What Happened to the McCrays?

by Tracey Lange

Small towns don’t forgive easily. Even when they do, they never forget.

Charlie had been gone eighteen months when she slit her wrist that awful night. In some ways the first six months had been easier, only because she’d lived in a perpetual state of shock and disbelief, her brain coated with a protective numbness, like she was walking through life in a fog. Then the fog started to lift, and she was expected to adjust to a new normal she just didn’t want to adjust to. No one said it out loud, but life was moving on without Charlie, and she was supposed to as well. She’d been, first and foremost, Charlie’s mom for almost ten years, and that’s who she’d planned to be for the rest of her life. She had been the earth to Charlie’s sun. Without his gravity she felt weightless, like she could just float away and disappear. Sometimes, that’s exactly what she wanted.

She decided then and there, sitting across from Social Worker Maggie, that she would never put him through that again. Maggie said that was a good start, but she also explained that during suicidal moments the physiological functioning of the brain changes, its ability to problem solve is diminished, which is why there seems to be only one way to end the pain. So Casey stayed in the hospital for five more days, underwent the evaluations, participated in ongoing therapy, and she learned the darkest times would pass if she waited them out or distracted herself by making the pain physical: snapping a rubber band against her skin, pinching herself, tugging her hair. Safe techniques that disrupted her thinking and provided momentary relief.

Kyle was their hockey coach, not their parent. It wasn’t his place to explain that the older they got the vastly more complicated things would become. As they grew up they would hear all the platitudes: sometimes you have to know when to quit; when things are out of your control you have to let go and move on; doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity … But he wasn’t going to be the one to say those things, force them to grow up any faster than they had to. So, instead, he offered something a little simpler and hoped it made sense. “Sometimes you’ve taken all the shots you can,” he said. “And then it’s time to let someone else carry the puck for a while.”

He softened his tone. “Casey, you can’t let the grief consume all the good—what you and Kyle gave him, what you all had together. The rest of your life shouldn’t be about how Charlie died. It should be about how he lived.” She drew in the sharpest breath. Is that what she’d been doing? Was she so focused on Charlie’s death she was forgetting how he lived, forgetting all the good? A blinding panic flooded her mind as she considered what her ritual might have cost her

The memories were tinged with sadness, but they were also so happy, and she realized something, or remembered a truth she must have forgotten a long time ago. Pain and happiness weren’t mutually exclusive, they could coexist in the same moment, in the same memory. Charlie wasn’t just with her when she was suffering, he was with her when she was smiling too.

“You know, I think that’s how grief works. You have to feel it so you can heal it, not bury yourself in it. You get through it, and each time it’s a little less. That’s how it was for me when we lost Dad and Mom. It’s how it’s been for me since we lost Charlie.”