The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living (4 page)

In the mornings I don’t scrounge around looking for bread to give to my family. But I do scrounge around looking for ways to paint our life together with the kaleidoscope lens of a life lived like jazz. How am I doing, Mom? Can I borrow your pink leather jacket?

I
was ten years old. I was supposed to be asleep on Gramps’s itchy brown tweed couch, but the TV was on. I can never sleep when the TV is on. The house was dark and everyone had long since gone to bed. So it was just Pat Robertson on the
700
Club
show and me.

Pat was showing videos about starving children in Somalia. There was a toll-free number on the bottom of the screen to call if you wanted to obey Jesus and donate money to these widows and orphans. If you didn’t know Jesus as your Savior, you could call the number to pray with someone and become his follower. I kept looking at the phone on the end table above my head. My heart was burning in me to help these children somehow, but I didn’t have any money. So instead I called and prayed with someone to become a follower
of Jesus who, Pat said, was a God who loves kids and cares about widows and orphans.

That same year I became an atheist.

Kelton—we called him Kelly for short—was our cousin and my little brother Phillip
’
s best friend in 1991. They were both three years old. Kelly and Phil were obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They had the same spiky mullets with cool steps shaved on the sides of their heads and wore multicolored and puffy MC Hammer pants with elastic around the ankles. Each of them wore awful smelling cowboy boots. Quite the get-up. They were hilarious and too smart for three-year-olds.

One time my Aunt Tera, Kelly’s mom, was driving around doing her errands while Kelly and Phil sat in the backseat. Aunt Tera told us that suddenly she realized how quiet they were back there. When she glanced in the rearview mirror to check on them, she saw two three-year-old boys wearing nothing but their stinky cowboy boots.

It turns out they both thought it would be fun to take off articles of clothing and hold each piece in the roaring wind outside the window until the wind snatched it away. Over and over they let each piece of their clothes fly out the window until they wore nothing but their beloved boots. All Aunt Tera could do was to drive the naked boys home and clothe them again.

A Turning Point

Mrs. Woods was my teacher that year, in fifth grade. I was sitting in her history class learning about Paul Revere’s role in the American Revolution. It
’
s weird how you remember those kinds of details when an experience changes your life. My stepdad at the time showed up at Mrs. Woods’s classroom
door with a note excusing me from school. On the way to the car I asked him several times why we were getting out early.

Nothing, not a word.

We got into the car and waited. I remember the silence. Finally, I saw my brother Eric walk out of the school building and head for the car. That’s when I realized something might be wrong. When Eric climbed in beside me we hounded our stepdad until he finally told us.

“Your cousin Kelly is dead.”

At that moment I hated my stepdad worse than I had ever hated anyone in my life. He was the kind of guy who joked too much. He was always making up weird lies to shock us, just because he thought it was funny. I did not believe him for a second, and I hated him for saying something so sick and horrible. I slumped down in the backseat and stared with hatred at his big ears poking out from behind the headrest while he drove. I wanted so badly to just punch him in those big ears.

I hated him all the way home. Until I saw my mom.

This was the first time I remember seeing my mother really cry. That was when I knew my stepdad wasn
’
t making up a sick joke. He was telling the truth.

But even then I didn
’
t get it, because I didn
’
t really understand what it meant to be dead. I remember sitting on a hotel bed in Houston, Texas, listening to the news in the background. I listened to see if they mentioned my cousin at all, since up to that point no one had wanted to tell me the truth about what happened to him.
Surely they’d mention a
three-year-old child dying on the news
, I thought.

Although I never heard them mention Kelly, there were many stories of children being killed somehow. The news anchor talked about the horror stories like she was giving an uneventful weather report. She made it seem like children
died all the time in Houston. It made me think the city had to be the worst city on the planet. My aunt had recently moved here from Arlington, where she’d lived for a year next to us in the Arlington Oaks Condominiums. I thought Houston must be a dangerous place for kids and wanted to get out as soon as the funeral was over.

The hotel room was packed with my relatives. My brother Phillip was sitting next to me on the bed, and I could tell my Granny was lying by the way she stumbled to say her words in an extra-sweet voice.

“What happened to Kelly?” Phillip asked her.

“His daddy was playing with him and . . . and he just played too rough. He hit him in the stomach too hard . . . on accident and . . . and now Kelly is with Jesus.”

At the funeral everyone went up and kissed the body. Looking back, I think having a child kiss a dead body is a terrible thing to do. But I don
’
t think any of us really knew what to do. It was like my little brother was in that casket. He was such a special little person to our family. Everything was so unexpected.

Boyz II Men
’
s version of “It
’
s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” was playing while the line of people made their way from the casket to my aunt to hug and kiss her. When it was my turn, Eric Clapton
’
s “Tears in Heaven” was playing. Today it’s still hard to hear that song. When I saw Kelly, he was wearing his Ninja Turtles shoes, and some of his toys lay in the casket with him.
How strange
, I thought,
toys in a casket
.

