The first time I nearly died, I was sitting in the front seat of my mom’s car. I was about three years old, and we were out shopping. It felt like a big deal, getting to ride up front like that. We stopped at a red light, and off to our right sat a hotel parking lot.
Some woman in a car there started beeping her horn at us, impatient for the light to turn. She gave up waiting after about five seconds and floored it, smashing straight into the passenger side. The side I was sitting on. My leg got trapped between the seat and the door.
The firefighters had to pull me out. I was crying and terrified, but I wasn’t badly hurt. I got to sit in a real police car afterward, which I thought was pretty cool. Years later, I learned that the woman tried to claim the accident was my mom’s fault, but that didn’t fly because a police officer had been waiting at the same light and saw everything.
For a while after that, I was apparently scared of riding in cars, though I don’t remember that part at all. When I was four, my dad disappeared. He was gone for nine months. I still remember seeing an Ingles grocery store for the first time, a few towns over, while we were out searching for him.
We didn’t have those stores in our town, and I thought we must have traveled incredibly far. The reason he left was that his bipolar medication had stopped working properly. He worked outside, and the sun exposure had basically made the meds ineffective. In the days leading up to his disappearance, he said strange things I couldn’t understand at that age.
He told me to stop watching Lassie because that show was of the devil. He said I couldn’t use my Beauty and the Beast blanket because it hinted at the number of the Antichrist. Little me was baffled but obeyed. I know now that sudden excessive religiosity is a warning sign that his medication needs adjustment.
About four months after he vanished, his truck was found abandoned and partially wrecked two states away. That was rough on my mom. She thought he was dead for sure. Our outside cat had recently had kittens, and I used to pick them up and bring them inside to her, trying to help however I could.
Eventually, he was found wandering along an interstate several more states away. He had his jacket, his wallet, and a Bible piled neatly in the left lane. He sorted out his medication levels and has only had a few issues requiring adjustments since then. But I was traumatized for years.
When he came home, I’d latch onto his leg, terrified he’d leave again. The worst part is that he still feels guilty to this day. I’m always telling him, “Dude, it’s not your fault. It’s so not your fault.
” My dad has been a model provider and father all these years, but he carries guilt for circumstances he never intended to cause. It’s exactly why we need to talk more openly about mental health. The scariest thing that ever happened to me, or at least the one that stands out, was being stalked through the woods by a cougar. My aunt owns a big property out in the backwoods, and cougar sightings there are fairly common.
Her friends constantly call to warn her so she can bring her dogs inside. I was around six or seven, and I was exploring some old overgrown trails near her house with my mom, my cousin who was four or five, and a couple of aunts. We went pretty deep into the woods, and it started getting dark, so we turned back. Then we noticed everything had gone eerily silent.
Our parents were acting strange, scanning the trees, looking in every direction. Then we heard a low growl, too close for comfort. Looking back, it was unmistakably a cougar. The house came into view, about 200 or 250 meters away.
One of my aunts said, “Guys, we’ll race you back to the house. Go. ” My cousin and I bolted. As we ran, I saw my mom and the other aunt still staring down something in the woods and backing away slowly.
We all made it inside, locked the door, and then they told us we hadn’t been playing tag. We had been fleeing from an angry cougar. I got home early from school one day when I was about nine. My parents were out, and my brother and sister were still at their high school activities.
The doorbell rang. My neighbor brought me my cat in some strange plastic container. The cat was meowing pitifully and looked like she was in pain. Apparently, the boy next door, who was about a year younger than me, thought my cat wandering into his yard was some kind of trespassing.
He brutally mistreated her just for walking onto his property. Another neighbor saw what was happening and did her best to get the cat away from him. I couldn’t reach anyone with a car who could take her to the vet. This was before cell phones were common, so I scrambled around desperately trying to find a ride.
About twenty minutes later, I found my cat lifeless behind the sofa. The boy was put on some kind of list, and my parents and his parents made him bury my cat. When I was five, my family was driving back from a beach in Oregon. My father drove, my mother sat in the front passenger seat, I was in the middle row with my baby sister in a car seat next to me, and my older brother sat in the back.
We were in a blue minivan. That’s all I remember clearly. Down a two-lane highway with deep ditches on both sides, probably a fifteen-to-twenty-five-foot drop at a forty-five-degree decline. I remember very little about the actual crash.
