He left with the intention of getting that child, and for the next six hours, all I could do was worry and pray. What was I going to do if he came back with another girl? I hadn’t done anything to stop him. Did that mean I was complicit in this kidnapping? Was it partially my fault? Was there some part of me that wanted him to succeed so that I wouldn’t be alone? So that I wouldn’t always be the one their anger was taken out on? Did I secretly long for a friend to confide in and imagine we might find a way to escape together? I suppose deep down I did. I knew it was wrong, and had he succeeded in abducting that girl, it would have haunted me forever, even if it hadn’t been my hand that had kidnapped her, or my plan, or my desire. The fact that I had done nothing to stop him weighed on me so heavily that I welcomed it as a miracle that night when he did not succeed.
He came back into camp huffing and puffing like he had just run a marathon. He sat down and immediately began to consume what little food we had. He told us how he had taken the bus to the girl’s house and searched around the whole property before he found a sliding door left unlocked. As he started pulling the door back, he heard something, stopped, and listened. When he didn’t hear anything again, he continued pulling the door back and started to enter the home. He heard the noise again. I know most people consider snoring a health risk or an annoyance, but in the case of this young girl, it saved her life. When Mitchell realized that what he was hearing was a manly snore, he knew that he would not succeed in “rescuing”—which is to say kidnapping and raping—this girl. After he finished the food and the story of his misadventure, he told us in his most “spiritual” voice that it had been merely a test, like when Abraham was commanded to kill Isaac. The Lord just needed to know he was willing, and the next wife would come, all in due time.
After this episode, I lost all hope that I would ever be found, that I would ever be happy again, that I would ever feel safe again. I knew it would be easier to give up and end it all. I knew that I would be in Heaven for eternity, that I would be with God, free from suffering, reunited with my family. The problem was the act of actually killing myself. I just wanted to die—to magically walk through a door and suddenly be in Heaven, away from this horrible nightmare I was living—but I couldn’t imagine how that might be done with the available resources. By what method would this happen? And the more I thought about the particulars, the more I knew I couldn’t do it. I realized that if I wanted to live—and I did want to live—I had to find my hope again and cling to it. I couldn’t give up.
But I did come very close to giving up. Close enough that I have great compassion and empathy for anyone who feels they can no longer bear to live. So when Rebecca tells me what Rachel said—“I don’t feel myself. I feel like someone else is in my head. I am not myself.”—I believe her. I always want to be respectful and not intrude, but I feel like I’ve learned so much about Rachel, like she’s a friend. I’ve never met her, to my knowledge or memory, but there are so many similarities between us. I want to know what happened.
“How did Rachel die?” I ask.
“She was on an antidepressant. She knew it wasn’t working and she had adverse effects from it. She couldn’t even open her jaw. She had a dentist appointment that I kept rescheduling and rescheduling. She had lockjaw. She wasn’t herself. She was in her apartment—and you have to understand, Rachel’s never done anything wrong. Ever. She’s like a really good girl. Never. She’d never done anything wrong. She just was really a wonderful, wonderful person. That’s why it’s so shocking to us. Her roommate found her. She had a four-poster bed. The posts had these really pretty sheer white drapes. Four drapes that came down. She had wrapped the drape around her neck. She wasn’t hanging. She was leaned to the side like this…”
Rebecca shows me. Leaning a little. Like a swan in a ballet.
“She had choked herself. It’s so hard … because I could feel something was wrong. And I kept calling her for a couple hours. She wouldn’t answer. I told my husband, Sean, ‘Could you just run down to Rachel’s apartment and see if she’s doing okay?’ Because sometimes she’d go to the horses and wouldn’t answer if she was on a trail ride or something. She had just moved into this cute apartment. My husband pulled up and all the police cars were there and the ambulance and everything. He never got to see her. They wouldn’t let him go in. He called me and said, ‘Come down to Rachel’s apartment. Hurry. There’s something wrong.’ That’s when I went down.”
