December 9, 2025 • 41 mins
Aileen Loy grew up inside a storm—descended from indentured laborers, raised in a rigid, often violent household, and taught to keep the family together at any cost. At 13, she watched a Halloween car crash fling her four-month-older nephew through a windshield; the year before, a beloved brother had died by suicide. For years she became the caretaker and the peacemaker—“a people pleaser” who never prioritized her own pain—until the reckoning came: an ICU stay after a suicidal spiral and the hard decision to break from the patterns that were breaking her. In this raw conversation, Aileen traces the inheritance of shame and self-loathing, the pressure to assimilate, and the moment she realized, “I am a severely damaged person,” then chose to heal—through truth-telling, boundaries, and art. It’s a story about refusing the “family curse,” and finding dignity beyond survival.
Content note: This episode includes discussion of family violence, a fatal accident involving a child, suicide and suicidal ideation, depression, and intergenerational trauma. Listener discretion advised.
If you or someone you love is struggling, you’re not alone. In the U.S., dial or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Stpory Producer: Nicholas Tecosky
If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story! Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com We’d love to hear your story!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
My name is Aleen Lay, and I am a severely
damaged person. I think that's kind of going to like
with this. Experiencing younger death in my family before older people.
You know, I never actually prioritize my feelings. I almost
became the third kid that off themselves. I spent a
(00:41):
week trying to do so, and I ended up in
the ICU, and it was just like, like, well, this
is how I'm adapting to societies by these like kind
of near death phoenix moments or whatever, and that's terrible.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people his lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:14):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I only had one set of grandparents that were alive,
and technically only one biological grandparent.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
My step up grandpa was always my grandpa.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
But if you want to talk about blood relations, I
only had one grandparent that was alive when I was born.
The other set came over to Guyana's bonded labor to
work plantation. Well after transcontinental slavery had been abolished in Britain,
they tried doing bonded labor for a while.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
That got out lawed as well. There were a lot
of abuses.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
It was dusted off again in the early twentieth century
because they really couldn't afford to operate with the amount
of profit that they wanted without free labor. So my
grandparents came over from my grandpa from China and my
grandmother from Indian. My father was born in Guyana obviously,
(02:25):
but he, like his dad, was kind of absentee. He
was like a prospector going the interior looking for golden diamonds.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
He ended up dying when he was he says three.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
But he's got a couple of memories of his dad
coming in with when he would he would come in
back into town kind of like you know, fat pockets
and kind of like you know, large ass, and he's like, oh,
he had this nut candy, and I loved oh, I
loved nut candy. And he was like and he would
talk about how he would speak with him and that
man hung the moon like he was. He just loved
(02:56):
his father. But there's not a lot of stories about
that because I think his father died when he was
probably between the ages of three and five. When he
was twelve, he was sassing his mom. They were in
the field and she wanted him to kind of sit
quietly read his primer or do his homework, and he
(03:17):
didn't want to, and he sassed her and was being
very difficult, you know, like kids do. And he calmed
down finally, just kind of like you know, brooding, going
to like booky fine, and his mother went to work.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
And a little bit later.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
He was trying to find her and couldn't realize that
she had collapsed in the fields from exhaustion. So she
had been working, and she was a young woman, she
was in her thirties, but she'd been working a plantation,
like picking kin. She's like like tiny, tiny South Asian
(04:00):
woman with these really broken, wide broken hands from the cane.
And he has an immense amount of guilt around that
about assassin. His mom before she died, because that's the
last thing he remembers saying to her. I didn't know
(04:21):
that story until I was her age, because we were
on Mother's Day and he looked across the table and
looked stricken, and he's just like, you look just like her.
Up to that point, it didn't look like anybody in
my family because I was such a mut I didn't
know who he was talking about. And his eyes got
watery and misty, and he started talking about his mother
(04:41):
and told me this story. So it was like this
kind of weird, bittersweet moment where he's able to actually
tell his stories finally, a little by a little. And
then there's a brother, brother named Fred, who was also
a prospector. I think he committed suicide at a young
age because he's again, it was just like a kind
(05:03):
of a pretty hard scrubble of life. It's not it
wasn't a very stable existence, and I think it got
the best of them. So that's the whole history that
we've kind of inherited in the family that a few
of us have kind of put together all of the pieces,
although like the little bits of stories that we were told,
because we're not told a lot in the family. So
(05:26):
we're just kind of sitting there, going why are we
failing so much? So there's a like this this great
deal of self loathing that's in my family. A lot
of it's moving here to the West and being kind
of like scrutinized and not quite fitting in, especially for
(05:46):
my brothers and sisters who were born there from his
first marriage. They are South Asian descent, and so that,
you know, growing up in Rednicked Nashville a nuanced time
in the seventies and the eighties growing up there, but
so that was difficult, and you know, anything that they
were interested in, like you know, they wanted to listen
(06:08):
to lata or lata like the Bollywood music or like
fashions or you know, movies. That's also kind of like
it's foreign. Therefore it's not really interesting to other people,
you know. So it's all of that, and then they're
feeling that they're not good enough and trying to kind
of mimic what Western culture is. And then you know,
(06:29):
like I'm doing what you said. Like they're Christian, and
my dad came over to go to Saint Augsburg because
the missionary like arranged for him to go to Saint
Augsburg in Minnesota and become ostensibly a reverend or a pastor,
and that's how he met my mother, who's a German
immigrant family from Kustern, Minnesota. It's it's like, Okay, we're
(06:50):
doing all the things, we're being good Christians and all that,
and it still was not enough. And I don't think
they They might have suspected that it would never be enough,
but I don't think they were able to speak to
that or acknowledge it because they're just too busy trying
to fit in instead of just being And I think
(07:15):
that adds up said like they have the family history
that is kind of known and not known, and the
way the parents or react to, you know, outside forces
like if the kids aren't behaving correctly, then being overly
correction or you know, like like overly correcting their kids.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Because we want to fit in.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
We want to be good people, people of value. There
is a lot of very harsh punishment in my family.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
It was violent.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
It was basically having parents that are part of breaking
down the kids as well and not acknowledging the two
damage that they've done.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
To those kids. It wasn't there.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
In time, I will say that, but it doesn't excuse it.
And they're kind of unable to acknowledge a lot of
that because I think it would tear them down if
they did. I have two suicides in the family, my
two brothers who committed suicide, one when I was twelve
(08:20):
and the other one much later. I have a brother
who odeed, which you know, you could, yeah, you could
say they distructed his own destructive forces. Whether that was
actually suicidal or not, I don't know. And then my nephew, Richard,
my mother, my mother, and my oldest sister are five
(08:41):
years apart because of the age difference between my dad
and my mom, so they were pregnant at the same time,
and so we were that family. Like by the time
she was twenty five and had me, she was now.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
The mom of twelve kids. And we're in Nashville, Tennessee.
