'They're dead.' In disbelief, my response was unfiltered. 'What?' Followed by the F word. A wave of emotion rushed through me. My chest tightened. My body went cold. I could not immediately find the words to offer condolences, not because I did not feel them deeply, but because inside, my many parts were experiencing a collective shock. When you live with dissociative identity disorder (DID), news like this does not land in one place. It ricochets across all parts within.
Breaking down the walls of denial in my DID system of parts has been anything but easy, but it has been necessary to thrive. I was sitting across the table from my closest friend from graduate school as we co-worked. She is also a mob daughter, but from a different lineage. We were discussing how only now, in 2026, am I fully grasping who my father actually was, despite beginning trauma-informed therapy in 2012 and spending a life savings to survive, understand, and heal.
