278: What if you couldn't keep her safe?
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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. It felt like I had lost my mind and my body was filled with pain and panic.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 278, What If You Couldn't Keep Her Safe?

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My dad's family is refugees from the Holocaust in Germany, and they had just gotten to America and moved to Puerto Rico. My mom's parents were in Puerto Rico because of my grandfather's job in the Navy, and

They were at a party for the release of the album of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and my dad just immediately fell in love with my mom. She was so beautiful. She had really long red hair and a gorgeous figure, and she was a great dancer and really funny. Then they fell in love, and eventually they both moved to Massachusetts for college, and

They were together a really long time before they had me, probably about 10 years. In that time they had a lot of fun together. They really enjoyed being without kids and they did a lot of road trips and they built a dark room so they could do photography. I think that my parents just assumed that they should have kids and they didn't regret it, but I think it was just what they thought you were supposed to do.

My memories from being a kid are a lot about making art with my mom and my brother and my dad. Making art together has always been really important in our family.

My parents were like best friends, and sometimes it seemed romantic a little bit. But the burden of having children and other responsibilities definitely got in the way of their ability to have a lot of romance and connection between them.

Before I was 12 years old, my mom was really solid. And when I was 13, my uncle died of AIDS and it really changed my mom forever.

The grief she was experiencing led her into therapy, which led her into a prescription for Prozac. And in a reaction to that drug, it launched her into a manic episode that would be the beginning of her bipolar disorder.

When my mom's brother was diagnosed with AIDS, my mom really wanted to help people that had HIV. She joined this program called AIDS Buddies and they matched her with somebody to help that person go to the doctor, make sure they could get their medications and things like that.

The man that my mom was matched with just ended up being a really bad person and had a very easy time manipulating my mother because she was not in her right head.

I think this person convinced my mom that he was in love with her. He tricked her into believing that she was entering a certain type of romantic relationship, but then used having her in his possession as a way to exploit her and exploit our family financially.

and none of us really knew what was happening until she was missing. One day I came home from school and my mom was gone. That was really unlike her. And as I went through the house, I realized that all sorts of things had been removed from the house. The drawers from the dressers that had valuables were gone. It was like we had been robbed.

He took my mom and he took our valuables. We had no real way to track her other than the credit cards. So for about three months, this predator had my mom and spent my family's money. And then when all the money was gone, let our mom go back to us.

It felt like it would be a victory to get her back home and that if we got her back home, we would have won. That everything would be better and everything would just be fine again. But it wasn't like that at all.

She came home, like, on Christmas Eve, and it was just so sad. It was so traumatic to see her just physically defeated and abused and embarrassed and traumatized, and then to have to enter our family again. She was just very frail. After that, her battle with bipolar...

really began and there would be times where she would be suicidal and there would be times where she would seem okay. Most of what my mom did after that was stay in bed all the time. She was on a lot of pills and prescriptions. I would go lay in her bed next to her and she would be kind of catatonic

But she would stare at me like she enjoyed seeing my face. My biggest guilt about it is that I told my brother that it was his fault that she left. And I wish I hadn't done that because it wasn't his fault. But there was this part of me that felt like it was our fault as bad children. It felt like we were too difficult for her.

After that, she got different medications, and sometimes they were helpful, and sometimes they were more just like drugs to abuse and get addicted to. When I was a teenager, I really enjoyed the lack of supervision, and I definitely exploited having a parent that was in bed and not going to go investigate what I was doing.

This opened the door to a lot of activities like sex and drugs. Having my mom be on so many prescriptions meant that there was a lot of drugs in our house and that was a world where I could be happy and escape my life.

At that point, she also became very obsessed with people in our community that had experienced suicide in their families. And she began having me spend time with this older woman that would be like a grandmother figure to me. Her name was Alice.

When she was a child, her parents had both died by suicide, and she had come home from school, and they were hanging dead, and Alice had to cut them down. And I feel like my mom really wanted me to meet Alice as a way to protect me in case that happened to me.

And I think she wanted me to meet Alice because Alice was such a wonderful woman with such a great life and a beautiful house and kids and grandkids. Someone to look up to. I feel like it's at that point that my mom and I both began to understand that this was a very likely way for her to die.

