263: What if a darkness destroyed your family?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. You know it's real, but you just can't wrap your head around it. I don't feel like I'm ever going to fully be able to grasp what happened, even though I was there and I witnessed it. It's not supposed to happen, you know, but it did happen and now you have to live with it.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 263. What if a darkness destroyed your family?

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. Both of my parents, they were born in Libya. They were both born into a family of five other siblings.

My mom was always happy talking about her upbringing in Libya. It just sounded like a really good life. She had a really, really good relationship with her father. Her mom taught her how to cook. So this is something that a lot of people remember about my mom, that she was a really, really amazing cook.

Anything that had to do with like nurturing others. It's a theme that I noticed with my mom. She loved gardening, for example. She loved to feed others. I can remember multiple surprise parties that she threw for friends. She grew up in a loving environment. And it's something that I feel my brothers and I and even my father, like we all benefited from.

When it comes to my father's background, I do not know that much about my father. There were certain periods of my life where I actually felt like, oh, I would like to be close to him. I want to know him more. So I would ask him certain questions about his past and everything, and he was just very vague.

Which was always strange to me and I feel like at the time I didn't really have the language or the thought to just ask him why he's being vague. It's unfortunate to me, but I don't really know a lot about him. So my parents being Muslim, we do not date or live together before marriage or have any kind of premarital relations.

The norm at the time, and even now, it's that a man and a woman who are not married, they are not supposed to be alone together, whether in public or especially in private. The way things usually go, like at least in my family, is it's usually the man that comes to the woman's house and the woman's parents will also be there while the couple kind of gets to know each other.

In Libya, this is something that's very normal. So my parents spoke for maybe a little bit less than a year before they got married. And I stayed in Libya for about one year together before immigrating to the U.S.

They settled in Oakland and they had my eldest brother in 1990 and then my second oldest in 1993 and then I was born in 1995. And then in the year 2000, she had our youngest brother. My earliest memories from childhood honestly were like really pleasant.

I remember as a family, we'd go to the lake a lot and we'd just spend like a whole day there, swimming, barbecuing. We also went camping a lot. We had a security door at the front door. So we would open the regular door and just have the breeze coming in and we would lay down our blankets and the six of us would just sleep right in front of the door, like really warm nights. It was something I really enjoyed doing, something I was always excited about.

We grew up with a lot of pets. In my childhood years, we had sheep at one point. We had a snake at one point, frogs, turtles, a goat, cats, and I really liked animals. We all kind of did. I had a really good relationship with my mom my whole life.

My relationship with my father, I wouldn't say that it was bad. I just don't feel like we had a close relationship. Even though he did make time, of course, for us to do things as a family, the connection that I had with my mom, it was just something different. My mom felt like my friend, my confidant, someone that I could talk to about anything.

Even though my father was reserved, even though I didn't have the kind of closeness that I wanted to have with him, he was still a very warm and loving person. I never felt unloved by him. I still feel like I have a lot of the same traits from when I was a child. I'm very happy. I joked a lot as a kid. I was introverted, but I always loved to laugh.

I played clarinet for a very long time, so I was in band a lot. Writing is also another thing. I always journaled. I always loved sharing my stories in elementary, middle school and onward. My mom, she was always like moved by what I wrote and chose to share with her. She always stressed the importance of education.

She went to university and she got her master's in child development. And she would tell me all the time, she's like, you know, your knowledge is the one thing that nobody could take away from you. So there's a particular quote by Abu Bakr as-Sadiq, who is one of the leaders in Islamic caliph. He said, "Without knowledge, action is useless and knowledge without action is futile."

In 2006, I was about 11. I think that's when I started to feel darkness. I don't even recall a specific incident, but I just remember that things were not feeling as they were before. My mom didn't seem as happy, and I just felt like there was some tension that was never there before.

