Rock Bottom Was Only The Lobby

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  • A Letter To My Unborn Granddaughter

    A Letter To My Unborn Granddaughter

    Dear Noelle,

    You’re not here yet. You’re still tucked safely inside your mama, growing quietly and completely unaware that there is already an entire world waiting for you. But somehow, little girl, you have already changed mine. Your name is Noelle Bradley. And one day, when you’re old enough to understand why your Grandma gets a little emotional when she says your whole name, I’ll tell you a story.

    I’ll tell you about your daddy. And I’ll tell you about my grandmother. And I’ll tell you about how sometimes the people we love don’t really disappear. They just find another way to stay.

    Your daddy’s name is Bradley. I chose that name for him because of my grandmother, Estella Pearl Bradley. She was one of the most important people in my entire life. She wasn’t just my grandmother. She was home. She was the person who made me feel like I belonged somewhere simply because I existed.

    I grew up with her. She was there for so much of my life that I can’t separate the woman I became from the little girl she loved. And then I lost her. She died just nine days after your daddy was born. Nine days. I had just brought a new life into the world, and nine days later, one of the people who had meant the most to me left it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain what that did to me. It was joy and grief occupying the exact same space.

    I had a son. And I had lost my grandmother. But I had already given my son her name. Bradley. And now, all these years later, my little boy is having a little girl of his own. You. Noelle Bradley.

    Do you see what I mean when I tell you that names can carry stories? Your middle name isn’t just something written on your birth certificate. It’s part of a story that started long before you ever existed.

    It’s your daddy. It’s the little boy I once held in my arms. It’s the man he became. It’s the grandmother who helped shape the woman who raised him. And now it’s you. Three generations of love, somehow sitting inside two words. And someday, when you ask me about her, I’m going to tell you everything. I’m going to tell you that she wasn’t some perfect, larger-than-life woman. She was real. She was funny. She was complicated. She had her quirks. She had her own way of doing things. She was human. And she loved me in a way that taught me something I wouldn’t fully understand until much later:

    There is a kind of love that makes you feel safe simply by existing. She gave me that. And when she died, I spent a lot of my life looking for that feeling again. I didn’t always know that’s what I was doing. Sometimes I looked for it in people. Sometimes in relationships. Sometimes in places. Sometimes I tried to create it for myself. Sometimes I got it wrong.

    Really wrong.

    I’ve made mistakes, Noelle. A lot of them. I’ve loved people I shouldn’t have. I’ve stayed too long. I’ve left too soon. I’ve trusted the wrong people. I’ve hurt people I never intended to hurt. I’ve been hurt myself. I’ve made choices that I wish I could go back and change. I’ve had seasons where I barely recognized myself. I’ve had moments where surviving the day felt like enough. And I’ve had to learn, over and over again, that being broken isn’t the same thing as being finished.

    I hope you learn that too.

    Because life is going to hurt you sometimes. I wish I could promise you otherwise. I can’t. There will be heartbreak. There will be disappointment. There will be people who don’t understand you. There will be people who leave. There will be days when you don’t recognize the person staring back at you in the mirror. There will be times when you make a mess of things. And baby girl, when that happens, I hope you remember this:

    You are not your worst day.

    You are not your mistakes. You are not the person who hurt you. You are not the things someone else said about you. You are not required to be perfect to be worthy of love. You never have to earn your place in this family. You never have to become smaller so someone else can feel bigger. You never have to apologize for having a big heart. And please, please don’t spend your life begging someone to love you. The right people won’t make you audition for a place in their lives.

    I hope you love fiercely. I hope you laugh until your stomach hurts. I hope you dance badly. I hope you travel. I hope you make ridiculous memories. I hope you fall in love. I hope you have friendships that survive decades. I hope you do things that scare you. I hope you fail at things.

    Yes. Fail.

    Because failure isn’t the opposite of success. Sometimes it’s how you find out what you’re actually capable of.

    I hope you learn to say no. I hope you learn to leave. I hope you learn to stay when something is worth fighting for. I hope you become the kind of woman who can look at herself honestly and still choose to love herself.

    And more than anything, I hope you stay soft. The world will try to convince you that being soft is dangerous. That caring too much makes you weak. That vulnerability is something to hide.

    Don’t believe it.

    Some of the strongest people I’ve ever known were the ones who still managed to love after life gave them every reason not to. I want you to be one of those people.

