Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (8 page)

“W
HETHER A SON OR
daughter died in a muddy rice paddy in Southeast Asia or in an antiseptic hospital ward, in a sudden accident or after prolonged illness, the result is the same,” writes Harriet Schiff, in
The Bereaved Parent.
“You, the child’s mother or father, seem to have violated a natural law. You have outlived your child.”
¹²

Schiff, who lost her ten-year-old son, Robby, to heart disease, offers a mix of anecdote, homely advice, and wisdom from the experiences of bereaved parents she interviewed. Her basic message is that nobody but those who have lost children can really understand what such a loss feels like, which makes the grief isolating. Still, Schiff insists, life will, in time, regain meaning. Nicole’s world is now divided into “before” and “after,” with Friday, November 22 as point zero. “It was like before then I was in a theater watching this movie, and since then it’s been like walking into a parking lot and trying to adjust to the bright lights from being so engrossed in this movie for so long. It’s like the places I used to go to look different to me because it’s this postmovie kind of thing.”

It’s not as though the movie she was watching was necessarily uplifting. As a single mother of three she remembers being exhausted, overwhelmed, and, at times, very down. “I wish I had done more with the boys. I wish I wasn’t so stressed and depressed all the time,” she says. “There were a lot of nights when I would come home from work and just order pizza because I didn’t feel like cooking anything. And I would stare at the TV, and Jaiden would either be at Quentin’s or he’d be upstairs or whatever. And I feel like I wish I’d gone outside and played with them. And I regret not doing those things with all my kids.”

But it was nonetheless a movie with a complete cast of characters, and it felt whole. “For the most part now it’s still just me trying to figure things out. Like I’ve always done. It’s nothing new. Except now instead of being a single mom of three I’m a single mom of two.”

The first time I met Nicole was in her office four months after Jaiden’s death. It was her birthday, but she hadn’t let on to her coworkers and had no plans to do anything special that night. She was wearing a hoodie bearing Jaiden’s name and face and the word
Legendary.
Her friend had set up a website so they could sell them to raise funds. She has one in every color and at the time was wearing one every day. She also wore a necklace spelling Jaiden’s name in curly script. She has another made from his thumbprint, which was taken at the funeral home. An image of Jaiden accompanied her pretty much everywhere she went. And yet at home she found it difficult to see him. “I can’t look at any of his pictures right now. I have school pictures in the living room over the mantel. I know where the picture is. I catch myself diverting my attention so that I don’t have to look in that area because it hurts too much to see him.” She’s in therapy, but struggling with the advice. “The only thing they keep saying is that grief is different for everybody. And they keep saying that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. They keep saying, ‘It’ll get better, it’ll get better.’ But I’m kind of at the point where I don’t see it.”

Five months later, when I saw her again she still couldn’t see it. We had dinner at the Longhorn Steakhouse and then went back to her house to meet friends who knew Jaiden. If anything, she was in a darker place. Most evenings she stayed up as late as possible to avoid going to sleep
so that she could avoid the nightmares. Her mind whirs—an apparently endless loop of what-ifs and horror sequences that she can’t bear but also can’t prevent. “I keep replaying seeing him falling to the ground. I keep replaying, ‘I should have done this, I should have done that. I should have been there. I should have opened the door.’ I don’t want to sleep because I don’t want to think about it.”

So she stays up and tries to engross herself in a game or the TV or a book. Anything to keep her mind off her melancholic, self-flagellating regret. “When I go to sleep it’s because I absolutely can’t even keep my eyes open anymore. And I’m so hoping the dreams won’t even follow.” Three to five nights a week the nightmares come anyhow. Being awake is not much fun either. “If I don’t think about him, then I’m okay. But the second I start thinking about him and my brain starts going, then I just go crazy. It feels like I’m watching everybody else live their life in a TV show. And it’s like I’m going through the motions—talking to people and interacting with people—but I’m not really there.”

Schiff writes, “Far worse than lying awake all night, were the mornings. There seemed to be daily a brief period shortly after I opened my eyes when I completely forgot Robby was dead. Then, like a tidal wave, remembrance would come and engulf me and make me feel as if I were drowning. I had to fight my way out of bed every day—and I mean every day. This went on for several months and was probably my toughest battle.”
¹³

So it has been for Nicole. Moreover, for every night she stays up trying to stave off nightmares, there follows a morning where she’s too tired to get herself together at a reasonable hour. Sometimes she simply can’t get out of bed. “I wish I could just get up and leave my problems at home, but I can’t.”

She has worked at the same small legal firm for some time and is on good terms with her boss. She says he has been very understanding since Jaiden died. But when she struggles, so does he. And she’s been struggling a lot. “I’ve had a lot of breakdowns and meltdowns.” Some days she doesn’t get in until noon. On others she doesn’t go in at all. “Sometimes
I’ll just text him and say, ‘I’m not getting out of bed today. I just can’t do it.’”