My father owned a small business, so he fixed computers. That was all the income that we had for our family of six. 2007, he started experiencing less income. When my father was earning and we were comfortable and were able to go on trips and vacation and go camping and things like that, I think that's when he felt his best. There is a lot of stress on the man to provide in a relationship.

But in 2007, his self-esteem took a hit. He felt like he wasn't being the father or husband that he was supposed to be. That started filling in to our family life in a lot of negative ways. Things started going downhill. In 2008, when the economy completely crashed, things got really difficult for our entire family.

We had been renting homes pretty much my whole life. And in 2009, we just kind of realized like we are not going to be able to afford renting anymore. So my father had his computer shop and that's where we had to live. We moved in to a shop in the summer of 2009, the summer before I started my freshman year of high school.

My father's computer shop, it wasn't super tiny, but of course it's not any place for a family to be living in. There were two rooms in the back. So the first room that you would pass, that's where my mother and I slept together. In the next room, we emptied that out completely and put down four mattresses for my father and my brothers to sleep on.

The bathroom didn't have like a shower or anything like that. So when we did have to shower, you just keep on throwing like a bucket of water and refilling it. And we just clean ourselves that way. With the kitchen, I remember we just had like this old camp stove. And that's what my mother would cook on for the family. The neighborhood that it was in was not that great either. I still remember the night that we officially moved into the shop.

I remember my mom, she apologized to me and one of my brothers. She was like, "I'm so sorry." And my brother and I were like, "It's not your fault." It was strange, I think, for all of us. For me, it didn't even feel like it was happening. It didn't feel real. But I think I would have felt less upset if my father had not become abusive. Our living situation coupled with the abuse, it just made it really difficult.

He promised we were only going to spend that one summer at the shop and then we would end up finding another place to live. But we ended up staying there until I graduated from high school. For the first few months, I was kind of like, I'm going to protest this. And I refused to sleep on the floor. So I would sleep on beach chairs or I would sleep at my brother's desk.

very uncomfortable. But I was like, I don't want him to think that I'm getting comfortable with the situation or that I'm happy with us living here. But eventually I just became very accustomed to it. It just started to feel very normal. You just kind of adjust to whatever situation you're in. There definitely was a lot of tension at home. And even though it's hard to point out specific instances, like we were all walking on eggshells around my father.

On February 14, 2009, I remember we just got back from Costco. Already it was tense, just grocery shopping together. It was my mother, my father, my little brother and me. My mom, my brother and I, we were sitting in the kitchen at the table. And my father, he was watching TV like in the living room, so I could see him from where I was sitting.

At one point, he just called my mother to the living room and we didn't know what was going on or anything, but I just felt very concerned. So I kept watching her, you know, and then I hear him say very sternly, you know, sit down. My mom, she stays like standing up and she's like, I'm not going to sit down like you could tell me whatever you need to tell me.

I think he might have asked her again to sit down, but she refused to sit down. And I remember he just got up from his seat, pressed his fingers into her arms, and he was just like shaking her. My mom, she starts crying and screaming. So I run to my brother's room and I just remember like yelling at the top of my lungs. I was hysterical and I was like, Baba's hitting Mama.

My brothers, they both get up and I saw my father, like before my brothers got into the room, I saw him take the rocking chair and he just like threw it in my mother's direction. But she shielded herself with the bookcase that was in the room. So my brothers go into the living room and they get in between my parents and that diffused the situation like he wasn't going to try anything after that.

But I was shaking and I just kind of knew like when I came to my father, I was never going to see him like the same way after that. There's like a threat and the threat is in your own house and it's not like a stranger, it's your father. So it's not something that you feel you can escape. I feel like I just wasn't ever as happy as I was before.

After that, I just became hypervigilant and physically feel it, like the fear. That night, my mom told one of her good friends and that friend strongly advised my mom to call the police just to file a police report. So my mom did. The next day, my mom was cooking dinner and he came behind her, kind of like towering over her.