    But I also want you to have boundaries. Because your heart is precious. Don’t hand it to everyone who asks. And when somebody breaks it, don’t let them convince you that you should stop having one.

    Now let me tell you something else. You are going to have a Grandma who is probably going to embarrass you.

    A lot.

    I’m going to take too many pictures. I’m going to tell stories you probably don’t want me telling. I’m going to kiss your face when you’re trying to act grown. I’m going to worry about you. I’m going to spoil you when your parents tell me not to. And I’m going to love you so fiercely that you may occasionally wonder if I’m completely ridiculous.

    I probably am.

    But I also want to be something else for you. I want to be home. Because that’s what my grandmother was for me. And maybe that’s the greatest gift I can give you. A place where you don’t have to perform. A place where you don’t have to pretend. A place where you can show up messy and exhausted and heartbroken and still be loved. A place where you can tell the truth. A place where you can say, “Grandma, I fucked up,” and know that the first thing I’m going to say is, “Okay. Come here.” Because I want you to know what my grandmother taught me without ever sitting me down and teaching me a damn thing:

    Love doesn’t mean someone never makes mistakes.

    Love means they still have somewhere to come home to. And Noelle, you will always have somewhere to come home to. I wish I could tell you that your great-great-grandmother will meet you. She won’t. But I will make sure you know her. I’ll tell you about her until you can picture her. I’ll tell you the funny stories. I’ll tell you the stories that make me cry. I’ll tell you about the woman who helped make me who I am. I’ll tell you about the grandmother who made me feel safe. And maybe someday you’ll understand why I get quiet when I talk about her. Why I still miss her. Why a little piece of my heart still belongs to a woman who has been gone for years. And maybe you’ll understand why your name means so much to me.

    Because when I say Noelle Bradley, I hear more than your name. I hear a little girl I haven’t met yet. I hear your daddy as a little boy. I hear myself as a little girl. And somewhere underneath all of it, I hear her.

    Estella Pearl Bradley.

    The woman who loved me. The woman who helped make me.The woman whose absence has never quite stopped hurting. And somehow, through your daddy, a piece of that story made its way to you. That’s the strange and beautiful thing about families. We leave pieces of ourselves behind without ever knowing where they’ll end up. A name. A laugh. A recipe. A mannerism. A story. A way of loving. And sometimes, decades later, you look into the face of a baby who hasn’t even been born yet and realize:

    The love didn’t end.

    It just kept moving. From her to me. From me to your daddy. And now from him to you. You are the next chapter, Noelle. And I cannot wait to meet you. I cannot wait to see your little face. I cannot wait to hear your cry. I cannot wait to hold you for the first time and have that surreal moment where the whole world probably disappears for a second.

    I already know I’ll cry. I’m crying now. You’re not even here yet and I’m already crying. Because you are my first grandchild. My first little girl in this new chapter of my life. And you have no idea how much has happened before you. You don’t know how many things your Grandma has survived. You don’t know how many times I’ve had to start over. You don’t know how many people I’ve loved and lost. You don’t know how many times I’ve had to find my way back to myself. And you don’t need to know all of it yet. But someday, I’ll tell you.

    Because I don’t want you to think your Grandma has always had it figured out. I haven’t. I still don’t. I just kept going. And maybe that’s one of the things I want you to remember most.

    Keep going.

    Not because life is always easy. Not because everything happens for a reason. Not because everything works out exactly the way we want it to. But because there is still so much life you haven’t lived yet. There are people you haven’t met. Places you haven’t seen. Songs you haven’t heard. Food you haven’t tasted. People you haven’t fallen in love with. Mistakes you haven’t made. Things you haven’t survived. And moments of happiness you cannot possibly imagine yet.

    You have an entire life waiting for you. And I hope you live the hell out of it. I hope you make it yours. I hope you don’t waste it trying to become who somebody else thinks you should be. And when you lose your way, and you probably will sometimes, come home. Come find me. I’ll remind you who you are.

    And if someday I’m not here anymore, I hope this letter reminds you. Because I want you to know something that I know with every part of me:

    You were loved before you were ever born.

    You were wanted. You were dreamed about. You were talked about. You were waited for. And you were already making your Grandma’s heart bigger before I had ever seen your face.

    So come on, Noelle. January can’t get here fast enough. Your mama is waiting. Your daddy is waiting. Your whole family is waiting. And your Grandma? Well, I’ve been waiting for you longer than I even knew. And when I finally hold you, I’m going to think about the woman who once held me. I’m going to think about the little boy I named Bradley. I’m going to think about the man he became. And I’m going to look at you. Noelle Bradley. And I’m going to know that somehow, impossibly, beautifully, the love made it here. All the way to you.