In this house.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
There's twelve of us piling into a beat up station
wagon with primer spots on it, old Buick and getting
ready to go to Sunday school, you know kind of thing,
that's what you do. My nephew, Richard is four months
older than me, and his brother Stephen is a year
younger than me. We all grew up in the same
house because the Barbera's marriage they all fell apart early on,
(09:25):
so she lived with us most of the time. We
grew up in the same home, and we grew up
in the same schools. When Halloween there's a local hunted house,
like the jc's round, my sisters had been involved with
it before, So we're going to visit the makeup artist
(09:45):
and the crew and go do a tour of the
haunted house. And so it was the big kids showing
off with the little kids. So we're like, yeah, we
get to hang out with Julie and a really cool friend, Missy,
you know. And Missy had just bought this really sporty
new car. The boys were really eyeballing it and they
(10:05):
were like really wanting to go for a ride in it,
and she let me ride with her, and so they're
kind of bummed about it, and it was more important
to them than it was to me, and I'm just like,
I felt kind of guilty about it. And so we
went to the hunted house and you know, met with
people and kind of like, you know, got the dickens
scared out of us. And we were going back and
(10:30):
the cars were kind of They're parked pretty quite close
to each other, and I had my hand on the
door of Missy's car and my person stuff was still
inside it, and I had this weird moment.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I remember this clearly because.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
I thought that was strange at the time, where we
both looked up and it was like this weird kismet
kind of synchronicity or synchronous moment. We both looked up
and we kind of met eye contact, and he had
his hand on the dark car door two, you know,
And I didn't say anything. I just kind of wildlight
and we just swapped places. He didn't ask, and I
(11:06):
didn't say okay. I just knew he wanted to go
in the car, and it meant a lot to him,
the young guy, you know, And so we swapped places.
We went out, went out on the main road, not
even a block from the driveway, and there's a curve
(11:27):
up ahead and Missy's car was in front of us,
and she takes the curve and then all of a sudden,
you just hear this horrible racket in this big cloud
of like asphalt and dust because they were doing construction
and there was a construction on that part of the
(11:50):
road that they hadn't clearly marked. They had moved it
so people could come into the haunted house. I think
there was this big bank of gravel, but she hid
it and it just ramped up the car. The car
flew into the air and flipped, and I watched Richard's
body fly out of the windshield.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
And then fly.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I mean he went so far into the into the
field that was like pretty parallel to where my car
had parked. So from where I was sitting in the
passenger seat, he was like just straight on. I could
see him. And Julie hopped out of the car to
(12:36):
you know, make sure Missy was okay and to try
to figure out what to do next. And there there's
still kids too there in high school, you know, and
she's she's only like three years older than me. I
was thirteen at the time, and I couldn't get out
myself because I was I was holding Serena, and Serena
(12:56):
is Richard's sister or my niece. She was three, and
I wanted to I wanted to keep her calm because
I didn't know what was going on. I wasn't sure
if he was okay or not, and everyone else was
losing it, and I didn't want her to freak out,
so I kept her in the car with me and
(13:18):
talked to her. And the whole time I'm like doing that,
and there emergency cruiser here very quickly, and they're trying
to their lashlights everywhere trying to find him. At this
point I realized he's he's gone. It was It was horrible.
He was dead on impact. My father's very stoic. He's
(13:44):
also like a very patriarchal figure. He's you know, was
also a pastor. He was the person who was supposed
to hold everything together, and that's his favorite grandson.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
And between that and then my brother Arnold.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
That had died year previous, he committed suicide by.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Shooting him, shooting himself in the head with a thirty
odd six. That was his favorite son.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
I knew that he would be in that position again
and earlier, like the first death, I had kind of
logiced out. I don't know why I was like this,
but I've always been kind of like this. I'd logiced
out that if he's the person who's supposed to keep
it together, then he would have no ability to actually
show his own emotion. There would be no one there
(14:35):
for him, because everyone else will be dealing with their grief,
and that's partly by design.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
It's not their fault.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
This is Dad being strong, but he wouldn't grieve, and
I know that it was horrible for him, and so
I decided that he needed company, and I remember trying
to be that person as best as I could for
him so we could be strong for everybody.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
And I remember doing that as.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Best as I could at that age because I was
also kind of like, there's a hierarchy to it. It's like,
that's your favorite son, and so your grief is more
pronounced and more more important than my grief, even though
that's my favorite brother. I do have grief, but like
yours is so much more pronounced and dramatic.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
And you had this boy, and for some reason.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
That that popped in my head as part of my
rationale for this.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
So I became that person.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
And I did it again when Richard died, because that's
my sister Barber's boy. She was obviously asash herself and
this was not going to be something that she would
come back from very easily, and I wanted to be
there for her and.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Wanted to be there.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
For my dad because I know that he would just
couldn't be.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
He was just going to be at the tough.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Guy, and I know it was killing him. So I did,
And you know, I figured I was doing a pretty
good job of it because I was really good at it.
I'm just really good at being stoic and riggilating my
own emotions and taking it home with me kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
So like that was like kind of going into high school.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
And I remember going into a new high school because
I didn't go into what I was zoned for, which
was where everyone knew Richard and my family because like
all the kids had gone to the same high school.
I got accepted into the academically gifted program at a
Magnet school that they were just starting as a as
kind of a lab. I got the opportunity to go
(16:50):
to a completely different environment, which was pretty great, and
I figured no one's going to ask about it, to
give me a chance to deal with all of this
stuff as on my own, on my own time, and
not be reminded about it by people who know him.
So I didn't really talk about it there. That caused
(17:14):
some issues, like later when I realized it's like, oh,
like I was like highly critical of my own abilities
to handle shit if my grades started suffering, or if
I started withdrawing, which I did. You know, for a
while it was just because oh you're lazy.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Or what's wrong with you?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
And a lot of it was just this kind of
people pleasing mode where you know, I like turn stuff
in lakes and maybe I didn't spend enough time on
that paper or I should have spent more time. And
I finally, like, I had a teacher who was like,
I know you did the work because you're always present.
You're always present, you always know what's going on. And
(17:58):
so I finally gave him all of the work that
I had turned in and he's like, and he's like,
these would.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Be a's but they can't be now.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
But at least I turned them in and it also
kind of course corrected me in my thinking as well.
But it's like anytime, anytime there was a failure on
my part to excel, because I was the kid that
was supposed to excel and everything, and so it wasn't
actually talking about depression or grief, right, So it's missing that.
It's missing that, and there's no one actually discussing that
(18:30):
with me either, And there are no adults saying hey,
you're probably depressed or you're probably still grieving. This it's
the this is kind of like, oh, are you on drugs?
What's wrong with you? That kind of thing, and that
followed me. It's a really dramatic family. It's a big family,
(18:52):
and since I was the youngest, I was kind of
in the position of being able to observe a lot
and just going to sit back and see what happened.
And yeah, it was very it was violent at times,
it was heartbreaking at times, and I became very estranged
from all of them because they all kind of went away.
(19:14):
I just I had this idea that everybody would get
together at one point that they understood I'd been watching
for them for so long and even though we hadn't
seen each other in ages, that they would know I
was still there for them, and they would I understand
why they were stranged, but one day everybody would get along,
they would be able to kind of talk through these things.