He just kind of whispered, but I could hear him. If you ever call the police on me again, I'm going to kill you. When he said that, like, of course, I'm terrified. But, you know, I'm not thinking, oh, he's actually going to kill her. For like a couple weeks after my father first hit her, my mom was sleeping in my room with me, like on my bed.

For a while, my father allowed it. But like by the second week, I remember he just came in in the middle of the night and he just grabs my mom out of the bed. And I started crying and I just got in front of my mom and I just started yelling at him to leave her alone. He said, fine, you could sleep here tonight. But after that, you have to sleep in our room or else.

We were all catering to my father at this point. My father just wanted the world to revolve around him, which it was in the household. You just can't relax in that environment. You can't live your life because you're always thinking about like, "Okay, what can I do to get through this day or through this next hour or until he goes to sleep or until he goes to work?"

I remember like my father hit her and literally the very next day he brought her flowers and he hugged her. He kissed her and everything. I just remember being confused, not just about that, but just confused about everything because it's like maybe what worked last time is not working this time.

I think people have this idea that like there is something that you can do to make things better, to make a situation better. But having lived it, witnessed it, experienced it, that's definitely not the case anymore.

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So in July of 2009, that's when we ended up moving into my father's computer shop as a family.

At the end of that summer, my father sent me, my mom, and my little brother to Libya. He wanted us to stay a year, so he got a one-way ticket for us, but we ended up coming back. When we came back, my mom ended up moving in with a friend. So my parents are pretty much separated at this point. They weren't really talking.

Around nine-ish months of us living with my mom's friend, they kind of reconciled and they were kind of talking again. Then at one point, my mom decided that she was going to move back into the shop. I was not happy because things just kind of went back to how they were.

I daydreamed a lot in high school about leaving my father, about how we could do it. I don't know if domestic violence was even in my vocabulary, to be honest. I didn't know about any resources. I didn't know about anyone dealing with anything similar. We didn't really talk about it. I felt very isolated. I felt like we were isolated, like nobody else was dealing with what we were dealing with, and it wasn't something that I could even talk about. But my mom made everything better for me.

Our relationship was really good and I loved her so much. She gave me a lot of what I could have lacked that might have led me into depression. She did the best that she could to continue to shelter my brothers and I from everything that was going on.

So I graduated high school in June 2013. The plan was for me to go to the local community college.

I was very, very interested in working for Doctors Without Borders as a nurse. And our local community college had like a good nursing program and everything. But my father wasn't super supportive of the idea. And I'm not as good as I would like to be advocating for myself.

I know he's going to take certain measures. If he doesn't want something to happen, he's going to make sure that it doesn't happen. He's not going to like anything that might get me and us closer to leaving. I think like deep down, it's like I know that I'm just going to do whatever he wants me to do. So it was June 8th, 2013, three days after I graduated from high school.

On the day of my high school graduation, my mom told me that my father had hit her before they came to my ceremony. So things were really tense. And even that week, we went for a walk together, she and I, and she told me, she's like, "After you graduate, you and me and your brothers, we need to sit down and talk about what we're going to do because we can't stay here anymore." The threat was imminent.

So on June 8th, one of her good friends came over to the shop so my father could fix her car mirror. So my father, he fixed it. And then my mom went out and sat in the car with her friend. And I was sitting in the front. My mom's friend gave me like 40 bucks. So I wanted to go buy books. And I was kind of looking at my mom and I could also see my father. He was like looking outside every few seconds, like really looking at my mom.

And it was like concerning me, like the way that he was staring at her. My mom, like she eventually comes inside and she goes to our room that we shared organizing documents or something. There was a stack of papers with her. Then my father goes to the back of the shop. And just a few seconds after that, I hear my mom like shout my name. And I get up and I run to the back and I see like a pink mark on her face. And my mom tells me she's like, he just hit me.

