When I arrived at the event, there were already dozens of people there mingling and chatting, among them my parents, who had also been invited. As the night progressed, my nerves progressed too. Usually, I don’t get nervous; I’m not worried about what I’m going to say. But somehow, that night it was different. Any time my parents are in a crowd where I can see them, I almost always shed a few tears. It’s not sadness; it’s more an acknowledgment of the pain they went through and a moment of realizing that their love for me extends beyond realms I ever thought possible. And that night was no exception.
After my talk, I didn’t want to seem rude or cold, but I really just wanted to be by myself to allow myself to feel what I was feeling without having to explain it to anybody. Plus I always feel a little awkward when I cry onstage in front of people. So I was hoping to slip away as quickly as I could, but then Rebecca Covey stepped to the podium, her chestnut hair and classic evening dress impeccably but gracefully styled. She spoke briefly in a warm, welcoming voice about her daughter Rachel. All I knew about Rachel was that she had passed away; I didn’t know how. I saw the portraits of Rachel, a beautiful girl with a broad smile and a strong chin: Rachel sitting with a fluffy little white dog in her lap. Rachel focusing intently with her hands poised over the strings of a harp. Rachel on horseback, flying like the wind. I listened to Rebecca speak of her with that same unconditional and abiding love that my parents have for me. The sound of her voice and the radiance of Rachel’s smile stayed with me for a long time. As I made the list of people I wanted to interview for this book, I thought of Rebecca Covey and sent her an email that I hoped was not too forward. It had been over a year since we’d last seen each other, but she said she’d be happy to help in any way she could and invited me to her house so we could sit down together for a quiet conversation.
It’s boiling hot outside as I pull up in front of Rebecca’s house. All morning, Chloé has been vocal about how she thinks we should spend the day, and none of her ideas include her car seat. She practically explodes from the seat as soon as I have the buckle undone. Walking up to Rebecca’s home, I notice the beautiful yard and think briefly about how nice it would be to spend the day playing among the flower beds and bushes with Chloé instead of struggling to restrain her in my arms while trying to conduct a very serious conversation for the next hour. Knocking on the door, I feel a little bit anxious. Almost intimidated.
The door opens, and two of Rebecca’s children—a nine-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy—smile up at me. I smile back at them and say, “Hi, I’m Elizabeth. Is Rebecca home?”
They run off to find their mother. She appears and invites me in. Rebecca looks the same as she did the night of the gala over a year ago. She has her long dark hair swept into a ponytail, and when she smiles, there is no questioning the kind of mother she is: patient, generous, kind, and calm. Inside the house, it’s cool and quiet and full of memories. I notice Rachel’s beautiful gold harp behind French doors. Pictures of family hang on the walls and stand on shelves. Even though I feel anxious and a little nervous, there’s a familiar feeling. This isn’t just a house; this is a home that has known both joy and sorrow.
In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, Nigel (played by Stanley Tucci) says fashion is “greater than art, because you live your life in it.” As I see it, a home is greater than any other structure, because we live our lives in it. A truly beautiful home—like the one I’m standing in now—is vibrant with life. It’s not just a show house or a museum where everything has a place and nothing is to be touched. It’s lovely but lived in, and people who come knocking at the door feel more at ease because of it.
Rebecca leads me into her husband’s office, and we sink into a comfortable sofa. I set my little digital recorder between us and begin with the question I always start with: “Would you please introduce yourself briefly? Just for the record.”
“I’m a mother,” says Rebecca. A simple statement, but there’s great pride, purpose, and meaning in the way she says it. “I love being a mom and helping my kids with their lives, helping them in the right direction. I also run a nonprofit foundation called Bridle Up Hope: The Rachel Covey Foundation, in honor of our daughter Rachel, who passed away in 2012. That’s who I am and what I am focusing on right now in life.”