Our house was on this big hill, and when I'd come home from school, I would imagine that my mom was going to be hanging from a tree when I'd get to the top of the hill. It was just a vision I had every day for the rest of high school. The idea just carved into my head. As soon as I'd start walking up the driveway, the idea would just immediately pop in my head.

My mother's suicide has been my greatest fear in life for decades. There was one time when I was home and my mom was just gone for too long. It got late, so I just started calling hotels in the area to see if maybe she had checked into one of them. I just called so many hotels.

and finally found that she had checked into a hotel about an hour away. I drove to the hotel. I hoped that by the time I got there, the police would have found her and saved her. And they had. I got to the hotel and I just stayed in her room for the night while she was at the hospital. She had taken a bunch of pills and tried to kill herself.

I don't really know a lot more details because it wasn't something that you wanted to tell me about. There was always this feeling like if I started to cry, I might never be able to stop crying. And so I just tried to stay away from crying and I tried to distract myself as much as I could with my friends and with partying.

Even though I'm not proud of using drugs and love and sex at that time to disassociate, I do feel like it kind of saved my life. I kind of needed that crutch in order to make it through. Going to college felt like I was escaping and also abandoning.

I'm kind of surprised I even made it to college, but my friends were really pushy about me going and even though my parents were consumed with my mom's mental health issues, my friends really came together and made sure that I scored high in the SATs and picked colleges to go to.

My friends didn't really know how to talk to me about what was going on with my mom because we didn't really have words for it. When I was in college, I was pretty unhappy. I was really depressed and it was hard to focus on school while having a mom that could kill herself anytime. I did a lot of drugs in college to be able to function.

After college, I moved around a bit and finally settled on living in New Orleans. I had fallen in love with a musician guy and he convinced me to get in his van and come to New Orleans.

I was so grateful to just be saved from my life in Massachusetts and excited to be part of a whole new culture and just build my own life. My mom came for Thanksgiving two years later. Her and my dad had broken up at that point and she was in another really bad relationship with this guy that was a trucker.

She had gotten her trucker's license, which was pretty impressive, and the two of them had bought a truck with my mom's money and driven it down to New Orleans for Thanksgiving. We were downtown and her boyfriend was at the hotel and I took her out for a walk and I asked her what he was gonna do while we were out and she said, "He's gonna go to the strip clubs and we're gonna go do the laundry."

And I asked my mom if she was okay with that and she gave me this look like I need to be rescued. I asked her if he hurt her physically and she said yes. And I asked her if she was scared to leave him and she said yes. My mom knew me well enough to know that telling me those things would immediately launch me into action.

So I asked this friend that lived down by the hotel that when he saw the guy go up to him and tell him to get the fuck out of town. Which was a pretty weird thing for me to do. My mom and I, we went down and we got the giant truck, this 18 wheeler, and we drove it up to my house on the other side of town. My mom calls this the Thelma and Louise moment.

So her and I had this 18-wheeler and we're driving across New Orleans with it, trying to figure out how to escape this guy. We drive it up to my house and park it, and he calls her on the phone, and I can hear him yelling at her through the phone, but then I can hear him yelling at her through the windows.

My mom came running out and jumped in the driver's seat of the truck. He went up to the door of the truck and pulled her out, and then he came to my window, and I pepper sprayed him, and he fell backwards. And I got my mom and drove off. And that's how she landed in New Orleans. And she was mine, I guess.

She didn't have a place to live. She had been living in the truck with him. She didn't really have any possessions. She was pretty beaten down again. I took her in. My boyfriend told me that if I moved my mother to New Orleans, he'd break up with me. So he broke up with me, and my mom moved to New Orleans.

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After she moved to New Orleans, she was pretty broken for a little while. But then we got her to a new doctor and a new assessment of her medications. It seemed to really help her a lot. We got her this really cute house to rent, an artist's loft with big backyard and huge bedroom. I lived there often with her too.

At that time I was starting my art career and it was really nice to have her around. She was really creative and good at making things and fun to have in the studio. So I just tried to really bring her into my life, fully adopt her. I felt like she could really flourish here and she really did.

