And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Read Free Page B

but nobody, could help her.
    I didn’t cry when she tried repeatedly to end her pain herself, first with a razor blade, then with a needle.
    I didn’t cry when I knew she could no longer live with us in our home without destroying her sister and brother. She had already come close to destroying our marriage.
    I didn’t cry when I got the news that she was dead. I held Frank while he wept through the night, my own eyes dry.
    I didn’t cry at her funeral. I couldn’t. By then, I’d forgotten how.
    I had never let myself feel the pain. I blocked it. Now I felt it. Oh, how I felt it.
    I kept having the same nightmare. Every night in my dreams, Nancy was a small child of five, running up to me waving her hands in front of her face and exclaiming “Look what I have, Mommy! Look what I have!” When she got up close to me, I saw that what she had all over her little girl’s hands were track marks from shooting heroin, the track marks she showed me when she was seventeen to let me know she was a drug addict. “Help me, Mommy,” she had said in real life, and in my dream, too. “Help me, Mommy,” cried little Nancy.
    I hadn’t been able to. She was dead. And I was alone, totally alone in the world. My life had no meaning. I had no desire towork, to love, to be productive, to see anyone I knew, to smile. I had no desire to be alive.
    I shivered. I was cold, even with my coat on.
    I really knew Nancy was going to die young. She had wanted to die since she’d been eleven years old. I had long since accepted it as inevitable. It was just a matter of how and when. I had her death all mapped out in my mind for two years before it actually happened. It was my recurring fantasy. We would get a phone call early one morning from the police saying that Nancy was in the hospital from a drug overdose. Frank, Suzy, David, and I would rush to the hospital. Nancy would be in a bed in a private room, conscious. It would be clean and quiet. She would say good-bye to each of us. We would say good-bye to her. Then she would die in my arms.
    Nancy’s death was dignified in my fantasy. In death, she had at last found the peace she never found in life. The ordeal was over.
    It did not work out that way. A murderer intervened. Nancy died under a hotel sink with a knife in her stomach, the whole world there to gape at her. She died the subject of ridicule and scorn. The press called her Nauseating Nancy. Their stories made it seem like she had “asked for it,” just like a rape victim in a provocative dress “asks for it.” They made it seem like she got what she deserved. In life, the media had made my daughter into a distasteful celebrity; in death, they made her a freak. There was a derisive skit about her on
Saturday Night Live
, jokes about her in Johnny Carson’s monologue. Some people were selling Sid and Nancy T-shirts. Others were buying them.
    Nobody wanted to hear of her pain, her sadness, her sensitivity. Nobody wanted to understand Nancy. Nobody cared.
    I wanted to run to the highest roof and scream “Nancy was my baby! She was my child!” I wanted to yell “No matter what she became, she didn’t deserve to die this way—to be
treated
this way!” I wanted to scream “You don’t understand her! She was
loved!
”
    I wanted to yell so loud that everyone would have to hear, have to understand, have to care.
    But I was mute. I could not fight anymore. I ached too much. I was feeling all of the pain, the twenty years of pain I’d accumulated and held in through our tortured life with Nancy. It wouldn’t go away. If only it would go away.…
    And now, as I stood in front of the mirror, noose around my neck, I realized the pain wouldn’t go away because I wouldn’t let go of Nancy. I couldn’t. My odyssey with her wasn’t complete. Hermurderer had taken more than her life. He’d taken
my
life, my purpose, my