(19:35):
Because I always told Dad the truth about who I was,
and it was not accepted very well. It caused a
lot of fights, but I did it and I kept
doing it because I figured, well, if we just keep
doing this, then eventually everyone will get a chance to
talk and say their peace and say their truth.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
That never happened.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
And I remember, like, you know, thinking this is like,
you know, if this takes forever, if this takes forever.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
I'm always going to be there.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
I'm always going to like accept people like open you know,
hearted and open armed. And it's not I can't put
a condition on when that will happen, if it ever does. Right,
So they're a big, very rational right And then I
realized I was looking at my brother on the internet
and I came across his website and there's this bio
he said that he's the youngest of ten kids and
(20:33):
I'm the youngest of twelve. So like we're mathing hard
and it's just not coming up. Yeah, it's not matching.
And I'm like, oh, and it's like I think everything
kind of like locked in together and formed the this
(20:56):
is the missing picture behind all of the other pictures
you were looking at.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
And I felt so stupid.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I like, this is the ultimate betrayal, but it was
more of a betrayal of myself where it's just like
you're you're not wanted in any of this.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
I don't think that he means that now, but.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
He doesn't know that that that set me that that
just set me over the edge where I was just
waiting for this grand reconciliation. Most of the kids had
gone because of Dad, and because I was so young,
I was considered an extension of that because they left
the household and I was still in the household. And
some of them I've like reached out afterwards, and there
(21:47):
I can tell that they're fond of me, and I'm
fond of them. But there is like that weird schism,
you know. And it's weird because I understand why they left.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
They weren't wrong.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
It was the first time I actually had to really
look at the family dynamic, and so I do have
him to thank for it. But for that though, it's
it set me over the edge, and it set me
right down the whole shoot where I almost became the
third kid that off themselves. I spent a week trying
(22:19):
to do so, and I ended up in the ICU
and I ended up in observation. So it was like
and it wasn't the first time that I had that
I'd gone down that path, Like every time that I
had gone down that path in the past. It forced
me to look closer at what was going on with
the family or take more responsibility for the way I
(22:41):
was thinking.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
And it was just like like, well, this is how
I'm adapting to.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Society is by these like kind of near death phoenix
moments or whatever, and that's terrible. And this was the
big one. This is the bigger one that that really
forced me to to cut ties.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
I was distant.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
There are always like fights that kind of like made
that distance easier because it wasn't me calling for distance.
It was Dad just skulking off for six months because
he got into a fight with me about whether or
not gays existed nature.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
And I'm like, oh my god, you know.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
You know, i't mean like ridiculous where like he's basically
afraid of like what if my daughter's gig because she's
not dating a lot of guys or dating at all,
and so he would get into these ridiculous fights because
he has his existential dread of his daughter being something different.
So there was always a reason for it. You know,
(23:38):
it wasn't me. It wasn't me throwing my hands up
in the air necessarily. And I finally just did, and
that went against everything I'd ever been taught where it's
just like you work harder. You just work harder to
make it to kind of like come to some reconciliation,
but you don't ever lie about who you are. And
(24:02):
so I had taken a harder path than anybody else
in the family had taken at that point because I
was sticking around, but also not making it easy for
him because if, like he asked, I'm like going to
I to him because I want him to understand who
I am, because I respect him so much and I
want him to respect me. And I thought, because I'm
being so logical and rational and I'm being conscientious that
(24:23):
this I would went out, And in some ways I
did get a lot.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Of space to be who I am, but.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
It was never really going to It was never going
to really acknowledge the stuff that I needed to work
on in order for me to be a whole or
better person and to pursue the things that I need
to pursue. It was not accounting for my emotions at all.
I think that's kind of going to like with this,
(24:51):
experiencing younger death in my family before older people, you know,
I think that that put me in the position of
kind of being a people pleaser and a caretaker and
making sure that everyone was taken care of.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
And it was for good reason at the.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Time, and so it's not a it's a coping mechanism,
and it was useful.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
I never actually prioritize my feelings.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
The day that I woke I literally woke up and
the first thought as I was going to get water
was like, I am a severely damaged person.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
It was such a relief.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
It was such a relief to be able to say
it out loud and to know it. Like I didn't
recognize trauma and my own family my trauma.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
I never never used that word.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Is someone used that word to me first, and I'm like,
my life's not that dramatic, you know, come on, And
it's just like I really really kind of bristled at it,
and they're like, no, you have family trauma.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
And I'm like, we weren't wrong.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
And it took me a while to actually allow that
thought in my own head and actually kind of consider
that because if anyone else that told me about it,
it's like half of the way I grew up. If
anyone told me about half of it, and about what
my sister I think it's also I was able to
put it off because I could say, well, that happened
to them, to my sisters and brothers, they got the
worst of it. He didn't hit me that much, you know,
(26:24):
I mean like that kind of thing, you know, or
his disdain of me wasn't that great. And there's still
like that sense of self loathing that we've all inherited
because of that.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
But I think I think that was like a outside
my dad's.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Ability to understand that he was doing he was doing
his best to make sure everyone is doing their level
best and survives right, because I don't think he understood
that he had self loathing, so he kind of they
inherited his because he never acknowledged it and he didn't
have the wherewithal or the ability to acknowledge it.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Everyone deals with death. This is the universal.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
We are born astride a grave, you know, So this
is not new, and so you know, handle it, handle
it as well as you can, and don't think you're
so special as you're the first one or the only
one who's ever had someone die. And then also you know,
there might be people around you right now or having
a real shit time of it, and it's far worse
(27:34):
than you could possibly imagine, far worse than anything you've experienced.
So maybe you need to keep your wits about yourself
so you can be there and not think, oh, I
am the prettiest princess with the deepest sorrows. You don't
want to be that person. And so like, yeah, you
can feel it, It'll come to you in ways. Maybe
(27:55):
a year now, you're gonna feel it again, you know, like,
I know it's never convenient, and I know that I'm
going to feel it, and it's okay to feel sad
and it's okay to be.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
To cry, but that's mine.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Welcome back, This is Alive again in the studio.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Today we have Nick Takowski and myself Dan Bush.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
Hey, this is Nick.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
I produced this story.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
You know, something really that resonated with me on this
one was this theme of generational trauma that ran through
this story. This is a family that, as every generation,
has had their own horrible struggle and a lot of
(29:07):
emotional weight to carry forth, from Aileen's dad sort of
sassing off to his mom right before she passes away,
to inherent violence within that household, to the drug use
and the suicide, and then this absolutely horrifying freak accident.
(29:33):
And I think that being able to see how the
trauma affects each generation and then how they pass their
own burden onto their children, and to finally see someone
like Aileen who was able to break away from it
and break this cycle of abuse and sort of despair
(29:57):
that had followed this family for gen I think is
absolutely inspiring.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
I think it's fascinating Alien's story because there's this shift.
She has a shift in perspective at some point, and
I'm not sure exactly what led her to that shift,
but there was that moment she talked about when when
she realized that she was not even sort of listed
in the thoughts of the other She found that it
was at a letter nick where she and there was twelve.
