We weren’t friends in high school. In fact, if I had to classify our relationship it would have been adversarial. You were my nemesis, my tormentor. You’d laugh at me, poke me, hit me, destroy my belongings, all for a laugh. I tried to ignore you, but you made it impossible. How can someone ignore being…
When we are young, if we are lucky, we never have to face the death of someone close to us. My first encounter with death was at 19, still a kid by many standards, but still considered a man. Was serving my country on a ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean when I learned of the sudden death of my father. Not only was I was distant from my father emotionally, but I was physically distant from the situation. Being distant helped me in some ways to process what had happened.
The next time I encountered death was when my uncle, my father’s brother, developed cancer from exposure to Agent Orange during his duty in Vietnam. This death was much harder for me to process because I had the opportunity to say goodbye to him before he passed. I remember sitting in the driveway of his house, waving to him for the last time from the car, and just wanting to go home. It was one of the hardest experiences of my life up to that point.
In 2012, a year before Evelyn’s death, my mother died from COPD. Her death was not unexpected. I knew that it was coming and I had time to prepare emotionally, and I knew that when she passed she would be better off.
When we are young, unless we experience the death of someone close to us, no one prepares us for the inevitability that someone in your future will die. Of course, we know that our parents will die someday, and we expect them to pass at ripe old ages having lived full and productive lives, but there is no expectation that we will outlive our own children. It is not the normal way of things. You hear about other peoples’ experiences, other parents who lose their kids. It is on TV, in the paper, and all over the Internet. You ponder for a moment what you would do, how you would react to the loss of one of your own, a brief moment, and then you go on with your daily routine.
Today and every day is a struggle. It is a struggle to appear normal to those who do not know, to those without compassion, and to those who just do not know what to do. In our culture, death is a taboo topic. When someone dies, we rush to bury them, we rush to get passed it, and then seemingly well-meaning people push us to get on with our lives. There is no time to grieve and certainly not around them. We are conditioned to hide our pain. We are expected to go see a grief counselor to deal with it. Don’t bring it to work, don’t bring it to the party, leave that shit at home.
For many employers the standard practice is to give three days of bereavement. For the birth of a child, you can take eight weeks off, but for the death of an immediate family member, most times you get three days. Think about that. I was luckier than most.
Many people just do not know what to say to you or how to act around you. They are awkward, they stutter, they fumble for words. Eventually they do not talk to you anymore, because they do not know how to help you and avoiding you is easier. I have been fortunate in that I have a great support system in my friends and family.
I think about Evelyn every day, but today she is on my mind more than other days. Today is her birthday. She would have been 21 years old today. Finally an adult. She had big plans for her life. She was a model. She was beautiful, she was smart, and she was great with people. She was elegant and sophisticated, just like her mother. She was a strong young woman full of aspirations and goals.
It is funny that when someone is no longer in your life anymore, you miss the annoying things more than anything else. You would give anything to have them back, poking you in the face while you slept, or making rude noises during a movie, or constantly telling them to clean up their room.
My beliefs prevent me from thinking that I will ever see her again. However, that does not mean that I have given up the hope that I am wrong. I miss my daughter.
Happy Birthday Evelyn! I love you!
It’s been a year since Evelyn was taken from us. I’ve been thinking about what I would write here on this day. I tried, but I don’t have anything left to say that I haven’t already said before. She’s gone and she’s not coming back. We are left to pick up the pieces and learn how to live without her. All we have left are memories of her. Be they good or not so good, they are all we have. There are pictures and videos, but they won’t talk back, they can’t.
We miss her every day and that is the way of things. It’s not fair, but it is what it is. I can’t dwell on a future of what might have been and I can’t live in what has passed. All I can do–all that any of us can do–is live in the here and now. Yes, life is less full and life less happy, but that is the way of things when someone we love is taken from us.
What we can do is be inspired by Evy. We can be inspired by her beauty, her sense of humor, and her compassion for others. Remember something she did for you and pay that forward to someone else. Not just today, but everyday.
