Rachael
My niece died last week.
My niece Rachael died last week. I don’t know her exact age, but she was in her early 30s. She died, alone, in a shabby room in a shabby motel in San Francisco. Probably an overdose. Probably accidental.
The details — where, when, how — seem unimportant. They don’t change that she’s dead.
The phone call with the news from my ex-wife — Rachael is her sister’s middle child — certainly shocked me. But the news did not surprise me.
Rachael suffered greatly in her life. Alcohol and drugs — heroin, cocaine, even meth on occasion if she is to be believed (and I think she always told me her truth, even as she left out large and salient parts too) — muted her pain, but she also enjoyed the feelings they gave her.
She and I communicated nearly weekly over the past several years, and we’d get together to share a meal and some ice cream two to three times a year too. I don’t know how close we were — I think she trusted me as an uncle but not as a confidant — but we did care for each other, and when we talked or texted we did it without judgment. We encouraged each other through the big changes in our lives, and we laughed about the silly things life brought us too. I had no expectations about our relationship, and I think she appreciated that. I don’t know if she thought of our relationship as a refuge, but I do think I was a safe place for her to come for support. I never excused her choices — she called herself “the Queen of Bad Decisions” for cause — but I also didn’t berate or belittle her for them. We focused our conversations on what was coming next instead of what had already passed, so she never felt she had to answer for any failings.
Rachael was not a saint. In fact, she could be difficult. Very difficult. She was impatient, impetuous, volatile. Her emotional pain often manifested itself as anger, so she regularly said mean things, unfair things to people who loved her. Many of them stopped making themselves available to her for that abuse.
She was also creative and wildly funny. Her energy was kinetic and authentic, and she had a strongly-felt need to connect with people. Which was her kryptonite. All she ever wanted was for someone to care about her, for someone to put her first, just once.
But no one ever did.
Her father sexually abused her, then committed suicide when she was around five years old. Her mother had two sons flanking Rachael in birth order and suffered her own trauma, leaving less of herself than Rachael wanted or needed. Her brothers had to hoe her same row. She entered into intimate relationships quickly, even rashly, and they never lasted. I know of two restraining orders that she had issued against boyfriends, and more than one of them beat her into the hospital. They also enabled if not encouraged her drug and alcohol abuse.
I’m no psychologist, but I do know that Rachael had both cripplingly-low self-esteem and massive mistrust of authority figures, manifesting in oppositional behavior. Very oppositional. She desperately wanted teachers, bosses, and potential mentors to invest in her; instead they all became enemies to be marginalized and even humiliated if possible, because she couldn’t bear their rejection. She believed that rejection was inescapable, because her experiences supported that conclusion. To be fair, she also didn’t like the constraints on her behavior that more responsible, more intentional choices would have brought. She rebelled at structure and seemed to seek out chaos. It was comfortable, familiar.
But Rachael wasn’t a monster. She was a damaged young woman who never caught a break. She contributed to her misery to be sure, but her decisions weren’t the primary source of her pain. The circumstances of her life were simply unfair — egregiously so — and, given her innate self, she could never overcome the disadvantage.
I will miss Rachael being in my world, but my grief at her death isn’t as sharp and painful as I thought it would be.
Probably because I thought it would be.
Am I a bad person because I thought that her life would likely end this way? I wasn’t certain of a tragically-early death. In fact I really, really hoped to be wrong. But I can’t deny that I believed the odds were high, especially as the battle between hope and despair that raged within her turned progressively darker over the past three years. If pre-processed grief is a real thing, then I suppose I am experiencing it.
I remember many things about Rachael, but the memory that both haunts and soothes me is from when she was about eight years old and my family was visiting Indiana at Christmas. At the family dinner on Christmas Eve we all dressed nicely, except Rachael. She came in a nightgown, because she was so excited about Santa Claus that she wanted to go to bed as soon as possible to accelerate his arrival.
I believe the sweetness of that eight-year-old — the naivete, her hopefulness, the thrill and promise of unknown possibilities that could only turn out well — remained a part of Rachael throughout her life. It lit her from within, even as fresh hurts and frustrations and disappointments and sadnesses and doubts buried it more and more deeply.
Her life experiences proved to her that the world is cruel. She never found a community that valued her or a partner who treasured her. But possibilities still captivated her. When we last communicated she asked how I was faring. She cared about me — and others — and she hoped for a better future for herself even a couple weeks before she died.
And it’s that loss of caring, that loss of hope that I grieve most.
