There’s a version of this story I could tell you that sounds simple. I wrote a horror novella. It has a monster, a grieving father, and an ending that doesn’t let you off the hook. You should read it.
But the truth is, it isn’t a simple story.
The real story starts much earlier— in a house where the weight of things was never named out loud, only felt. I grew up around mental illness. Not in the abstract, textbook way people sometimes talk about it, but in the very immediate, daily way that becomes the background noise of your childhood. You learn early to read a room. To watch for shifts. To understand that the person you love can be two different people depending on the day, and that neither version is wrong. They’re just sick, and sick in a way that even they can’t always see.
My stepfather struggled with schizophrenia for most of his adult life. Episodes of psychosis that came and went, that he sometimes recognized and sometimes didn’t. When you love someone like that, you spend a lot of time living in the space between what’s real and what they’re experiencing— trying to build a bridge across a gap you can’t fully measure. It is terrifying. It is confusing. And it is one of the loneliest feelings in the world, because it’s so hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it.
I lost him to suicide.
I’ve carried that for a long time without knowing quite what to do with it. Grief has a way of sitting in you quietly until it finds an exit. For me, that exit has always been writing.
The Sound of Water didn’t start as a book about mental illness. It started as a horror story; A man alone in a house, a presence that follows him, a sound he can’t explain. But somewhere in the drafting, I realized what I was actually writing about: the terrifying disconnect between what someone feels is real and what the people around them can see. The way love and illness can tangle together until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. The way a person can be so desperate to hold on to something— a family, a sense of home, a version of themselves that the line between salvation and destruction dissolves entirely.
The ending of this story is dark. Some readers will find it disturbing. I understand that. But I want you to know that from inside Tom’s perspective (the main character) it isn’t dark at all. To him, it’s peace. It’s reunion. That is not an endorsement of that peace or darkness. It’s an attempt to show, honestly, what severe mental illness can do to a person’s perception of reality. How it can make something devastating feel like a gift.
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this story, it isn’t fear. It’s compassion. For the people fighting battles inside their own minds. For the families who love them and don’t always know how to help. For the ones we’ve lost to something they couldn’t control.
Stories can’t change the past. But sometimes they can help us understand it. And maybe help us feel a little less alone in it.
The Sound of Water is available now on Amazon. If it moves you, I’d be grateful if you shared it with someone who might need it.
If you or someone you love is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 — call or text 988. Please don’t fight this battle alone. There is someone out there that loves you, there are people that care. I care, you’re worth it and you matter.
