Chapter Two of Goodbye, Good Night, and Good Riddance: Why I’m actually dead and how I got here

Chapter Two of Goodbye, Good Night and Good Riddance

Jul 11, 2025

Why I’m actually dead and how I got here

Obviously, I wasn’t doing great, we can grasp that. I was just so sick and tired of everyone around me, the people who were supposed to love me completely screwing me over, and honestly I blame my impulsivity for almost all of this. I guess that’s more of a “me” issue than a “them” issue. Therapy probably would have sufficed if I stopped blowing it off all the time. Remembering to take my medication every day instead of every two or three days for the last year of my life might have helped too. It’s hard to remember to do those day-to-day things when you’re drunk most of the time. I barely had enough energy to remember to eat or sleep, let alone shower. There’s no way I was remembering to do anything beyond that.

I’m still mentally in a place where it’s really hard for me to not blame everyone around me for killing myself. I just wanted to get away from everyone so badly that I truly felt like I had no other choice. Maybe if I was rich enough to buy a cabin deep in a forest I might have picked that instead, but that clearly wasn’t an option, so here we are.

It’s hard for me to not cackle at the thought of taking the time to write a list of everyone I didn’t want at my funeral. I just want them to think about what they did to me and let it eat away at their soul for the rest of their lives until the day they get here. Heaven and Hell aren’t real; that’s what I’ve learned since getting here. It’s just a different form of reality. Luckily for them this isn’t the type of place you can just run into people, and they’ll get to kick rocks for all of forever when it comes to seeing me again.

“Bunny.” I heard a stern voice while I had these thoughts. “Your energy is loud, the anger still strong. This isn’t going to help you get to the light.”

I somehow turned Grandma Lizzie’s voice off. It sounded like I was turning the knob on a radio to a different station. I didn’t want to hear it. Maybe this really was just Hell- staying pissed off over everything that happened while you were alive and just stewing in it until the end of time.

Anyway, back to how I got here.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I was already teetering, I hadn’t been doing well for the better part of a year. Mom was yelling at me everyday for being drunk all the time. She said I stunk because I always forgot to shower from sleeping in too late after a late night of drowning in a bottle to keep my emotions at bay. She was worried I would lose my job, and she told me if I did she was going to kick me out of the house. The stress just kept piling on until it was crushing my entire existence. I was aware my once full, thick brown hair had lost its shine and looked no better than a bird’s nest wadded up on my head every day, that glimmers of gray could be seen throughout thanks to the stress I subjected myself to, and that my once full, muscular frame had become wiry and frail. I didn’t understand why she could see that I was suffering and instead of wanting to help, she wanted to punish me for it.

I had moved back home six months before that point when my boyfriend Sully and I were breaking up for what felt like the first real time. We were fighting constantly, and instead of letting me go, he was stringing me along for months. I was being an idiot. He had me really thinking everything might get better, that we could get back together. I could tell that maybe, if he was serious, I would really quit drinking. I had high hopes for the future. Clearly I had bigger issues I chose to ignore by letting the trajectory of my life stay in the hands of a serial cheater and pathological liar.

The day I died, I got into an argument with my mom. I hadn’t drank for a week and I was really trying to do better. I was showering, eating, and remembering my meds, not that that helped much because they hadn’t really built up in my system. She didn’t believe that I was trying to do better, and she yelled at me for choosing to work at a big box grocery store, reminding me that I was wasting my chemistry degree. She made me feel like the biggest loser when I already felt bad enough. Why couldn’t she see I was doing better?

In retrospect, I hadn’t told her any of this. I didn’t tell her how I felt, how she was making me feel, how Sully had been treating me. In her eyes I was just making bad choices, not living up to my full potential. My reaction to that was to just stop living then. But I realized maybe I should have talked to her about it, she wasn’t the most receptive but perhaps she would have at least backed off.

“There you go.” I heard Grandma Lizzie’s voice, somehow butting into my thoughts once again. I internally rolled my eyes.