    Love always,

    Grandma

  • The Ghosts in My Home

    The Ghosts in My Home

    After Jason died, I spent the rest of that winter, all of spring, and most of the summer couch surfing. I was drifting from one place to another, trying to figure out what the hell came next. I didn’t really have a home. I didn’t really have much of anything.

    Then, sometime around August or September of 2020, I finally got an apartment of my own. It was a townhouse, and on paper it was exactly what I needed: a place to land, a place to breathe, a place that was finally mine.

    The problem was that I hadn’t really been alone in a very long time. And being alone was harder than I expected.

    Before long, my mom moved in with me. Then I met Robbie, and eventually he moved in too. So there we were: me, Mom, and Robbie, all living together in my little townhouse.

    Robbie and I noticed pretty quickly that there was something strange about the place. We started seeing things. Little figures would peek around the staircase from upstairs while we were sitting in the living room. They looked like children. We’d catch glimpses of them and then they’d be gone. It was creepy as hell.

    There was also a dog. My mom and I would sometimes see what looked like a dog walking behind the fainting couch in her bedroom. You couldn’t see the whole animal, just this long ghostly tail bobbing up and down behind the couch, as if it were walking past us. There was never any explanation for the dog. None of the research I did ever mentioned one.

    Then one night, Robbie and I went to the casino. When we came home, it was late, and there was a man standing outside in civilian clothes holding an AK-47. He looked at us and said, “You need to get in the house.”

    So we did.

    We went inside and started peeking through the blinds. Before long, there were police everywhere. They were at the townhouse directly across from ours, where a man lived with his pregnant girlfriend. I’d talked to him before. He always seemed incredibly nice, kind, friendly, gentle. The kind of guy you wouldn’t think twice about.

    The police took him away in handcuffs.

    Eventually I went outside for a cigarette. I don’t smoke in the house, and after the police told me it was safe, I sat outside and smoked while trying to make sense of what had just happened. That’s when they told me why they’d arrested him. He was wanted for murder in California. Years earlier, he had allegedly killed a woman, and the police had discovered a body in one of the storage units at the back of our complex, one he’d rented under the radar.

    I remember thinking: You have got to be fucking kidding me.

    I already had a haunted apartment. Now the seemingly nice guy across the street was a suspected murderer. But while I was sitting outside, I overheard the police talking about something else. They mentioned a murder-suicide that had happened years earlier in the same complex.

    Well. Naturally, I needed to know if it had happened in MY townhouse. The police wouldn’t tell me. So I went inside and did what any reasonable person would do: I started doing some Nancy Drew shit.

    I searched. I called around. I dug through old newspaper archives. Eventually I found a Tulsa World article about it. A man had killed his wife and two of their children inside that townhouse before killing himself. Their children were Caroline, who was five, and Franklin, who was three. There had also been a much younger child who survived. And then I saw a photograph of Caroline.

    I had already taken a picture of what I believed was one of the little figures I’d seen in the townhouse. In the picture, she appeared to be standing in front of the bathroom door. You could actually see the doorknob through her body. And when I looked at the newspaper photograph of Caroline, I swear to you, it was the same little girl I had been seeing.

    Caroline and Franklin. Those were the two little figures peeking around my staircase. I never saw their parents. I only ever saw the children. And sometimes that dog tail. Then came the strangest experience of all.

    My son had been staying with me, and he’d bought me an herbal bath soak from the Asian market nearby. I decided to take a bath. I put the herbs into a little washcloth sachet, tied it up, and dropped it into the water. Within a short time, I became incredibly dizzy. I don’t know whether it was the herbs, the heat, relaxation, something psychological, or something I can’t explain. I only know that the experience became extremely vivid. 

    And then Caroline and Franklin appeared in the bathroom. Not like the little glimpses we’d seen before. They seemed solid. Present. Close enough that I felt like I could reach out and touch them. And then Caroline showed me something.

    I was suddenly standing in what looked like my bedroom, but it wasn’t my bedroom anymore. The furniture was different. The room was different. I was watching a man and woman arguing. I understood that I was seeing the moment their family had been destroyed. I watched the argument escalate. I watched the father shoot the mother. Then the children came upstairs because they heard the gunshot. They saw their mother on the floor. They were terrified. And then he shot them too.

