I’m new to this subreddit, and I apologize for any typos. It seemed like the best place to tell my story.
I’m not even sure of what is the truth and what is false anymore. My daughter, let’s call her Elise, and I never had a good relationship. In fact, she moved out when she turned 17 and proceeded to have her own life without me. Despite my protests, my wife decided we needed to support her financially. Elise went on to earn two bachelors degrees, and immediately moved to Berlin to study for her masters degree.
My wife was sick - she had been diagnosed with so many illnesses, the doctors finally found out that it was myotonic dystrophy. It’s easy to use google; it’s a disease similar to ALS but degenerates a person for much longer than that. You’ll see where I’m headed with that information.
Elise didn’t talk to me or my wife much during her studies, she claimed she was depressed and too stressed, and my wife and I didn’t want to bother her.
After she came back from Europe, she was a completely different person. When she spoke, her voice was different. It sounded like the days when her mother and I began dating. She hugged and kissed us more (she never initiated such actions in the past). Meanwhile, my wife seemed to become weakened every time Elise showed affection towards us.
Elise booked a holiday trip for me and my wife, but my wife demanded that Elise come along for the vacation. It was an 10 day cruise to wonderful destinations that my wife would have surprised me with as a Christmas present. Elise never would have done that for us, and I honestly thought she was plotting to send mercenaries after me because I was never a good father.
The cruise was an amazing escape for us as a family, but every photo taken of my wife seemed wrong. Her body was deteriorating due to her illness, but she had a strange smile and perfect facial expressions - much like Elise in her graduation photos.
I was scared. I was afraid of my daughter and my wife, and I was afraid of whether I was delusional.
After the cruise, on our 3 hour drive back to the city we lived in, my wife handed me a bottle of water to drink during the drive. I didn’t think anything of it - it’s a water bottle. When I drank it, my wife started convulsing and what I thought was a seizure. Elise stared straight ahead, motionless and expressionless, almost as if she were asleep with her eyes open.
We pulled into a hospital in a small town, and the doctors couldn’t see anything on the various tests I demanded for them to perform. The only words my wife could manage to say were “let’s go home, I’ll make your favorite noodles when we get home, let’s just go home”.
I held back tears the entire drive home, knowing that Elise had done SOMETHING. I could feel my wife slipping away during the drive, and she stopped breathing as soon as we pulled into the driveway to our house. Elise walked upstairs as the ambulance and the police arrived, and she smiled with the most evil expression I’ve seen and said in a hollow voice “she’s dead”.
Elise and I have spoken a few times since my ‘wife’s’ passing. She looks and sounds childish. She doesn’t sound or behave the way a 27 year old should, and she seems extremely depressed. She earns more money than I thought imaginable. She never calls me “Dad” or my deceased wife “Mom”.
I have dreams about her as a happy child, the child that my wife and I raised, whom we taught to read and write and draw, whom we taught to ride a bicycle.
When I wake up, I can’t remember if those things ever happened.
I can’t remember my wife’s name. Just the name “Elise”.