The Beginning of the End
Even though I was staring straight at the My Little Pony decorations, my brain could not accept that I was actually at a memorial service for a three-year-old.
Even though I was staring straight at the My Little Pony decorations, my brain could not accept that I was actually at a memorial service for a three-year-old. Part of me believed that at any moment Ellie would run into her mother’s arms and we’d all go home happy to have been wrong about her death. That just never happened.
This wasn’t the official funeral, which was to come later. It was a space of story gathering, where those who knew Ellie could come together and share memories of her. As guests, we’d been tasked with maintaining a joyful atmosphere in which we focused on the celebration of her life rather than the circumstances of her death. I tried my best to oblige by arriving in a brightly colored dress and hoping I’d already ran out of tears for the day. The circumstances were sad enough, but the love and care put into making this event something that Ellie herself would have enjoyed attending felt like its own separate gut punch. The pastel decorations were matched by a wall of pink sprinkle donuts, the food table offering an array of chicken nuggets and juice boxes.
I managed to keep it together only until I saw the printed photo of the first and only time I held her, the sweet memory marred by Jared’s behavior that day.
I had made the long trek out to Rancho Cucamonga with my grandmother. It was Chrystal’s birthday, but the universe had already given her everything she wanted. We brought a cake and plenty of love to shower Ellie with.
Most babies her age look like blobs, if we’re being honest. But at three weeks old, Ellie already looked like herself, just perfect. When I held her, I knew I would do anything for her.
Jared was off the walls— that’s really the only way to describe it. Words like “mania” already exist, but they fall short. I felt incredibly uncomfortable but also angry on Chrystal’s behalf that he would not shut the fuck up for two seconds. He was here, he was there. Banging around in the kitchen, changing the channel on the tv every ten seconds because he frantically wanted to show me something else. It was like he had a personal grievance against silence and was determined not to let it collect in the air for a second.
“The wedding video is out! Who wants to see the wedding video? Chrystal? Where’s the remote. Has anyone seen the remote? Sometimes I don’t watch tv but then recently I’ve been like hmm maybe there’s some good stuff I’ve been missing out on. Who here watches tv? Zinnia, do you watch tv? Have you seen any movies lately? Still looking. Haven’t found that remote. You ever lose something and then it’s like ahhhh where is it! When you lose something do you have a system to find it or do you just look around? Oh finally. The remote. Okay let’s put the wedding video on. Hey, can everyone please be quiet? I really want to show you this.”
That was a thirty second whirlwind right there. And then after all that about showing us the wedding footage, he abruptly changed the channel after a few seconds and started ranting about something else. We never finished the wedding video! Now he wanted us to all watch a YouTube video about meditation and talk about how much meditation has helped his anxiety, whether or not we’ve ever had anxiety, and so on. When he tried to go back to the wedding video ten minutes later, I told him I wasn’t in the mood to watch tv.
Ellie’s delivery had been incredibly complicated. The cord was wrapped around her neck twice, and it was as if Chrystal’s body could tell because after an inordinate amount of time in active labor she was actually getting less dilated. Ultimately she had a C-section, after laboring for over a day if I remember correctly. Shortly after getting home, she had a hypertension emergency and had to return to the hospital. Ellie had already gone home, so she didn’t even have the comfort of holding her baby.
This would have been a great time for Jared to step up but he fell short once again. Luckily Ellie had her devoted grandma to take care of her. My aunt Jamie also came to help by transporting breast milk home from the hospital and taking shifts with Mama Obi to take care of Ellie. Jared was off doing whatever the hell he was doing, gone from the apartment all day. It was during this time that Chrystal’s mother told Jamie that if he had still been alive, Chrystal’s dad would not have allowed Jared to marry her.
Chrystal hadn’t been back from the hospital for very long so my grandma and I wanted her to be able to get some rest as we tended to whatever tasks. Having given birth seven times herself, my grandmother understood that people usually wanted to come over to “see” the baby, but that there were more helpful things they could be doing than sitting there looking at a drained mother. She told me as much on the drive over there. I remember her getting up to wash the dishes, which was the activity Jared was midway through before going on the remote control spiel.