But the strangest thing was the idea of my cousin being buried. When I saw him at first, I remember thinking,
I knew it wasn
’
t
true. Kelton is right here!

I don’
t remember who was with me, but they told me to kiss Kelly when I approached the casket. When I did, it was like I’d kissed the sidewalk in the winter. That was when I knew
what it meant to be dead. My cousin Kelly was not there. I think I must have repeated that phrase in my head in that moment while I looked at his frozen face.

My cousin Kelly
is not here.

That was not him in the casket. It was a shell that looked like him. That’s all. Time stopped in that moment. I
bent
a little on the inside that day. I think I grew up in a slightly crooked way from that instant on.

I didn
’
t see people or bodies in the same way. A strange coldness settled over my heart. I now possessed a vague sense of the fragility of life. But more than anything, I had a deep sadness that wouldn
’
t lift for the next six years.

When I looked closer at Kelly’s little body, with scattered bruises everywhere, it made me think about what my granny had said.

My mom didn
’
t lie to me though.

She told me right away that Kelly was beaten to death. My mother never lies to make you feel better. I think she thinks it
’
s healthier to face life as it is and deal with it the best you can—at the very least
realistically
. She viewed sheltered people as naïve and easily duped. She loved her children by making sure they would not grow up naïve.

I Stop Believing in God

That was the moment I began to question God. He was supposed to be good. I thought he was supposed to be
so
big. Kelly was so very small. His stepdaddy was so tall and bulged with muscles. How could God let something like that happen to someone so small? God was supposed to love children, right?

I was with my aunt when she returned to get some of Kelly
’
s things from their apartment. She picked up his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pillow and hugged it so tight. She buried her head in the pillow and inhaled, closing her eyes. “It still smells like him,” she said.

The saddest thing to me in that moment was that she didn
’
t have her husband to hug her. He was in prison forever now, for murder. And I had heard scattered conversation about how he may not live that long in there because people in prison don
’
t treat child abusers or child killers with any kindness or mercy.

Even though they had terrible fights, I knew my aunt had loved her husband. How could God let all this happen to her? She was my hero. She loved me when I felt like I was just in the way all the time at home. I wanted to be just like her. I think it was in the room where Aunt Tera hugged Kelly
’
s pillow that I stopped believing in God.

I wanted to hug that pillow so bad, but I didn
’
t want to take any of the smell away from Kelly
’
s momma. That was all she had left of her only baby. This was the beginning of an emotional imbalance in me, one I continue to struggle with. It’s this constant tug-of-war that I have to be a protector, deliverer, and savior for all those around me. I thought I had to be the best god I could be, because if there was a God—which I doubted—he was obviously not going to help us.

It was impossible for me to believe in God at this point because I knew that if there was a God, he
must
have made people for more than just dying horrible deaths, more than going to prison, more than the deep depression I was sinking into.

But
maybe God hadn’t made us for great things after
all
, I thought.
But who cares anyway?
I didn’t believe in God anymore, and that was that.

How Doubt Leads Us to Light

When Kelly died, I felt a part of me die with him—my belief in anything good, in anything beautiful, in anything having to do with this so-called God. Pat Robertson had said that Jesus loved children. But because of death itself I decided to stop believing that. Death didn’t just happen to bad guys, like kid movies seemed to teach me, and death didn’t just happen to old people who had lived full, happy lives, like I’d thought. Death was a huge, dark, scary mountain to me as a child. This mountain of death shot up from the ground, and I was suddenly lost in the middle of it. I felt like I was left to find my way out all alone. What I didn’t realize at the time is that love is stronger than death. I wouldn’t know love until it was almost too late.

W
hen I returned to school, things didn’t feel right. School was so bright and colorful. There was laughter and joking, games and music. It felt wrong for me to be going to school and moving on with life after the death of my cousin. When recess came, I wandered around the playground thinking about him. Then I saw his name. Totally amazed, I stood and gazed at the “Kelly” printed on the side of one of the tires that led up to the jungle gym. I climbed up onto the tire and ran my hands across the letters. I spent the rest of recess sitting there thinking of him, wanting to tell him I was sorry that everyone seemed to expect me to just move on with life.

After recess came music class. The music teacher handed us the lyrics to the song she was about to teach us. When I
saw what the song was, I felt all the blood rush to my face. My heart started racing. It was the same song that had played as I waited in line to view Kelly’s body. I tried to figure out if this was supposed to comfort me or if it was supposed to spark a meltdown. I stood and watched nervously as the teacher started the song. Did I want to hear it? I felt like I had to decide right then what my response should be, all on my own, all in the small time span between receiving the paper and the beginning of the song.

