STOP CHILD ABUSE

My story begins on December 16, 1968, a Monday at 3:02 am, when I was born prematurely, weighing only 3lbs 7oz to my mother Diana Sabala and Frank Sabala, her husband, and my father.

Since I was early and underweight, I had to be placed in the ICU for a while before becoming strong enough to go home to house 13 Buffington In Pennsylvania.  I finally arrived home on January 3rd, 1969.

I was a blonde with blue eyes in those first years, and I imagine life was good my memory doesn't;t go back that far.  I remember playing with solid metal Tonka Trucks and my Father feeding me and our dog wimpy food on Christmas.

It must have been 1971, as my next memory is my cousin, a massive beast of a man, 6'6" and over 330lbs, sneaking me into my Father's hospital room in Allegheny General Hospital.

I was under a cart covered in a sheet but got to see him before he passed away from lung cancer. 

I had no comprehension of the magnitude of what was happening. I only knew that Daddy would not be coming home. He died of lung cancer, and the house that should have remained a place of security changed fundamentally. Looking back, I can see that moment as the hinge between innocence and something darker. I didn’t understand grief or loss then; I only felt the absence that followed.

That absence marked the beginning of a long, slow descent into what I now recognize as the depths of hell. It wasn’t a single dramatic collapse so much as a series of small, crushing losses and choices that accumulated over time. The world that once seemed stable and ordinary revealed itself to be fragile, and I struggled to find footing in its shifting ground.

Writing these memories now is an act of both remembrance and reckoning. The earliest images—hospital lights, metal toys, a hidden cart—are shorthand for larger truths about vulnerability, family, and the ways grief reshapes a life. Though that descent began decades ago, recounting it helps me map the path I’ve taken and imagine, perhaps, a way forward.