Ampora’s Story
“The first time I felt the cold numbing void of death I was eight years old. I was a daddy’s girl, as I was his first born and looked like I was solely made of his image. Although my parents split when I was four, I spent every school vacation traveling from New York to Dallas to spend time with him. I remember our last visit, he was sick, and the disease had begun to emaciate his body, but the love that beamed though him, I still carry with me until this day. After he passed away, we were told he died of lung cancer. I remember I missed a lot of school because I was too sad to learn. This was the biggest sign of my grief at the time as I loved school and was an excellent student. My younger brother and I went into counseling shortly after, but I remember he had a very different experience than me because of our parents’ separation. Unlike myself, he wouldn’t visit my dad when we were young. My brother never wanted to leave my mother, and he lost a father that he never got the opportunity to really know.
The next time death would visit, it would tear apart my world. My mother was the most beautiful, vibrant person I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. She was a PTA mom, a track mom, and a paralegal with a creative flower arrangement business on the side. She worked out three times a week and was so outwardly healthy, all the while she was secretly dying of HIV. See, because of the stigma around AIDS/HIV in the ‘80s, my family hid from us the facts that our father had died of AIDS and not lung cancer, and my mother had been slowly dying in secret for the past seven years. My mother lost her fight on October 22nd, 1994, seventeen days after her thirty-fifth birthday.
This loss had me question the validity of everything in my world. It took me a long time to accept anything at face value because of the deception. However, my mother’s last words to my brother and me were ‘Bye, my babies,’ and it has always given me the strength to face anything. My mother said those words and then took her last breath, after being in a coma for two weeks. My brother and I had traveled from her sister’s home in New Jersey back to New York to say our goodbyes. We moved the summer before to live with my aunt to start school because we all knew my mother probably wouldn’t make it through the school year. The fact that she held on just to say goodbye to her children, until this day gives me insight into the power and strength of the human spirit.
The last time death came for my heart, my baby brother, the person I was left to face the world with, protect and raise in many ways. Unfortunately, life had given him demons that compounded with our parents’ deaths, he just couldn’t overcome. He was an alcoholic and was killed in a tragic bar fight in Brooklyn. I will never forget the call in the middle of the night that notified me that I needed to make the decision to take him off life support. On my way from Los Angeles to New York, I looked up every brain surgeon in the area that I could, to see if someone would take his case. I fought with the hospital for days until I had to face the fact that nothing could be done, and I needed to let him go. Telling his fifteen-year-old daughter was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, knowing the scars that losing a parent at fifteen leaves.
I have lost many more people including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends, but losing my entire nuclear family has been the greatest loss of my life. People ask me how am I so strong or how do I live on without them? First of all, I am not “SO” strong. I am as strong as I need to be. To be here, to be present and to keep living. I have a family now of my own, a husband and three wonderful children, who will never know their grandparents or uncle, but I feel like they live on through me being the best version of myself every day. Some days like holidays and birthdays may mean that I’m a little sad, but it mostly means that I have the greatest cheering section of angels on my side rooting for me to keep going, to keep writing, to keep living until the sadness is another memory, and joy and peace are my signature.
For those of you who are grieving, know that it’s okay to grieve for as long as it takes, but also know that we are all here for a purpose and a season and whomever you have lost wants you to walk in that purpose and keep showing up to live the best life that you can. I am always comforted by the fact that God won’t give me more than I can bear and I know He’ll do the same for you.”