Today is Father’s Day. People all over the world will have dinners with their kids and dinners with their parents. Last year on this day, we went to a friend’s home so we could all celebrate together. Evelyn had invited some friends over to swim, so she didn’t come with us, which was fine, because she would have been bored and we weren’t going to be gone very late.
When we got home, I went in the back room. She was watching an old movie on TV. We made some small talk, she told me Happy Father’s Day and that she loved me. I said thank you and told her I loved her. Then I went to bed.
I don’t remember much about any conversations that we had over the next couple of days. I just remember the night before she died and how late it was and my wife and I had to go to work. I just remember waking to the sound of the NPR station talking about the accident.
I remember walking by the accident scene on my way to catch my bus. I remember the call from my wife telling me that I needed to come home, that something had happened to Evy.
All I can remember from our last interaction, is telling her that I loved her. I’m glad that I got to tell her that and I hope she believed me.
It hasn’t gotten any easier.
Evelyn’s name resonates inside my skull like tribal drums playing on an infinite loop. Each syllable beating out a rhythm, competing with the ringing in my ears.
Sometimes I sit in the back and listen to the trees rustle and the birds sing. My mind tells me that she is gone, but my heart hopes that there is a part of her with me.
My son is a wonderful, intelligent young man. I am proud of him and the way he is coping with his own loss. His sister. I am proud of him that he can go to school, study, and pass his classes. I am also proud of the person he is becoming.
This Father’s Day is bittersweet. Full of memories of what was, what is to come, and what will never be. As time passes, I hope they will become less so, but for now I will just have to learn how to live with what they are.
About the Photo: This was a photo of us taken on my birthday in 2009. We were celebrating at Disneyland.
When Evelyn died, we did the normal thing, we called family and close friends to tell them of our loss. What about everyone else? Between the family, there were literally hundreds of people who needed to know about Evelyn, about us, and how and when to pay respects.
We turned to social media. In the hours after her death, and the media had released her name, I posted on Facebook about our loss. We received hundreds of private messages and comments on our loss. People expressed what Evelyn had meant to them on our Facebook pages as well as Evelyn’s.
Social media played a large part in the celebrations of Evelyn’s life. It enabled us to plan important events like her funeral services and remembrance gatherings. Using Facebook’s event planning features, we could easily update people on the dates and times of events, what to expect, and in some cases how they could help.
Additionally, I found groups on Facebook for people who were going through or had been through the grief process too. I have made several lasting friendships with people from these groups. The groups have been a fountain of support and resources for someone with my belief system going through tragedies such as ours.
Using Facebook, I was able to create locations for her final resting place in the Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery and for her memorial tree at Lake Poway, so people could check-in and maybe share a story about Evelyn.
We were able to collect and share hundreds photos from our family and her friends to help remember her life. We were also able to share or re-share never seen photos from her early childhood and her years growing up. Many of her photos can be seen on Flickr and on my Facebook photography page.
Because of the eternal nature of the Internet and social media services, those photos, stories, and videos will always be there to help keep Evelyn’s memory alive.
Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey hosted by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a reboot of the 80s PBS show Cosmos: A Personal Journey, hosted by the late astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan.
I watched the first episode last night with eagerness. I really wanted to like it.
I wasn’t really a fan of the 80s show, but loved science and astronomy and learning new information. As a teenager in the 80s the first Cosmos was a little over my head, not because I’m stupid, but because I never paid attention in school.
The new show, produced by Seth MacFarlan, had a great intro, and a fantastic musical score, but a few minutes into the show, I had a hard time trying to figure out who was the audience. Was it written for kids? Was it written for believers in God or Atheists or was it written for budding scientists. It wasn’t clear to me.
The writers on the show didn’t do the host any favors. Dr. deGrasse Tyson isn’t an actor, so at times it seemed like he struggled to say some of the lines and have them come out with sincerity. Since he isn’t an actor, some acting lessons might do him some good. Acting and delivering scripted material is much different from giving a lecture.
I had questions about our cosmic address, he called our planet and our galaxy by their names, Earth and the Milky Way, but when he refereed to our solar system as simply “solar system”. If we don’t have a name for our solar system, maybe it’s time we come up with one.