Speaker 5 (30:24):
Children in the family and yeah, and she wasn't even mentioned.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
Right, That might have been the impetus for her to go, well,
am I even a part of this family? Or you know,
maybe the thought then happened with her of why is
my perspective and my behavior following this pattern? If I'm not,
you know, does that give me an allowance to not
be a part of the family or to think differently
in some way about who I am relative to the family.
(30:47):
And what was amazing is she was able to if
the ideation of suicide or the ideation that everything's terrible
and there's this generational legacy of violence and a b
if she's able to then go, that has become a norm.
If that's the normal, if that's baseline, then I can
(31:08):
move away from that and let that perspective go and
have a new perspective and sort of break the cycle.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
Yeah, I thought so too. I mean, I thought I
was incredibly powerful, and I think that a lot of us.
What was what is the phrase all happy families are
the same, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their
own special way. I forget who that is?
Speaker 6 (31:30):
Is that?
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Yeah? How does one What are some tools that we
might all have or take from her story about breaking
the cycle of trauma and hardship and and changing our perspective.
You know, I had a dear friend who went to
her abusive father, who was a Vietnam veteran who had
never quite recuperated fully and still suffered from PTSD and
(31:53):
was very harsh and very abusive. And I remember the
day she drove home to Charlotte, North Carolina, to say
goodbye to him, and her goodbye essentially was was letting
him know that she was no longer going to empower
this or be a part of this relationship, and that
if he wanted to drink himself to death, she was
no longer going to coddle him or try to help him,
and that she was done and she was moving on.
(32:13):
And it was this extremely empowering thing that happened when
she sort of had the foresight to go, I don't
have to be a part of this, I you know,
I can. I can shift my idea of who I
am and my perspective of who I am and my
identity so that it doesn't contain this I am. Yeah,
and I and Aileen.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
Did that absolutely. I think that there has to come
a realization at some point that you know, you don't
actually owe anything to your parents. They dragged you into
this world. If if they're good to you, then you'll
want to give back. But if they're bad to you
for years and years and years, you don't actually owe
them anything. They dragged you here unwillingly, you know. And
(32:53):
I think that there's something about that. I think that like,
if you're a parent, you can make that connection and
go like, I'm just not going to do that to
my kid. If you want your kid around, you'd be
good to your kid through their childhood and they'll stick around,
you know. And I think that I think that that's
something that many of us who have had sort of abusive,
shitty relationships in our pasts, have to come to on
(33:16):
our own. Nobody can nobody can talk you into understanding
that you can break the cycle. You have to figure
it out. And I think that, like, it's it's helpful
if you have the benefit of other examples out there.
And I think that the reason that this generation is
doing so much better than the generations that came before
(33:39):
this is that we're all much more aware of like
the you know, psychological effects of being hit as a child,
of being like constantly told that you're not smart enough, Like,
we have a better understanding of this now, and so
more people of our generation raising young kids now are going, like,
my actions have consequences that linger that stay throughout their lives.
(34:04):
And I don't want for them to feel like I
feel like, I want for them to feel healthier. I
want for them to feel better and more secure and
more capable and more empowered. To live the life that
they want to live. And I think that that just
wasn't available to a lot of us when we were younger.
(34:25):
You know, it clearly wasn't available to Aileen. It speaks
to her character that she was able to come to
this conclusion despite not having any model for this understanding
in her own life. She was able to come to
this conclusion herself. And I think that's kind of that's
kind of magical in that sense. You know that she
was able to see it better life huge despite not
(34:49):
having had a good life.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
It's huge. And also say, I don't have to carry
this legacy. I don't have to, Like you do it unconsciously.
You carry your family's legacy and kind but to rise
above it and go wait a minute, I don't have
to identify with this, you know, to get out of
that prison of your mind. To even become aware that
it is a prison and that you can unlock the
door and walk out is badass. It's incredibly heroic.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:17):
Like and well, and I'll go a little further. Even
the idea of like she talks about suicidal ideation, and
that is you know, the question is would would that
be a part of her mental process had it not
become normalized in her family. There's this history of generational
suicide in her family, and so so she so unconsciously.
(35:42):
I think that maybe she had that in the back
of her her mind, in the back of her soul
in some way that was that was saying, hey, you
can always check out. Other people have like it's not
uncommon in our family. Maybe that's why they checked out
or who knows what that conversation, that internal conversation, that
internal monologue was. But to stop that internal monologue and go,
(36:04):
you know what, I'm I don't have to have that
as as as part of my consciousness.
Speaker 5 (36:10):
Yeah, And I also think that there's something that even
goes further, you know, I think that there's this real
sense of the family being cursed and when you're raised
thinking that like it is not up to you how
your life goes, but it's up to some force that's
(36:31):
larger than you and ineffable and beyond you. Then there's
a sense of sort of fatalism there where it's it's
not just like, well, this is how my family deals
with pain is by killing themselves. It's like it's like
it is faded that I should that like we should
kill ourselves, that we should die off. And that's really
(36:53):
that's a really hard mental block to break. I imagine,
Like it's not just like my family fucked up, It's
like my family has a curse. My family is cursed.
So yeah, I mean, like I just think that it
Also it also speaks to what an incredible imagination you
(37:13):
would have to have to imagine a world beyond that,
to imagine a world beyond this deep belief system that
was like instilled with you. I think that that's incredible.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
She also attributes it some of the causality here. She
very clearly attributes not just to her family, as though
the family's you know, carrying the specific curse, but she
attributes a lot of it to the fact that the
family tried to fit in in a world that was
(37:46):
sort of not kind to them and not not welcoming
them with open arms. You know, they struggled in ways
with bringing know, trying to assimilate into a new culture,
and that new culture never quite accepting them. How that
fueled a lot of the self loathing that she then inherited.
(38:11):
So she points at a larger systemic thing too, and
how these cultural differences in sort of racism or classism
or these other things sort of fed into this family curse,
if we want to call it that. You know, it's
not just her family, it's all of society that she's
sort of going, wait a minute, that that doesn't make sense,
that's not right, you know, and rebelling against that.
Speaker 5 (38:34):
She's an incredible human being, and she's taken all of
this lifetime of trauma and has turned it toward a
lifetime of serving others and trying to make her community
stronger and.
Speaker 4 (38:48):
Better, and channeled it into theater and art and sculpture
and music in ways that are just stunned. Next time
I'm alive again, we meet Dwayne Meadows. Because you're vibed
the devastating two thousand and four Indian Ocean tsunami qualfacationing
in Thailand.
Speaker 6 (39:06):
I heard a scream and then I looked out to
the ocean, and I saw a far out in the
ocean that looked like some kind of small wave. The
next thing I remember, the water just comes gushing into
my room, moving incredibly fast, like a whitewater rafting trip.
And as I start to look around, I can see
debris everywhere now, and I mean cars, whole bungalows floating,
(39:31):
the buildings were breaking up. I got lucky with what
did hit me and what didn't hit me to make
it that day.
