A Year Ago We Lost a Child, and I Was Among Those That Found Her

I can’t turn away from the national tragedy of America’s murdered children

The girl that had gone missing was between the ages of my two daughters. The school sent out an alert, and I was out the door within ten minutes of getting the news. I took my dog with me. He’s an eighty pound lab and he would provide me with a tremendous amount of comfort in the days that followed.

As I left my home, I was burdened by a sense of responsibility. There was something awful in the atmosphere. I felt I owed it to the community to go and join the search even though I had little hope of finding the missing girl.

I didn’t think I would find her, but I was wrong.

The impulse to help is constantly on the periphery of our thoughts. Deep down, we want to help each other. We want the opportunity to protect children. We all want that. We just get confused by nonsense and tend to push our awareness of that shared belief to the side. We become fixated on the unimportant.

We’re rendered impotent. That’s the word that describes how I felt that day: impotent. You don’t want to read about little girls going missing. That never ends well. We know that terrible things exist, but we can’t allow ourselves to become fixated on them.

The thought paralyzes us, but sometimes you don’t have a choice in the matter. On that day, my emotions changed like the flick of a switch. I went from rage to sadness to terror to numbness and started the sequence again. I didn’t leave my house expecting to find her, but I did. She was gone.

I was alerted by screaming in the woods. I was the third person on the scene. Somebody else called the police. When they finally arrived, I was the one who showed the officers where to go. They pushed passed me grim and determined and unable to fix anything.

I was numb throughout. The pressing reality of the moment was too much. People walked by. My dog brushed against my leg and kept me grounded. I gave a statement to a terrified police detective. I felt tremendous compassion for him. Everybody there was hurting and there wasn’t any time for hurt.

None of us knew what to do.

When I finally had a moment, I called my wife and burst into tears. She recognized I was having a breakdown and came home from work. A police officer asked me if there was anything he could do to help me. I told them there wasn’t and I pulled myself together.

By then, the news crews had started to show up and I felt a need to get out of there. This wasn’t something for television. Sharing this moment felt obscene. This was too personal. I felt that rage sadness again. I wanted to scream and cry and hold my own children tight.

I took my dog and went home.

It felt like it took months to find a suspect. In reality, I think they had somebody in custody in less than 24 hours. That first night of not knowing was the worst. I opened the door to every closet and cupboard. I would have never gone to sleep if it hadn’t been for the dog.

Thank goodness for the fierce loyalty of dogs.

It helped to know someone had been arrested, but I had many stages of grief and terror yet to process. The arrest also brought more questions than answers. I kept asking, what’s wrong with us? How could this happen?

My proximity to this tragedy gave me a different perspective than those who just read the details. To them it was just another item in the news. Another in a long list of stories about murdered American children. To them it was just another one of those things that we’ve been conditioned not to dwell on.

That conditioning is broken for me now.

I’d meet people in the hardware store or at the grocery store. They’d say the things people are supposed to say when a community suffers a loss, and I’d burst into tears. That jolted them. They weren’t prepared for that.

All the things they said were so ineffective, so peripheral.

They’d repeat the idiotic, meaningless things you might see on a meme.

“There’s no way to prevent things like this.”

I wanted to grab them and shake them and say, “Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? We’ve got to make fundamental changes! We’ve got to show more compassion to each other! Can’t you see what’s wrong? There’s a sickness!”

We aren’t equipped to handle people dealing with grief. Perhaps we should try and fix that. We talk about mental health, but what do we do really?

“Go talk to somebody.”

Who?

What they really mean is, “You need a prescription that dulls you to the pain of reality.”

What I really need is a different reality.

About a month after it happened, I walked over to the police station. I felt compelled to talk to some of the officers that had been on the scene. I wanted to tell them that it was okay to cry. I was explaining all of this to the receptionist behind the pane of glass. I wonder what she thought of me.

“Maybe they don’t know that they need to cry,” I said. “Maybe it would be easier if they heard it from another man because I think they need to cry.” Then I started to cry.

The receptionist thanked me for my concern and informed me that officers did have people to talk to.

She was polite. In hindsight, she should have called up one of those people right then and handed the phone to me, but she didn’t.

