I Found My Mom’s Suicide Note After She Tried To Kill Herself

2:47 AM, I walk into my mom’s room to ask her to put her phone on silent because her typing on her iPhone is disrupting me from studying. I never stopped to ask why she was awake at almost three in the morning anyway. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia about eight years ago. She takes medication every night at around nine o’clock and is asleep within 15 minutes.

I was too selfish.

6:04 AM, I wake up to hear the floorboards outside my bedroom creak as my mom walks from her bedroom across the hall from mine to the kitchen. She walks back into her bedroom and shuts the door. Why does she have to be so loud? I’m exhausted. I have a major exam in five hours; why am I commuting to college?

I was too selfish.

10:23 AM, I hear her shriek my name. I wake up immediately. I jump out of bed and run to my bedroom door and open it. She’s lying on the floor; eyes closed, and is slurring as she says, “I need you to take me to the hospital. Please take me to the hospital.” I try lifting her up, but I’m a 5’1” 90-pound 18-year-old girl and she’s a 5’3” 140-pound 52-year-old woman. I can’t lift her up. So I call 911. I thought she fell, but when the 911 operator asked what was wrong, she told me that she had taken some pills. She tried to kill herself.

I found the bottle of Perphenazine on her bedside table. The 911 operator asked how much she took but my mom didn’t know. I tried doing the math by subtracting how many pills were still in the bottle by how much should have been in the bottle but the prescription was dated so long ago that the pills should have already been finished. I’m trying to wipe away my tears and be strong for my mom while communicating with the 911 operator and trying to stop myself from shaking, but my mom’s on our living room couch hardly conscious. I call my sister Aysha, I call my dad. The police officers came and left so fast it was in the blink of an eye. The next thing I know I’m standing in my living room staring at the wall looking around…the paramedics left our home a complete mess.

I get to the hospital. I have her wallet and a list of her medications and her phone with me in my purse because I knew the nurses and doctors were going to ask for information that I didn’t know off the top of my head. My mom’s been hospitalized way too many times before. I know the rundown. I’m pacing in the ER hallway while I hear my mom complaining about drinking liquid charcoal. It was supposed to coat her stomach so her stomach wouldn’t absorb any more of the medication she already ingested. She’s puking. I’m crying. I can hardly look at her. She just didn’t get it. How could she do this to me? We live alone. I’m only 18 years old. I’m in college. My paychecks from BMW are no more than $200 a week on the regular. I can’t do this alone.

I was too selfish.

I rewind the past 12 hours in my head. What was she doing on her phone at 3 in the morning? I pull out her phone from my purse and start snooping around to find an email she sent to me at 2:59 AM. At first I’m thinking to myself, “Damn it Mom. I told you I don’t use that email anymore.” And then I open it.

I was too selfish.

“Alia and Aysha. I love you. I’m sorry. My house in Florida belongs to you two. Love Always, Mom.”

What the hell? That’s what she thinks I’m worried about? I’ll be crying over her casket—oh, but at least the house in Florida belongs to my sister and I! I’ll graduate from college and be miserable that my mom won’t be there for it, but at least I can party it up in Tampa this summer! My children will never know their grandma, but at least they’ll know their Florida house. That’s what you think I care about, mom?

I was too selfish.

Does she know me? I could have sworn my ears were steaming. So I left the hospital. I was heartbroken. This is what she thought I cared about. She must have never known me.

I was too selfish.