5 things I learned from losing my parents
5 things I learned from losing my parents.
By Corinne Irizarry @corinneirizarry
Let me preface this by saying that I’m a strange animal... if you ever get the chance to get to know me on a personal level... you’ll understand what I mean by that... I will tell you this strange tidbit... I predicted the deaths of both of my parents before anyone told me they were gone.
I was 13 when my father died and I remember the day as if it were yesterday, I had spent a great day hanging out with our neighbor... we went to the mall, made a lip-sync video of under the bridge by the Red Hot Chili peppers.. good times.
we get back to the neighbor’s house and the phone rings, I already knew it was my mother on the other end. She sounded angry but the type of angry that drives sadness.. she tells me to come to where she is... Laurie asks me what’s wrong.. before my mind can process the question, I had an answer that still floors me to this day... I don’t know, she’s probably going to tell me my father died.
Ok, bye...
I left, got to my mother & I was right... Which leads me to my first lesson.
1. Life goes on regardless of who you lose - after my father died we went to the funeral where I got to learn more about him and how much everyone thought I looked like him and stories upon stories about how much he loved me and wanted to be in my life. It hurt me that I didn’t get the opportunity to have a father-daughter relationship in the traditional sense, but from the time I did get to spend with him, he made it very clear to me that he wanted me to be his shiniest star... I was the only girl out of his 5 children (he had 4 boys with his second wife). At an early age, I always knew I wanted to be an entertainer.. it was seeping out of me from when I was a toddler... My father knew it and was my biggest fan. I also think he knew that his time here on earth was limited, I mean why else would we have had the death talk when I was 11. He told me there would come a time that he would be gone and the most important thing to remember is that life goes on. He taught me that pain is temporary but, love is everlasting. I knew he would always be with me and I feel his love every time I check something off of my goals list. I’m not shitting on the grieving process people go through when they lose someone but, grieving the loss of a parent can throw your entire life off course if you’re not grounded and don’t realize how important your life is as much as the one that you just lost. We can’t lose ourselves when we lose someone otherwise, why are we even here. Honoring the life of my parents with my successes has become my life’s passion. After the loss of my mother, I decided to put my efforts towards my career instead of considering motherhood.
2. Not everyone is meant to have children. I lost my mother when I was 18 and a senior in High School.. we had a love-hate relationship that evolved after my father’s death... I didn’t understand her life struggles which is what kept me from my father, I just blamed her. As I was just entering my senior year, things were starting to look up for me. I was awarded student of the month, I was getting a scholarship, I had just turned 18 in July, I was feeling great.. it was a Friday night and there was a phone call... I was wide awake a few seconds before the phone rang. My mother was gone. I didn’t need anyone to tell me. I knew. Everything in my body knew. I went through the motions... I had to handle everything... I was a baby but, still legally an adult.. it would be months before my family told me that my mother died during extreme complications while in labor with my youngest brother. Losing my mother broke me. Although our last conversation we made up and we were on good terms, I felt an emptiness in my soul when she passed.. especially knowing she died to bring my brother into this world... I knew from that moment on that I would never birth children. I had to end the cycle of generational trauma that had already been keenly thrust upon me and my siblings and the only way I see that happening is by not procreating. I had already spent most of my life helping raise my siblings from the age of 9. The idea of going through all of it all over again just sends a flying kick to my uterus. The truth of the matter is that having children isn’t for everyone and the sooner you know which side of that coin you land on, you can really dig into who you want to be and what your passions in life really are.
3. Addiction doesn’t make the pain go away. - I’m not Superman in any way and to say that I survived my parent’s death without some residual PTSD would be a flat-out lie. Although my father’s death steered me clear away from drugs and alcohol and my mother’s death turned off the mommy clock... there wasn’t anything that kept me from becoming a sex addict to deal with my pent-up anger and sadness. I had it bad... I needed to feel something and the cat and mouse chase of acquiring dick became a drug to me. I wanted whoever anyone else said I couldn’t have. I used my humor, charm, and my sex appeal to get any man or woman I wanted. It wasn’t until I was in my late 30’s where I connected that I was trying to fill a void that would never be filled by chasing meaningless sex all over the country. I had an epiphany that love for myself had to outweigh the high sex with whatever guy or girl I was hooking up with. I found the peace I needed right before I met my husband who was also just supposed to be a one-night stand.. 8 years later.. welp, I was wrong about the man who knocked the hoe out of me…
4. Won’t have to deal with my significant other not being accepted by my parents or having our parents meet. - so, I found my forever man... now what. Disclaimer: I was married before.. big mistake. My ex’s mother hated me because I am a Puerto Rican woman and she wanted her white son to do better, be better, most importantly live better than and I quote she said, “if you want to be with roaches, you can go live with the roaches.. “ well, at least I’m not an Amoeba was my response from the other room less than 2 feet away from where they were talking.
It hurt deep, this woman who I wanted to connect with on a motherly level just basically told me with one sentence that I wasn’t good enough for her white child. Welp, I proved that bitch wrong and married her son out of spite. That’s right. I was that petty. You don’t want me to have him, I’ll just take him. I also learned that valuable lesson that you will never change a racist woman’s mind when it comes to her child. We divorced and I moved to LA.
It’s bittersweet not having to be paranoid about having my parents be accepting of the one I chose to marry. Especially, now that I am fortunate enough to have in-laws that completely accept me and love me for who I am. It truly makes the love my husband and I share that more special to me. It’s an unfortunate perk but, I know my parents would’ve loved him and my mother definitely would’ve tried to sleep with him.
5. What it means to be the strong one in the family.
During the pandemic I became an ordained minister so that I could be the one to officiate my cousin’s wedding. Two weeks before the wedding another cousin who I considered a brother passed away suddenly. I had the honor of officiating his funeral and tried to play the role of the glue that holds the family together as everyone was falling apart. As the only one in our entire family to lose both parents, I understood the pain everyone was feeling... I helped my cousin’s brother break the news to his daughter that her uncle wasn’t coming back from vacation. This by any means is one of the most difficult things one will ever have to do. I used Disney to explain death and I strongly recommend you do the same if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. We celebrated his life, laughed at our funny childhood storied and thanked god that he was now in a better place and no longer in pain. Death is a tragedy but, it’s also a reminder that we need to always be checking in with the ones we love because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed for anyone.
Being strong comes with the territory of overcoming tragedies. Being able to hold it all together for family, let alone yourself while the world around you seems to be collapsing is not something that comes easily by any means.. but, I can tell you this... losing my parents gave me the strength I needed to understand that life does indeed go on and that love is the only thing that makes the pain tolerable enough to still be able to find the joy in life and most importantly fuels my passion to succeed.
