The investigation is done

The investigators are done with their investigation into Amanda's death. We had a meeting with them today, so I'm still digesting everything. They gave us a lot of information, both audibly and items to look over, and it's just so much to take in. I have yet to read the reports, etc.

Basically, it seems to boil down to this:  Amanda was a very conflicted young lady. On the one hand, she wanted to get herself together, go to school, get a job, and have a nice life. On the other hand, she couldn't seem to withstand the pull of the drugs and the people in that scene.  Long story short, the mixture of the heroin with her antidepressants was lethal.  While we may never know what transpired in the 20-30 minutes between someone seeing her alive the morning of the 11th and when 911 was called, we are "comfortable" with it having been her choice to use that morning, no matter who gave it to her, and that it was just too much for her system. We don't believe that she was murdered or that it was necessarily done maliciously. She just shouldn't have been there doing that, ever. And I think that's what hurts so deeply...we had just spent these amazing days with her where the walls were down and then she is pulled right back in, and she went even when I begged her to stay away. I feel like my heart shattered all over again this morning and I can't really tell you HOW I feel at the moment. Overall, I guess I'm sad above all else. No matter her issues, she was our baby girl and we loved her and would have done anything to help her. Why she went, I will never know, but I've never been addicted to anything, so I don't know that draw. I know she struggled with self-worth, and maybe when she was high, she didn't struggle with that, I just don't know.

I'll write more later. I just can't really function too well right now. My mind is clouded like right after she passed.

A chat with Erica

Thursday 10:56pm

Hey Erica,

I'm Amanda's mom. I just wanted to reach out to you, mother to mother. These last 10 months since Amanda died have been a nightmare for her dad and I. To have your child die, to never be able to hold their hand or hear their voice, to watch them become the person they were meant to be, to watch them get married and have children of their own...it's more than any parent should ever have to endure. Please hear me on this, I am NOT interested in getting you in trouble. I do pray for you and your son. I hope that if you aren't free of the drugs yet, that you can beat it for his sake...so you can turn your life around and be the mom and person you were born to be. I hope that now that you're free of Ryan, you'll be able to do just that. I'm begging you, mom to mom, to tell the detective anything Ryan told you about what happened that morning with/to Amanda. It haunts me day and night that I don't know what happened, and I'm pretty sure that if you were in my shoes and something happened to your son, you would want to know, too. I am begging you.

 

 

Sunday 2:16pm

 

I must say, one, I am so terribly sorry for your loss. It haunts me too, I think of Amanda almost everyday. I have gotten clean I have been clean now working on 5 months and part of my driving force is I try to live everyday to the best of my ability because I know that Amanda can't. I have seen a lot of bad things happen to people over the years of my crazy addiction. But, for some reason Amanda sticks out for me. I have sat and talked with Detective Bucy, and I don't know anything other than what I told him. Truthfully I couldn't tell you what happened while I was at work, and Ryan isn't going to tell me. I am free of him these days and don't plan on ever going near him again. I don't know what happened myself and it bothers me. I wish I knew more as far as what happened to her that morning. I hate that things are this way. I could not imagine the pain you and your family must have endured. Amanda will forever be with me the day she passed was my birthday. I will forever carry Amanda with me. I know nothing I am going to say is going to bring her back or fix things, and you are right I could not imagine burying one of my own. I have still been ravaging my brain looking for answers but I can't seem to find any. I am so sorry for the lose you and your family have endured if I think of something I will most definitely keep you updated.

 

 

 

My thoughts:  I've taken a day to kind of digest this. I felt like she was being honest. I pray that she is clean and totally free of Ryan.  I had been so angry, and part of me still is, but mostly I'm just sad. I see her not as the monster I wanted to see her as, but as a broken person, and drugs were the avenue her demons played out. I don't know what her brokenness stems from. The drugs are a symptom, not the source, but they add to the troubles when they promise to make things better. Another tool of Satan. She seems remorseful. I really wasn't sure how or if she would respond. I guess I thought she'd tell me where to go and how to get there. As for Ryan, I still feel that he did something to her. He was the one home with her. He was the one who would administer the heroin.

