So I was thinking why I felt so bad about Lidia and Erin? How were they alike? Did they reflect something else? I started thinking about Amy and how, even though we weren't living together, I felt totally devastated when we broke up.

I then started thinking about loss and the overwhelming feeling of abandonment. So I dug a little deeper. When else had I felt so abandoned and it hit me. It was when my father died.

Wow, that was a shocker. I thought that maybe it had something to do with my mom getting ill both physically and mentally so she was hospitalized a lot when we were still pretty young. But then I realized that the whole precipitating event was the death of my father when I was 4.

I used to think that I was totally over this event. He had died when I was very young and I felt I had completely accepted that he wasn't there for us and especially for me. Even writing about it now, more than 40 years later I feel the sadness building, the tears welling, the sense of loss, anger at him leaving us! Talk about abandonment issues! When my father died he also sort of took my mother with him. She was able to come back to us but then she would leave too after a while, usually because she would have a psychotic break or something similar.

I feel it's too risky to get too close to anyone because they're just going to leave me!