Speaker 4 (39:38):
Swept a mile inland and then back out to see
by the powerful waves.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Dwayne's harrowing journey of.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
Survival is one of quick thinking, resilience, and courage. In
the aftermath, he helped others to find safety and later
returned to Thailand to assist in rebuilding communities impacted by
the disaster. Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney,
Brent Die, Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovin,
(40:04):
additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew
Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for
additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima L. K
Ali and Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slavitchka,
Brent Die, and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush. Special thanks to
(40:28):
Alien Loy for sharing her.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Remarkable story with us.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
Alive again is a production of i Art Radio and
Psychopia Pictures.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
we'd love to hear your story.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.
That's a l i v e A g A I
N p R O j e c t at gmail
dot com.
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
My name is Aleen Lay, and I am a severely
damaged person. I think that's kind of going to like
with this. Experiencing younger death in my family before older people.
You know, I never actually prioritize my feelings. I almost
became the third kid that off themselves. I spent a
(00:41):
week trying to do so, and I ended up in
the ICU, and it was just like, like, well, this
is how I'm adapting to societies by these like kind
of near death phoenix moments or whatever, and that's terrible.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people his lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:14):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I only had one set of grandparents that were alive,
and technically only one biological grandparent.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
My step up grandpa was always my grandpa.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
But if you want to talk about blood relations, I
only had one grandparent that was alive when I was born.
The other set came over to Guyana's bonded labor to
work plantation. Well after transcontinental slavery had been abolished in Britain,
they tried doing bonded labor for a while.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
That got out lawed as well. There were a lot
of abuses.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
It was dusted off again in the early twentieth century
because they really couldn't afford to operate with the amount
of profit that they wanted without free labor. So my
grandparents came over from my grandpa from China and my
grandmother from Indian. My father was born in Guyana obviously,
(02:25):
but he, like his dad, was kind of absentee. He
was like a prospector going the interior looking for golden diamonds.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
He ended up dying when he was he says three.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
But he's got a couple of memories of his dad
coming in with when he would he would come in
back into town kind of like you know, fat pockets
and kind of like you know, large ass, and he's like, oh,
he had this nut candy, and I loved oh, I
loved nut candy. And he was like and he would
talk about how he would speak with him and that
man hung the moon like he was. He just loved
(02:56):
his father. But there's not a lot of stories about
that because I think his father died when he was
probably between the ages of three and five. When he
was twelve, he was sassing his mom. They were in
the field and she wanted him to kind of sit
quietly read his primer or do his homework, and he
(03:17):
didn't want to, and he sassed her and was being
very difficult, you know, like kids do. And he calmed
down finally, just kind of like you know, brooding, going
to like booky fine, and his mother went to work.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
And a little bit later.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
He was trying to find her and couldn't realize that
she had collapsed in the fields from exhaustion. So she
had been working, and she was a young woman, she
was in her thirties, but she'd been working a plantation,
like picking kin. She's like like tiny, tiny South Asian
(04:00):
woman with these really broken, wide broken hands from the cane.
And he has an immense amount of guilt around that
about assassin. His mom before she died, because that's the
last thing he remembers saying to her. I didn't know
(04:21):
that story until I was her age, because we were
on Mother's Day and he looked across the table and
looked stricken, and he's just like, you look just like her.
Up to that point, it didn't look like anybody in
my family because I was such a mut I didn't
know who he was talking about. And his eyes got
watery and misty, and he started talking about his mother
(04:41):
and told me this story. So it was like this
kind of weird, bittersweet moment where he's able to actually
tell his stories finally, a little by a little. And
then there's a brother, brother named Fred, who was also
a prospector. I think he committed suicide at a young
age because he's again, it was just like a kind
(05:03):
of a pretty hard scrubble of life. It's not it
wasn't a very stable existence, and I think it got
the best of them. So that's the whole history that
we've kind of inherited in the family that a few
of us have kind of put together all of the pieces,
although like the little bits of stories that we were told,
because we're not told a lot in the family. So
(05:26):
we're just kind of sitting there, going why are we
failing so much? So there's a like this this great
deal of self loathing that's in my family. A lot
of it's moving here to the West and being kind
of like scrutinized and not quite fitting in, especially for
(05:46):
my brothers and sisters who were born there from his
first marriage. They are South Asian descent, and so that,
you know, growing up in Rednicked Nashville a nuanced time
in the seventies and the eighties growing up there, but
so that was difficult, and you know, anything that they
were interested in, like you know, they wanted to listen
(06:08):
to lata or lata like the Bollywood music or like
fashions or you know, movies. That's also kind of like
it's foreign. Therefore it's not really interesting to other people,
you know. So it's all of that, and then they're
feeling that they're not good enough and trying to kind
of mimic what Western culture is. And then you know,
(06:29):
like I'm doing what you said. Like they're Christian, and
my dad came over to go to Saint Augsburg because
the missionary like arranged for him to go to Saint
Augsburg in Minnesota and become ostensibly a reverend or a pastor,
and that's how he met my mother, who's a German
immigrant family from Kustern, Minnesota. It's it's like, Okay, we're
(06:50):
doing all the things, we're being good Christians and all that,
and it still was not enough. And I don't think
they They might have suspected that it would never be enough,
but I don't think they were able to speak to
that or acknowledge it because they're just too busy trying
to fit in instead of just being And I think
(07:15):
that adds up said like they have the family history
that is kind of known and not known, and the
way the parents or react to, you know, outside forces
like if the kids aren't behaving correctly, then being overly
correction or you know, like like overly correcting their kids.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Because we want to fit in.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
We want to be good people, people of value. There
is a lot of very harsh punishment in my family.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
It was violent.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
It was basically having parents that are part of breaking
down the kids as well and not acknowledging the two
damage that they've done.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
To those kids. It wasn't there.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
In time, I will say that, but it doesn't excuse it.
And they're kind of unable to acknowledge a lot of
that because I think it would tear them down if
they did. I have two suicides in the family, my
two brothers who committed suicide, one when I was twelve
(08:20):
and the other one much later. I have a brother
who odeed, which you know, you could, yeah, you could
say they distructed his own destructive forces. Whether that was
actually suicidal or not, I don't know. And then my nephew, Richard,
my mother, my mother, and my oldest sister are five
(08:41):
years apart because of the age difference between my dad
and my mom, so they were pregnant at the same time,
and so we were that family. Like by the time
she was twenty five and had me, she was now.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
The mom of twelve kids. And we're in Nashville, Tennessee.
