The Unfinished Woman

Every time I sit down in my home office and studio to do this work: the podcasts, the advocacy, the constant, necessary fight, Emily is already there. Her self-portrait hangs on the wall above me, painted when she was 18. Her eyes follow me the way only a daughter’s eyes, or an artist’s eyes, can. There is a sadness in them that no 18-year-old should carry. But Emily always carried more than her share. She was the little girl who grew her hair out at age seven so she could donate it to a child losing theirs to cancer. The one who raised money for animals at the humane society because she couldn’t bear the thought of them suffering alone. The one who seemed to feel everyone else’s pain as if it were her own.

Her work was incomplete when she died at 21. So was she.

Twenty-nine. I keep turning that number over in my mind. The last year of your 20s. The year so many women describe as the one when they finally felt like themselves, when the noise quieted just enough to hear their own voice. Emily never got that year. She never got any of them after 21.

Emily won the first South Dakota State AA Art Contest in her senior year with a mixed-media piece she called Clairvoyance. It depicted a young woman and an old man, back-to-back, surrounded by money on one side and newspaper headlines of war on the other, but with an intricate, almost luminous connection running between them at the backs of their heads. She explained it to me once, in one of those rare moments when she let me all the way in: young people, she said, are preoccupied with money and material things, while older people were shaped by war and loss. But the two generations are always connected, whether they know it or not.

That was the deepest conversation I ever had with Emily about her own work. I have turned it over in my mind a thousand times since she died.

Mr. Siska, her art teacher, told the school newspaper that in decades of teaching, he had only seen that kind of student a few times in his career. He saved paintings she had thrown away. He believed in what she was becoming, even when she couldn’t see it herself.

On Emily’s 21st birthday, the last birthday I would ever celebrate with her, her boyfriend destroyed a watercolor she had been working on. He poured water on her computer and ripped up her painting during a fight. I don’t know what the painting was. I never found out. I have thought about that unknown painting more times than I can count; what she was in the middle of making, what it might have shown me about where she was in her life, what it looked like before it was torn apart. I will never know. That not-knowing feels like a small but precise replica of the larger loss. She was in the middle of something. She never got to finish.

Emily was 16 when she met him. She was still winning art contests; still making pottery on Mr. Siska’s wheel; still the girl who couldn’t bear the thought of a child losing her hair to cancer or an animal suffering alone in a shelter. She was so full of feeling, so wide open to the world. That openness, that tenderness, made her vulnerable in ways I couldn’t fully see yet.

He was a year older and he was already dealing drugs. I was terrified from the beginning. I told Emily that a boy who disrespects her mother will disrespect her. She didn’t want to hear it. She was in love, completely, wholly, the way only a teenage girl can be. He showed up at her senior photo shoot to be in the pictures with her. She had a Pinterest board planning their wedding. It was earthy and bohemian, full of wildflowers and wood and all the beauty she saw everywhere she looked. She was 17, designing a future with someone who was already taking pieces of it away from her.

What followed was five years I would give anything to undo. The isolation from friends and family. The escalating control. The drugs that tightened their grip on both of them. Emily fought back. She was never passive, never quiet, but fighting back in an abusive relationship doesn’t mean you’re winning. It means you’re still in it. And abusers have a way of making the woman who fights back look like the unstable one, the crazy one, the one who can’t be trusted. I watched it happen to my daughter and I couldn’t stop it.

Young women in abusive relationships that begin in adolescence are in a particular kind of danger. They don’t yet know who they are well enough to fight for themselves. Their identity is still being constructed, and an abuser moves into that unfinished space and starts building walls. By the time Emily was 21, she had spent a third of her life being told, through words and actions and sometimes violence, that she was less than she was. That is not something you simply walk away from. That kind of damage takes years to undo.

Years Emily didn’t have.

I know this story from the inside.

When I was in college, I fell in love with someone who reminded me, years later, of him. He was controlling and charming in equal measure, the way abusers often are. He slapped me. He broke my things. Once, after a fight, he drove away and left me stranded in a remote area, alone. And then one day he hit me so hard he broke my eardrum. I went to a doctor who looked at me with compassion I wasn’t expecting and said, quietly, that nobody should ever do this to you. I believed him. However, it still took me a couple more years to get out, but I did, at 22.

But getting out of one bad relationship doesn’t mean the work is done. I know that too. I married Emily’s father, and that marriage ended in divorce. The wounds we carry from our earliest relationships have a way of shaping the choices we make long after we think we’ve healed from them. It took me until I was 42 to finally find a good man, a partner who treated me the way that doctor told me I deserved to be treated two decades earlier.

I had those years to figure it out. The painful ones and the better ones. All the years between 22 and 42–the mistakes and the growth and the slow, hard work of understanding myself. That is what time gives you, if you are lucky enough to have it.

Emily broke free three weeks before she died. Three weeks. She had just started to breathe air that wasn’t controlled by someone else, and I felt, for the first time in a long time, like I might actually get my daughter back—as if there was still time.

There wasn’t.

I have thought so many times about what the years might have given her. Not a perfect path. I know better than anyone that it’s rarely a straight line. But the chance to keep going. To make mistakes and learn from them. To slowly, painstakingly rebuild a self that someone spent years dismantling. Emily felt everyone else’s pain as if it were her own. Imagine what she might have done with that gift, once she finally turned it on herself. Imagine her at 29, still figuring it out, but alive, and still becoming.

People sometimes say, if only she’d had more time. And I believe that with every broken piece of my heart. But I also know, because I watched it happen, that time alone was never going to be enough. When Emily finally broke free of that five-year relationship, I exhaled for the first time in years. I thought: now. Now we have a chance.