It wasn’t enough time. I was overwhelmed with a desire to honor my cousin somehow. I wanted to respond to his death—the right way, the loving way. I guess I just needed to mourn, but at ten years old I didn’t really know how.

“Okay, class, I want you to read along with me as I recite the lyrics.”

She began. Something told me to be angry, to run away, to not stop hurting. Something told me this was meant to hurt me over and over and that it would never stop.

“The song is called ‘It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.’ It’s by a group called Boyz II Men,” she continued.

As she recited the lyrics, my heart wrenched with uncertainty. The familiar words spoke about longing for the past, but also about losing a future. It expressed the pain of having no more tomorrows with your loved one. Someone told me recently that one of the hardest parts of a divorce, or loss of a job, or when a child passes away, is the death of a vision. And I experienced that firsthand as the teacher read this first part of the song.

She had not finished reading the whole song before I made my decision: I would mourn. I chose to love Kelly by being
sad. I was going to try to remember to be sad always. In this small way, I was saying to him, “I won’t move on without you. It isn’t fair. And though I’m not dying with you outwardly, I’ll at least stay close to death inwardly.”

After she read the last words of the second chorus, I shot up from my chair and ran out of the classroom. I couldn’t listen to the song. I wouldn’t listen unless I was alone and could relive Kelly’s funeral and weep. It felt like the only loving response to my ten-year-old heart. After I slammed the door open I ran to hide on the playground. I went straight to the tire with Kelly’s name on it, climbed up on top of it, curled up in a ball, and cried.

I cried because I was sad but also because I was angry. I was angry at the world for telling me to move on. I was angry at the school for being colorful and jovial. I was mad at people for being happy, for not mourning with me. I was angry that people all around me went about their business as usual as if we didn’t live in a world where children got beaten to death.

Whenever the world around me was happy, it felt deceitful. It all felt fake and foolish and ignorant—on purpose. It made me angry at everyone. It made me want to hate them all. I was mad at the Texas sky for being sunny that September day. It felt inappropriate. I felt like the whole world was in on this deception—like even the weather was smiling at me and telling me to move on already. But I wasn’t falling for it.

Instead, I fell for a worse deception—one that would try to steal my life along with my cousin’s. The deception I was falling for looked much more honest in those moments. Life
was all wrong, and I could throw it away if I wanted to. It may be honest, and it may be half true, but it is not the whole truth, and therefore, it is a lie—a lie meant to kill me within the next six years.

If only I had stayed for the ending of that song, where the vocals soar with hope and purpose without compromising the honesty.

Toward the end of the song the voices remind the listener of memories. If you move on through the rain, the lyrics suggest, sunshine will be there after a while. They encourage you to find ways to make the life of your loved one count. By letting the good memories of their life make your life more colorful and bright, you will, in turn, illuminate the lives of those around you. In this way, even though it’s hard to fathom while it’s raining, while you are mourning, while you can barely bring yourself to say goodbye, the sunshine will come. You just need to keep going.

If only I had been teachable and let the lyrics remind me that there were beautiful memories to hang on to. There was an amazing little life that had been a gift to the world and to our family for three years. If I kept on living, then my good memories would live with me, and then my memories and I could, perhaps, in some small way, make the world better somehow. There may actually be good that could come after the bad.

There was the possibility that prison for Kelly’s stepdad actually saved my Aunt Tera’s life. That man had come close to killing her during one of their bad fights. If only I would have known that it was okay to mourn—that sometimes rain can be overwhelming, but that doesn’t mean that the rain will
never stop. And that sunshine after the rain makes rainbows visible. Thunderstorms can be signs of spring. If only I had seen that there were good memories to focus on and not forget. Maybe then I wouldn’t have chosen to start down that dark, reckless, hateful, lonely path toward death.

Learning Abuse

The year Kelly died was also the year they started teaching us about abuse in school. There were four different kinds: physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional. Some of the videos I saw looked pretty similar to stuff that happened at my house. Before watching those videos I didn
’
t know what abuse was. Though the videos helped me understand what abuse was, they really didn’t help my family or me at all.

After watching those videos, whenever I was hit or yelled at, I would go to my room and write it all down in a journal. Suddenly I felt like a crime had been committed against me. I would cry to myself about how my mom didn
’
t love me. This new information about abuse just made me feel sorry for myself to the point of depression and self-loathing.

This was the beginning of the years I would cry myself to sleep.

Although it seemed like a gradual process, the videos that classified some of my mother
’
s actions toward her kids as abusive, when all she was trying to do was raise us the best she knew how, really shut down my ability to be positively affected by her by the time I was in the sixth grade. I unrealistically expected things to happen in a certain normal way because of those videos. When they didn
’
t happen that way—because “normal” was never a category my family fit into—it caused an unprecedented sadness and self-pity that took control of my heart. It made me emotionally unhealthy.

