Letter 20

February 8, 2017

Dear Jesse,

It was late September 2015, just a year and a half after you'd died.

I drove there with dad and my son, Dylan, in the car. It was the day before I would travel back home to South Carolina after being in our hometown filming interviews for the Dear Jesse My Brother documentary I was creating

After I parked the car I handed dad the ipad to keep Dylan occupied while I was gone. As I approached the door entering into the police station I allowed myself to pause and take a deep breath before walking in.

Inside waiting was the terror she has been running from since the moment it happened.

Our sister.

She was the one carrying the weight of finding you, seeing what that final scene looked like. Seeing our brother alone... alone and dead.

The nightmares haven't stopped for her, Jesse. I had been watching her suffer and struggle with the hand dealt to her in this situation and it hasn't been pretty, in fact, it's been pretty painful. She still thought there was something she could have done. If she had never left after knocking on your door when you hadn't answered the day before we found you.

The ifs can kill a person if they let it.

"Hi, my name is Jen Roberts. My brother passed away about a year and a half ago and I would like to speak to your sergeant, please."

Shortly after the sergeant came to greet me and waved me in through the door. As I walked down the hall I followed him to the second office on the right and turned in. We both had a seat and then I spoke.

"First, bear with me if I become emotional."

"Of course, my sincerest apologies about your brother." he kindly said.

I took a breath.

"I know this is not necessarily something you may experience in here a lot from family members of the deceased, but I'd like to see the photos from my brother's scene."

There was silence.

He quietly just looked at me and then he spoke,

"Are you sure this is something you want to do? To be honest, this is quite unusual as most family members absolutely do not want to see any scene photos, especially in a case involving suicide."

With an unflinching gaze, I responded,

"Do I actually want to see them? No, but that's not why I'm here. I'm in the process of telling my brother's story. If I am going to actually tell his story then I need to know his whole story, every part of it."

He continued to look at me then took a deep breath and said,

"Well because you feel this strongly then okay."

What he didn't realize was that it wasn't just about knowing your whole story so I could tell it. It was about seeing the visual picture that haunts our sister. Letting her know that I too saw it so she didn't have to be completely alone with it.

But it was also about us.

You and me.

I wanted to gather the courage to go to the ending place with you and witness it. Not because I was able to change anything but because it was my way of silently saying to you,

"No matter how dark it got for you, Jesse, it was never enough to keep me from loving you even in your darkest hour."

The sergeant picked up the phone and rang the next office down requesting for your file to be pulled. He signaled for us to go ahead and get up and I followed behind him. We walked into the room while a second detective got things together on a computer.

I just stood there.

It was happening.

The detective looked back at me from over his shoulder with a nod to let me know he was ready to start... and then just like that...

There you were.

This was what your darkest hour looked like. This is what our sister, Aimee, saw as she peered through the 6 inch door opening screaming helplessly for you.

You were wearing red warm up pants and no shirt. Your body lay 3/4 flat on the bed as your shoulders and head were slightly propped up on the pillow. Your body was leaned over slightly to the left. I remember your skin color, it had hues of yellow while the pulling of blood in your body fell to your left side.

Jesse.

My brother.

My one and only brother.

I nodded my head to the detective to continue on after he turned back to make sure I was able to.

I often wonder how long you looked at that liner in the trashcan before putting it over your head. This question has never left me and still haunts me. I often wonder if there was a part of you screaming terrified inside just wishing you could have hit the restart button on your entire life.

I often wonder in these moments if you just wanted your mom.

Our mom.

I can't help but think of you sometimes when I see my own son, Dylan, crying and wanting me to kiss his scraped knee or hug him until his hurt feelings are better. I've realized that no matter how old I become or how much I grow and mature, I still yearn for mom. I still ache for her to just hold me at times so I can fall apart for a little bit. I still wish that she was here to tell me she's going to be here with me through the bumps ahead.

But she's not.

She's gone and I can never forget that it was you who found her dead just three years before you ended your own life.

The next image was one that I will forever see so clear.

The trashcan liner was concave around your mouth. The only way I can describe it is it was like seeing white spider webs attached to the sunken space of the liner as your mouth lay open searching for air.

I had finally come face to face with your final breath.

Condensation filled the bag even though it was tight against your face and head. Everything was in a fog underneath the bag. The visual was a representation of your internal world to me when you killed yourself. Like standing in the deep wilderness, completely alone and enveloped in the thickest of fogs. A fog so thick that you couldn't even see your hand while holding it an inch from your face. You couldn't see one inch in front of you, Jesse. You couldn't see a future, purpose or even a way out of the pain. You couldn't even see your reflection in the mirror which hung on the wall across from that bed.

It's taken me this past year of silence to understand what was happening to me the moment I came face to face with your last breath. As I wrote to you in my very first letter here, time felt like it was suspended in front of me during those moments before Aimee found you dead. Once again, time felt as though it was frozen and suspended right in front of me as I stared at you dead, your mouth wide open and suffocated in complete finality. 

It has taken me a year to be able to articulate the thing that has pulled me through in the moments I felt the fog enveloping me along this journey of losing you.

Freedom.

Just beyond this horrific trauma was my freedom and the only way to it was through this nightmare staring back at me through your scene photo.

I felt your presence around me the entire time I was standing there.

Even in your death, Jesse, you were loving me through the veil separating us. You were showing me that my very freedom was in the choice, act and courage to heal and love myself, the very things you did not do while alive.

I promised you in that moment that I wouldn't let my freedom stay trapped underneath that plastic bag where yours had died.