I get in between them and like I pushed my father and I was like, just leave her alone. He just kind of stood there for a second, but eventually he goes back to the front of the shop. My mom just like looked at herself in the mirror and saw the mark on her face. My mom told me, she's like, okay, I'm going to go outside and meet me outside. So I was like, okay, let me change. So she goes out the back door. She shuts the door. But then before I even have a chance, I see my father just walk right across my room.

None of it feels normal. So I run after him. He's outside and he starts pushing the door closed against me. Eventually he gives up. So I go outside and I'm like crying and my mom comes and she wipes the tears off my face and she's just like, it's okay Nora, like stop crying. The neighbors are watching. And there were neighbors outside.

We're in the parking lot at the back of the shop. It's like right where the alley is. She's trying to like walk away and my father is blocking her in like every direction that she's going in. So I grab my mother's hand and I walk into the alley with her. And my father's following us. He just keeps telling me, leave. I just want to talk to your mom. I just want to talk to your mom.

These two men who lived at the house on the corner, they were watching at the end of the alley and they asked my mom, they're like, you know, do you need help, lady? She just kind of puts her hand up. She's like, no. She's like, thank you. My mom eventually tells me it's okay, Noor. He's just going to tell me the same things that he's been telling me. You know, you could go.

She has asked me a few times before I left and I'm thinking like, okay, he might try something, but there are two men at the end of the alley watching my mom. And so I walk back to the door. I stay outside and I'm just like watching. I hear my father speaking, but can't really make out what he's saying. And he just like pulls up the shirt and pulls out the gun.

My mom sees the gun pointed at her. She just yells his name and then he just shoots her. It was at least four times I remember hearing and seeing. The neighbors ran away and he's still like holding the gun and I see him like walk away from her body and I just like ran across the street. When I got to the other side, I just stopped to look back and we make eye contact.

I think about this, his expression a lot. I really cannot describe what it was. He almost seemed like sad. And I remember I just screamed, get away from me. It's like, you just can't believe it. I'm just like, I can't even believe that this is happening. You know it's real, but you just can't wrap your head around it. Even now, I wake up so often and my first thought is that same thought.

I'm like, is she really dead because my father killed her? I don't feel like I'm ever going to fully be able to grasp what happened, even though I was there and I witnessed it. It's not supposed to happen, you know, but it did happen. And now you have to live with it.

After I screamed at him to get away from me, I had no idea where I was going. I didn't have a cell phone at the time. My little brother is actually asleep at the shop and my other brother's in San Francisco and the other one was at work.

I'm just walking toward the marina in Vallejo. And like, I just randomly stopped this couple. Like I got into the middle of the street, crying my eyes out, hysterical. And I'm just like, call the police. My dad killed my mom. So they were like, okay, I'm going to call the police. And they drove away. I keep walking, walking, walking, walking.

This lady, I still remember her name, Arianne. She stopped and she's like, what's going on, sweetie? I was like, my dad, my dad killed my mom. I think she asked me where and I just kind of pointed towards the general direction of where the shop was. And I just remember like she had me sit in the passenger seat of her car and she's like rubbing my shoulders and she's like, calm down, sweetie, like calm down. So she just waited with me until the police came.

They picked me up. They drove me back to the shop. There's like a whole crowd now on Tennessee Street, which is the front of the shop. And I see my little brother getting handcuffed and they had him sit on the curb. He was only like 12 years old at this time. He has no idea what happened. I had the window opened. He was like, he's like, oh, what's going on? I just keep telling him, I'll see you later. I'll see you later. Blew him a kiss. And I was like, I love you.

So they take me to the police station. The first question I asked when we walked inside, I was like, "Is my father going to prison?" The police said, "Let's just get settled in." So he takes me to a room. He leaves me by myself for like several hours. And I just kept reciting certain verses of the Quran.