After she picked her fight with me I threw myself onto my bed to wallow in self pity. I had the urge to text my best friend Hannah, but I stopped myself. I hadn’t spoken to her in over a month over what now seems like a stupid argument.

Hannah and I had been best friends since we were in Kindergarten. Our lives had grown to be vastly different the older we became, and I really tried to be a good friend to her, but she was always so wrapped up in her own issues. I respected that, because as a fellow human with outrageous issues, I understood more than she could ever know. I never told her my bigger problems, never unloaded on her. I didn’t want her to feel obligated to worry about my crap when she had her own. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to feel the same.

A month before I died, she had a birthday dinner. I had every intention of going, until my estranged father I hadn’t spoken to in ages chose to reach out with more of his drama. He screamed at me for never wanting to visit, or talk to him and told me I was the reason the woman he had left my mother for hated him. I made him look like an “absent father” according to him. She must have forgotten that part where she was completely vile to me anytime I went to visit him. They both had a drinking problem, so I have no doubt about where I inherited it from. I would get messages like this from him out of the blue, usually annually. Most of the time I could just scoff and write him off, but in a bad headspace that stuff could get to me.

With my father’s outburst, on top of Sully being horrendous, my mother being dismissive, and work riding my ass, I just didn’t have it in me to attend Hannah’s 25th birthday dinner. I had her card and gift ready, a hardcover copy of her favorite book, Little Women with a gold foiled cover and painted pages- a special edition, and sent her a text to let her know something came up but I would be by to drop it off to her the next day. She didn’t answer me and left me on read, posting photos of her night on Instagram looking cheery as ever. Where I was rather antisocial, she was a social butterfly. There were at least fifteen people at her birthday dinner at a very long table, where she sat at the head like the Queen Bee she always was. Her long, flowing dyed blond hair was curled in beachy, thick waves and she topped it with a glittering tiara, complete with a sash that read ‘Birthday Girl!’ Not only did she always mesh well with any group, but she was the most photogenic, beautiful person I had ever known. I felt terrible that I was missing her dinner, but happy to see that so many people were still able to show up and support her even though I couldn’t.

I expected her to be maybe annoyed, but she was absolutely irate that I didn’t go to her dinner. She waited until the next day to say so when I messaged her asking how it went and when I could drop off the gift.

“I’m tired of being present for you when you’re never present for me.” She had said.

“You’re not present for me though.” I responded. “You weren’t there when I had COVID and it took over two months for symptoms to wear off because your dog died. You weren’t there for my birthday because you said you were going through something else, I can’t even remember what. You’re not present for me because you have a lot of your own shit going on Hannah, and I understand that. All I ask is for the same understanding in return. So I’m not sure why you want me to show up for you when you can’t show up for me. The difference is I’m not mad about it.”

“You’re a selfish rotten person.” She told me. “And I need some time away from you to reassess our friendship.”

I didn’t answer her after that, and the rest of the month I continued to spiral. I couldn’t take it anymore. First that, then Sully screwing me over, and finally the fight with my mother. I was breaking bit by bit, then I got the last text I would get in my life.

I can’t say that it’s fully Ella Mason’s fault I killed myself. It was a number of things leading up to Ella’s text that made me do it. That was just the last of many things I was willing to let life throw at me until I was done with it. When I did it I blamed a lot more than just Ella.

“Sully and I have been seeing each other for six months.” Her text read. I stared at it, blankly. I had nothing left to give. I knew and suspected Sully had been hooking up with other girls behind my back, sure. I didn’t know he had a full blown relationship going on with a random girl from high school I had felt mostly indifferent about up until this point. Evidently, she didn’t like me.

“I would appreciate it if you left him alone.” She texted me again. “Just like he says, you’re a crazy ex and he’s moved on- you need to too.”

She followed that up with selfies of them kissing each other. They looked so happy and comfortable together, his dark hair falling into his eyes with her hand running through the back of it and the curl of her lips as she smiled mid-kiss. That sealed the deal for me and what I was willing to deal with in a lifetime. So, I got out my notebook and left my notes.