The show was mostly CGI and digital effects sprinkled with some great photography and simulations.There were some parts where the production could have been more effective. I did like the tribute to Carl Sagan at the end of the show, but thanks to shoddy camera work, I didn’t see the title of the book that Dr. Sagan had signed for Dr. deGrasse Tyson.
Overall, it left me feeling Meh. Maybe the next episode will be better.
Finally another painful milestone is behind us. Robbie Gillespie was sentenced to 10 years for his role in the death of our daughter. It was an emotional day for everyone. Thank you to everyone who has stood behind us and supported us during this tragedy.
What follows is our Victim Impact Statement at the sentencing hearing of Robbie Dean Gillespie in the death of our beautiful daughter, Evelyn Jean Courtney. It is very long. I have broken it up in to smaller sections for your convenience.
“I’ve got six cracked ribs, I’m in a lot of pain,” “I’m grieving on the inside. It’s been a really tough week.” “It was simply an accident,” “Yes, I feel terrible that it happened, but in the same token I know in my heart that I was trying to do the right thing.”
These were the first words that we heard from Robbie Gillespie.
In subsequent interviews, we heard of how much Gillespie lost—his wife, his kids, his job—not once did he offer any form of condolences to us for our loss. Not one time did he look into those cameras into our faces and say, “I’m sorry”.
Now, instead of remembering the times I could have had with my daughter—watching her grow in her career, working with her as we grew together, grandchildren and all of the holidays and events that we would have attended, and finally the first dance of a father of the bride at her wedding—all I have now to remember her is a tree in Lake Poway and a sun-faded orange circle in the intersection of Poway and Midland roads a constant reminder of where Evelyn breathed her last breath.
We have driven over and around that circle hundreds of times since her death. It is our own personal “circle of hell”. We have retraced the path of her death hundreds of times, and each time we imagined what she saw, what she thought, and what she said in the seconds before her death.
Our house, once a bustling center of teen activity, is quiet. The door to her room, often closed because it looked like a disaster area, is now open, displaying a neat and tidy, almost clinical room that never gets messed up. Unless we have a guest, it’s a museum where the only patrons are her mother and I.
Evelyn is on our minds every minute, of every hour, of every day. Gone is her raucous laughter, her boisterous sense of humor, her impressions, and her practical jokes. No more do I wake up in the middle of the night to find her watching old black and white movies, or writing songs, or drawing pictures. Now I wake up in the middle of the night sweating, pacing the house, and finding silence.
Instead of waking up to her poking me in the face with her finger, I wake up to a nightmare, to crying, anxiety, to nothing. There are days when the countdown to sleep begins upon awaking.
Christmas was always Evelyn’s favorite holiday. We would watch Christmas Vacation every year. The Christmas before Evelyn was killed was one of her proudest moments. She had a job and her own money to buy us all presents. She was a very generous and giving person. There is a picture of me where you can’t see my face because of the stack of boxes in my lap. Evelyn loved to decorate the house and the tree. That was true of most holidays, she loved to decorate and be festive.
This Christmas we couldn’t bear to be at home. It was too quiet, too lonely, and too empty.
The house is quiet, the silence is deafening.
I walk by your room every day The door is open I see the bed where you used to lay Now you’re broken You were your own person Always rehearsing For a part that you would never get Now we’re just wailing and cursing You left us here to feel the pain. All pain and…
Related to the post I made yesterday on the six-month anniversary of my daughter’s death, I was asked what was the story behind the photo that accompanied that story.
It was January 2011. I had been shooting seriously as a photographer for just over a year, and Evelyn had been in her third fashion show. She needed more photos for her portfolio and I needed more practice photographing people.
She changed her clothes and grabbed some props and I set up my lights. What followed was our first father/daughter photo session. The session lasted a couple of hours, with her changing clothes multiple times. We were both having a lot of fun and I captured many great shots of Evelyn being Evelyn. The Chanel scarf was her mother’s and became a useful prop in many of the photos.
That day and those that followed were some of the best days of our days together.