‘Everything’s fine’ — how tragedy changed a senior’s perception

“The hardest part is pretending that everything is OK when it’s not,” senior Melissa Szenda wrote in a Facebook post on Nov. 13, 2013.

Earlier that morning, a cold one in the middle of college app season, she found out her mother had died.

For a long time, as her mother Lisa Marie Edelmann suffered through illnesses, Melissa had kept quiet. She felt that she would be foisting her problems on others, because in Saratoga “everyone seems perfect.” That day, it was sheer emotion that made her decide to tell the world.

“Growing up in a community like Saratoga, I have always felt like the outcast with my constant family issues,” she wrote. “So I kept them quiet. To anyone, even my closest friends, my life was perfect. But it’s been far from perfect.”

In the next few weeks, Melissa learned that “it's OK to be weak,” that the students around her are far from uncaring or perfect. But she didn’t know this, then. After posting, she deleted her Facebook app and wondered if anyone would care.

Simpler times

When she was 9, Melissa and her mother lived in a condo in Mountain View. This was before the series of illnesses, seizures and strokes that left her mother in a non-functioning state. These were just far simpler times, and sometimes Melissa likes to search through her memories, when she misses her mom too much.

They lived within walking distance of a 7-11, and this was “the coolest thing ever” because it meant Slurpees on summer days.

"So we began walking and I got my Slurpie and my mom got her Diet Coke," Melissa said. “As we walked back I held her hand the whole time never letting go. Then randomly I started squeezing her hand and then she would squeeze back.

It became a game, but what we both noted is that it felt like a heart beat. Squeeze after squeeze, I giggled and she laughed. To me, each ‘heart beat’ was like a silent ‘I love you.’ There was something really special about that moment.”

“It was an inseparable mother-daughter bond that could never be broken,” she said. “I guess there’s a sad part of this memory, and that is that when my mom suffered her stroke, she no longer squeezed back.”

Melissa grew up in two households, since her parents divorced early on, with her father, the custodial parent, living in Saratoga. She only has “blurps” of memory of that period, but her childhood was a happy one.

Her mother was always the life of the party — energetic, strong-willed and independent. She worked in marketing and tended to change the color of her hair because she was spontaneous. One day it was brunette, the other day it was blonde.

Of all their fond memories, Melissa misses most the sound of her mother’s voice on the countless phone calls they have shared.

“I used to take [the phone calls] for granted,” Melissa said. “She would call maybe because she was lonely or maybe just to check in, and sometimes I zoned out and tried to get off the phone with my mom as quick as possible …  but you have no idea how much I regret that, not listening to her.”

It’s different now. She has a great relationship with her stepmom and her father (“I respect him so much as a human being it’s insane”), but she’s lost her confidant, in whom she was “100 percent open.”

Thanksgiving in the hospital

It was nearing Thanksgiving 2011, when radio stations tease with the occasional Christmas song, and Melissa, an eighth grader at the time, was “9 p.m.” tired and ready to change into her pajamas.

Suddenly, her dad said they had to go to the hospital.

“It felt super weird,” she said. “I’d known that Mom was in the hospital, but I thought it wasn’t a very big deal, like, OK she’s in the hospital again.”

For a while, Edelmann had been in and out of hospitals, as she dealt with various medical issues. But this wasn’t just another hospitalization. Edelmann had a stroke and was in the intensive care unit; the doctors wanted Melissa and her father to say goodbye before they operated.

“I remember me feeling ‘What’s going on,’” she said, staring at the table. “I rubbed my eyes. It was surreal. I just remember the Christmas music, this happy Christmas music on the car as we got there. So I remember walking through the halls, it was darkish, it just felt sad.”

“We go in and I see my mom unconscious. I’m just holding her hand, just silent. My dad is expecting me to say something but I couldn't say anything, I was just … I was speechless, didn’t know what to say.”

“The only thing I could say was ‘I love you Mommy I love you Mommy,’” Melissa said. “And then we went home.”

At Redwood Middle School the next morning, she kept silent about her troubles.

It was a common pattern for Melissa. When her mother was at her house recovering and Melissa had to care for her, she didn’t say a thing to her friends. When she saw her mother have a seizure — she kept calling her name, her mother wouldn’t respond — Melissa went to school and didn’t tell a soul.