I study Rachel’s portrait on the wall. She looks like the quintessential girl next door, her intelligent blue eyes full of fun. She has the polished look of someone who took time to get ready for a portrait but who would probably prefer to have her hair in a simple ponytail and be racing outside to go for a horseback ride, looking for the next great adventure.
“What was Rachel like?” I ask. “Some families have the peacemakers, or the family clowns. How did she fit into the family?”
“Rachel was the second mother,” Rebecca says. “Wyatt, my youngest, would call her Mom too, because she was seventeen when he was born. She was very nurturing, really fun with the kids. If the kids had a project for the science fair, it was Rachel saying, ‘You should do this.’ Then she would help them build some amazing thing. She was very creative, very hands-on, and had a good relationship with every one of the kids. I think that was kind of her role. That’s why it was so hard for us to lose her, because it was like she was so close to everyone and such an integral part of everyone’s lives.”
“The Bridle Up Hope website mentions that Rachel had a great love for animals. When did you realize that she loved them so much?”
“I would say it started when she was tiny—eighteen months old,” says Rebecca. “I didn’t grow up with animals, and I didn’t really like animals, so we didn’t have any, but my in-laws had a dog, and Rachel just adored that dog named Sheldon. She loved that dog so much that we got her a rabbit, and then a cat, and one animal led to another, until then it was a horse. She loved them all. In fact, once she saved her money and bought a chinchilla. I was really picky about where the animals would have to be, like in the garage. I was a bit of a germ freak. I feel really bad about it now.” That thought makes her catch her breath for half a second, but then she smiles, remembering the chinchilla story. “I didn’t know anything about it for months until my three-year-old said she was scared to go into Rachel’s room, and when I asked her why, she said, ‘Because there’s this little animal in there with these whiskers.’ Anyway, I had to laugh, because it was just like Rachel.”
I have to laugh, too, at the idea of this bright, softhearted teenager hiding a furry friend in her room.
“She was just drawn to animals,” says Rebecca. “Loved them. She was a really sensitive soul, a really sweet, sensitive soul.”
It’s not hard to imagine Rachel, the way her mother talks about her. I can feel that sweetness in the way the family interacts. Looking at the portraits of the pretty young girl smiling down at me, I see ample evidence that she was anything but ordinary. It’s easy to visualize her walking through the family’s kitchen and stooping to pick up the cat, only to put her down again, turn around, and play the harp that now stands silent behind the glass panes of the French doors. She seems like such a bright spirit, a girl to whom the laws of gravity barely apply. What could have happened that ended her life so soon?
In preparation for this conversation, I had read everything I could find about Rachel and the foundation. There was not much about her personally, but the foundation’s website mentioned that Rachel suffered from depression. I would have preferred to dwell on horses and chinchillas, but I need to understand the rest of the story, and Rebecca knows this is why I’ve come.
“Did Rachel suffer from depression her whole life,” I ask, “or was there a time you noticed a change in her?”
“I would say it probably started about seventh grade, when she had a hard time focusing at school. That’s where it started. When she was younger, she had a lazy eye—one eye would cross—so she wore glasses. She struggled in school. She didn’t like to read. She had a hard time focusing. I took her to a doctor, and he put her on some medicine
for ADD, and it was really bad. We took her off, and she seemed to resume her normal self, fun and loving. Then it seemed to start again in high school, maybe her senior year, when she started getting depressed.”
From the corner of my eye, I see that Chloé has completely ransacked my diaper bag and purse and spilled peanut butter M&Ms all over the floor. “Oh, shoot. I’m sorry.” I apologize and try to wedge Chloé between my knees. Having recently taken my own dogs to the vet after they ingested a variety of forbidden treats—ibuprofen, grapes, chocolate—I worry that one of the Coveys’ multiple pets will get into the M&Ms, so I quickly kneel to clean them up.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rebecca says. “I’ll just close the door and clean it up later. I’ve got a whole basket of toys. Would Chloé like to play with them?”