“Nobody had told you or your husband that Rachel had died?”
“Not until I got there to her apartment. I pull up, and there are cars everywhere. Then the policeman—no, it was the paramedic—he stopped me and said, ‘Your daughter’s passed away.’ It was really, really bad. Just totally shocking to our family. It’s hard as a mother, too, because I knew she was struggling, but I thought she was getting better…”
I sit quietly with no idea what to say. The profound sadness of the situation is like a dense fog you try to see through but can’t.
“This close friend of ours,” says Rebecca, “she can feel angels, and she said that she felt Rachel. After Rachel passed away, she felt that Rachel had come to her and had said, ‘Can you go tell my parents? I don’t know what happened and I’m really, really sorry.’ We almost feel like she just wasn’t herself. It wasn’t her real self. Not long after Rachel died, we met with Elder Jeffrey Holland. He has long been good friends with the Covey family and was so sad for us. He told us that depression is a disease. He said, ‘It’s like cancer, and it’s a sickness, and the sickness took your daughter.’”
I don’t for a moment struggle with the notion of angels, but it’s hard to pin down the idea of that other self—a wounded self inside the armor of day-to-day life—and I wonder how many people I know are waging that same fierce battle beneath a seemingly calm exterior. I wonder how often we look at a person’s smiling exterior and completely miss what is going on inside.
Rebecca and her family are the kind of people who, when bad times hit, don’t crumble and fall but rather cling to one another and become a fortress and a safe haven for each other. Rachel’s death obviously shook them to their very core, but it seems to me that the more lasting impression on them was made by her life. Something about the bright spirit of this girl sustained them and made them want to go on, to love each other, to get up in the morning.
“What helped you deal with your grief after Rachel died?”
“Two days after,” says Rebecca, “we were absolutely devastated, and one of her friends—someone we hadn’t seen in years—came to see us, and she said, ‘Do you know that Rachel changed my life?’ I’m like, ‘What? What do you mean?’ She said, ‘I hadn’t seen her since junior high, because I went this direction, which was a bad direction, and Rachel went this direction, which was a good direction.’”
Rebecca sets her hands wide apart, showing what the girl showed her. The girl went on to tell Rebecca that Rachel had reconnected with her and said, “I’m going to teach you how to ride a horse.”
“She had been taking this girl on trail rides,” says Rebecca. “We didn’t even know it. Rachel was helping her. She said it totally turned her life around.”
So right then, just a few days after Rachel’s death, Rebecca decided to start Bridle Up Hope. (The name was suggested by a friend who breeds Arabians.) It didn’t take long for Rebecca to see the impact.
“We’ve just been moving forward ever since,” she says. “We’ve put about three hundred girls through our program so far. I think it’s been really good for our family to have Bridle Up Hope. I think it saved me, because there were points I didn’t want to live. When you lose a child—for a mother, it’s devastating. You’ve been with them from the second you were pregnant. The twenty-one years we had with her were so wonderful. It was so … so devastating to me. Because you’re just like, What if? What if I had done this? Then I just realized, I couldn’t do the what-ifs. You can’t look back into the past. You literally just have to move forward. Y
ou can’t do the what-ifs.”
I’m familiar with the what-ifs. I know what a dark, pointless path they lead to.
“Have you ever felt anger or guilt about Rachel’s passing?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “I’ve had every emotion. Every single emotion. I think the biggest thing that’s helped me is … well, a few things. One is, you have to pray for strength to not have the crazy thoughts, to not have those weird emotions, the guilt, the anger, the sadness, the grief. Why didn’t I do this? If only I would’ve done this. But it just gets your mind in a frenzy, and you start thinking all these negative things. I learned I had to just stop it. The scripture says, ‘Be still and know that I am’—and to me, that means be still in your mind. Still those crazy thoughts. When you start thinking, Why didn’t I go over that day? Why didn’t I go over that moment? Why didn’t I know I needed to go help her that day?—it just doesn’t do any good, so I literally just have to still my mind, and just focus on what’s the most important, and just know that she’s in good hands, and that she’s in a good place, and that she’s happy, and that she’s helping others. I feel like she’s helping on the other side.” Rebecca looks intently at me and very honestly says, “Yes. I have found peace, but I am not totally healed yet from Rachel passing away.”