The last thing I recall while inside the van was everything switching to a bird’s-eye view. I saw the entire accident happen from about fifty feet in the air. It was likely some kind of vivid concussion, because I don’t remember feeling the impact at all, just watching it. I woke up in some random woman’s arms.
She was crying heavily and trying to comfort me while I had no idea what had happened. When I watched from above, I saw myself in my mother’s arms, but I woke up with a stranger. I never knew who she was, but I’m deeply grateful to her and to everyone who stopped to help. The ambulance ride was actually fun.
I was annoyed that my brother, on the rolling stretcher, was free to move and roll around while I was completely strapped down. I remember asking a few questions before passing out again. The medics were friendly. The next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed, asking everyone I saw where my mom was.
I had a horrible gut feeling, and as a kid, the only thing I wanted in the world was my mother. There were a lot of family members crying, keeping me in the dark until they rolled me into the same room as my brother and father. That’s when everything suddenly made sense. It was the first time in my life I saw my dad cry as he explained to his two kids that their mother and sister had died in the crash.
Here’s what I know about the accident: a semi-truck came into our lane after the driver fell asleep at the wheel. A lot of prescription drugs were found in his system, and he was later found to be at fault. My father tried to cut across the highway, but the truck hit the front passenger door, where my mother was sitting. We were pushed down into the ditch, rolled a few times, and were pulled out by strangers.
My sister lost her life with a broken arm that was my fault. She was on the couch, and I walked away, leaving her to fall off. I will always carry that guilt. But my father had it worst.
I can’t imagine the life you built with the love of your life coming crashing down on you, and then being forced to raise your kids on your own. If that wasn’t hard enough, years later I learned that my grandparents bullied all the life insurance money out of him, threatening a lawsuit because, in their eyes, he had taken their daughter’s life. Still, as a man, he kept a relationship with them for ten years before I found out, because he wanted us to have as normal a life as possible. The small amount he managed to keep, he invested in college funds for my brother and me.
Growing up, we lived on an acreage in the country. We had a lot of stray farm cats that kept having kittens, and we took them in, giving them food and shelter in our shed. One summer day, my dad and I decided to mow the lawn. We had about ten acres and a pond, so we used riding mowers.
My dad needed to back the mowers out of the shed where the kittens were playing. He didn’t want to round them up first. I told him to wait so I could grab them. I was about eight.
He said not to worry, that they’d run out when the mower started. They did run. They got scared. One went the wrong direction and then turned around to run out just as my dad was backing up.
The mower ran over its poor head. It was absolutely awful. I screamed bloody murder and told my dad I hated him. My mother told me later that he cried that day.
My father, who never cries. Remembering that sweet kitten getting run over so slowly still makes me sad. I grew up in a very large household. I had seven siblings between my mother and my father, four of them full siblings.
I never really distinguished between them, and it never mattered to me. Being the youngest, I watched most of my siblings leave home one by one. By the time I was eleven, it was just me, my brother Juan, who we affectionately called Janka, and my mother, moving from house to house. We were never in danger of being homeless, as far as I know, but things were touch and go for a while.
Because we moved around so much during my formative years, my brother and I grew extremely close. We bought two copies of every PC game so we could play together whenever we could afford it, and spent night after night in his room, watching him play Warcraft or Diablo. Those were really, really good times. There was a six-year age gap between us, but it never mattered.
One completely ordinary day, my brother got in his car to go to the movies. He never came back. I still remember what he was wearing, the smell of his cologne because he was going on a date, and the casual wave he gave me as he left. If I had known it was the last time, I would have done so much more.
I would have hugged him and told him how much I loved him. But I didn’t know. I couldn’t have. The following months were torture.
I was left alone with an inconsolable mother who essentially stopped functioning. She spent entire weeks in bed, crying herself to sleep over and over, and I never really got a chance to mourn for myself. How could I? It was just me and my mother, and she had clearly been hit harder.
I was fourteen, and suddenly I was completely alone. I remember logging into our old Ultima Online account and giving his ship one last goodbye voyage. I told the boat master to go forward, then recalled out. His considerable wealth was added to mine, along with his castle and assorted belongings, but it all felt empty.
I couldn’t enjoy any of it. It would be years before I could get into another MMO without half expecting him to be there. Sometimes I’d pretend he was there, just playing with me. I’d see things that reminded me of him, and for just a second, I’d be playing with my brother again.