She loved being part of the scene of Carnival and I had a lot of friends that were her age, so she fit pretty easily into my social life. When my mom first moved to New Orleans, my parents first talked about getting divorced. It seemed like another burden that I couldn't really handle. I really needed my dad to support me in supporting my mom.

And I asked my dad to please not divorce her. And my parents never got divorced. They both evolved into other relationships with new partners in their lives. My mom got really into Cajun dancing and dancing to the live bands and learning to two-step.

In that time, she met her partner that would be with her the rest of her life, named Pat. At first, I didn't trust Pat at all, because all the guys that seemed to like my mom seemed to be trouble. But Pat ended up being a really good guy, showing her a lot of love and patience and companionship.

My dad was really grateful to Pat for being a solid partner to my mom and taking a lot of the burden to take care of her. The first time that they met was at my dad's house up in Massachusetts and my dad like fell to his knees when Pat walked in and said, "Thank you, Pat. Thank you so much."

They're very close with each other and they collaborated for years on protecting my mom and loving my mom. For about a decade, my mom really had it together. She had a doctor she really liked and trusted, a psychiatrist, a really nice facility that was close to her house. She had a really beautiful home.

And everything seemed really good. It seemed like the drugs were working and she wasn't overmedicated. She was really enjoying her life. She had four cats that she just loved so much. Later on, Pat's daughter got pregnant and they had a grandchild. She just fell right into that role of being a nana. It was like a lifelong dream.

I went to see her on Mother's Day and she didn't look good. She looked like a hundred years old even though she was only in her 60s. Everything about her physically had really changed. She couldn't really walk well and she was shaking a lot.

And I asked her boyfriend what happened. And he said that it was a medication she was on and that she was trying to get off the medication, but that it would take a while. He gave me this box of marijuana and pipes and stuff that was hers.

And he asked me to take it away because the hospital wouldn't treat her if she tested positive again for marijuana. And I don't know what that policy is, but it felt really ominous. Felt like I can't imagine her being alive anymore if they're gonna start policing her lifestyle like this. It was right then that I thought, "I'm never gonna see my mom alive again."

I took the box of drugs and then I took her out to lunch and brought a friend with me because I was scared to be alone with her. I was scared to see her look so bad. I was scared for myself emotionally to navigate being with her. I just wanted to be a good daughter. And my friend brought me to get my mom flowers and then came over with me.

I remember the bill for lunch only came to $12 because no one really ate anything. She was having these tremors where her hands were shaking really bad. She wasn't able to use a fork. And when we walked home, she was walking so slow. Felt like she was crippled. I didn't understand how a medication could make her legs not work and make her hands shake.

I didn't really understand what she was going through inside her body at that time. After that, I left town and she didn't want me to leave. I felt like I could only handle so much of witnessing her decline.

I went to an artist residency in Detroit, drove up there to be an artist in residence for two months. I had a boyfriend in West Virginia that lived in a cabin on a mountain. I'd visit him on the weekends if I could.

And I was out there with him. And for his birthday, I had installed this vintage antique cast iron bathtub on the back deck of the cabin. And you could sit out there in the bathtub and look at the mountains and the sunset and the animals. It was like paradise.

I was in the bathtub, and these two baby deer came in front of the bathtub and were just frolicking, eating berries in front of me with the mountains behind them and the sunset. And I took a picture of my toes in the bath and the baby deer behind that and the mountains and the sunset, and I sent it to my mom. And I told her not to lose hope, and she said, um...

You're my baby, dear, and I will live vicariously through you. I said that I loved her, and she said that she loved me. About an hour later, I got a group text to my brother and I, and it said, I love you always and forever. It felt silly because I had just texted with her, and I didn't respond to it, and my brother didn't respond to it.

That night I went to bed with my boyfriend and had an amazing night. It was super romantic and just so beautiful. And early in the morning my dad called and I answered and he said that mom died. I was just naked standing there. I didn't want to burden my dad with the emotions that I knew were about to come. I told him that I loved him and I thanked him.

I started to cry. My boyfriend had heard the phone call and was in shock. And I didn't really know that it was true. I felt like I had to fact check it. So I called my mom's boyfriend, Pat, and I just said, is it true? And he said, it's true. And I asked him how she did it. And he said that she did it with a gun. It felt impossible that she had a gun.