“To bury a child,” writes Schiff, “is to see a part of yourself, your eye color, your dimple, your sense of humor, being placed in the ground. . . . In reality, when children die, not only are we mourning them, we are also mourning that bit of our own immortality that they carried.”
¹⁴

In the reception area of St. Joseph’s Cemetery, where Jaiden is buried, a range of small pamphlets is assembled to assist the bereaved: “Losing Your Mom,” “Losing Your Dad,” “Losing Your Husband,” “Losing Your Wife,” “When Mom or Dad Dies,” “Talking with Your Kids About Funerals,” “Death of a Parent” “When Death Comes Unexpectedly,” and “Grieving the Death of a Grown Son or Daughter”—to name but a few. There is pretty much every permutation of grief possible but one—a pamphlet titled “Losing Your Young Child.” Because that’s not supposed to happen. It goes against the natural order of things that a parent would ever have to bury her child. When that child is as young as Jaiden, the tragedy is so unthinkable not even a cemetery has a leaflet for it.

“You know what I find interesting?” Brenda asks her undertaker boyfriend, Nate, in the TV series
Six Feet Under.
“If you lose a spouse, you’re called a widow or a widower. If you’re a child and you lose your parents, then you’re an orphan. But what’s the word to describe a parent who loses a child? I guess that’s just too fucking awful to even have a name.”
¹⁵

CHAPTER 2

KENNETH MILLS-TUCKER (19)

Indianapolis, Indiana

N
OVEMBER
23, 3:13
A
.
M
.
EST

A
RAPID, REPETITIVE BARRAGE OF SHOTS HAD PIERCED THE NIGHT
like the clacking of an almighty typewriter echoing through a dark, empty office. It was 3:13 a.m. when a woman, woken by the noise but still with the weight of sleep in her voice, called 911 and told the controller what she’d heard. “Some kind of gunfire,” she said, before deferring to her husband, a muffled presence on the line. “My husband says it’s automatic.” The controller asks which direction the gunfire is heading. “Going north. From just down to the street,” she says before her husband corrects her. “He says it’s going east. Going toward the main office.”

“How many did you hear?”

“Repeated fire. It’s more than six.”

“Six?”

“More than six.
I’m in my bed, I didn’t get up. ’Cos they woke us up. It woke me up. I never heard this kind of fire before.”

The second caller was matter-of-fact and brief. “911? The police are round here now. But someone got shot outside my house.” As the drama unfolded in real time, residents in a patch of northwest Indianapolis offered what they could by way of information. Stray bullets peppered the area. One hit a bedroom wall, two others went through bedroom windows. The calls were partial, occasionally panicked accounts from residents whose slumber had been disturbed by the high-powered crackling of a weapon of war and who were now disoriented as they struggled to relate their versions of events to the dispassionate voice of a civil servant seeking hard, actionable information on the other end of the line.

“I’m at Three Fountains West apartments. And I think I heard gunshots. And then people running through right past my house,” a third caller says in breathless, abrupt sentences. “I heard the shots. And as soon as I looked out the window there were two gentlemen running right past my house. And I saw them stop.”

“Okay are they white, black, Hispanic?” asks the controller.

There’s a long pause.

“They are black. And they’re wearing black.”

“Both wearing black?”

“So my roommate says the victim was shot right in front of his room.”

“He saw this happen?”

“He didn’t see it. He heard it. And looked out the window. He saw that he fell.”

The next caller is clearly terrified. “Me, my baby, and my boyfriend were in the house and then we heard a gunshot. My window. . . . My wall is just. . . . ” A bullet had just gone through her window. As she loses her train of thought, her boyfriend takes over, his tone more fretful and urgent. “They’re shooting from my house. We’re at Falcon Crest watching TV. I need to get out of here. Can you get a car so I can get out of here? I don’t want to be in this area.”

“I think there’s several officers already over there,” the dispatcher says.

“I don’t want to be in this area. What the hell.” He’s breathing hard.

“There are so many officers over there,” the controller says, trying to reassure him. “You’re going to be okay now. Okay. There’s a lot of them over there.”

He’s not listening. He’s instructing his girlfriend to gather their things. “Put the stuff in the baby bag. Find it tomorrow. We’ll carry it to a hotel.” His breathing is still labored.

“We’re going to let them know,” says the controller.

“How long is it going to take?” he asks.

“You want to leave now?”

“Yeah, we just want to sleep in a hotel.”

His girlfriend returns to the phone. “Hello ma’am. We’ve got a young two-month-old baby.”

“I understand.”

“So we really want to leave now, okay?” she says. “We really want to leave.”

The controller is getting testy. “I understand, ma’am, I’ve already told you that we’re going to get an officer inside your house, okay? They’re really busy out there. There’s a lot going on out there. They’ll be with you as soon as they can. But I’ll let them know that you want to leave and you want to go to a hotel. They’ll be there as soon as they can, alright? As soon as they can? As. Soon. As. They. Can. To talk to you, okay? Just stay inside your apartment. Do not go out. We’ll get an officer to you.”

“Alright. Thanks.”

Three Fountains West is in a curious part of Indianapolis where country, town, and suburb meet but don’t match. Within a three-minute drive you can be on the interstate, on a horse, in a box store, in an apartment, or in a town house. But Three Fountains West, a housing cooperative, is pleasant. It reminded me of the English new town that I grew up in during the seventies: newly built, affordable, cookie-cutter homes, with yards front and back, decent amenities—a few playgrounds, a community center, a swimming pool with a slide—and well-tended green space. A three-bedroom town house here goes for $620 a month, with management promising to “provide that ‘at home’ feeling without the hassles of home ownership.”
¹
According to the website of the census
tract (a relatively small area usually comprising a few thousand people), this was the most diverse of all the places where kids got shot that day (62 percent black, 15 percent white, 20 percent Latino).
²