This Will Be Dark, So Run Away If Dark Is Just Not What You Can Do
By: Judy Beck
Tags: Transgendered, Surviving Trauma, Motherhood, Suicide, Surviving

I have survived too much. There are still days I don’t care if I continue to breathe in and out, in and out. I will share pieces of these attacks on my soul. Here is the first:

It is May 6, 2016. Eight weeks since my husband, Mark, and I moved into this beautiful old house. It was built in 1940 and restored to a lovely relic with beautiful wood floors and plentiful windows. A lush green garden complete with two huge pecan trees fills the backyard and provides much needed shade. The peaceful, warm, New Mexico desert night is rattled by a phone call about 9:30 pm. A curious, worrisome time for the phone to ring in my house. My well educated, handsome, loving, but relapsing alcoholic husband answers, hands me the phone, and tells me it’s the police in Colorado Springs where my daughter lives. My first thought is that Freyja, not being the best driver, has been in a car accident. I am as frightened as a rabbit sensing a hawk circling overhead. I answer — the air around me is stiff. “Mrs. Carter? Do you have a daughter, Freyja Wolf?” I said yes, I do. “There has been an incident. The coroner wishes to speak with you.” My breath stops. The world becomes surreal, wrapping around my neck like a snak

He tells me the story he never wants to tell, the one he has told too many times. He speaks with kindness and gentleness in his voice. “Your daughter was discovered dead from a self-inflicted gunshot to her head.” My mind screams NO. Not true. She would never do that. She had no hard, hateful gun. Surely someone followed her, this tall, lovely 30-year-old woman, to inflict hot murderous hate upon her soft body. Sure of the answer, I ask, “Did someone attack her?” knowing transgendered individuals are at risk of violence. One of the many fears I had carried for so long. He tells me no. It was clearly a suicide. I become confused, swirling, my brain thrashing about like a wounded bird. “Where was she?” “Some hikers found her on a trail just outside of town.” They discovered her lying in the dirt, her body in a pool of dirty blood, the gun lying nearby. Racing thoughts in an instant……..But she has never owned a gun, she doesn’t know how to operate one, she doesn’t have money, where was it hidden from my eyes during the last visit? I scream and give the phone to my confused husband. I cannot speak to let him know. I can only shriek in a state of terror I never knew existed.

The sequence of events becomes scrambled. I call my daughter, Summer, who lives 8 hours away in Colorado. How I wish she were 8 minutes away. She wails over the phone, my sensitive, strong, 33-year-old, beautiful, artistic daughter. I’m so very far away from her. I need to hold her tightly. My husband calls my best friend, Brenda, who comes straight over. Brenda who stands by me always. She holds me, holds me up, taking in what has happened.

Someone calls my life-long friend, Vickie. Vickie, who I have known since age 7. With who I have been through so much. Whose own daughter is transgendered. She and her mother, who is like my second mother, and stepfather arrive. I am panicking. “I don’t know what to do…..I don’t know what to do.” There is a roar in my head, the color of dull copper washing over everything. I call my older brother, Oneal, who lives in Washington. In between sobs I tell him it is my turn. I received the same dreadful phone call from him 9 years earlier when his son, Jack, died by suicide at age 17. He is crushed. Plane reservations will be made. He will come, my rock.

I am in a wild-eyed animal state. I call Freyja’s father, John who I had married at age 17. Our relationship remains very strained since divorcing him 19 years earlier. I do not trust my emotional health when I’m around him. Yet, I must go to his house and tell him. Mark drives me to Lera Circle, in the “rich” part of this small desert town where I had raised my three precious children for 12 of their years. I approach the front porch, junky and messy. So different from when I had lived here.

I am at the front door. The dark energy of the memories of twenty-two years of his increasing control, paranoia, and emotional abuse seeps from my swollen eyes, mingling with the hot tears for my Freyja. Ring the bell, no answer. Ring the bell, no answer. I start beating on the door over and over, my heart pounding, my fists numb. Not only do I face the task of telling John of his loss, I must tell my oldest son, Loren, who has returned from China where he had been teaching English at a university for several years. Loren, who has not spoken to me for four years after his girlfriend contacted me telling me he was suicidal, resulting in my attempt to intervene the only way I knew how. To reach out to those around him to check on him. My efforts infuriated him resulting in fiery, distorted emails engulfing my heart. Disowning me.

Finally, John answers the door and I ask to come in. I tell him of the death of our son. John is shocked but unemotional, hiding behind his permanent mask of keeping others out. His relationship with Freyja was very poor, only communicating with her in the last few months when she would call him. He never reached out to her after she moved to Colorado Springs, 9 years earlier. I have lost my daughter, and my brilliant son is upstairs. He is alive and will surely come down to talk to me. “Will you tell Loren to come down so I can tell him?” “No, ask him yourself.” I yell up the stairwell asking if I can talk to him. His response is a loud, “Absolutely not.” I am utterly crushed. My world is disintegrating like sand from an incoming wave. Mark takes me home; I take two pills for sleep and go to bed. I am in hell.

The gouging wound of this night changes me. Altering my life forever. The sorrow, the terror, follows me, stalks me, arising on its own power, burning into every cell of my body. I am transported to a new world that too many others had experienced before me. How can I survive?

I told you it would be dark. To be continued…by so much more.