There's one verse that you say when someone dies. In English, it's translated to, "To God we belong, and to Him we shall return." Just this reminder and this promise, like me and my mother, you know, we don't belong to each other the way that the both of us belong to God. This whole life is just us returning back to God. That's something I find a lot of comfort in.

Eventually, they finally tell me, okay, it's time for your interview. They take me to a different room. There are like three male officers at the other end of this table that I'm at. And they were just telling me how sorry they were. They're like, you know, we're all fathers and we can't even imagine what you're going through. And at the end, they told me that when the officer arrived on the scene, my father aimed his gun at him. And the officer responded by fatally shooting him dead.

I lost my breath for a second and started to cry, but I wasn't sad. I was weeping because I was furious. I was mourning the loss of the opportunity that I had been daydreaming about for all of the hours that I was waiting to be interviewed, which was the opportunity for me to visit my father in prison just once for the sole purpose of letting him know that I hope he burns in hell.

He wasn't my father anymore, just the man that killed my mom. But I was also relieved that he was dead because I don't have to be afraid anymore. This person is the source of so much stress and trauma and abuse. And now they're gone. It's like, obviously, that's a relief, which is really sad that this was one of the ways out for my brothers and I.

Then of course, I was devastated that my mom was dead. She literally was my best friend. My mom sometimes, she would even talk about death. I would just tell her, "Oh, please don't talk about death or don't talk about you dying. I don't want to think about a time where you're not going to be with me." That was really one of my worst fears.

They put me in a different room, which is where my brothers and I reunited. I first saw my little brother though, and I asked him if he knew what happened, and he said he did, and he just shed like one or two tears, and we just hugged each other. Neither myself nor my community, I don't feel like we really knew how to encounter the grief, especially just because of how shocking it was.

I can't even begin to articulate just who my parents were in the community and among their friends. It was in her nature to just care for others, to celebrate others. And this is just what she loved to do and people loved her for it. People would go to her for advice. Even though my father was not as social as my mother, people loved my father and he loved everybody else as well.

That definitely added to the shock because it's like we seemed like this perfect family on the outside. After the murder, my anger was just very, very intense all the time. It was so overwhelming, like just the extent of my anger. It was kind of spilling over into other areas of my life. I was just being like really short with people. I isolated myself a lot.

One of my aunts, she nicknamed me "disappearing girl" because I was just very, very antisocial. One of the biggest things is the fact that so many of the people that were around me, even though I'm sure it was well-intentioned, were trying to get me to completely forget about what happened.

Like we had just gotten out of the police station and arrived at my aunt's house. And this lady that was there from our community, she walked me to the park. Like she just kind of wanted to talk to me and like I'm crying. And she told me, she's like, you have to forgive your father.

I got so angry because I'm like, "How are you telling me that I need to forgive my father?" First of all, it's not your place to say that. But even if you wanted to advise someone to be forgiving, you don't tell them five hours after they watched their mom get killed by that person.

that really bothered me and if that was like the only instance it would not be a big deal but this is something that kept on happening not only for the weeks or months after but even for like several years a lot of people did blame my mother sometimes it was very direct sometimes it was more subtle

When people would speak as if my mother was the one who was responsible for her own murder, in my head that translated to them just thinking that my mother was very meek and complacent and spineless, like she didn't have any regard for her own life or the life of her kids.

Whenever people did blame my mom, I just felt like they were just painting my father out to be like this victim who was like almost in a way coerced to kill the source of his greatest stresses. Like if my mother had listened to my father, that this would not have happened to her. One of her friends had told me, you know, the woman can always change the direction of the relationship.

You know, your mother knew that it was getting bad. She could have changed it. I'm super depressed. I'm super tired all the time. I am not taking care of myself. I'm not combing my hair anymore. I'm not showering as much as I should be. All these things that were happening and how it made me feel was that what I was feeling was wrong.