I knew it was all in my head, but it made me feel better. To this day, whenever I face a difficult decision, I ask myself, “What would Janka do? ” It’s crushing to realize I surpassed his age long ago. My role model was, objectively, a twenty-year-old kid just starting out in life.
I miss him dearly. My father used to take my siblings and me for long walks in the woods when we lived in Washington state. There was plenty of wilderness to get lost in. I must have been about nine, which would have made my brothers seven and five, and my sister three.
We climbed to the top of some mountain and started down the backside, where there was no trail. The brush got thicker and thicker until we could barely move. We were already committed to that route, and going back would have been harder, so we pushed deeper into the thorns. Eventually we were practically crawling through them.
My father decided he would get us out one by one. He took my three-year-old sister and went ahead, planning to come back for each of us. We heard him go off, and then we just sat there waiting. We waited, and waited, and waited.
Hours passed. No sign of him. It started getting dark. We could barely move through the thorns.
Being the oldest, I made the executive decision that we had to get ourselves out. I led the way, dragging myself through a tunnel of vicious thorns that tore at my clothes and skin. We were all covered in deep scratches. We backtracked a little and, through sheer luck, found a slightly less congested route down.
Once we cleared the thorny area, it got much easier, and we knew that if we kept going in that direction, we’d eventually reach the road. The sun fully set while we were still in the woods, but we found the road and started heading toward where we thought the car was. When we got there, it wasn’t my dad waiting for us. It was my mom, with an ambulance.
My father had stumbled over a cliff he couldn’t see through the brush and fallen ten to fifteen feet with my sister on his shoulders. He had shielded her body with his own and broken his leg in two places before dragging himself the rest of the way to the road. When I was around nine or ten, my family hosted foster children whenever we could. I’ll never forget the night a girl’s boyfriend didn’t take the breakup well.
He went from throwing rocks through a bedroom window to throwing himself through the living room picture window. My father was away working, and my mother managed to escape, but my little sister, our foster sister, and I were trapped inside. I remember getting my little sister downstairs and hiding her, though not very well, in a basement bedroom while the crazed ex smashed the upstairs windows in a fit of rage. He kicked down the locked bathroom door and held his ex hostage at knifepoint until the police arrived, which took a long time.
He screamed terrifying things about hurting her and finding us, then fought with the police when they finally arrested him. Fortunately, our foster sister was physically okay, and he never made it downstairs. The thing etched into my memory is when the police finally told my little sister and me to come up. The floors and walls, all the way to the ceiling, were covered in dark red stains, because smashing the windows had cut him badly.
When I was five and my sister was four, I woke up on a stretcher in a hospital. All I remember at first are incredibly bright lights and sterile white walls. A pretty nurse with curly blonde hair and bright red lipstick kept worrying over me. I may have been strapped down, but I don’t remember.
I have no idea why I didn’t put up a fight, because I do remember there being a tube down my throat. To this day, I can’t stand the thought of gagging or throwing up. I couldn’t understand why the nurse was so worried. I just wanted her to laugh.
So every time she gave me another shot in my arm, I would try to gasp, look at her, roll my eyes, and pretend to pass out. Then I’d open my eyes and let out a muffled laugh, and she would smile. My dad would randomly burst into the room. He looked terrified.
I didn’t understand why he kept leaving until much later, when I learned they had my sister and me in opposite rooms. Apparently, my heart stopped nine times. It wasn’t long before my sister and I found out our mother had tried to overdose us on her pills. It took another two decades before I realized she hadn’t had a psychotic break like I thought.
She was just mad at my dad for drinking and wanted to get back at him. One time, my older brother and I were home alone playing PlayStation when we heard noises coming from downstairs. Our parents were away for the day. We freaked out.
My brother snuck into the downstairs kitchen, grabbed a knife, and we hid in a tiny bathroom, waiting for whoever it was to leave. After a while, they were still making noise around the house. My brother said, “Wait here. ” Then he slowly opened the door and went out with the kitchen knife.
I’ve never been more scared in my life. It turns out my sister was home, and we both just kind of forgot we had a sister. We assumed a burglar was in the house. When I was four, I was taking a nap with my puppy in front of our fireplace.
It was the first winter in that house, so the first time we used the fireplace. Suddenly I heard a massive crack and a bloodcurdling shriek. The first one fell from the fireplace, the first flaming squirrel. It attacked.