“I always tried to put this front on, just wanted to fit in,” she said. “I really liked school because I liked the escape where everyone is OK in school, it was almost like a pretend world — because everyone in Saratoga acts like everything’s OK, and I think it’s just part of…”

She pauses.

“Everyone keeps closed.’’

There, but not ‘there’

A year after the surgery in Thanksgiving, her mother was housed in a rehabilitation center, after a long, emotional series of medical problems that Melissa had to witness first hand.

Melissa recalled the first time she entered the rehab center. She walked down the hallways and saw, everywhere, old people, sick people.

“The first time I walked into there it felt like death,” Melissa said.

When she asked her father if there was a better place, he shook his head. It was the best place in the entire South Bay.

Her mother had grown extremely thin, and visibly unwell. Upon seeing her, Melissa’s fragile hopefulness shattered.

“It just didn't feel like [the patients] left,” she said. “That’s when I realized, OK, this might not go back to how it used to be.”

She tried to visit every weekend, but sometimes she said she just couldn’t bring herself to do so.

“I didn’t see her as often as I should have,” she said. “Every time I would go there it ruined my entire day, my entire week.”

Melissa shakes her head, and struggles to speak. It hurts, more than most things, when she wonders if she could have done more.

“The only thing I could do was hold her hand, tell her ‘I love you,’” Melissa said. “Words couldn't really come to my mind, I told her what's going on, ‘Oh there was prom and stuff,’ but there was a big chunk of me that knew she couldn't hear me anyway.”

“It was hard, that’s the only word I can use, insanely difficult, to see this person I had always looked up to, expected to be there for me to completely shut down.”

Death in the family

October was prime college season, and Melissa had finalized her list of schools. The night before, she had spent time “stressing about stupid things.” The next day, though, the last thing she could think about was college.

Tears filled her eyes, and she felt her pulse begin to rise. Her father's voice cracked as he said, "Melissa, we need to talk to you.”

“I didn’t need to hear his words to know what had happened,” she said. “It had been coming for so long, but somehow as the words drifted off his lips, it all became real. Everything I had been running from, burying away, was real again.

‘Your mom passed away.’”

It was painless, she heard her father and stepmom say, as they too started crying. She just fell asleep. She’s free now. No longer trapped inside a motionless body.

“I had lost the person that brought me into this world and it was devastating,” she said. “And I had never felt so alone.”

Onwards

For a while, after losing her mom, Melissa had wanted to become a therapist or social worker. But she’s been drawn to journalism. The executive producer of SHSTV, Melissa recently was admitted to the Walter Cronkite School of

Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State and is “obsessed with it.”

These days, Melissa has plenty of things to occupy herself with. But while she has plenty of support around her, that doesn’t mean the pain has gone away.

More than anything, she misses the phone calls with her mother.

“The day my mom stopped calling was a terrible and painful day,” she said. “I actually saved all of her voicemails on my old phone and I prayed they would still be there, so I could still have that part of her and hear her voice once more.”

She checked last month, and the voicemails are gone.

Opening up

On that day last November, Melissa wrote the Facebook status, posted it, logged off, deleted her Facebook app, turned off her phone and took a long shower. She had broken her silence and wanted to forget it.

“I’m sure I will regret this Facebook post the second I post it, however I know it’s what my mom would have wanted,” she wrote. “I think she knows I have been holding it in for too long, and it’s time to just be free from it all.”

Then she came back online, one shower later. There was “just a little heart, or people who said ‘Hey I’m here for you.’” She started crying.

“It was like this huge weight had been lifted,” she said. “OK, it’s out there now. I don't have anything else to hide. This is my life and people know.”

The support offered by her friends, even people she didn’t know, changed the way she remembered that day.

“It was weird, I was almost happy on such a sad day,” she said. “The whole time I thought [people] would push me away like ‘Wow you’re an outsider’ but they did the opposite.”

Melissa said she is no longer afraid of telling the truth — even if it breaks with the “perfect” image others might aspire to have.

“Honestly,” she said, “being strong all the time isn’t healthy. It’s OK to be weak.”