October 29, 2013 was the first day that I remember really crying at work. Like…couldn’t stop, heaving, sobbing, ugly crying. I had to leave and go home and sometimes I couldn’t even see through my tears to drive. I sat at my neighbor, Julie’s, house sobbing until school pickup. I couldn’t even answer my phone. She had to do it.
That was the day my daughter’s classmate passed away from complications from leukemia. That was the day Erin Moomey didn’t leave the hospital ever again.
May 14, 2014 On this day I didn’t go to work. I had already spent a night literally on my knees praying and sobbing and asking God to help someone pull through. I cried off and on at work prior to this for over a week obsessively checking my phone for updates. I didn’t go to work on this day because I was at home with what would eventually become my step-niece and nephew waiting for their parents to come from a hospital in Omaha.
That was the day my Dad’s girlfriend’s son, Cole Buchholz, was declared brain-dead after succumbing to a genetic condition no one knew he had until it was too late.
March 22, 2020 COVID lockdown had just begun. No one knew what was going to happen. How long this would last. It was a Sunday, and I spent the day deep cleaning the kitchen with the kids. As a reward for ourselves, we ordered food from The Night Hawk in Slater. Craig and Mackenzie went to pick it up with her driving on her new learner’s permit. When they got home, she told me how she had to pull over for fire trucks and ambulances on the road going really fast with lights and sirens. Shortly after that, I got a message from a running friend telling me there was something going on at a house in their subdivision where a family I knew lived. She said it wasn’t a fire and that there were a lot of police cars. She texted me telling me the ambulance left. Lights and sirens. About a minute or two later, I heard it go by our house. I prayed that everything was ok. I had no idea that it could ever be what it was.
The next morning I awoke to an email from our dance studio telling us the owners’ youngest son, Colton Ferree, the one my kids danced with and played with for years and was exactly one month older than Mackenzie, had tragically passed away the night before.
July 29, 2020 We got a call we had been waiting for at any moment for the past week. A call we knew would be coming a few months before. A call that I found out would happen during the second show of my daughters’ dance recital, and I had to keep quiet until I could tell them in the dark parking lot late that night. A call that was the culmination of over four years of surgeries, doctors’ appointments, chemo, immunotherapy, prayers, hope, anger, frustration. A call that meant no more nights spent eating chips and watching Criminal Minds with friends, exhausted from the daily fight, instead of going out like teenagers should. A call that meant I no longer had to help my child help her friend die, and now I had to help her figure out how to go on without her. Into their senior year of high school under weird COVID restrictions not knowing how school and activities were going to go, but knowing she was doing it without her best friend.
That was the day Madison’s best friend, Camila Lopez Arias, passed away from pediatric osteosarcoma.
The first two times, I picked my kids up from school, sat them down on the couch, and told them a friend was gone. The third time, I had to wake them up early, bring them into my bedroom in the dark, and tell them their friend was gone. The last time, Madison got the call and told me herself. The only call we knew was coming. The screaming, crying, begging, yelling, hating God, hating themselves, guilt, anguish…I never want to do this again. If I tell the kids I need to talk to them, they immediately think someone has died. It could be about the dance schedule or what to have for dinner, but Thank You PTSD, they go straight to thinking they’ve lost someone again.
I have cried so many times at work. Silently. Not so silently. Because I saw something that reminded me of them. Because I sat and thought about it for too long. Because it was a day like today…another year has passed since someone has been gone. We have wristbands and t-shirts and foundations and events—small and large—to honor and remember them.
As I close this chapter on this job, this office where I have waited for phone calls, news, information. Where I have cried more tears that anyone will ever know. I wonder what it will be like now. Will I be able to distract myself when I am not sitting in this office? Will I find a better way to cope? Will I never have to cry because another child, teenager, person way too young was taken from us? If leaving here meant that would be true, I would have left years ago.
Sometimes, like today, it’s a little overwhelming. I never wanted my children to have to learn resiliency this way. I never wanted them to go have lunch with their friend in the cemetery or find ornaments that say “Believe” on them for a special Christmas tree or fight for empty chairs at graduation because those girls, at the very least, deserve that.
Somedays it gets really heavy. Not one of those kids would want us sitting around crying. Every one of them was a light, a spark, fun, full of life. They would tell us they were ok and that we should go out and make the world a better place. We are trying, guys. Today it’s just really hard.
I just don’t want to cry anymore.
Peace and Love and Kindness and Sparkles and Believing and Green Socks and Gold Crowns-
Julia