For a long time, I felt crazy, like there was something wrong with me because I'm just trying to grieve. And people are like, "No, no, forget about what happened or forgive him or move on." The day of the funeral, we had it four days after the murder at the mosque in Vallejo. And even there, I feel like there was not really an acknowledgement of what happened.

The way that they were talking about my parents, they just kind of paired the two. Like, oh, it's so sad that they died. You know, God rest their souls as if their deaths were equal. It's just like, it's not the same. It's just not the same.

I think at the time, I didn't understand that people are just very uncomfortable with what happened and this is how it's manifesting. You know, it's easier for them to not acknowledge what happened.

I remember I was at one of our family friend's house, my aunt's house, and I was crying. Quite a few people were telling me to just kind of stop crying, but I was also told that the more I cry, the more my parents will suffer. I just felt what I was feeling was not normal. Why can't I move on? Everyone's telling me I need to move on, so why can't I?

There was one person there who was one of our family friends, and she was literally the only one that day. And for a long time, that just straight up told me, you're allowed to feel however you feel. She's like, if you don't want to forgive your father, you're completely allowed to not forgive him. If you want to forgive him one day and you're angry the next day, you're allowed to be feeling that way. And that meant a lot to me.

The most common thing that I heard was people saying, "Why didn't she leave?" or "She should have left." "She could have left." "She could have gone to a shelter." "Why didn't she ask for help?" I think a lot of people, when they are not in that situation, they don't really understand how difficult it is to leave.

something really tragic happened. And a lot of people who, you know, love my mother, like it came as a shock to them and they lost someone that they were very close to that was very beloved to them. And they just don't know how to deal with it. And I think for people when they say things like, oh, why didn't she leave? Or she should have asked for help.

or she triggered your father, whatever the case is, I feel like for a lot of them, they're trying to make sense of what happened. When it came to myself and my grief, I really don't feel like I handled it. Losing my mom, I hated the thought of living without her. But losing her, especially in the way that I did and especially being there and witnessing it, it kind of messed me up for a while.

I had a lot of guilt as a result of what happened. I felt the most guilt for just walking away because I was standing in between my parents and the entire time that I'm standing in between them in the alley, my father was telling me, "Go inside. I just want to talk to your mother." Until eventually my mother told me the same thing. You know, when my mother told me several times to walk away, like I didn't feel good about it, but I just walked away.

So that was something that I felt really guilty about for a long time. I'll always think to myself, if my brothers were there instead, this probably wouldn't have happened. Of course, you know, our father was determined to kill her, even if it didn't happen in that moment, on that day, in that week, it would have happened eventually.

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I'm not disciplined at my job. I don't know why. My self-esteem took a really big hit. There was nothing that I felt proud of in my life. I was not attributing everything that was going wrong with everything that happened. I honestly didn't know how to process anything. I only took two classes that following semester and I failed both of them.

The following semester, I ended up visiting one of my friends just for a weekend. And that entire weekend, I was crying my eyes out for no reason in particular. There was nothing that triggered it that I can recall. I was just crying so much and she and her family, they ended up taking me to see a psychiatrist while I was there that weekend.

And that's when I was officially diagnosed with clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. After that, I ended up just dropping out of school because I couldn't do it anymore. I had been calling the suicide hotline, I'd say on average, like three to four times a week. There was a long period of time where I just did not want to live.

I was continuing to go to work still, but once I got fired from that job, I pretty much just used whatever I had in savings and I left California. I feel like I actually kind of got to recovering a little bit while I was staying with my friend. I stayed with her and her family for five months. I'm really grateful for her and her family.

I came back, I think at the beginning of 2017 with the intention of attending a domestic violence training in Oakland. So that was something that I actually became excited about. I was like very curious for a long time to know why my father did what he did. I'm never going to have an answer for that, obviously, but I feel like it kind of helped me process things. And so when I ended up going to the domestic violence training, then I started volunteering at the shelter.