She speculates that it may be years before that happens—if it ever does—and in the meantime, she’s determined to harness that pain and turn it toward something good. Rachel’s story is heartbreaking, but because of her—not because of her death, but because of the girl she truly was during her brief life—Bridle Up Hope has helped hundreds of other girls find their way back to a place of hope. Rebecca Covey found a modicum of peace and an outlet for her grief, working to save the lives of other young women who struggle in the same ways Rachel did. This world would be practically perfect if we all followed that example every time we were struck down by grief and loss in our lives.
Sadness. Grief. Depression. These are three very different things, though they may seem the same on the surface sometimes. Depression is an illness. Sadness is a mood. And grief—it’s complicated. Grief can be unclear and confusing, and no two people experience it in the same way. We’ve all heard of the different stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—which makes it sound so cut-and-dried. Like you just move from one box on the flowchart to the next. Three, four, five—done! You’re good. I think grief can take you in loops like a roller coaster, so that you visit any of those stages more than once, and I think it’s possible to experience more than one of those stages at the same time.
Long before I met Matthew, when he was only eighteen years old, his father, Stewart, died suddenly. Matthew is the second of five children. His youngest sibling, his only brother, was eight years old. Stewart had gone to the doctor to find out why his back was hurting so much. For weeks he hadn’t been able to stand up straight. He’d been to see the doctor several times before and was always told to go see a chiropractor or a massage therapist, which he did, but that didn’t help. This time was different; the doctors knew something was seriously wrong. After a series of tests and scans, the results came back: Cancer had spread throughout his body, metastasizing to the extent that they couldn’t even guess where it had originated. He was told he was terminally ill, but no one could have guessed how swiftly the end would come. He was diagnosed on a Monday; he died that Thursday.
But before Stewart died, he found a moment to speak with each of his children. Matthew told me that when he saw his father, it was hard to even recognize him because his face and body were severely swollen due to the steroids and medication he was on. Matthew knew at that moment that the only way his father would ever come home again was in a coffin.
Stewart died shortly after speaking with Matthew. It was after Stewart died and while his body lay in his hospital bed that Matthew spent a few moments alone with him and allowed his grief to overcome him. He knew his father was dead, and he accepted it, but that didn’t make it any easier. He was just a kid. He wanted his dad, not just for himself but for his mum, for his sisters, and for his eight-year-old brother. Matthew has told me that he felt every stage of grief in that moment, a tornado of shock and sadness and loss and fear for the future and gratitude for the past. And love.
In Europe it is not uncommon for the deceased person to return to their home and basically lie in state for a day or two before being buried. When I first heard that, I was a bit uncomfortable with the idea. No one I knew had done anything like that. In the United States, whether a person dies in a hospital or at home, they’re immediately taken to a mortuary, where they are prepared for burial. They’re brought back out for the funeral and then taken to the grave site. That’s what we’re used to, and that’s what we’re comfortable with. But after listening to Matthew’s experience, I changed my mind. There’s a certain beauty in the European way.
After Stewart died, he was brought home in his coffin so people could come pay their last respects. While he was at his home for the last time, each of the children had the chance to sit alone with him. Matthew has said he knew then that not only had he accepted what had happened but also that no matter how hard it was, he had to keep going.
Isn’t it strange and kind of impractical that the moment we lose someone is the moment when we feel our love for them most intensely? We all deal with grief in life. That’s just the way things are. The only way you’ll never grieve is if you never love anyone—including yourself—so we’re left with only one way forward: to embrace grief. It is healthy to grieve when we lose family, friends, loved ones—or when we lose a little chunk of ourselves. We will only destroy ourselves from the inside out if we bottle it up and never let it out. Over and over again, I see that the healthiest way to let it out is to help someone else.