In this house.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
There's twelve of us piling into a beat up station
wagon with primer spots on it, old Buick and getting
ready to go to Sunday school, you know kind of thing,
that's what you do. My nephew, Richard is four months
older than me, and his brother Stephen is a year
younger than me. We all grew up in the same
house because the Barbera's marriage they all fell apart early on,
(09:25):
so she lived with us most of the time. We
grew up in the same home, and we grew up
in the same schools. When Halloween there's a local hunted house,
like the jc's round, my sisters had been involved with
it before, So we're going to visit the makeup artist
(09:45):
and the crew and go do a tour of the
haunted house. And so it was the big kids showing
off with the little kids. So we're like, yeah, we
get to hang out with Julie and a really cool friend, Missy,
you know. And Missy had just bought this really sporty
new car. The boys were really eyeballing it and they
(10:05):
were like really wanting to go for a ride in it,
and she let me ride with her, and so they're
kind of bummed about it, and it was more important
to them than it was to me, and I'm just like,
I felt kind of guilty about it. And so we
went to the hunted house and you know, met with
people and kind of like, you know, got the dickens
scared out of us. And we were going back and
(10:30):
the cars were kind of They're parked pretty quite close
to each other, and I had my hand on the
door of Missy's car and my person stuff was still
inside it, and I had this weird moment.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I remember this clearly because.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
I thought that was strange at the time, where we
both looked up and it was like this weird kismet
kind of synchronicity or synchronous moment. We both looked up
and we kind of met eye contact, and he had
his hand on the dark car door two, you know,
And I didn't say anything. I just kind of wildlight
and we just swapped places. He didn't ask, and I
(11:06):
didn't say okay. I just knew he wanted to go
in the car, and it meant a lot to him,
the young guy, you know, And so we swapped places.
We went out, went out on the main road, not
even a block from the driveway, and there's a curve
(11:27):
up ahead and Missy's car was in front of us,
and she takes the curve and then all of a sudden,
you just hear this horrible racket in this big cloud
of like asphalt and dust because they were doing construction
and there was a construction on that part of the
(11:50):
road that they hadn't clearly marked. They had moved it
so people could come into the haunted house. I think
there was this big bank of gravel, but she hid
it and it just ramped up the car. The car
flew into the air and flipped, and I watched Richard's
body fly out of the windshield.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
And then fly.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I mean he went so far into the into the
field that was like pretty parallel to where my car
had parked. So from where I was sitting in the
passenger seat, he was like just straight on. I could
see him. And Julie hopped out of the car to
(12:36):
you know, make sure Missy was okay and to try
to figure out what to do next. And there there's
still kids too there in high school, you know, and
she's she's only like three years older than me. I
was thirteen at the time, and I couldn't get out
myself because I was I was holding Serena, and Serena
(12:56):
is Richard's sister or my niece. She was three, and
I wanted to I wanted to keep her calm because
I didn't know what was going on. I wasn't sure
if he was okay or not, and everyone else was
losing it, and I didn't want her to freak out,
so I kept her in the car with me and
(13:18):
talked to her. And the whole time I'm like doing that,
and there emergency cruiser here very quickly, and they're trying
to their lashlights everywhere trying to find him. At this
point I realized he's he's gone. It was It was horrible.
He was dead on impact. My father's very stoic. He's
(13:44):
also like a very patriarchal figure. He's you know, was
also a pastor. He was the person who was supposed
to hold everything together, and that's his favorite grandson.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
And between that and then my brother Arnold.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
That had died year previous, he committed suicide by.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Shooting him, shooting himself in the head with a thirty
odd six. That was his favorite son.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
I knew that he would be in that position again
and earlier, like the first death, I had kind of
logiced out. I don't know why I was like this,
but I've always been kind of like this. I'd logiced
out that if he's the person who's supposed to keep
it together, then he would have no ability to actually
show his own emotion. There would be no one there
(14:35):
for him, because everyone else will be dealing with their grief,
and that's partly by design.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
It's not their fault.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
This is Dad being strong, but he wouldn't grieve, and
I know that it was horrible for him, and so
I decided that he needed company, and I remember trying
to be that person as best as I could for
him so we could be strong for everybody.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
And I remember doing that as.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Best as I could at that age because I was
also kind of like, there's a hierarchy to it. It's like,
that's your favorite son, and so your grief is more
pronounced and more more important than my grief, even though
that's my favorite brother. I do have grief, but like
yours is so much more pronounced and dramatic.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
And you had this boy, and for some reason.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
That that popped in my head as part of my
rationale for this.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
So I became that person.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
And I did it again when Richard died, because that's
my sister Barber's boy. She was obviously asash herself and
this was not going to be something that she would
come back from very easily, and I wanted to be
there for her and.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Wanted to be there.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
For my dad because I know that he would just
couldn't be.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
He was just going to be at the tough.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Guy, and I know it was killing him. So I did,
And you know, I figured I was doing a pretty
good job of it because I was really good at it.
I'm just really good at being stoic and riggilating my
own emotions and taking it home with me kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
So like that was like kind of going into high school.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
And I remember going into a new high school because
I didn't go into what I was zoned for, which
was where everyone knew Richard and my family because like
all the kids had gone to the same high school.
I got accepted into the academically gifted program at a
Magnet school that they were just starting as a as
kind of a lab. I got the opportunity to go
(16:50):
to a completely different environment, which was pretty great, and
I figured no one's going to ask about it, to
give me a chance to deal with all of this
stuff as on my own, on my own time, and
not be reminded about it by people who know him.
So I didn't really talk about it there. That caused
(17:14):
some issues, like later when I realized it's like, oh,
like I was like highly critical of my own abilities
to handle shit if my grades started suffering, or if
I started withdrawing, which I did. You know, for a
while it was just because oh you're lazy.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Or what's wrong with you?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
And a lot of it was just this kind of
people pleasing mode where you know, I like turn stuff
in lakes and maybe I didn't spend enough time on
that paper or I should have spent more time. And
I finally, like, I had a teacher who was like,
I know you did the work because you're always present.
You're always present, you always know what's going on. And
(17:58):
so I finally gave him all of the work that
I had turned in and he's like, and he's like,
these would.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Be a's but they can't be now.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
But at least I turned them in and it also
kind of course corrected me in my thinking as well.
But it's like anytime, anytime there was a failure on
my part to excel, because I was the kid that
was supposed to excel and everything, and so it wasn't
actually talking about depression or grief, right, So it's missing that.
It's missing that, and there's no one actually discussing that
(18:30):
with me either, And there are no adults saying hey,
you're probably depressed or you're probably still grieving. This it's
the this is kind of like, oh, are you on drugs?
What's wrong with you? That kind of thing, and that
followed me. It's a really dramatic family. It's a big family,
(18:52):
and since I was the youngest, I was kind of
in the position of being able to observe a lot
and just going to sit back and see what happened.
And yeah, it was very it was violent at times,
it was heartbreaking at times, and I became very estranged
from all of them because they all kind of went away.
(19:14):
I just I had this idea that everybody would get
together at one point that they understood I'd been watching
for them for so long and even though we hadn't
seen each other in ages, that they would know I
was still there for them, and they would I understand
why they were stranged, but one day everybody would get along,
they would be able to kind of talk through these things.
(19:35):
Because I always told Dad the truth about who I was,
and it was not accepted very well. It caused a
lot of fights, but I did it and I kept
doing it because I figured, well, if we just keep
doing this, then eventually everyone will get a chance to
talk and say their peace and say their truth.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
That never happened.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
And I remember, like, you know, thinking this is like,
you know, if this takes forever, if this takes forever.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
I'm always going to be there.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
I'm always going to like accept people like open you know,
hearted and open armed. And it's not I can't put
a condition on when that will happen, if it ever does. Right,
So they're a big, very rational right And then I
realized I was looking at my brother on the internet
and I came across his website and there's this bio
he said that he's the youngest of ten kids and
(20:33):
I'm the youngest of twelve. So like we're mathing hard
and it's just not coming up. Yeah, it's not matching.