There is no doubt that Rebecca is a mother and has been in the same situation, trying to entertain a toddler while trying to accomplish something much more serious at the same time. I gratefully accept the toys for Chloé, and while Rebecca gets her interested in them, I pick up the rest of the candy. Rebecca smiles at Chloé, perhaps remembering happier days when her children were still little.
“Rachel’s senior year in high school,” she says, “that’s when I started noticing the depression and anxiety. I had never been around it, so it wasn’t … I didn’t understand it. I just thought she was being lazy or that she didn’t like school, so it turned into a negative thing. The negative feelings towards school and homework often trigger negative emotions in the parent like, ‘Come on, you’ve got to get your assignments in.’ She was just so right-brained, just so creative. She played harp—did all the Suzuki harp camps—was an amazing harpist. She was an artist. She would sew. She was very crafty.”
Listening to Rebecca, I’m a little stunned to realize how similar Rachel and I were while we were growing up. We were both the oldest girls in our families, both loved animals, especially horses, both played the harp and attended Suzuki harp camp. I’m surprised I never knew her.
Rebecca says, “I decided not to focus so much on school, and why she wasn’t getting her homework done, but just focus on the positive. That was kind of a transition for me as a mother, realizing that not every child is the same and that you’re going to have some kids that are book smart and do really well on tests, and you’re going to have some kids that like to be outside with horses and have an amazing creative side to them.”
After Rachel graduated from high school, she went to Brigham Young University—another thing we have in common—though she went to the Idaho campus, where she came to a startling realization, Rebecca tells me. “She calls me and says, ‘Mom, I think I’m dyslexic. I think I have dyslexia.’ She came home that weekend, and we took her to a learning specialist who tested her for dyslexia—and she had dyslexia! I never knew that. She went all the way through all of her school years, and I never knew it. I just thought she didn’t like to read. We felt so bad. But for her, she said, ‘That makes sense now. Now I can totally see why school was so hard for me.’”
Rachel was also diagnosed with auditory processing disorder, a sort of disconnection between what the ear hears and what the brain comprehends, which has been linked to ear infections, head trauma, and premature birth.
“When she would read a paragraph, she would put different words at the end and then at the front so by the end, she wouldn’t understand what she just read,” says Rebecca. “She ended up coming back to Utah and enrolling in a vet tech program at Broadview University. When you study dyslexia and depression, they kind of go hand in hand. Many people who have dyslexia have depression as well, and I think it just got worse and worse. But because I had never had gone through depression—I didn’t grow up with it in my home—I didn’t know. I feel like I was a naïve mother who didn’t realize the seriousness of it. Now that I’m looking back, I’m just like, Why didn’t I recognize that? She did struggle with the anxiety. The depression got really bad to where she wouldn’t even go to school to do her vet tech program. Then we took her to a doctor, and he put her on an antidepressant. That’s what I feel really hurt her the most, because a lot of times people are on antidepressants, and it’s good and it helps them, but then there are those other people that … it doesn’t help them … and doctors don’t know how that person’s brain is going to react to that antidepressant.”
Rebecca straightens her spine. Her jaw takes on a certain set.
“I don’t want to get into all the negative of it,” she says, “but basically, parents need to be more aware, and they need to educate themselves and figure out that there are alternatives to antidepressants. One is exercise. One is being in nature, yoga, other types of things that can do so much good.”
This rings so true for me. I do believe in the power of modern medicine and medication, but I also believe that there are many other healing options. I can speak firsthand to that. After I was rescued, I had so many people suggesting therapies, therapists, hospitals, treatment centers, places I should go and stay to be debriefed and then reintroduced to society. And I have no doubt that most of those different methods have merit for some, but for me, they wouldn’t have been right. I needed to be at home with my parents, who listened without pushing me to talk more than I wanted to and offered wise counsel without pretending to truly understand what I’d been through. I needed the freedom to sort through my own thoughts and make my own choices. Horses and nature were extremely healing for me, and I also found peace through playing the harp. I agree with Rebecca that the answer is to help educate people that there is more than one right way, that all options should be considered. You keep trying until you find what works for you.