Are you ready to open that door and see a bigger picture beyond your own pain?
Can you imagine yourself feeling less fragile in the moment you turn your pain toward a greater cause?
5
The Sacredness of Faith
For we walk by faith, not by sight.
—2 CORINTHIANS 5:7
My faith has served me through my darkest times. It’s been a constant in my life, and it’s precisely because I feel so strongly about my own faith that I honor and respect the faith of others. I get a lot of questions about my faith—not about the particulars of being Mormon, but about how I kept my faith and how it’s affected my life in general. When I signed up to serve a mission for my church, I had no idea the effect it would have on my life. I knew that I wanted to share with others this faith that had helped me through so much darkness—and that still helps me today.
Sister Smart,
You are hereby called to serve as a missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. You are assigned to labor in the France Paris Mission. It is anticipated that you will serve a period of 18 months. You should report to the Provo Missionary Training Center, where you will prepare to preach the gospel in the French language.
It was a hot, sunny summer day when I received my mission calling. I was twenty-two years old and had just returned from a semester abroad in England. All my family was gathered around, everyone guessing where I was going to go. Although I had marked in my application that I would like to serve a foreign mission, that is a guarantee of nothing. I could be called to just about anywhere in the world, from Tokyo, Japan, to Austin, Texas, from Wellington, New Zealand, to Fairbanks, Alaska. It was already a huge step for me to decide to serve a mission, and the wait for the mission assignment had felt like an eternity.
When I ripped open the envelope and tore out the letter, I was so nervous I didn’t even see where I was being assigned. Then, realizing I needed to read it word for word, I went back over it and let it sink in: I was going to the France Paris Mission. I would be speaking French. Wow. I could hardly believe it. I immediately conjured up an image of strolling through the streets of Paris with a Book of Mormon in one hand and a mil
le-feuille in the other, speaking the most romantic language on earth. I have to laugh now at how wrong I was. I did eat a lot of French pastry—about forty extra pounds’ worth—and I don’t regret a single éclair, but other than that and the scenery itself, there was nothing romantic about my time in Paris.
Every mission is split up into “areas” that you’re assigned to work in. You are also assigned a companion who goes everywhere with you. Women are assigned a female companion, called a “Sister,” and men are assigned a male companion, called an “Elder.” The only time you’re ever alone is when you’re in the bathroom. Your time as a missionary is split up into “transfers”: six-week intervals during which the area president can, if he feels the need to, change your companion or your area. The first area I was assigned to serve in was a suburb of Paris called Évry.
My first transfer ended up being the most difficult one of my entire mission. I had arrived in France in February. It was dark and cold. The missionaries who were assigned to work in the mission offices dropped off my trainer companion and me late at night after a series of long flights. I was so tired, I fell asleep in the car on the way to Évry and started snoring and probably drooling with my mouth open. My companion shook me and said, “We are here, sister. Wake up.” I stumbled out of the car and struggled inside with my luggage, which contained everything I would wear for the next eighteen months: as many skirts, blouses, and panty hose as I could fit into two suitcases. Overwhelmed by jet lag, I just collapsed on one of the beds when we walked into the tiny apartment.
When I woke up the following morning, I stared at the small living quarters around me. The whole apartment could have fit into my bedroom at home. It was a long and narrow studio with a set of bunk beds, two desks, a small galley kitchen, and an even smaller bathroom, but it was clean and seemed safe enough. Cozy, even. The apartment didn’t do much to prepare me for the shock I received when I walked around our area. The majority of people were from Africa (Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo) or the Middle East (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan). With my bright blond hair and blue eyes, I stuck out like a sore thumb. People always stared at us, partly because I was so white, I think, and partly because of the name tags we wore on our jackets introducing us as missionaries. It was not uncommon for people to mistake us for nuns.
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