And I'm like, oh, and it's like I think everything
kind of like locked in together and formed the this
(20:56):
is the missing picture behind all of the other pictures
you were looking at.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
And I felt so stupid.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I like, this is the ultimate betrayal, but it was
more of a betrayal of myself where it's just like
you're you're not wanted in any of this.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
I don't think that he means that now, but.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
He doesn't know that that that set me that that
just set me over the edge where I was just
waiting for this grand reconciliation. Most of the kids had
gone because of Dad, and because I was so young,
I was considered an extension of that because they left
the household and I was still in the household. And
some of them I've like reached out afterwards, and there
(21:47):
I can tell that they're fond of me, and I'm
fond of them. But there is like that weird schism,
you know. And it's weird because I understand why they left.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
They weren't wrong.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
It was the first time I actually had to really
look at the family dynamic, and so I do have
him to thank for it. But for that though, it's
it set me over the edge, and it set me
right down the whole shoot where I almost became the
third kid that off themselves. I spent a week trying
(22:19):
to do so, and I ended up in the ICU
and I ended up in observation. So it was like
and it wasn't the first time that I had that
I'd gone down that path, Like every time that I
had gone down that path in the past. It forced
me to look closer at what was going on with
the family or take more responsibility for the way I
(22:41):
was thinking.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
And it was just like like, well, this is how
I'm adapting to.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Society is by these like kind of near death phoenix
moments or whatever, and that's terrible. And this was the
big one. This is the bigger one that that really
forced me to to cut ties.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
I was distant.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
There are always like fights that kind of like made
that distance easier because it wasn't me calling for distance.
It was Dad just skulking off for six months because
he got into a fight with me about whether or
not gays existed nature.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
And I'm like, oh my god, you know.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
You know, i't mean like ridiculous where like he's basically
afraid of like what if my daughter's gig because she's
not dating a lot of guys or dating at all,
and so he would get into these ridiculous fights because
he has his existential dread of his daughter being something different.
So there was always a reason for it. You know,
(23:38):
it wasn't me. It wasn't me throwing my hands up
in the air necessarily. And I finally just did, and
that went against everything I'd ever been taught where it's
just like you work harder. You just work harder to
make it to kind of like come to some reconciliation,
but you don't ever lie about who you are. And
(24:02):
so I had taken a harder path than anybody else
in the family had taken at that point because I
was sticking around, but also not making it easy for
him because if, like he asked, I'm like going to
I to him because I want him to understand who
I am, because I respect him so much and I
want him to respect me. And I thought, because I'm
being so logical and rational and I'm being conscientious that
(24:23):
this I would went out, And in some ways I
did get a lot.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Of space to be who I am, but.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
It was never really going to It was never going
to really acknowledge the stuff that I needed to work
on in order for me to be a whole or
better person and to pursue the things that I need
to pursue. It was not accounting for my emotions at all.
I think that's kind of going to like with this,
(24:51):
experiencing younger death in my family before older people, you know,
I think that that put me in the position of
kind of being a people pleaser and a caretaker and
making sure that everyone was taken care of.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
And it was for good reason at the.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Time, and so it's not a it's a coping mechanism,
and it was useful.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
I never actually prioritize my feelings.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
The day that I woke I literally woke up and
the first thought as I was going to get water
was like, I am a severely damaged person.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
It was such a relief.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
It was such a relief to be able to say
it out loud and to know it. Like I didn't
recognize trauma and my own family my trauma.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
I never never used that word.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Is someone used that word to me first, and I'm like,
my life's not that dramatic, you know, come on, And
it's just like I really really kind of bristled at it,
and they're like, no, you have family trauma.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
And I'm like, we weren't wrong.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
And it took me a while to actually allow that
thought in my own head and actually kind of consider
that because if anyone else that told me about it,
it's like half of the way I grew up. If
anyone told me about half of it, and about what
my sister I think it's also I was able to
put it off because I could say, well, that happened
to them, to my sisters and brothers, they got the
worst of it. He didn't hit me that much, you know,
(26:24):
I mean like that kind of thing, you know, or
his disdain of me wasn't that great. And there's still
like that sense of self loathing that we've all inherited
because of that.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
But I think I think that was like a outside
my dad's.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Ability to understand that he was doing he was doing
his best to make sure everyone is doing their level
best and survives right, because I don't think he understood
that he had self loathing, so he kind of they
inherited his because he never acknowledged it and he didn't
have the wherewithal or the ability to acknowledge it.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Everyone deals with death. This is the universal.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
We are born astride a grave, you know, So this
is not new, and so you know, handle it, handle
it as well as you can, and don't think you're
so special as you're the first one or the only
one who's ever had someone die. And then also you know,
there might be people around you right now or having
a real shit time of it, and it's far worse
(27:34):
than you could possibly imagine, far worse than anything you've experienced.
So maybe you need to keep your wits about yourself
so you can be there and not think, oh, I
am the prettiest princess with the deepest sorrows. You don't
want to be that person. And so like, yeah, you
can feel it, It'll come to you in ways. Maybe
(27:55):
a year now, you're gonna feel it again, you know, like,
I know it's never convenient, and I know that I'm
going to feel it, and it's okay to feel sad
and it's okay to be.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
To cry, but that's mine.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Welcome back, This is Alive again in the studio.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Today we have Nick Takowski and myself Dan Bush.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
Hey, this is Nick.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
I produced this story.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
You know, something really that resonated with me on this
one was this theme of generational trauma that ran through
this story. This is a family that, as every generation,
has had their own horrible struggle and a lot of
(29:07):
emotional weight to carry forth, from Aileen's dad sort of
sassing off to his mom right before she passes away,
to inherent violence within that household, to the drug use
and the suicide, and then this absolutely horrifying freak accident.
(29:33):
And I think that being able to see how the
trauma affects each generation and then how they pass their
own burden onto their children, and to finally see someone
like Aileen who was able to break away from it
and break this cycle of abuse and sort of despair
(29:57):
that had followed this family for gen I think is
absolutely inspiring.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
I think it's fascinating Alien's story because there's this shift.
She has a shift in perspective at some point, and
I'm not sure exactly what led her to that shift,
but there was that moment she talked about when when
she realized that she was not even sort of listed
in the thoughts of the other She found that it
was at a letter nick where she and there was twelve.
Speaker 5 (30:24):
Children in the family and yeah, and she wasn't even mentioned.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
Right, That might have been the impetus for her to go, well,
am I even a part of this family? Or you know,
maybe the thought then happened with her of why is
my perspective and my behavior following this pattern? If I'm not,
you know, does that give me an allowance to not
be a part of the family or to think differently
in some way about who I am relative to the family.
(30:47):
And what was amazing is she was able to if
the ideation of suicide or the ideation that everything's terrible
and there's this generational legacy of violence and a b
if she's able to then go, that has become a norm.