In general, things were getting better. I started junior college again. Taking the domestic violence trainings that I took, I think that was just good for me to feel involved. I ended up also volunteering and working there for a while. We would go to schools and events in the city and just educate communities about domestic violence and provide resources.

There was this whole narrative. My mother was at fault in some way that she could have prevented what happened to her. You know, there was never a part of me that believed in any of that, of course. But I think just being able to go to these trainings and befriend like the other people that were there as well and do the work that I was doing, I felt like my mother's experience was honored in those spaces.

In 2017, in the summer, I was fortunate enough to attend a writing workshop in Philadelphia. I would have never called myself a writer at that point, but I went to this workshop and that kind of propelled me to start writing about my experiences, what happened to my mother. I started pitching essays and having them published.

to create something beautiful, something that resonates with a lot of people out of your own suffering. That's very, very cathartic. I know we hear that all the time, but that's because it's true. A few people were telling me, you know, you should stop writing about it. You're kind of tainting the image that we have of your mother. No one wants to see her in this light. She wouldn't even want you to talk about how she suffered.

Some people kind of mentioned how they dislike the way that I spoke about my father. They said that I sounded angry or that I painted him in a bad light, which he didn't deserve. It did bother me, but you keep going.

In one particular essay, a lot of people were commenting saying that domestic violence is something that is unique to the Muslim community or, you know, because they know that I, the author, am Muslim. They would say like, "Oh, she's writing all of this and yet she still follows this faith which condones this sort of violence against women."

Domestic violence happens in all communities, like across the board. It happens everywhere. But I feel like there's a very unique conversation that people want to bring in when it comes to certain groups of people who perpetrate and experience domestic violence. And I definitely feel like that's true for Muslim communities as well.

I know that my religion does not condone domestic violence or violence against women, but that just becomes the story once people find out that I am Muslim, that my mother, that my father are Muslim. For so many years, especially after my mom died, I had this very strong inclination to go to Libya. That was one of the first things I thought about after she died.

So in 2019, I decided to go to Libya for like six months. I had all these fantasies about going, about being like this big happy family, very cliche. And I had this idea that I was going to feel so close to my mom if I go back. But when I went back, literally none of that happened.

Going back, I was like, okay, I want to have this happy family. I want us to talk about things. I want us to recall all these memories of my mother. And when I got there, that wasn't what happened at all. You know, people still didn't want to acknowledge what happened, particularly on my father's side of the family. And for me, it's near impossible for me to be close to them if this is not something that is going to be acknowledged.

About four months into my trip, I was getting ready for bed and right before midnight, I started to hear shelling outside. When the bomb dropped, I didn't know it was a bomb. I just felt like the reverberations from the bomb, like all of the windows around us were shuttering and they were tugging the blinds back and forth against the glass.

Even the ground was vibrating beneath my feet and I could feel it rippling throughout my entire body. I just remember freezing at that point. I was with my aunt and my uncle. We were in the living room glancing at each other. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on, but eventually everything calmed down. My aunt, just three or four minutes after we heard the bomb drop, she said that she was going to go drive back to her house, which is on the other side of the city.

When I told her to stay, she just insisted that she would go and she said, "God is my protector." She just went on her way. I feel like this is a general attitude that a lot of people have in Libya. They're just like this very sincere reliance on God. It's something that I admire a lot. After my aunt left, I told my uncle, I was like, "Honestly, I'm too afraid to go to sleep."

I literally just started to imagine the house being bombed. I imagined the weight of the bomb just tearing through the roof and destroying everything while I was asleep. Charred skin and dismembered limbs and ruptured eardrums. I imagined the shock waves and death and just waking up to a completely different reality

My uncle took it as an opportunity to make a joke, like we might be next tomorrow night, like the bomb might drop on our house, which now I'm thinking about and it's kind of funny because I make jokes like that that have made people uncomfortable. So I kind of understand where that's coming from. But honestly, he put me off and I just went into the room and didn't really engage with him.

