No one gets out of life unscathed…
Nat asked me in the early days after Owen’s death, “Mom, what the fuck? Is our family cursed? What is it, that we should have all these horrible things happen?”
My answer was, “We’re not cursed, Nat. Other people just don’t talk about it the way we do.” We had a long history of talking about uncomfortable subjects, and difficult relationships. So, he listened, cried, and cursed all the beliefs he had built before this unthinkable loss of his best friend, and younger brother.
We do now, and always have, talked about every thing that sucks…but also, about all those miraculous things we were fortunate enough to experience, that were just as unexplainable. While we marveled at the best of life, we also grieved over the sad, and unforgivable things.
I don’t trust I will ever have the answers that will relieve Nat in knowing the answers to the mystery of his brother’s loss. At least, that’s the way it feels right now, still having no date or cause of death for Owen. I call the coroner’s office and the local police department each and every week, but their answers are vague and without relief, given our dilemma – when they bother to return my calls, that is.
What we have is a system that does not honestly manage time, costs, and other resources in the best interests of families who are experiencing deaths of unknown sources. Because the pathologists in our county are all independent contractors, there is little hope this will change in the near future. Our county performs over 3,000 autopsies each year through the coroner’s office, with only 5 pathologists. An autopsy can take anywhere from 4 – 8 hours, on average. Quite a workload. So the estimate of 12 – 16 weeks for the final report is probably conservative. But, for those of us who wait, that timeframe is unacceptable. UN-FUCKING-ACCEPTABLE.
A few weeks after Owen’s body was found (no less than 4 people have now taken credit for finding his body, although only 1 phone call was made to 911), I called the mother of a childhood friend. I had always thought of her family as the one that could handle no more.
Her daughter, Gail, who was 4 years older than Jeannie (my childhood friend) and me, died of leukemia on November 22, 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Exactly 2 years later, on November 22, 1965, my father died from injuries sustained in a commercial airplane crash that happened 11 days earlier. Two more of our family members died in an airplane crash years later. What are the odds?
The dilemma: not knowing. Not knowing what happened to Owen in those last hours (or were they actually days?), when we searched, asked questions, and talked to people on the streets who supposedly knew Owen — was this time lost, when the local authorities should have been out doing the same things? Why was Search and Rescue never dispatched?
They tell me they were searching at the local level (not involving the county Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team), and they tell me they interviewed over 40 people, and came up with over 2 dozen DIFFERENT stories of what happened. How do we move forward with that? We don’t. We’re stuck in May 29, 2007, when Owen went to see a movie with a guest, and Owen’s coworkers confirm this is the last time they saw him.
There is more to the story, but we are waiting for that final autopsy report, before we strategize our next quest for answers. All, so far, have panned out in little credible evidence. This is surely, the way those who were there, with Owen, on that night, would want it.
My friend’s mother (mentioned in the paragraphs above) talked with me on the phone a few weeks after Owen was found. She lost her daughter at age 12, her son at age 30, and her husband only 5 months later. She became a grief counselor, and swam every day for 13 years in order to maintain her health, as she had 2 living children, and knew they needed their mother.
Her name is Adele, and my friend’s name is Jeannie. Jeannie and I have been friends since we were 3 years old, but have only lived in the same town for those first 5 years of our friendship. Amazingly, we have remained friends over these many years, and with great geographical distances between our homes. I’ve spoken with her a few times since Owen’s death. She is grieving along with us, and recollecting her family’s losses again, as this is what happens.
Adele told me a story on the phone that day. She said that she had been working her way through not only the grief of her losses, but also, working with other families who were in the early stages of loss. She visited her brother-in-law’s family several years later, and they had just experienced their first “difficulty” in their family relationships (not a death). Her brother-in-law, with whom she had always been very close, asked her, “Did you bring the black cloud with you?” She realized then, that NO ONE gets out unscathed, and that people think of grieving relatives or friends as, somehow, “contagious”.
Adele was kind enough to share her experiences with death, and also, this realization, that no matter how perfect others’ lives seem, they, too, will have times of great loss and distress. While that is not something we want to look for in our friends and families, it simply…is.
Owen was not one to dive into the quagmire. He would want us to seek answers, deal with what is, and move on. We are still seeking those answers, dealing with what is, and hoping to move on, eventually. I, myself, look forward to a day when I look forward…to anything. For the moment, I look forward only to knowing how my son’s body ended up being retreived from the Petaluma River, four days after he went missing. No one gets out of life unscathed…but some of us have to work harder at knowing how and why.
Leave a Reply