This is another installation in what was a 36 part series on my life that began here and culminated in Rory’s death. However, our story did not stop when his life did, so I have decided to continue writing.
I remember sitting on the couch next to Brock, the world in sharp relief around me. Everything felt more real and yet somehow less real; a continuation of a dream that just wouldn’t seem to end. I could not wake myself up.
I could not make myself fall asleep.
Meliea had made some calls and gotten a prescription of Valium for Brock and I. I took one that first night, when we went to bed. Our children were being cared for by loving friends, and we laid next to each other in a quiet, empty home – and we cried.
I had, in the past, experienced heavy sorrow before. I had cried until it hurt. But I had never experienced the deep grief and exhaustion that comes from loss, and it is hard to describe: the pain and sadness that filled my existence to my bones. The way my eyes hurt, and my lungs hurt, and my throat ached from crying. My jaw… it’s hard to explain. My jaw felt like I had been at the dentist for a million hours. The pain in my jaw would become the pain I associated with heavy grief, and it returns whenever I return to that space.
Brock and I laid in bed, looking at pictures and videos of our Rory, crying and hurting, until the valium did it’s work, and we fell asleep.
The next morning, we woke in the same nightmare. Rory was still dead.
The days after became in incredible blur. We were surrounded by loving people and friends. Food was brought and placed in front of us. My mother was flown in and began caring for us. We were reminded constantly to eat – the desires to continue living seemed to have faded. The usual urges to take care of self had thinned to mere whispers.
Despite the reality of losing our child, we were forced to continue being rational and coherent, and make decisions about everything else. Sign paperwork. Cremation. Money. Urns. Memorials? Planning a memorial for your own child feels like, above and beyond, the worst of things that can be asked of you.
Our need to take care of ourselves had faded, but so had most of my social hesitations and proprietary restrictions. I began saying whatever words popped into my mind. When I was given a choice or an option on something, I would immediately and unabashedly pick the one that sounded or felt right, and then moved forward unapologetically. There were people that I did not want to celebrate Rory’s life with us. There were “traditional” things that I did not want at his celebration. There were things that felt important to me that I had not ever heard of people doing before. And there were some things that needed to be said out loud – so I said them. I also went ahead and planned two memorials – a private, intimate, family celebration; and a public memorial. It just felt like the right thing to do.
Each step away from the moments where Rory was alive felt like torture. It felt cruel to force us to continue moving away from his life. We wanted to sit quietly, shut down and stay there with him – in that space where his existed within his body – and we couldn’t.
Eventually we had to bring our children back home – sooner, I think, than we would have liked. Ruby’s 6th birthday was five days after Rory died, and we knew the celebration of her could not be overshadowed by the death of her brother. We fought powerfully and intentionally to make sure our children’s lives, irrevocably changed by Rory’s death, were not also ruined by it.
Around this time, the gifts and cards and messages started pouring in, along with the fundraisers. It was painful and beautiful to watch, the way love poured out of people in the form of handwritten notes, thoughtful statues and candles, as well as money. But it also filled us both, Brock and I, with an intense feeling of shame. Our child died, and people are paying us. We didn’t keep our son alive, and people are loving us. Caring for us. It felt wrong.
In those same days, the media was hounding us. I think, honestly, I had never felt so ashamed of mankind. The way the press was pushing us for a story, knocking on our door and the doors of our neighbors and even the neighbors at the lake house, digging to find out what happened so they could ‘break the story’. It hurt so badly. We were also under investigation by CPS. The morning the phone call arrived that Rory’s body had been released from the medical examiner, and his autopsy had cleared us from “criminal investigation”… felt like I had been punched in the face. We did not request an autopsy. We were not aware we were under criminal investigation. Our son had drowned, and we had pulled him from the water and tried desperately, inexhaustibly to save his life – and we were under criminal investigation. The rational parts of my brain knew that there was reason that this was protocol, but it felt like a gross insult and heaving injury to our loss and our grief.
Finally, the story broke on the news – someone had given the media the names and details of Rory’s death. Not long after, I published, “How Rory Died” on Facebook and Instagram. I had wanted my words to be the ones that were shared, but it didn’t work out that way. The story spread far and wide, and the loving words that went with it restored some of my faith in humanity. We experienced very little shame and judgement, which I think is not typically the case. Anyhow, if people were thinking it, they weren’t speaking it – and the reality is, WE were thinking it. Grief and guilt had become inseparable within both of us, and it didn’t take long for us to return to therapy.
I think I’ll write more later.