But the addiction didn’t pause to let her heal. She went almost immediately into a relationship with the man she was with when she died, someone who was also using heroin. It was he who bought the fentanyl-laced heroin that killed my daughter. He was later sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for distribution leading to the death of a young man who died weeks before Emily.

This is what substance use disorder does. It narrows the world. It steers you toward the people and places that will feed it, even when you think you’re making a fresh start. Emily wasn’t weak. Emily wasn’t stupid. Emily was sick, and she never got the treatment she needed to get well. The relationship and the addiction were tangled together from the beginning, one feeding the other, and you cannot pull one thread without addressing both.

What would 29 have looked like for Emily? I think about her missing each coming year, every March. I think it would have required treatment: real, sustained, supported treatment, not just a breakup and a new beginning. It would have required someone to catch her in those three weeks. It would have required the kind of intervention that we planned, just a few days too late.

But here is what I also believe, with the same certainty: she wanted to live. She wanted to get out. The girl who felt everyone else’s pain so deeply, who grew her hair for a child with cancer, who planned a wildflower wedding on a Pinterest board, that girl was still in there at 21. She just needed more time, and the right help, and the chance to use both.

She deserved that chance. Every young person does.

I imagine her healthy. That’s the first thing; just healthy. A body that belongs to her again, eyes that are clear, a laugh that comes all the way from her chest, the way it used to.

I imagine her making something — always making something — maybe a studio of her own someday, paint on her hands, a half-finished canvas leaning against the wall. And I can also see her in a different kind of studio–a Pilates studio, moving with the ease and precision of the gymnast and track star and runner she once was, helping other people find strength in their bodies the way she once found it in hers. In the weeks before she died, I was working with a local studio to help her become a certified pilates instructor. She had dropped out of college, and I was trying to help her find her way; a job she would love, something that used all of who she was. Her athleticism. Her empathy. Her instinct to make other people feel better.

She died weeks later.

In the last months of her life, Emily and I would meet at my house on our lunch breaks. Just the two of us, in the middle of an ordinary day. Those hours were small and imperfect and I treasured every one of them. The years of fear and fighting over her drug use had damaged something between us — every parent who has been through this knows exactly what I mean. We were quietly, carefully trying to repair it, like two people relearning how to be in the same room without bracing for impact.

There wasn’t enough time for it to fully heal. She died before we got there.

But I think about those lunch breaks when I try to imagine Emily at 29. I think she would have come through the other side of everything from the addiction to the relationship—all the lost years. And she would have found her way back. Back to her art. Back to her body. Back to herself. Back to me. And we would have had all the time in the world to finish what we started in those stolen hours at my kitchen table.

That is what 29 would have looked like. I am certain of it.

Emily’s paintings hang in our office, in our community, in the hearts of everyone who has ever stood in front of one and felt something shift inside them. Her art outlived her. That is both a comfort and an ache I will never fully put into words.

But this year, on what would have been her 29th birthday, we are doing something that feels new. Something that feels, in the deepest way, like her.

The $2,900 we are raising on March 23rd. That’s $100 for every year she should have lived. It will go directly toward art supplies for workshops in our schools. Supplies that will put brushes, pencils, and paint into the hands of young people who are exactly the age Emily was when everything started going wrong. Those students will create their own original work for the Emily’s Hope Youth Substance Prevention Coalition Art Showcase. It’s a competition that celebrates healthy choices and the power of saying no to substances.

Emily used art the way some people use words and others use prayer. It was how she processed what she couldn’t say out loud. It was where she put her pain and her beauty when she had nowhere else to put them. Mr. Siska knew it. I knew it. Anyone who ever stood in front of one of her paintings and felt it looking back at them knew it.

Now we are handing that same language to young people who may desperately need it. Not to remember Emily, though I hope they come to know her, but to find their own voice before someone or something tries to take it from them. Art cannot save everyone. I know that better than most. But it can give a young person somewhere to put what they are carrying. It can keep them in the room long enough for help to arrive. It can remind them, in the wordless way that only art can, that what they feel matters. That they matter.

If you would like to honor Emily on her 29th birthday, please consider making a donation to our $2,900 birthday fundraiser. Every $100 is a year she didn’t live, given forward to someone who still can.

As I write this, I glance at her self-portrait on my wall. I have sat beneath those painted eyes through hundreds of conversations, thousands of words written in her name, every hard day and every small victory. She was most herself when she was making something. That has not changed. It will never change.

The relationship between us that was damaged by addiction, by the years of fear and fighting and desperate love that couldn’t quite reach her, has healed in ways I never expected and could not have planned. Not at a kitchen table over a lunch break, the way I once hoped. But through this work. Through every student who learns her story and makes a different choice. Through every young person who picks up a brush and finds a language for what they are carrying inside. Through every mother who calls me and says, “You gave me hope.”

Emily gave me that. Even in her absence, she gave me that.

She was an artist who never got to finish her work. She was a young woman who never got to finish becoming herself. She was my daughter, and she was 21, and she was so much more than the disease that took her.

On Monday, March 23rd, she would have been 29. I will visit the cemetery, as I always do. I will think about the Pilates studio and the lunch breaks and the wildflower wedding she planned on a Pinterest board at 17 and never got to have. I will think aboutClairvoyance on the jumbotron, and the teapot she made me on Mr. Siska’s wheel, and the watercolor that was destroyed on her last birthday, and all the paintings she never got to make.

And then I will come back to my office, and sit down beneath her watching eyes, and keep going.

Because somewhere in a classroom in this community, a young person is about to pick up a brush for the first time. And Emily’s spirit will be in the room when they do.

Happy 29th Birthday, my sweet girl. I Love You Always Forever.

Faith, Hope & Courage,

Angela