I put my blanket and pillows down on the floor and my uncle told me to sleep on the floor away from the window. But in the same breath, he said, "There's nothing to be afraid of." And then I just went to sleep. I think about the attitude that people have towards death a lot when I compare Libya versus how people deal with grief in America.

There's a lot of emphasis on grief has no timeline. Healing is not linear. You know, be kind to yourself. But in Libya, I don't hear that kind of thing. That's not really the attitude that people have when things happen over there, like when someone dies, even in a very violent way. Of course, people are shocked and they grieve for a number of days and then it feels like they kind of move on.

Between war, fighting between militias and growing instability in the country and things like that, I started to see parallels between Libya's deterioration and the deterioration, I guess, in my own life. When I had my mother, she was like a home for me. That's always how I felt about her. And similarly, that's the way that I felt about Libya on all of those visits that I took with her.

But when I went in 2019, it completely changed. I feel like violence has interrupted my life in many ways. And I think it's done the same for Libya, too. I don't know if I believe in closure. There's no resolve for me in this case. But I do think going to Libya definitely did get me as close to closure as I'm probably going to get now.

Like for me, Livia and my mother, like these were my homes, my shelters. Going back and realizing that what had been there before is not there anymore. Just like my mother was here before and she's not anymore. All it really did was kill the fantasy that I had that there's a place to go back to that's going to be better for me.

Healing from Lubia has been so painful, but I'm really grateful that I got to visit because it really did give me what I needed. That's more than anything that I could have asked for. I always think about my father's face, how it looked the last time I looked into his eyes, full of sorrow and grief and regret. He looked sad. It's like the face of like, "Oh, I didn't want to do this, but I had to."

And I still haven't forgiven him and maybe I'll surprise myself in the future, but I don't anticipate that I will be forgiving him. I don't know if I have it in me to do that. But I know he wasn't in a good state for the last several years of his life as well. I'm pretty sure he had depression and some other psychological issue that was never diagnosed. He was just very paranoid in the last few years. Very, very paranoid all the time.

and there wouldn't be any kind of evidence for him to be feeling a certain way. I mean, it's just, it's paranoia. So something had shifted mentally. And my mom, like she told him, like, you know, you should go to the doctor. And he just, it was never something he would consider. So he was just kind of remained that way and obviously deteriorated over several years. Something was off, but he was a good father for most of my life.

He took us camping and he'd host barbecues and he joked with people a lot. He was gentle in the way that he spoke and the way that he acted. Good friend to people, a good person in a lot of ways. When I've written my essays about what happened, sometimes in the comments section,

People will say, oh, oh, he's a monster. He's terrible. He's a terrorist. Just terrorize the family, things like that. And it's like, of course, he is the source of that violence and anxiety and all all the stuff that we were dealing with. But it's not so black and white. I know we hear that a lot, but really, it's just not like, oh, I hate my father. Oh, I love my father. It's complicated feelings.

From the point that my mom was killed, her murder became like the binary marker of my entire life. Now, like I always think about my life in terms of this is the life that I had before she was killed. And then this is the life after she was killed, basically. And this is kind of the way that I keep time and have kept time ever since it happened.

I used to have a lot of dreams about my mom being in Libya. Like I would wake up after having this dream and sometimes I would think that that was actually true. I just kind of have this fantasy that, you know, she's there. She must be there.

I don't have those dreams anymore. Since going back, and I don't spend all of the hours that I used to spend driving my car around Vallejo every night, which is where she died, I'm not searching in the hope that I might find her again. I don't go back to the alley where she was killed anymore either, which is something that I used to do so often.

I feel so far away from who I was for so many of those years when I literally couldn't see an end in sight. And I'm just really grateful that I'm out of that now. Today's episode featured Noor Naz. To find out more about Noor, you can read her writing at NoorMNaz.com. That's N-O-U-R-M-N-A-Z.

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. Yeah.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.