Angela Marie Muñoz
Angela Marie Muñoz
1984-2006
Written by HummingbirdsAppetite
Angela’s story started when we were just kids. Through years of emotional and physical abuse at the hand of our alcoholic father. There was an inappropriate focus on her body. What she looked like, how much she weighed. I remember him lining Angela and our older sister Melissa up to measure their waists. Melissa was older but Angela’s waist always measured wider. This led to feelings of inadequacy, major body insecurities and eventually an urge to numb out.
Angela was my older sister. She was three years older than me and she was my best friend. As kids when I couldn’t rely on my parents for emotional support I would wake up through the night and climb into Angela’s bed to get back to sleep. She always let me. Eventually we would share a room. We shared secrets: our dreams, our hopes, our fears. We shared clothes, friends and even boys.
Angela was the coolest fucking girl I ever knew. I always looked up to her and wanted to be just like her. In high school she would give me cigarettes and take me to get lattes at the cool coffee shop downtown. She would drive my friends & I places and let us hang out with her crew. Through a messy entangling with our parents she switched to attended my high school for her senior year. All of the other kids were smitten. The classmates that has ignored me for years suddenly found any excuse to talk to “Angela’s Sister”. I was cool by association for a brief period. She drove my friends & I to school blasting dance to Mary J Blige & Ludacris on her cheap car stereo while we danced our asses off.
But Angela had a darkness inside of her. To the rest of us she was this gorgeous firecracker but she hated herself deeply. Always comparing herself to others. Always striving for perfection. She suffered from bulimia as a teenager and began to dabble in alcohol and drugs.
When she was attending Beauty School in 2003, Angela was in a car accident. She survived but left the hospital with ongoing chronic pain that developed into a pill addiction and soon after escalated to rampant alcohol abuse. While receiving treatment in the aftermath of her accident Angela was told that she was causing severe liver damage and if she continued using the way she was she would die. She was barely 19 years old.
She began going through extreme episodes of alcohol use. I remember many times that she called me drunk in the middle of the day. Her paranoid ranting on the other end of the phone while I crouched hidden on the floor of the school bathroom in tears. I never believed she had a problem but our mother saw it for what it was. She had experienced alcoholism first hand married to our father and was always on the lookout for symptoms in their children.
We checked Angela into rehab and she began a recovery program. She attended daily AA meetings and found a sponsor. But the darkness remained inside of her. She ran away from rehab multiple times, relapsing again and again but returning to her program. I worshipped Angela and never could believe that she was an alcoholic. Even when she came home to visit the family over the holidays and was caught stealing our mom’s pain medicine I did not believe it.
Eventually she left rehab for good. At first she lived in a homeless shelter but was soon kicked out and found herself living on the streets. She started to couch surf - or bed surf - bouncing from home to home of different strange men who would let her stay a short while. When she cut off communication with our family completely our older sister Melissa & I drove the five hours to Southern California to hunt her down at a strange hotel. We found her but it wasn’t the girl we knew. Angela was unrecognizable: thin, puffy face, pale skin, greasy hair, strange tattoos. She did not look like or act like the sister I had looked up to my whole life.
After hours of begging Angela agreed to go to an AA meeting the next day with a woman from rehab. When we drove away I assured Angela that if she did not get her shit together that the next time I drove 5 hours to see her it would be for her funeral. The following day she refused to answer the hotel door and never went back to AA. We never spoke again.
One month later we got the call that would change our lives forever: Angela was dead. Her heart stopped. Her liver failed. Dead in her sleep. In a strange hotel, next to a strange man. She was 22 years old. The devastation for our family was never ending. The loss of a sister, a daughter, a friend. Her absence haunting us at every holiday, every major life event. Graduations, marriages, children, sickness, celebrations. All without the life of the party. A senseless, preventable tragedy that continues to touch our lives every day.