    What happened next is difficult to explain, because I didn’t hear Caroline speak in the ordinary sense. It felt more like she put the understanding directly into my mind. She wanted me to know something.

    Her daddy loved her.

    She wanted me to understand that he had been a good father. That he loved her. That he loved Franklin. That he loved their mother. She wasn’t asking me to excuse what he did. She wasn’t saying it was okay. She was trying to make me understand that the man who committed that horrific act had not necessarily been a monster every minute of his life.

    In her understanding, something in him had snapped. And in that moment, his thinking became horribly distorted. He believed that everything was over, that his children had witnessed something they could never recover from, that they had no one else, that their family was gone, and that somehow the only answer was for all of them to die together.

    It was horrifying. It was also profoundly human. And that changed something in me. Because it made me realize how badly we want human beings to fit into simple categories.

    Good person. Bad person. Monster. Victim. Innocent. Guilty. Crazy. Sane.

    We want the world to make sense, so we put everything into neat little boxes and close the lid.

    But people aren’t neat little boxes.

    Human beings are complicated. Trauma is complicated. Mental illness is complicated. Grief is complicated. Rage is complicated. Love is complicated.

    Sometimes a person can do something absolutely horrific and still have been capable of tremendous love. Those two things can exist at the same time. Understanding that does not erase accountability. It doesn’t make the harm disappear. It simply means that understanding a person is not the same thing as excusing them.

    I’ve thought about that a lot since then. Especially when I see people talking about cases involving severe mental illness. A recent case involving Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who killed her three young children during a severe episode of postpartum psychosis, brought that issue right back to the surface for me. People saw the headline and immediately reached for words like “monster” and “cold-blooded.” But severe postpartum psychosis can profoundly distort a person’s perception of reality.

    That doesn’t undo the unimaginable loss those children suffered, and it doesn’t make what happened okay. But it does force us to ask a harder question:

    What was happening inside that person’s mind when she did it?

    That question matters. Because if we refuse to look deeper than the headline, we may never understand anything about the tragedy at all. That’s what Caroline taught me, or at least, that’s what I took from the experience.

    She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t vengeful. She didn’t seem consumed by hatred. She simply wanted me to understand that there was more to her family’s story than “murder-suicide.”

    There was love. There was fear. There was mental illness, trauma, desperation, and a catastrophic moment that changed everything forever.

    When I came back to myself, I was sitting in a bathtub full of freezing cold water. And, naturally, after everything we’d just experienced, I had one final thing to say.

    “Caroline. Franklin. Look. We need to establish some house rules. Because listen, if you’re going to haunt my house, there are boundaries. If I’m in the bathroom, you wait your turn. I don’t care if you’re alive, dead, three years old, five years old, or a fucking ghost. You do NOT walk into the bathroom while I’m taking a bath.”

    Apparently, even the afterlife needs boundaries.

    My mom and I eventually became determined to help those kids “cross over.” I know how that sounds. I know how ambitious, and maybe even a little ridiculous it sounds to think two women with absolutely no idea what they were doing could somehow help two dead children move on. But we tried.

    We sat together and talked to them. We told them that if they wanted to leave, they should look for a light. We told them their mom and dad might be waiting for them. We told them they didn’t have to stay there anymore. And then, shortly before we moved out, we stopped seeing them.

    I have no idea what that means. Maybe the activity simply stopped. Maybe packing and moving changed the atmosphere of the house. Maybe there was an explanation I never found. Or maybe, just maybe, Caroline and Franklin found the light we’d been telling them about.

    I’ll never know. But I do know this:

    That apartment changed the way I think about humanity. It taught me that sometimes the story underneath the story is the one worth hearing. It taught me that empathy doesn’t require us to excuse terrible things. It simply requires us to remember that people are more complicated than the worst thing they’ve ever done, or the worst thing we’ve ever heard about them.

    And maybe that’s what I want people to take from all of this. Not that you have to believe in ghosts. Not that you have to believe Caroline and Franklin actually visited me. You don’t even have to believe my bathtub story.

    Believe whatever you want.

    But I hope you’ll consider this: Before you decide you know who somebody is, maybe look a little deeper. Before you call someone a monster, ask what happened inside them. Before you reduce an entire life to one terrible moment, remember that human beings are messy, complicated, contradictory creatures. Sometimes there isn’t a clean explanation. Sometimes there isn’t a box big enough to hold the whole story. And sometimes, the only honest thing we can say is:

    I don’t understand what happened, but I want to try.