Seeing those videos at school when I was ten was a major turning point for me. I became addicted, at a very young age, to feeling sad and sorry for myself. I think most people would call this depression.

I thought about suicide all the time.

There were five of us kids at that point. My mom wanted us to go to a nice school and live in a better neighborhood than we could afford. So we all lived in a one-bedroom efficiency condominium in a place called Arlington Oaks. There were two mattresses on the floor in the living room. One for the boys, one for the girls, and then my mom and our youngest baby sister, Stevie, slept in the bedroom. We ate on a pink plastic tablecloth we rolled out onto the floor by the kitchen.

The humid Texas heat is the perfect environment for roaches. And we had them in our condo as well. There were definitely times when we all felt crowded in such a small place with six people and the unwelcome bug families. The tension of our circumstances added fodder to the reasons I found to be sad in those days. My sadness could fill every square inch of the air in that place at times. But there were also two toddlers and a little baby who didn’t yet know how to wallow in self-pity. For Jazilyn and Phillip, the situation intensified their ability and need to be creative in their playtime. It was their joy and gratitude that consistently interrupted my plans to stay sad.

Many times, because of the children, what had felt cramped all of a sudden felt cozy and magical. At night all of us kids would pile into the same bed. In the dark, there were no walls, no roaches, no messes. We could have been in a palace. Or in Neverland. But our favorite place to pretend to go was Disney World. Our voices would whisper back and forth during a game of storytelling. One of us would start and then each of
us would add on to the story until our heroes, villains, and talking animals had died and come back to life several times.

For years, these magical moments weren’t the ones that stood out in my memory. The thing I could remember best was the depravity of the sad moments. Those were the moments I was looking for, in a confused and twisted way. I didn’t realize that I was doing this; I just thought I was trying to stay realistic and to not be naïve. I wasn’t aware that I was teaching myself to use my mind to steal my own joy.

We did go to a good school, which only meant that the rich kids would bully us and make fun of our thrift-store clothes. This forced us to band together with the minority group of kids who dressed similar to us. These were the kids who had the same kind of stress we did at home. They were the ones who needed friends more than anyone. Sometimes I would get to visit my friends’ homes, where I would discover that their imaginations were just as big as ours.

But many times I would find an affinity for sadness, darkness, self-pity, harshness, and coldness in these homes as well. This made me more comfortable. I related to the sad feelings in other people’s homes because it felt familiar to what I swam around in most of the time in our cramped condo.

My mom kept us at the condo and in that school so she could finish art school and get a better job. She attended the Art Institute of Dallas to become an audio and video engineer.

An Orphaned Feeling of Unbelief

My mother has never stopped believing in God. The miracle of that, after everything she has seen and been through, is
enough to make you question your own atheism. Because I was a rebellious teenager, however, the fact that my mother believed was all the more reason for me
not
to. One night, after an intense session of family fighting, my brother Eric and I ran out of the house. My mother screamed from the front porch after us, “You had better ask God to forgive you!”

My brother stood in the middle of the street and cussed the idea of God. I felt nervous for him because it was a moment of despair I hadn
’
t seen in him before, but it resonated with me. I understood the orphaned feeling of unbelief. I understood the resentment of a heart that felt disregarded and mistreated by life.

My brother, my mother, and I were all meant for more than intense family fights. We may very well have been abusive in the way we all treated each other. To me, the saddest part about this is that our minds weren’t made to think hateful thoughts.

And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. (Phil. 4:8 NLT)

Hateful thinking is not what our God-given ability to reflect and meditate is meant for. It is meant to be used to meditate on love, God, truth, beauty, honor—anything good. Our mouths weren’t made to speak hateful words. They were made to encourage, to teach, and to speak truth in love.

We were not created so we could use our actions and words in an abusive way toward one another. God intended our actions and words to be used for loving one another. God did not intend for his creation to be abused by others
—
or to wallow in self-pity. God created us so that we could love both others and ourselves. We were not meant to feel abandoned. God made
us so that we could experience his embrace and the embrace of others—he made us for a special kind of relationship, a covenant relationship. We weren’t made for the kind of despair we lived in. We were made to live with hope, faith, and love.

Kurt Cobain pointed out that there is a comfort in being sad. It’s dark and hauntingly true, at least when you’re a young girl looking for something to cling to. Crying myself to sleep began to feel familiar, like a kind of home. Darkness can feel honest, and honesty can be beautiful and feel so inspiring. But darkness stops short of resolution. It’s deceptive. You can’t see all that lurks within darkness. The things that inhabit darkness live there because you can’t see them; that way they can deceive you, pervert you, and ultimately destroy you from the inside out.