It was like if he had told me she bought a spaceship and left the planet, it was like that far-fetched that she would have a gun. It was just so unlike her. It felt like I had lost my mind and my body was filled with pain and panic.

I felt like I was screaming all the time, but not making any noise. But all the pain in my throat was there, like I was being choked, like strangled. I just cried all the time. It was awful, and it wasn't even the worst of it. The real deep pain came later, once the shock wore off and the PTSD took root. She had

been hospitalized three times in the recent past for suicidality and mental instability, but we couldn't get her back into the hospital because her psychiatrist wasn't really responding. My mom even wrote him a letter two days before she died begging for some help, but he didn't even respond.

That day, Pat was watching my mom, and in the morning, she told him that she was going to go to the mall and buy underwear. Pat watched her on the security cameras as she was going to her car, and as soon as she left, Pat knew something was wrong. He called the police over and over again, begging for help, and he kept calling my mom and texting her.

Later that night, they would come with the bad news that they had found her dead at the park. My mom's final wish would be that we take care of Pat. In her suicide note, it just says, Pat, I'm sorry. I love you.

no one else has mentioned. So it's pretty obvious that she loved Pat and very committed to making sure that Pat knows that I love him and that I support him. We didn't have a lot of information about what happened to my mom. We didn't see her body and it felt like she had just disappeared. Then slowly we got clues like the gun box and the bullets.

We got her cell phone back. I didn't know her password and I just was guessing different passwords. And I unlocked her phone and I looked at her search history. It said, "How to hang yourself." And I clicked on it and I looked at what article was highlighted that she would have opened and read.

And it said that if you try and hang yourself, you'll probably fail and you'll end up a quadriplegic or brain dead or something. And that the best choice would be to use a handgun. And then she searched gun stores, New Orleans, and pulled up the gun store that was near her.

After she died, I googled "gun suicide" and I found out that most gun deaths are suicides and most suicides are by gun. And I was so surprised by that information. It felt like we had just known to keep her away from guns, but our family didn't have any guns and we never imagined that she could even go buy one at all or so quickly.

Also, I posted on my Facebook page that my mom shot herself and that I couldn't believe how easy it was to get a gun for her and how hard it was to get mental health care.

And the post went viral and people really felt for me. And this beautiful police officer lady reached out to me and she said, "You need to just keep talking and you need to keep telling everybody what happened to your mom because this is happening all over the place every day." That police officer is still in my life. She's such an angel. So grateful.

In the beginning, after she died, I spent a lot of time talking to friends on the phone all day long. The grief was so intense, it felt like my body was manufacturing it. It felt so useless to be having my body produce so much of this grief itself.

It had to have value. But I couldn't just have all these horrible emotions and have my mom's bullet in her head be the end of the story. I wanted justice, and I wanted to feel safe. It felt really unsafe that I knew how to buy a gun, and now I was so depressed. My mind was so erratic.

It felt unfair for society to give me such a clear map to go buy a gun and also kill myself. It felt so dangerous that my mom could come out of psychiatric care and just go buy a gun.

First, I thought that maybe the sale had been illegal. I didn't really understand how someone could buy a gun so fast that had been in psychiatric care so recently. I thought that there must have been some breach of policy that enabled that sale to go through. And I contacted a lawyer friend that knows a lot about guns and law.

And I asked him if he thought that the gun sale was legal, and he said that it likely was because there weren't a lot of restrictions on gun sales. And then I said, "But don't people who are in mental hospitals lose their ability to purchase a gun?" He said, "Only if it's involuntarily committed."

Which meant that because my mom had self-advocated and voluntarily committed herself, she was not given the same tool for self-defense against suicide that someone who had been forced into commitment by police would have been given. And it just felt like she deserved that tool.

When I thought about how hard my mom had worked to stay alive and the hundreds of doctor's appointments and prescriptions and efforts that she had made, and then later in her life, the freedoms that she had

given up in order to save her life, like being locked up in a psychiatric ward and not having her cell phone, being away from her cats, and losing access to her body autonomy in order to protect herself from suicide. It just felt like she would have given up the right to purchase a gun also.

