that's why today is a strange sort of day for me.