My sister has severe learning disabilities (as well as my brother) and to this day can read and write at only a fifth grade level or so. By the time I hit sixth grade, when both of my siblings were in high school, I began helping them with their homework as I understood what they could not.
With family problems and learning disabilities, Michele was losing her grip on the world and when she was about fifteen she started cutting her wrists without anyone knowing, including myself. Then one day, my life was changed. When she was sixteen years old, I walked in the house after school and found her sitting on the floor, crying on the phone. She had gotten in another fight with my dad and had taken 20 or so Tylenol. My mother and I spent the night in the hospital with her as she got her stomach pumped and then, for three weeks, she was in the mental ward of the hospital. When she got home, she would talk to me until 2 or 3 in the morning about life, and how I could never do what she had done to herself. I had to be strong and I had to make that promise to her that I would never try to kill myself.
Our late-night talks died out when she met her first serious boyfriend, Jeremy. He was perfect for her, he loved her and it was something she had never felt so openly. He convinced her to stop cutting her wrists and made her promise to God that she would never use a knife on herself again. She buried a knife as a symbol to God in an open field where she often ran away to when she got into fights with my dad. .
Things were going well for her, that is until late one night when she arrived at his apartment and found him doing crack. His father and older brother both used the drug and thus, Jeremy was following their footsteps. For months she tried to get him to quit, to "save" him from his addiction. She cried, she yelled, she threatened to leave him, she promised him everything, but he continued with the drug.
