An incredible gift and incredibly gifted. I always knew this about my daughter Emily from the moment she was born. She was a beautiful baby, and a difficult one. Colicky, fussy, sensitive to everything the world put against her skin. But when she smiled at me, all of my frustration dissolved, like the last bit of snow on a sidewalk giving way to an unusually warm spring day.
I knew she was special, not in the way every parent believes their child is special, but in the way you know when you are watching gifts bubble to the surface one by one. Her beauty was obvious from the start. Her empathy, her creativity, her intellect took time to discover as she grew, like wildflowers you don’t notice until suddenly the whole field is full of them.
When she needed slippers for pajama day at school, I drove to Walmart after my evening newscast to buy them. I stayed up all night helping her finish projects. That was simply what love looked like then, uncomplicated, purposeful, enough.
I used to always tell her: “With so many gifts comes great responsibility to the world.” Maybe that was too much pressure to place on such a sensitive soul.
It is difficult to say exactly why a dark cloud moved over my daughter’s eyes at fourteen. One day, those eyes were clear and bright, the color shifting with her moods, green to gray to blue, and the next, a shadow had settled in them that I could not explain and could not chase away.
I would learn later that in her attempt to seek the attention of boys at her school, she had been sexually abused. She admitted to me that she had gone into the bathroom tucked under the stairs with different boys at their request. I could not wrap my mind around it. I was more focused on what she had done than on what had been done to her. I was trying to understand her behavior, but I was judging it at the same time. And she felt that.
As teenage boys do when it comes to sexual exploits, they talked. Soon, Emily’s reputation in that Catholic school community was damaged in a way she would never be able to repair. She was carrying not only her own shame but the judgment of an entire community, at the very age she needed understanding most.
I was the person she loved most, and I failed her in that moment. I remember her clinging to me after her confession, clinging the way she had as a baby, needing the same thing she had always needed: to be held without condition. And I was so tangled in my own hurt and confusion that I may have seemed cold. That was the door that closed between us. Neither of us could ever fully recover from it.
I took her to counselors. I tried hard to repair whatever had broken inside her. But what was broken could not be fixed, not with the tools I had, not the way I was looking at it then.
Years later, after her death, I saw those bathroom incidents for what they truly were: sexual abuse by teenage boys who took advantage of a girl who wanted only attention and love, attention and love she had never reliably received from her own father. At the time, I saw only a failure of morality; a failure of my parenting. I did not yet see the wound beneath the behavior.
The years that followed were consumed by trying to turn a barreling freight train around. I took classes on parenting oppositional and defiant children. I grounded her. I punished her. I got angry. I stayed calm. I cried, more than I had ever cried in my life, more than I knew was possible. None of it worked.
When I caught her smoking marijuana in my house and she attacked her stepfather and me, I called the police, hoping that fear might do what love could not. It didn’t work either. It was the biggest failure of my life, those years. They dominated everything.
I look back now and feel sorry for my other children, Abby and Adam, who became like angels, partly because when one sibling is in crisis, no one else wants to draw attention to themselves. I remember them crawling into bed with me, holding me while I cried too loudly, on the night Emily packed her bags and moved in with her father. He saw in the arrangement an easy way to reduce his child support payments and fought for fifty percent custody with a legal document that portrayed me as the worst mother imaginable. I was unprepared for the war launched against me by my child and her father at the same time.
But I never stopped loving her fiercely. And that love, eventually, became my only strategy. After high school, after the disappearances, after everything, I stopped leading with rules and started leading with lunch. I invited her over. I took her shopping. I showed up. She came when she could, and when she was too sick to come, I told myself there was still time.
There are trolls on the internet who said Emily’s death was my fault. That I was too consumed by my career to pay attention to my daughter. Those people have no idea. My daughter had all of me, to the detriment of myself, my other children, and my husband. I say this not in my own defense, but because shame is one of the things that kills. It keeps parents from asking for help, keeps families silent, keeps the door closed on the very conversations that might save a life.
In the end, I think about the kind of person Emily was before the darkness found her. She felt everything, other people’s pain, a stranger’s sadness, an animal in distress. She brought me breakfast in bed. She painted me pictures. She spent hours making just the right gift, writing just the right words in a card, because making the people she loved feel seen was the thing that made her happiest. Emily and I loved to hike together at a state park near our home. In nature, we felt most like ourselves. She was a wildflower, vivid and singular, not made for a world that handles sensitive things so carelessly.
Men, from her father, to the boys who abused her, to the boyfriend who hit her, to the one who gave her heroin, were more powerful than my love. I failed to save my daughter in a world where cruelty finds the softest targets first.
We never stood a chance. I had the cards stacked against me, and I made mistakes I could not undo. Both of those things are true. I carry them both.
What remains is this: I still go to that trail in May, when the wildflowers are coming up along the path and the trees are filling back in and the sky is the particular blue it gets in spring. And I feel her there, in all of it. In every living thing, turning its face toward the sun. That is what Emily did through her art: she sought the light, always. I believe she found it. And in May, on that trail, so do I.
Faith, Hope & Courage,
Angela
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