“After Rachel had been on medication for some time,” Rebecca says, “it just wasn’t working, and she called me and said, ‘I don’t feel myself. I feel like someone else is in my head, like there’s someone else in my brain or something. I’m not myself.’ We knew that. She said, ‘I’m going to come off them.’ You have to wean yourself off them, but I don’t think she did. I think she just went cold turkey. I think what happens is … your mind just does crazy things. We personally feel that…”
Again I see the resolve, the self-determination in Rebecca’s shoulders, but now I see the tremendous weight she carries as well.
“I just don’t like the word suicide,” she says. “You know what? It’s the reality of it, but we really honestly feel like it was not Rachel. It was not Rachel.”
I understand that there’s a firestorm of emotional response to suicide in a family, in a community, and in our culture, but I don’t get the feeling that Rebecca is shying away from the truth of what happened. And I’m glad I didn’t pry into the cause of Rachel’s death before I understood the big picture of her life. I think I get the distinction Rebecca is making: the difference between who someone truly is at their core and who they are when they feel that core has been usurped or is missing somehow—or even, in a sense, has been kidnapped.
There was a time when I was being held captive when things had grown so dark and painful, the effort to try to keep living so overwhelming, I started to consider what would happen next if I did kill myself. I don’t know if I would have done it—if I was capable of doing it. But I do know that I was in a very dark place. My captors had moved us to Southern California, and I was confined to a dirty riverbed where there were rodents and bugs. Mitchell had just tried to kidnap another young girl. For weeks he had been searching for his “next wife,” and finally he thought he had found the one. He hadn’t actually seen her in real life, but he had seen a picture of her.
He had found some clothes discarded at an abandoned homeless camp in the same dry riverbed about a mile away from where I was hidden. He put them on, put his beard into a ponytail on his chin, and pulled his hair back into a low ponytail at the nape of his neck. Then he started scouting out different churches. He always targeted the Mormon churches. One Sunday, he showed up at a Mormon church in El Cajon, where he was greeted and invited in to
attend the meetings. Later, when Mitchell got back to the camp, he scoffed at the kindness the members and missionaries had shown him, saying, “Ha! They thought they were going to teach me? The Lord’s servant? They will all be humbled one day when I am revealed as the Lord’s righteous right hand.”
Because kindness and compassion are always stressed in our faith, he had been invited to dinner by a family in the church. They drove him in their car to their home. He gorged himself on the Sunday dinner this generous woman prepared and later told me—as I sat there practically starving—every detail of every bite. Almond chicken, steamed green beans, mashed potatoes, salad, fruit. He said, “Deep down, she knew who she was dealing with—the Lord’s servant and her future son in-law.”
It honestly makes me taste throw up in my mouth a little bit, just thinking about him and the things he used to say. While he was at this family’s house, he saw a picture of a young girl on the piano. He asked who she was. The lady said it was her daughter from her first marriage and that she lived with her father but came to them every other weekend and Wednesdays. That was all it took for him to decide that this young girl would be his next victim.
On the night of the would-be abduction, he dressed in the same black sweats he had worn when he kidnapped me. As he very carefully packed his bag, he pulled out a knife. It was the same one he had held to my throat. He asked, “Do you know what this is?”
What an idiot. Of course I knew what that was—as if I would forget something like that.
Then he asked me, “Do you remember what I said to you the night I came and rescued you?”
Once again, yes. Did he really think I would forget the most horrific words ever said to me? And don’t even get me started on him “rescuing” me. There are many things that I will never understand, and don’t want to understand, but how he could say that he was “rescuing” me and imagine that I believed that—ugh. I will forever be dumbstruck and disgusted by it.
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