It would have been a much easier freedom to give up than so many of the other freedoms that she had already given up. And then I started finding out about other legislations that are similar. And one of them is for people who have compulsive gambling problems. They can opt out of their ability to enter a casino. And that legislation has been very successful.

If our country can understand that someone should be able to prohibit themselves from entering a casino, our country should be able to understand that someone should be able to opt out of their ability to purchase a gun for their own safety and self-preservation. Immediately, I was committed to doing this work.

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There's so much grief, fog, almost like brain damage that I have from that period of time that I'm really impressed with myself that in that moment this is the thing that came out of me. I felt like I really need an outlet to put all this fire and emotion into.

I wrote to this woman, Victoria, that I didn't really know that well, but she had just been appointed as the director of gun policy for Amnesty International. And we started talking about how to make a legislation that could have protected my mom.

This woman, Victoria, really encouraged me to make Adana's Law and to create a barrier for people like my mom from purchasing a gun in a psychotic episode.

Immediately there was support for it. Because I'm an artist, I have a lot of followers that have been following my artwork on social media and I was able to leverage the support of my followers and move it into working together to create this legislation.

To have never made legislation and to not even have known the vocabulary of legislation and then be able to be speaking with the highest level representatives of our government about my mom and working with them to create Donna's Law.

Working on the legislation became a way for me to channel my energy. I became really obsessed. It was all-consuming. I didn't care about anything else in my life, and I just poured myself completely into the legislation.

And it also brought into my life a lot of people who had also experienced gun suicide and had a lot of experience with healing from that.

In the beginning, I would just try and meet somebody new every day on the phone that might be able to help me, and I would start to feel the emotions of the grief. And I would just get on Google and look up "10 people to contact" about my legislation idea.

There was this reporter, Richard, and he spent about a month doing a big investigative report about my mom's death. And I was so grateful that he was there because he was such a nice guy. And there were so many days where it felt like he really understood what I was going through. And so that relationship with Rich and making that report for the newspaper was very helpful to my healing.

Rich also connected me with other experts. One of the people he connected me with was this law professor in Alabama named Fred Vars, who had also conceived this legislation as a way to protect people from gun death without interfering with the Second Amendment. He had been working to pass the legislation in different states and had just passed it in Washington state.

Fred was so calm, he wasn't angry, and he told me to not be angry and that we could change this. It's really taught me about being a political activist and learning to put the fire that's inside of me to the side and have civilized conversations with people who have

have very opposing politics to truly understand someone else's perspective that is against my legislation and learn to calmly bring them into friendship in order to perhaps have them listen. It's a really weird time in America to make laws about guns, but it's also the best time to do it.

Through working with Fred, we've been able to bring this legislation to Virginia and Utah and Washington state and enable people to opt out of their ability to purchase a gun in those states. I've been able to give up my right to purchase a gun in Washington and Virginia through Donna's Law. Unfortunately, I can't do it in Louisiana. I also do have a gun. I have my mom's gun.

Eventually, the police would return her car. On her passenger seat was all the artifacts of a shopping spree at a gun store. And there was an empty box for a Smith & Wesson 38 special. And there was a free gun lock.

And there was a box of rose gold pink bullets for breast cancer awareness with some of them missing from the box, but the rest of them were still there. And there was a receipt from the store that sold my mom the gun and their slogan was "Because your safety matters." And there were a bunch of business cards from the salesman that had sold it to her and so I called them

I told him, "My mom came in yesterday and she bought a gun. Then she killed herself and now she doesn't need it anymore. Can I return it?" And he said, "All sales final." And then he hung up on me. I just wanted him to know. When my mom first died and I went to grief therapy, the grief therapist told me that if I didn't want to, I didn't have to tell people that my mom died by suicide.

But being given the opportunity to be public about my mom's death is like not living in the closet. It seems so silly how much it's censored about suicide. Sometimes even when I look up articles about myself, it'll be censored and it's a really strange feeling because it's my own story.

Society wants me to censor this story, and by not doing that, I'm able to destigmatize this experience for other people and activate them into helping protect future people from this experience.