I walked home.

I kept thinking I was getting better, but every time that happened, my mind released a new wave of grief. It was like some involuntary response was giving me the pain in stages. I’d absorbed too much on that day. It came out in manageable chunks that I could process.

The worst stretch happened about two months later. I stopped being able to eat. I lost 14 pounds in ten days.

My dog was a great comfort to me. He lay at my feet and looked at me with his huge soulful eyes as if to say, “It’s going to be okay.”

I have my own kids and I have to be there for them, but the pain, for a few days, was almost unbearable. More than once, I had to remind myself that I had to be there for my kids.

I felt numb and weak and then I’d be possessed by a terrifying strength and anger. I lashed out at people. I flipped over our 150 pound coffee table and it whirled around twice in the air before it crashed into the wall. The local pastor made a comment on social media in support of gun rights and I sent him a profanity laced private message before blocking him.

That was probably a disproportionate reaction, but isn’t it his job to know when people are in pain?

Useless, useless, useless.

A politician approached me in the park to talk about nonsensical issues, and I screamed at her through a mask of tears. Politicians aren’t prepared to handle somebody who has been faced with the reality of murdered children.

My wife asked me if I was okay.

My kids asked me if I was okay.

My dog didn’t ask because he knew I wasn’t okay.

But other than that, there was nothing. There was no help. It should have been obvious to a dozen people, maybe a hundred people, that I was suffering, but our society is all about “suck it up and get to work.”

There is some suffering you can’t ignore. That’s asking the impossible. Perhaps that’s why these tragedies happen in the first place. We need to rethink our priorities.

One evening, when we were trying to put our lives back together, my family was walking to a restaurant when a white pickup truck roared by. The truck had an enormous 4 foot by 6 foot political flag with the F-word flying for all the world to see.

Which political party do you think that was affiliated with?

I just didn’t feel like reading that word right then.

It provoked me to the point where I almost threw myself in front of the car. “Can’t you see?” I wanted to scream. “Can’t you see that the community is suffering? Why do you have to do that? Why do you have to drive around shoving profanities into everyone’s face? Don’t you understand that the world is already profane? Well, I understand!”

But I didn’t throw myself in front of the car.

I didn’t scream at him.

I didn’t hurt myself.

The days went by and my subconscious mind continued to dole out as much grief as it thought I could handle. Little by little, I got through it. Little by little, I began to remember that there was joy in the world.

I took my girls out swimming. I held them close.

The dog became less worried and more playful.

Life got better, but it never got back to normal. There’s a hole in the world now. I guess it’s always been there, I just didn’t see it before, or I deliberately ignored it.

I can’t ignore it any more.

I’m not sure I want to.

We occupy our daily thoughts with nonsense. We distract ourselves with trivialities. We manufacture division.

We’ve all got to take a breath and recognize the fragile beauty of the world. It’s both sobering and paralyzing to stand in the presence of death and get a glimpse of just how imminent it is. We need to understand how much we risk every day just by being in possession of the privilege of life.

How quickly it can go away — as we stand there impotent.

I hope none of you have the experience I had. I hope you don’t have to feel those things. I hope you can fast forward to the lesson I’ve learned after processing this unbearable grief for a year.

Something like that will take the edge off of you.

We need to help each other. We want to help each other. We’re all the same. We have precious few seconds to live and love and be kind. Turn down the volume on your outrage. Turn up the volume on your compassion.

There’s less time than you think.

Get there a few hours too late and you’ll know what I mean.

Hug your kids today. Hug your enemies. Hug your dog. Tell them you love them. None of us is strong enough to bear the terrible, tragic, and beautiful burden of life alone.

Think about this the next time you see somebody crying in a grocery store for no apparent reason. It could be that person has recently come face-to-face with a truth we all must confront eventually.

Prepare yourself!

That’s how we’ll achieve the wisdom necessary to build a society that respects grief and love and youth and life and death. We’re nowhere near that level of maturity.

We owe it to our children to make progress towards a better world. I feel an overwhelming sadness for the ones who didn’t live long enough to see it, but there’s still time for all those that remain.

Precious time. But we have to act now.

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