Personal Update #2

I don't owe anyone an explanation for inactivity, but it weighs on me nonetheless.

It’s been a month and a half since I last posted anything, though I have much more written and even more than that in draft. Sometimes this website seems useless and sometimes it’s something I can pour myself into to stay afloat. Lately it’s felt more like the former.

Ellie was supposed to turn four last month but she didn’t. Her pre-school class received a delivery of pink sprinkle donuts, but she didn’t get to have one too. They were her favorite.

The rest of eternity is similarly filled with milestones that she has been denied. In the fall, it will be kindergarten. But after missing her first day of elementary school, she will miss the rest of it too. There will be no spelling tests. No best friends. No note passing or daydreaming or getting in trouble for talking in class. There will be no adolescence. No graduation. No dreaming about where life would take her next. Not for her, not for her mother.

I was so consumed by the events of July 12, I never really stopped to realize how soon the murder occurred after her birthday— May 16. A date I double checked by pulling up her missing poster, as macabre as that is. Ellie didn’t get to turn four this year, but she barely got to experience the joys of being three either. She looked older on account of her height and seemed older too on account of her intelligence. Ultimately though, she was just a baby.

Somehow it feels like I haven’t breathed in a whole year. I know I must have, or else I’d be dead too. But when I inhale, the air gets caught in my throat. In those moments, I no longer experience the passage of time. Just choking in suspended animation.

Before all this happened, I had been working to advocate for the rights and wellbeing of incarcerated teen girls experiencing dehumanization and degradation from both the institution and society at large. Before that, I worked with families affected by the foster care system. I care deeply about equipping children with the support needed to thrive, especially when the odds have been stacked against them. That really motivated me to advocate for Ellie’s safety through letters to the judge and interviews with the court’s social workers. I did it for work everyday. Of course I would do it for her.

After everything that’s happened, my values remain the same but my capacity to function has fluctuated wildly. Early on, I spent months in partial psychiatric hospitalization. There I went through hours of therapy a day, though I found the most solace in trying to make sense of things through the little comics I drew. Since then, I’ve been working on and off while trying not to be too hard on myself if I need to take a break.

Though the navigating the system is maddening as ever, I’m grateful that I have had access to short-term wage replacement benefits from my state. I attend a support group for people around the country who have lost loved ones to homicide. Many are even dealing with the same flavor of brokenness and confusion that comes when one family member kills another. But most live in states, or have specific circumstances, that leave them without a social safety net while they try to recover from this hell.

As I type this, there are currently two major national news stories competing for air time. In one, our lawmakers are giddily attempting to strip such a safety net even further, plunging vulnerable communities into even more precarious situations. Meanwhile, a powerful man was found not guilty of trafficking the woman who we saw him, on tape, nakedly and violently drag back into a hotel room for a non-consensual sexual encounter.

And so we have another wave of victim blaming towards the battered being added to the swirling hatred of the disabled and the poor. Because why didn’t Cassie leave earlier? Why didn’t she fight back harder? Why didn’t she do what you assume you’d do in a situation you’re lucky to have never experienced?

Well.

Sometimes you leave and he blows up your new boyfriend’s car or extorts your parents for tens of thousands of dollars that they don’t have. Sometimes you leave and he mercilessly beats you before you can make it to the elevator. Sometimes he doesn’t have a billion dollars at his disposal, just access to the person more important to you than anything else in the world.

Sometimes you leave and he murders your child.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

I don’t think anyone deserves to live in fear of the person they share a bed with. I’m not saying that what happened to Ellie is a cautionary tale of why you should stay with an abuser. Because if your partner is willing to killing their own child, they are capable of doing so for whatever perceived transgression they encounter. If it wasn’t after you left, it could have been after they lost their job or were caught in a lie. It could have just been a day where they felt especially sadistic.

I can say with absolute certainty that Ellie’s mom did the right thing by leaving my uncle. That act may have prolonged her child’s life to a degree we’ll never fully know. And him committing this atrocity is entirely his own fault. But we live in a world in which we cannot count on courts or judges to lead us to justice or protect us from violence. By the time they enter the picture, it’s often too late.

This happened even though so many steps were taken to prevent Ellie from restraining orders to relocation. So rather than just telling someone to leave a bad relationship, or shaming and judging for not doing it “fast enough,” what can be done societally instead?

That’s where I’m stuck.

Everything about this has me stuck.

Last month I found myself sobbing on the bathroom floor wishing I had killed myself long before I ever crossed Chrystal’s path, because maybe then Jared would have kept his mask on long enough for their daughter to live out their life. It had seemed as if calling him out publicly (or familially) might shame him out of nefariousness and wake up anyone believing the many lies he was spreading. I didn’t know what he was planning but I hoped that turning the light on might thwart it. Afterwards, I pulled back because I didn’t want my presence in Chrystal and Ellie’s life to provoke him further. I shrank into the shadows hoping that they were home free. That’s another regret right there. Not showering her with all my love.

But at one point, this madman treated me like a confidant. Was my letter to the court the wrong move? It didn’t keep Ellie safe. I urged the custody evaluators to implement supervised visitation, but it ended up getting taken away. Had I acted more secretively, could I have remained in contact and better gauged his state of mind?

I don’t know. These days I don’t feel like I know much at all. Just that it hurts.

Soon I start school again. I’m going to grad school to become a children’s therapist and it makes me happy that I feel strong enough to do so. There was a time where it felt too painful to be around children, as much as I love them and have dedicated my career to supporting them. I just couldn’t look at a toddler without thinking about Ellie and bursting into tears. I skipped baby showers, I went in the other room at work when coworkers brought their babies in. I just couldn’t do it.

But after a close friend had a baby, I was able to overcome my inner turmoil and show up for someone small once more. Watching him learn to crawl and work towards walking has been incredibly healing. I’m still angry and dismayed over what happened, but I can channel that into working to support him and his mom through the difficulties of single parenthood as best as I can.

There’s a small part of me that worries about this level of transparency being the first thing attached to my name in a digital landscape. I have my own therapist and could certainly keep this blog focused on the facts of the case, leaving my emotional state out of it. At the end of the day though, I don’t really care. Ellie was important and wanted and loved. She deserves to be remembered in entirety and that includes the devastation caused by her absence. In a world where one atrocity is quickly flashed at us after another, the reality is lost that these tragedies linger on for so much longer than a news cycle.