For a long time, I thought that making the choice to survive to push past the nightmares, honor my promises to Mother, and force myself to look toward the future, was the hardest battle I would ever have to fight. I believed that once I conquered the desire to give up, the worst of the storm was finally behind me.
I was wrong. The true terror didn't come from the grief itself; it came from what my own mind did to protect me from it.
One week later, when I made decision to fight and survive, a chilling realization began to dawn on me: something was profoundly wrong with my mind.
For that single week, the nightmares had completely stopped, and I had finally fallen into a deep, silent sleep. At first, I welcomed it as a blessing. But soon, an eerie, hollow sensation settled in my chest. When I tried to recall the days following Mother's passing, I found... nothing. The agonizing hours of her final moments, the cold weight of her head in my lap as I frantically shook her, the heavy, suffocating silence of the funeral day, it had all been violently scrubbed clean.
Later, when I searched online articles out of sheer panic, I finally understood what had happened. I learned about how extreme trauma forces the brain into a survival mode, selectively locking away or deleting agonizing memories to prevent total psychological fracture. It was a biological safeguard, a cruel act of self-preservation. But for me, it felt like theft.
Even the few happy memories I had left of Mother were no longer vivid. They were wrapped in pale, foggy shades, like old photographs left out in the outside. Massive, hollow gaps yawned where my history used to be.
When that realization fully hit me back then, the fragile stability I thought I had built shattered instantly. I broke down, screaming and weeping in the empty room like a lunatic, clawing at my own hair. "No, no!" I had sobbed. "What is going on? Why can't I remember anything about my mother?"
Driven by a desperate panic, I spent the entire next day forcing my mind to work, begging it to give them back. I started to chant ,"remember, you have remember everything " . Slowly, agonizingly, the scenes returned, like the hospital room, the gravesite, the events of that tragic day. But as I sat there in the wreckage of my panic, a much crueler realization froze my blood: the memories had returned as silent films. I could see the scenes, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember my mother's voice. The warmth and cadence of her speech were gone, replaced by a deafening silence.
Lying here in the dark tonight, staring at the ceiling while my sister breathes softly beside me, all of those suppressed horrors have come flooding back. Her harsh, cutting words, calling me boring, mocking me for always being stuck in the past—pried open the scabs of those old wounds.
Hearing her scold me like that, a bitter, agonizing truth settled over my chest: My sister is right. I am still stuck in the past. I am still haunted by the ghosts of memories my own mind tried to erase, paying the eternal price for a survival I'm not even sure I deserve.'
It was a strange, hollow kind of torture—the kind of cruelty only a fractured mind could invent.
Whenever I forced those buried memories to resurface, playing them back in the theater of my mind, it felt exactly like watching an old, muted film. I could see the exact shape of her lips moving, the sorrow carved into her face, the gentle gestures of her hands. I could even remember the voices of everyone else who had been there, the murmur of the relatives, the somber words spoken by my maternal uncle, the background chatter of the mourners. Those voices remained intact, preserved in sharp detail.
But when it came to her? Absolute, deafening quiet.
It was like reading subtitles on a screen with the volume knob turned permanently down to zero. I knew what she was saying; the words were etched into my mind like a script I had memorized by heart. But the actual sound of her voice, the unique cadence, the melodic warmth, the soft, grounding pitch that used to calm my worst fears had been completely erased. It was gone, wiped away as if it had never existed at all.
Even now, lying here in the dark nearly two years later, with the shadow of my father's impending remarriage looming over the household and everything changing around me, I still cannot remember it.
I refuse to fully accept it. I still catch myself lying awake, staring at the ceiling, trying to force my brain to cough up just a single second of her spoken voice, grasping at smoke. But it never comes. It remains a blank space, a silent ghost haunting every corner of my memory. No matter how hard I try, I am forced to live with the harsh, agonizing reality: I have forgotten the sound of my own mother's voice and that's the price of staying alive.