I freaked out because this spawn of Satan was charging at full speed right at me, but then I saw it was going for my puppy. I kicked that kamikaze squirrel four feet straight into the curtain. Then the rest fell from the chimney. It was like a scene from The Lord of the Rings when the orcs pile down the mountain, except it was ten flaming baby squirrels charging out of the flames.
I couldn’t take them all. There were too many, so I fled. I watched from a distance as my dog grabbed one of those horrifying creatures and immediately dropped it because it was on fire. He fled too.
My parents made it upstairs and called the fire department. The house was singed but fine. I remember all the baby squirrels running around in little circles while badly burned. I didn’t understand what I was seeing.
I just knew it was terrifying. Looking back, it’s one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever witnessed. My mom and I went shopping for my birthday party on the day I turned five. We went to a store that was having some kind of mascot day.
There were Power Rangers, Tony the Tiger, and other characters. Barney was there too. I remember that vividly. I was obsessed with Barney.
My parents said I used to drop whatever I was doing whenever I heard the theme song so I could go watch it. When I saw him in the store, I went crazy because I wanted to talk to him. My mom agreed and pushed the cart over. He sounded just like Barney, acted like him, and looked exactly like him.
The fact that I knew it was a costume didn’t matter to a young, impressionable child like me. I loved every minute of it. After saying hi to Barney and Tony the Tiger, we went to finish our shopping. After a while, we noticed he was in every aisle we visited.
Every single one. My mom started getting worried. Her motherly instinct kicked in, and she knew Barney was following us. She decided to buy the rest of the things we needed at another store and headed for the checkout.
And, of course, this person was there too. By that point, my mom wasn’t just worried. She was alarmed. All she knew was that this stranger had been following us throughout the store, and that I was five years old and my dad wasn’t there.
We checked out as fast as we could and headed for the car. I was sitting in the little child seat in the shopping cart and looked over my mom’s shoulder. Guess who I saw. I pointed and said, “Barney.
” I was excited. He was following us out to the car. How fun. My mom started running, and she ran fast.
The only vivid image I have is looking over her shoulder and seeing Barney start running after us. It must have been awkward to run in that costume because he was waddling along just like the real character did on the show. So there I was, in a store parking lot, watching Barney chase my mom and me. We finally made it to the car.
My mom practically threw me inside before tossing in the groceries. By then, the man in the costume had caught up. He threw himself onto the hood of the car as my mom jumped into the driver’s seat. He lay there on top of the hood, literally.
My mom sped out of the parking lot, and we never saw him again. To this day, we have no idea what he was trying to accomplish. My family still talks about it. The only thing we can think of is that it was someone who knew us and was messing with us, but nobody ever confessed.
When I was five, I lived in a house with a big backyard and a fenced-off area of forest on the property. One day I was playing and running backward, because why not, I was five. I stumbled and fell onto a tall pile of sand that collapsed a bit and formed a kind of throne. Except it wasn’t just a pile of sand.
It was one of those massive one-meter anthills. Within seconds, I was covered in black ants. They were all over me, head to toe, under and on my clothes, in my hair, everywhere. I ran screaming back to the house.
My mother hosed most of them off, but it took another twenty minutes and a bath for the crawling sensation to stop. Ever since then, I’ve lived with a phobia of ants. When I was six, I woke up one morning and found out my dad was in the hospital in a coma. He had fallen backward down a flight of thirteen wooden stairs.
He was in a coma for fifteen days. I didn’t see him for at least two months. When my brother and I finally got to see him, he could only speak in a high-pitched whisper, as if it were difficult. I remember that at some point a nurse took off his shirt and undid a strap around his stomach, revealing a large tube connected to it.
She poured canned food into the tube to feed him. It was strange and horrifying, knowing that Daddy couldn’t behave the way he used to. Later that day, after we left his room, a nurse told us my dad was nowhere to be found. He was trying to leave the hospital and go home.
I think he made it to the parking lot before they found him. After that, they put a net over his bed so he couldn’t escape. While he was in the hospital, he had to relearn everything, including how to remember things. It was weird for me, but also sad.
I didn’t fully understand what was happening or why he had so many problems. Now my dad is doing just fine. He has a full-time job and raised both my brother and me on his own. He’s one of the best fathers I could ask for, even if he wasn’t always there for emotional support.
I still had a great childhood and took advantage of the opportunities he gave me. I have an awesome dad.