It means a lot to me to see Congress people holding my mom's photo and talking about the need to prevent gun suicide. When I'm working on Donna's Law, it feels really good, and I can be really happy about Donna's Law passing in another state or getting sponsored in Congress. But when I think about Donna Nathan, my mom, it's just so sad.

Seeing my mom's name being attached to this life-saving tool, I know that she would love the attention and she would love the opportunity to be involved in this conversation about suicide prevention because she works so hard to prevent her own suicide. It's almost like she's an organ donor for legislation.

Sometimes people think, like, I made this legislation and had all this success bringing this life-saving legislation around to different states, and that I must be healed because I've been able to do this. But I'm not healed. I'm just doing this anyway. About a year after she died, I started having really bad symptoms of PTSD.

I was really depressed. All of my senses felt really out of whack. I remember one day my footstep sounding like a gunshot, and it was just me walking, and it was so loud. And I realized that something was happening to my body from the trauma.

And then I started being scared all the time. I would think about just doing something normal like going to the grocery store and my brain would show me in very vivid imagery me getting into a car accident or me getting kidnapped or me being hurt or raped or killed. And I would just go back to bed because that's where I felt safe.

There was this thought that just kept coming into my head all the time, and it was my mom putting the gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger. And I just kept seeing it endlessly. It was like my brain was trying to understand it but couldn't understand it, so it just kept trying. I realized that my mental health was really declining, so I went to the emergency room

This therapist hooked me up with a psychiatrist about getting on medication, but I just couldn't go on medication. I had seen what happened to my mom on medications, and it just didn't feel safe for me. I was lucky enough to have friends that were healers in different ways, and they really helped me out. It's really shown me a lot about how sometimes you have more to give than you are.

Like, with my art, I can give so much joy to thousands of people, even if I'm depressed. There's no basis of how much joy I can give based on how much joy I have. And the same is true with this legislative work. I can give. It's a good place to put the feelings and the energy, but it also does bring it up all the time.

There's a lot of criticism that comes at me for making this legislation. I'm sure people can imagine if you're doing gun laws, there's a lot of people that are upset. That can be hard, especially the first couple years of doing this work.

And then now, it's really hard to just see people trying to slow me down, working against me, just to see organizations of adults working to make sure that people like my mom continue to have access to firearms even if they don't want that access. But I try to really compassion about where would someone have to be inside themselves to be threatened by my legislation?

And I've learned a lot talking to gun owners about what their fears are and how much gun ownership is connected to people who have a lot of trauma and didn't feel safe and never want to feel that way again and think that protecting access to firearms will keep them safer.

I'm so grateful that I don't live inside a body that is constantly in fear. I don't feel that I need a gun, otherwise I'm unsafe. A lot of my art has been about funerals. I've designed caskets and amazing funerals for people, including my mom. It's made me realize that what's even more important than a funeral is a legacy.

We can build legacy for people who have died in this way, like by creating things like Donna's Law and donate the stories of our loved ones to lawmakers so that they can add some emotion and care into the conversations about gun violence and preventing more gun violence.

Not everything has to be a political war to save a life. People just finding out that most gun deaths are suicide and most suicides are gun deaths enables families to protect their loved ones.

And even though we think of gun violence as this huge problem, we have so much power within our families to protect ourselves from gun violence. There's a lot that can be done.

Legislation is a sport that I've spent a lot of time becoming really good at and I'm excited to have this skill set and these relationships and to always be involved with legislation even after this one is complete. I've changed a lot since my mom died and mostly since learning to manage the trauma.

I look at the rates of suicide for somebody like me, which are incredibly high, but I feel like I'm able to experience so much joy now. It's really given me a different perspective about life and about how quickly it can change. It's made me appreciate a normal day so much.

Just a normal day with no big problems is such a good day and I'm so much more grateful for those beautiful moments.

Today's episode featured Katrina Breeze. You can find out more about Katrina on Instagram at Katrina Breeze. That's K-A-T-R-I-N-A-B-R-E-E-S. And if you'd like to find out more about her legislation and donate or support, you can do so on the website donnaslaw.com. That's D-O-N-N-A-S-L-A-W dot com.

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