 

Thursday we have our sit-down with the detectives, and honestly I feel sick. I want to know, but I don't. I don't want to tell Dad whatever is said as he's already judged her based on her actions and fails to look past the actions to the root and try to understand the hurt that drove the demons. I'm not saying that to excuse her behavior. Every choice has a consequence, positive or negative. We see where hers went, but no matter her actions, she was and will always be our baby girl. Something Brandon Hatmaker said last night on our Explore God series was (paraphrasing), "My children didn't do anything to earn my love, and they can't do anything to lose it."  That's the same way with God and it's what we were trying to tell Amanda all along...there was nothing she could do to push us away, to turn us away from her or make us not love her. Our love just was and it will remain.

 

I miss you, Sugarbear.

A million little things

My brain won't shut off tonight. This isn't profound or anything, but losing Amanda wasn't just a one-time loss; it's a million little losses for the rest of our lives. 

For instance, tonight I made an apple pie from scratch...ok, the crust was courtesy of Pillsbury, but the rest was from scratch. That was the first time I'd ever even attempted one, and Amanda wasn't here.  But before that, I had pulled out a bunch of recipes, loose ones and looked through my recipe book, and it's in looking at that recipe book that I see the recipes she hand-wrote out for me just to help me out, and the recipes she just taped in there in the appropriate sections that I remember thinking when she did it that I would go back and re-do in a neater fashion.  Now I wouldn't redo them for neither money nor gold. She did that for me, to save me time and headache, because she loved me. I love seeing her handwriting. Seeing it makes my heart hurt...I just miss her so much.  Then, as I'm looking through the recipes for the apple pie recipe I'd saved years ago for "one day," I see her recipe...the one she'd learned and written down in Home Economics and asked me a bunch of times if we could make...the one I never took the time to go get the stuff for.  Why didn't I??  What did that communicate to my sweet girl?  What would it have hurt to go to the store and take some time out of my "busy day" to make these with my girl???  So many missed opportunities, wasted chances, always thinking we could do it "some day."  We had "some day," but I was too busy being busy.  I'm sorry, baby girl. Regret is such a big pill to swallow when it was so easily avoidable.

I'm supposed to call the detective, Aaron Bucy, on Thursday if I haven't heard from him by then.  Thanksgiving is coming up, and it makes my heart hurt so much. Our first without you alive. That is the day you tried heroin for the first time. You should have been with us, with your family who loved you and wanted the best for you. Now I am going to have to cook for me, Dad, and my dad, possibly others, and pretend it's just another Happy Thanksgiving.  I'm just so sad. I want you here. I want a do-over. I want to take those missed opportunities to pour into you and love you and spend time with you. I'm sorry I was so selfish and self-involved. I hope you knew that even though I'm this selfish, flawed person, that I loved you more than life itself...still do, always will. Feeling like...

Too much in my brain...

I should have written sooner before I had so much in my brain that it will come out a jumbled mess, and I'm afraid that's what this will be.

We heard from the PI on October 6, I believe, that they had found an EYE WITNESS that had seen Amanda up walking around October 11, 2013, between 7:30 and 7:45 a.m.  The detective said they are positive it was my Amanda they saw, and that he deems them a very credible witness.  This was huge and mind-blowing. For one, we had assumed, based on her core body temperature and acidity, that her heart had to have stopped around midnight to 1 a.m. The longer the heart had not been pumping blood, the more acid would have built up in her system. So that seemed a good assumption. BUT, if she was alive around 7:30 a.m., even to 7:45 a.m. and then Ryan called 911 around 8:30, (A), what happened in that time interval?  (B) obviously her heart hadn't been stopped THAT long to account for the acid level being so high, (C) that explains why EMS said she was still "warm," and (D) that DOESN'T explain why her core body temp was as it was.  This had me broken all over again. All I kept thinking was what did that bastard do to her? (excuse my language; I really have a hard time thinking kind thoughts when it comes to someone having hurt my child).  All I could do was sob and sob for her, for me, for us, for not knowing. 

