num_pages: 110
description: It was the spring of 1989. I was sixteen years old a junior in high school and an honors student. I had what every teenager wants: a stable family a nice home in the suburbs a great group of friends big plans for my future and no reason to believe that any of that would ever change. Then came my mother's psychosis. I experienced first-hand the terror of watching someone I loved transform into a monster the terror of discovering that I was to be her primary victim. For years Ive lived with the sadness of knowing that she too was a helpless victim  a victim of a terrible disease that consumed and destroyed the strong and caring woman I had once called Mom. My mother's illness took everything. My family my home my friends my future. A year and a half later I would be living alone on the street on the other side of the country wondering whether I could even survive on my own. But I did. That was how my mother - my real mother - raised me. To survive. She too was a survivor. It wasn't until last year that I learned that she had died - in 2007. No one will ever know her side of the story now. But perhaps at last its time for me to tell mine.
language: English
title: On Hearing of My Mother's Death Six Years After It Happened: A Daughter's Memoir of Mental Illness
publisher: None