Letter 5

October 24, 2014

Dear Jesse,

Your dance with darkness almost completely ravaged you.

Almost.

Aimee face-timed me on Christmas morning. She was at Dads along with you. We hadn’t spoke since you checked yourself out of rehab the first time. At that point I did the hardest thing I’ve had to do. I completely cut you out. I couldn’t do the dance anymore. I was emotionally spiraling and I needed to desperately protect myself.

I couldn’t save you, Jesse.

To get to a point of accepting that was beyond hard.

It was fucking excruciating.

Not a second went by that I wasn’t thinking about you, about us, about us three kids. I was so angry you were leaving Aimee and I. After everything we had gone through as siblings. You know our journey wasn’t the average. We could have written a book on our childhood alone. There were large parts of it that were really fucked up. You know we needed each other until the end.

When Aimee appeared on my phones screen that morning I became anxious. I hadn’t seen your face or looked into your eyes in a while. I could tell she was sitting on the couch next to you. And just like that, I saw you. You were nodded out with your head leaning back.

I couldn’t believe the image on my screen.

Oh my god… my brother.

Poor dad, he was giving out gifts to you and Aimee trying to avoid the obvious. That was, and will forever be the most empty Christmas our family will have. It was emptier then the the year mom died 2 weeks before Christmas Day.

Once you woke up and realized what was happening I turned the phone around so you could see Dylan with his toys. I didn’t want to engage with you. I tried to keep it surface but it happened. At a certain point Aimee turned the phone to you and I was looking right into the screen.

We saw each other.

We looked right into one another’s eyes.

In that moment I saw a glimpse of you still alive. It may have been a glimpse but the Jesse I knew was still somewhere in there even if the drugs and pain had him buried deep inside.The tears started to come up in us both within seconds. And just like that, you hit the phone out of Aimee’s hand and locked yourself in dads bathroom for the next hour shooting up.

Shortly after you died, I read an interview somewhere with an ex heroin addict. This was the part that stuck out to me-

“People don’t understand the ability heroin has when it comes to neutralizing pain. I’m not talking about the physical, but the mental and emotional.”

Looking at me in that moment brought up certain truths you were running from. You had lost me along with your precious relationship with your nephew. You were destroying your sister emotionally and mentally and making your father watch his son die. You had traded all of us for the escape, Jesse. I really believe that moment made your soul touch the truth. I also truly believe that moment had showed me you were still somewhere in that shell of the Jesse we once knew.