On Friday the PI, Aaron, had said he was going to go try and question Erica and see what she might tell him. She and Ryan are apparently in a custody battle now for their son, so I was hopeful that IF Ryan had told her anything about what happened that day, and I can't see that he didn't, she might be more willing to spill the beans on him to try and remove him from the equation of the custody situation. Nothing had come back under Amanda's fingernails as far as DNA goes. The syringes only showed heroin in the needles and no DNA, and they weren't able to get any fingerprints on the syringes either. Aaron said if he couldn't at first get Erica to talk to him, he would try her attorney for the custody dispute and see if he/she could get Erica to talk to him. He was going to try and talk to Erica's mom, too, to see if she had told her anything. I was so hopeful.

He said Erica at first tried to give the same song and dance about what happened that night as what she'd told Laxton, but when Aaron confronted her with things he KNEW had happened and when, she changed her tune and filled in a lot of blanks and answered questions that they still had about some things.  The one thing she didn't provide, is what, if anything, Ryan told her about what happened that morning. So, while it was fruitful, it wasn't what I really needed/wanted to have come from that. Aaron said he has a very good idea and a very strong timeline of what happened except for about the critical 30-45 minutes.  I was crushed.  Aaron feels he should have this wrapped up in the next few weeks.

I asked him if it was his inclination that this was something criminal or just something she did, a bad decision, and he said probably both. He said he feels Amanda was a willing participant, and I don't doubt that. BUT he said that he does NOT feel Amanda was dosing her own heroin (and even by Erica's interview, Ryan was extremely controlling of the heroin and would hide it,  constantly moving it around and not tell her where it was). He feels that if it can be proven or if Erica would ever say that Ryan told her he gave it to her, Ryan could be on the hook for manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide, even if it was an accident, but none of that will come to be unless Erica talks.

Another thing that has been eating at me is Tim's schedule. I KNOW what he's doing are good things, it's Kingdom work, and it's God work. I know this. He's so flipping busy I feel like a side note and I HAVE to work with him in the various activities just to see him. He's part-time at both places BUT it's definitely NOT part time either place. Then even when he's "off," someone is calling him about work, or someone needs counseling, or there's some book he has to be reading to prepare for the next meeting, or there's the next meeting to be prepping for, or the next tailgating on a Saturday (also a day off), or the next message to be practicing or doing research for, etc. etc. And I feel like such a heel. I just miss him having ONE job and having time off that really felt like time off, not just time to prepare for the next thing on the list. If you looked at his calendar, it's amazing he doesn't have to schedule bathroom breaks, for real!  All of his busyness, even with good things, makes me resentful sometimes. I miss my husband. I miss us having OUR time and OUR space and not feeling like I have to share him with 50,000 people daily.  Also, I've been wanting to go into storage to start looking for pictures to finally start putting together our picture frame we'd bought before Amanda died. I truly thought I was going to have to go there alone and do that by myself and that made me angry. I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO THIS ALONE!  And that's the main feeling of his busyness for me, I feel alone.  He must have heard me talking today to my friend Jean about how I was feeling and that I was going to go to storage today while he went to his meeting, because he offered to go with me for a little bit, which he did.  Jean had offered to go with me for support if I needed/wanted company. I told her I really wasn't sure how I was going to feel when I got there. She told me to just call her if I needed her.

Which leads to my next thing.  Going into storage is excruciating. It's a big neon sign in the face that screams SHE'S NOT HERE ANYMORE!  I finally went through her clothes that were in her hamper. Some of her shirts still had a lot of her hair on them.  I was throwing some things out (underwear, bras), and setting aside some of her T-shirts to hopefully have turned into a quilt, and setting aside other things to go to a Goodwill type program. Tim did find the pictures and we loaded that tub into the truck. To even throw one thing away that was hers, that she wore or touched felt like a betrayal. I know it's not, and I know this is necessary and that I can't hold onto every single thing. This will take me some time. I told Tim before we got over there to not go into his organizer mode and start riding roughshod over me, that this was going to be upsetting and I needed to go slow. He was good. He broke down two times, one when he ran across the video of her birth, which for reasons stated in prior posts, I have great guilt over Amanda ever having seen. The next time he broke down was when he was handling Amanda's box of important things and he dropped it and the contents spilled all over the floor of the storage room. I wasn't able to access her dresser, and I know I need to go through that. Baby steps. 

So, that's where we're at. My head and heart are a mixed up jumble of emotions. I miss you so much baby girl.