When mental illness afflicts a loved one, loss does not only come in the form

of death; it comes as missing person advertisements and paper work and months of
anxiety and fear as you wait for the police to find your mother. It comes as the
unraveling of a vibrant person with a great sense of humor, undying loyalty, and
unselfish generosity. It comes as family feuds formed from accusations of domestic
violence. It comes as sleepless nights. It comes as a childhood characterized by
depression. It comes, it comes, it comes. For the families of the afflicted, loss
becomes an inevitable familiarity. Despite all the loss derived from mental illness,
however, light does shine through in the forms of inspiration, motivation and a
rejuvenated need for success. Finding these three positive forces that have come
from the heavy passing of my mother due in part to schizoaffective disorder marked
my transition from childhood into adulthood as the necessity for maturity arose.
The first time I lost my mother, I was seven years old; she ran away under a
delusion that she was meant to save the world. During that time I could not be
comforted; I spent each night sobbing to sleep, until finally one night my agnostic
father told me to pray. With the shaky foundation of belief that my mother had
established in me to guide me, I did pray. Six months later, my prayers were
answered. While those six months in which my mother was missing were some of
the hardest of my life, they gifted me with a true spiritual relationship that many
people my age, and even older, lack.
The last time I lost my mother, I was sixteen years old. She had been missing
for nearly a year, and life had gone on; by this point in my life, she had run away
too many times to count, and I was calloused. Her absence was my normal.
However, this particular time something in my heart told me she would not be
coming back, but that made the news no easier to hear when my father told me
that my mother had passed. She had been in the Bronx, unaware that she had
diabetes and thus suffered a diabetic coma; she developed pneumonia while in the
coma. She had one heart attack, two heart attacks; the doctors revived her. The
third heart attack killed her. I could not fathom the suffering my mother
experienced, but more so I could not fathom her strength: to the very end, she
fought. Her strength motivates me to fight the way she fought against all odds
throughout her entire life and to harbor the same strength as she did.
While helping my uncle to plan my mothers funeral, he told me not to
become dissolute because of her loss, but instead to strive to make her proud. Since
then, I have fixated on succeeding for her. She deserves to see all the things she
missed during life because she couldnt be around; she deserves to see me perform
in shows, deserves to see my good report cards, deserves to see me graduate.
While my mother is no longer here with me in life, she lives on in my heart, and her
presence guides me towards the successful life I want to live.
Loss is an inevitability for every human being on the face of the earth;
however, without loss and the associated suffering, how could people learn and
change? Lessons learned through adversity are those most valuable. Although loss
causes strife, the beauty of the growth that it causes outweighs the pain. Life offers

the choice to allow hardship to strike us down and curse us, or the choice to grow
even amidst challenges and suffering; therefore, to be blessed by what pains us.
Using this understanding of loss to guide emotionality is what differentiates children
and adults.