Cotard’s Delusion

Since childhood, my father had been the light that would set me free when it

felt like darkness was going to consume me. His mere presence made me feel

loved and heard. One night, he was returning from work with an

acquaintance, when a drunk driver caused a horrific accident. This resulted in

the death of my father’s colleague. The accident took my father by shock.

Growing up, my father always emphasized the virtue of being empathetic. He

taught me that to love is to feel. The guilt of surviving weighed heavily on

him. He had escaped death by a very tiny margin.

Severely injured, he valiantly fought for his life in the ICU for days. It hurt

me to see my father in such a frail condition. My beloved father, who always

offered help to others, was now helpless. He, who stood as the epitome of

might and strength for everyone in our family, now lay in his rickety hospital

bed, merely a shadow of the man he used to be. His skin was shriveled and

pale, his existence almost fading into nothingness. Seeing him struggling just

to survive was torturous.

He recovered slowly, but something within him had changed. He seemed

detached from all of us. He would sometimes bring up how he did not feel

like he existed. We dismissed this, assuming he just felt disheveled and

disturbed, perhaps haunted and perturbed by the horrors of that fateful day.

The warmth, the love, and the kindness that my father once radiated seemed

to wither away.

He would zone out during conversations. The man who once taught me that

feeling emotions was a blessing now seemed to be devoid of them. We

realized that the experience had damaged him beyond repair. We were losing

him to something that we couldn’t even identify.

I watched helplessly as my father's mental health worsened. He would have

nightmares and would often talk to himself. Doctors suggested he needed

therapy and medication to cope with the trauma he had faced.

Eventually, he began talking about how he was a lifeless body, he refused to

believe that his limbs belonged to him. He would explicitly state sometimes

how he could feel his body minutely rotting. He believed that my mother and

I were just demons of his imagination, mere creations of his mind, and that

he had died that night. He would look at me and my mother with a vacant

stare as if we were strangers to him. He would not engage in conversations

with us. I could not recognize the man I was living with.

"I am the corpse of the man I used to be," he would say. "I simply do not

exist anywhere. I am a clump of rotting flesh and debilitating bones. The

decaying skeleton of a man who once breathed life, whose stern ribs were

once a dwelling for a pounding heart."

Therapy, medication, electroshock treatment—nothing seemed to work. My

father was convinced that we were all just illusions. He was diagnosed with

Cotard’s Delusion, a condition where the affected person holds the delusional

belief that they are dead, that they simply do not exist. I felt exhausted. I felt

like a spectator, watching helplessly as my father slipped farther away from

us with each passing day. One day, I came back from college and tried to talk

to him. I could hear birds chirping, which seemed weird because there were

barely any birds in our locality.

Without warning, he snapped. He turned to me, his eyes filled with an

indescribable madness I had never seen before. He grabbed me, his

hands sturdily wrapped around my feeble wrists. My father, the man who fed

me with his hands, who wiped the salty tears off my face, whose love for me

knew no bounds, now held me with utter hatred and sheer insolence. I could

feel that his body was strangely lathered with dust and dried-up mud. Perhaps I could not recognize the man in front of me. It did not matter as I had lost my

father to the darkness of Cotard's delusion.

As I looked into his eyes, I saw a stranger staring back at me. He held me

down; I tried to struggle, to break free, but it was no use. He was too strong,

too determined to end my life. I felt my body weakening, my vision blurring,

and my heart slowing. I could feel the conviction he felt, that he was doing

the right thing through his inescapable grip. For a split second, I felt as if I

saw trees swaying on a sunny day. I was in my house. I dismissed the visual.

My vision faded to black. I looked at my father's face. I simply could not let

this happen. As tears rolled down my cheeks, his grip weakened.

Momentarily, it felt like my loving father was back. As soon as he let loose, I

held him by his collar and pushed him away. He fell on the cold floor. I

looked at him and shook him as I yelled repeatedly, convincing him that I

was, in fact, real. That he was alive and that he survived. He lay there looking

at me, motionless. Echoes of my weeping filled my empty heart.

I felt someone tap on my shoulder and then pull me to stand up. I knew it was

my mom. As I turned back to look at her, I realized we were not at home. We

were on some kind of ground. The weeping sounds weren’t mine but my

mother’s. As I looked towards my father, I saw him lying before us, lifeless.

His eyes were wide open, the moisture from them nowhere to be found.

Bacteria had broken down his tissues. A rancid smell seemed to suffocate

me. Nothing made sense. I had learned about Cotard’s delusion a day before

my father’s death, I realized. We were not at home. Or on some ground. We

were in a graveyard. I looked at my filthy hands and nails, covered in

dirt. I looked at the pile of debris and dust beside my father’s dead body. I

looked at the empty space where my father’s body should have been buried. I

figured by the appeal of his sunken features, the musty odor, and taut skin, that

my father had been dead for days.

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