"cruel to be kind"

Ashlee…you’d never asked me to tell you exactly what happened the day your daddy died until yesterday. It’s not something I ever really wanted to go into detail about with you. It’s not something a parent should ever have to explain to their child.

But here we are.

You have questions. That’s completely understandable. I want to be honest and tell you. What I need you to understand is how extremely difficult it is for me to have to recall that day.

I couldn’t get through it telling you over the phone, so you asked me to write it down on this blog.

If you really MUST know…read on. If not… please stop reading now.

 

He planned it.

On September 21^st, 2020, Nick called Chad and invited him to come to dinner on September 23^rd. Chad said he was “insistent”. So much so, Chad cancelled a date.

About forty minutes before Chad was supposed to arrive, Nick asked me to go to the butcher shop to pick up the steaks he’d ordered for dinner. He insisted I take his car instead of our old Subaru Forrester (which was the car I normally drove). The Subaru was in the garage and his vintage Mach 1 was parked directly behind it in the driveway. It made sense to me to take his car at the time.

Before I left for the shop, he hugged me tightly and kissed me telling me how very much he loved me. That was not out of the norm. It’s what we always did when one of us left the house. I smiled, told him I loved him too, and said I’d be back in twenty minutes.

After I left the house and was about five blocks away, I suddenly remembered I’d left my wallet on the kitchen counter. I turned around and headed back home to retrieve it.

Instead of pulling into the driveway, I left the car running in the street in front of the house. As I started to get out of the car, I heard what sounded like a loud muffled gunshot and glass shattering. I quickly pushed the garage door opener on the car visor to open the door.

Once inside the garage and when I realized what happened I was feral. It felt as if my brain and heart were exploding simultaneously. “HELP ME!” were the only words I could scream out. The whole neighborhood heard me.

The young doctor who used to live across the street ran full speed and barefoot up the driveway and into the garage. He told me to stay back. I just couldn’t do that. I pulled the Subaru door open and grabbed onto Nick. I desperately wanted to believe he was still alive. The doctor called 911 from his cell phone and tried his best to console me when we both realized Nick was indeed dead.

The police and ambulance arrived within minutes.

Chad arrived early, saw our street blocked off with all the emergency vehicles, heard me screaming, got out of his car in the middle of the road and ran across our neighbor’s lawn shouting my name at the top of his lungs.

He found me covered in blood kneeling on the garage floor sobbing and shrieking. Chad grabbed the closest paramedic and demanded they give me a sedative to calm me down. When the man wasn’t moving fast enough, Chad grabbed the hypodermic needle out of the stunned paramedics hand and administered it to me himself. He pulled me up off the ground into his arms and carried me inside the house. 

After the injection, I didn’t come to until the very early morning of the next day.

When I woke up to a pounding headache on the living room couch, I thought I’d had a nightmare. I hoped it had all just been a nightmare. By the look on Chad’s tear-stained face, I knew it wasn’t.

Chad didn’t know what Nick had planned. He thought he was just coming for dinner that night.

Ashlee…I didn’t see it coming and there weren’t any clues or warning signs. I had no idea your daddy had fourth stage Cancer with “no hope in sight”. He never told me. In his letter he said by the time he found out he had Cancer his body was “riddled with it”. He didn’t want me to watch him die after everything we’d been through. He said suicide was his way of being “cruel to be kind”.

Ultimately, all you really need to know is that he loved us so much more than either of us realized.