If that's the normal, if that's baseline, then I can
(31:08):
move away from that and let that perspective go and
have a new perspective and sort of break the cycle.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
Yeah, I thought so too. I mean, I thought I
was incredibly powerful, and I think that a lot of us.
What was what is the phrase all happy families are
the same, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their
own special way. I forget who that is?
Speaker 6 (31:30):
Is that?
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Yeah? How does one What are some tools that we
might all have or take from her story about breaking
the cycle of trauma and hardship and and changing our perspective.
You know, I had a dear friend who went to
her abusive father, who was a Vietnam veteran who had
never quite recuperated fully and still suffered from PTSD and
(31:53):
was very harsh and very abusive. And I remember the
day she drove home to Charlotte, North Carolina, to say
goodbye to him, and her goodbye essentially was was letting
him know that she was no longer going to empower
this or be a part of this relationship, and that
if he wanted to drink himself to death, she was
no longer going to coddle him or try to help him,
and that she was done and she was moving on.
(32:13):
And it was this extremely empowering thing that happened when
she sort of had the foresight to go, I don't
have to be a part of this, I you know,
I can. I can shift my idea of who I
am and my perspective of who I am and my
identity so that it doesn't contain this I am. Yeah,
and I and Aileen.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
Did that absolutely. I think that there has to come
a realization at some point that you know, you don't
actually owe anything to your parents. They dragged you into
this world. If if they're good to you, then you'll
want to give back. But if they're bad to you
for years and years and years, you don't actually owe
them anything. They dragged you here unwillingly, you know. And
(32:53):
I think that there's something about that. I think that like,
if you're a parent, you can make that connection and
go like, I'm just not going to do that to
my kid. If you want your kid around, you'd be
good to your kid through their childhood and they'll stick around,
you know. And I think that I think that that's
something that many of us who have had sort of abusive,
shitty relationships in our pasts, have to come to on
(33:16):
our own. Nobody can nobody can talk you into understanding
that you can break the cycle. You have to figure
it out. And I think that, like, it's it's helpful
if you have the benefit of other examples out there.
And I think that the reason that this generation is
doing so much better than the generations that came before
(33:39):
this is that we're all much more aware of like
the you know, psychological effects of being hit as a child,
of being like constantly told that you're not smart enough, Like,
we have a better understanding of this now, and so
more people of our generation raising young kids now are going, like,
my actions have consequences that linger that stay throughout their lives.
(34:04):
And I don't want for them to feel like I
feel like, I want for them to feel healthier. I
want for them to feel better and more secure and
more capable and more empowered. To live the life that
they want to live. And I think that that just
wasn't available to a lot of us when we were younger.
(34:25):
You know, it clearly wasn't available to Aileen. It speaks
to her character that she was able to come to
this conclusion despite not having any model for this understanding
in her own life. She was able to come to
this conclusion herself. And I think that's kind of that's
kind of magical in that sense. You know that she
was able to see it better life huge despite not
(34:49):
having had a good life.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
It's huge. And also say, I don't have to carry
this legacy. I don't have to, Like you do it unconsciously.
You carry your family's legacy and kind but to rise
above it and go wait a minute, I don't have
to identify with this, you know, to get out of
that prison of your mind. To even become aware that
it is a prison and that you can unlock the
door and walk out is badass. It's incredibly heroic.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:17):
Like and well, and I'll go a little further. Even
the idea of like she talks about suicidal ideation, and
that is you know, the question is would would that
be a part of her mental process had it not
become normalized in her family. There's this history of generational
suicide in her family, and so so she so unconsciously.
(35:42):
I think that maybe she had that in the back
of her her mind, in the back of her soul
in some way that was that was saying, hey, you
can always check out. Other people have like it's not
uncommon in our family. Maybe that's why they checked out
or who knows what that conversation, that internal conversation, that
internal monologue was. But to stop that internal monologue and go,
(36:04):
you know what, I'm I don't have to have that
as as as part of my consciousness.
Speaker 5 (36:10):
Yeah, And I also think that there's something that even
goes further, you know, I think that there's this real
sense of the family being cursed and when you're raised
thinking that like it is not up to you how
your life goes, but it's up to some force that's
(36:31):
larger than you and ineffable and beyond you. Then there's
a sense of sort of fatalism there where it's it's
not just like, well, this is how my family deals
with pain is by killing themselves. It's like it's like
it is faded that I should that like we should
kill ourselves, that we should die off. And that's really
(36:53):
that's a really hard mental block to break. I imagine,
Like it's not just like my family fucked up, It's
like my family has a curse. My family is cursed.
So yeah, I mean, like I just think that it
Also it also speaks to what an incredible imagination you
(37:13):
would have to have to imagine a world beyond that,
to imagine a world beyond this deep belief system that
was like instilled with you. I think that that's incredible.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
She also attributes it some of the causality here. She
very clearly attributes not just to her family, as though
the family's you know, carrying the specific curse, but she
attributes a lot of it to the fact that the
family tried to fit in in a world that was
(37:46):
sort of not kind to them and not not welcoming
them with open arms. You know, they struggled in ways
with bringing know, trying to assimilate into a new culture,
and that new culture never quite accepting them. How that
fueled a lot of the self loathing that she then inherited.
(38:11):
So she points at a larger systemic thing too, and
how these cultural differences in sort of racism or classism
or these other things sort of fed into this family curse,
if we want to call it that. You know, it's
not just her family, it's all of society that she's
sort of going, wait a minute, that that doesn't make sense,
that's not right, you know, and rebelling against that.
Speaker 5 (38:34):
She's an incredible human being, and she's taken all of
this lifetime of trauma and has turned it toward a
lifetime of serving others and trying to make her community
stronger and.
Speaker 4 (38:48):
Better, and channeled it into theater and art and sculpture
and music in ways that are just stunned. Next time
I'm alive again, we meet Dwayne Meadows. Because you're vibed
the devastating two thousand and four Indian Ocean tsunami qualfacationing
in Thailand.
Speaker 6 (39:06):
I heard a scream and then I looked out to
the ocean, and I saw a far out in the
ocean that looked like some kind of small wave. The
next thing I remember, the water just comes gushing into
my room, moving incredibly fast, like a whitewater rafting trip.
And as I start to look around, I can see
debris everywhere now, and I mean cars, whole bungalows floating,
(39:31):
the buildings were breaking up. I got lucky with what
did hit me and what didn't hit me to make
it that day.
Speaker 4 (39:38):
Swept a mile inland and then back out to see
by the powerful waves.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Dwayne's harrowing journey of.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
Survival is one of quick thinking, resilience, and courage. In
the aftermath, he helped others to find safety and later
returned to Thailand to assist in rebuilding communities impacted by
the disaster. Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney,
Brent Die, Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovin,
(40:04):
additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew
Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for
additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima L. K
Ali and Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slavitchka,
Brent Die, and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush. Special thanks to
(40:28):
Alien Loy for sharing her.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Remarkable story with us.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
Alive again is a production of i Art Radio and
Psychopia Pictures.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
we'd love to hear your story.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.
That's a l i v e A g A I
N p R O j e c t at gmail
dot com.
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