Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives by Gary Younge Read Free Book Online

the boys’ “boxes.” Whatever the boys had created, gathered, or produced in a given year she would put in a box and write their school year on it: “Jarid 7th grade,” “Jordin 6th grade,” “Jaiden kindergarten.” She stored them under the hutch in the basement. They had all been thrown out. “I felt like the last ten years of my life were erased. I had to start all over again.”
    For Nicole, “all over again” meant starting from scratch. She had never been rich. She grew up in a solid blue-collar family. Her father, who’d moved to Arizona and died in 1999, had been a truck driver. Her mom, who looked after the house and the kids and volunteered at school, has been severely disabled since suffering a stroke in 1993 and is cared for by her brother. Growing up, Nicole never had everything she wanted, but she had pretty much everything she needed—everything except self-esteem. Her dad was a verbally abusive alcoholic who used to reinforce the taunting she received in school about her weight and boyish ways. “She went from one extreme to another looking for acceptance,” says Amy. “And she found it in the wrong places with these guys who were real jerks to her. They would say horrible things, take her money, basically take what they wanted, and leave without ever committing to her. That’s how she came by Danny.”
    By Nicole’s early twenties, she was in a tight spot, with two infants and nowhere to stay. “Sixteen years ago, when Jarid was seventeen months and Jordin was four weeks old, I was homeless,” she says. “We were legit homeless in a homeless shelter. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs. It wasn’t like I wasn’t intelligent or didn’t have the education like a lot of the other people in the homeless shelters. It was because I simply didn’t have anywhere to go. I had two kids. I had no family. Nobody could take us in. No money. I didn’t have a job. I couldn’t get a job because I was pregnant. It was a circumstantial homeless situation versusbeing an uneducated crackhead situation. We had nothing. And I busted my ass to get out of there and move up. Jordin’s first Thanksgiving and first Christmas were in a homeless shelter back in 1997, and I swore to myself it would never be like that again. They were so little they had no clue. But it still bothers me. And I built what I had. And everything was for them. And I got to the point where I was starting to be a mom.”
    She became a paralegal at a small law firm and gradually pulled her life together. Coming back from nothing gave everything she did have greater value. “Once you’ve been homeless you hold on to too much because when you have nothing you try to keep every single thing you can.”
    When she came back to Grove City to find most of her things gone, she felt as though she was back at square one. “It was like moving back into the shelter. It seems like everyday something is gone.” Her grief counselor said that given her personal history and the circumstances of her return, she was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

    “W HETHER A SON OR daughter died in a muddy rice paddy in Southeast Asia or in an antiseptic hospital ward, in a sudden accident or after prolonged illness, the result is the same,” writes Harriet Schiff, in The Bereaved Parent. “You, the child’s mother or father, seem to have violated a natural law. You have outlived your child.” 12
    Schiff, who lost her ten-year-old son, Robby, to heart disease, offers a mix of anecdote, homely advice, and wisdom from the experiences of bereaved parents she interviewed. Her basic message is that nobody but those who have lost children can really understand what such a loss feels like, which makes the grief isolating. Still, Schiff insists, life will, in time, regain meaning. Nicole’s world is now divided into “before” and “after,” with Friday, November 22 as point zero. “It was like before then I was in a theater