Even though she was tired, Chrystal was happy to see some new faces and wanted the company. Jared turned his focus onto badgering her to sleep anyway, as if anyone could fall asleep to the noise of nonsense. He was loudly telling her over and over to go to bed, waking her up further more than anything else. She did end up laying down, and he continued talking.
The apartment was covered in boxes because they were planning to move in the next two days. Jared just hadn’t settled on where yet. He was deciding between graduate school in North Carolina or Berkeley, and Chrystal was just along for the ride. It struck me as odd how much he was exerting control over this decision. She was established in her career as a radiologist and the Berkeley option would result in a massive pay cut. I remember my mom telling her not to sacrifice her career for his whims, and to make sure she was prioritizing herself too. But really, any huge move with a baby that small was wild.
It was shocking that Jared wasn’t deferring his acceptance to either program and I told him as much multiple times. It wasn’t like this was some sacrifice he was making to better his child’s future. Chrystal was already making plenty of money and would be taking a huge pay cut to follow him off to whichever school he picked.
For years he had talked about his desire to be a father, even using photos of himself with his nieces and nephews on his dating app profile back in the day to make sure women could picture him in a favorably paternal light. Before Chrystal was pregnant, he’d talked so much about his dreams of fatherhood and the things he wanted to focus on when he became a dad. When she was actually pregnant, it was like he hated the light being off of him. I got the impression that he felt overshadowed. Now that the baby was here, he was surprisingly unengaged and completely focused on school.
When Jared’s phone alarm went off, he explained it was time for his meditation. When he wouldn’t be quiet long enough for anyone to have a thought, there was nothing anyone else could have done about it. Now that he wanted some quiet, he shushed us all incredibly rudely and mandated our silence for the next ten minutes.
When he had insisted that Chrystal go take a nap, even though she wanted to catch up, he tried to usher her to the bedroom. Now he decided to take his meditation, which he also described as a power nap, right on the living room couch where we’d all been socializing. Multiple people asked him to hand any of us the baby so he could take this nap, but he held on to her defiantly. Grandma asked him to do his meditation in the other room and he didn’t listen.
I’d seen this type of passive aggression before. Years earlier, my cousin and I were visiting a different uncle up north. If this was in present times, we would have both prioritized our well-being over his feelings and not attended at all. It was the holidays and setting a boundary with him in advance that we would only be visiting for a short time, not staying overnight, was a big step.
He wanted us to cook him a turkey/holiday dinner but was told that we would not be doing that as our attendance at his house would not last that long. When we arrived, surprise! There was no food prepared as he expected us to cook for him. The piece de resistance was a frozen, uncooked turkey waiting for us to take the helm.
We re-iterated that we had other obligations and would not be there long enough to cook the turkey. We wouldn’t be there long enough for it to thaw! Really, the only other obligations we had were to our own self-determination. We had made a plan, and we’re sticking to it. If he wanted female relatives to willingly spend time with him, he shouldn’t have been a sexual predator.
But while we were still in the kitchen, he was quietly pushing the couches out the front door. We returned to a living room completely devoid of seating. I’d never seen a clearer sign that my company was no longer welcome. But he insisted that he’d just been meaning to put the couches on the curb and it had nothing to do with us. When we left shortly after, he acted dumbfounded. Like us standing in the living room, since sitting was no longer an option, would have been perfectly normal.
This reminded me of that. We’d all told Jared he was too loud. We asked him to be quieter for the sake of the baby and, honestly, the adults too. He had tried to make Chrystal go lay down in bed, but she told him that she wanted to talk to us in the living room. We were all having a pleasant time but it wasn’t in accordance with Jared’s design. So in a fit of passive aggression, he turned it against us.
You want quiet? Here, have silence. Yours included.
You want to socialize in the common area? I’m commandeering it for personal use.
You wouldn’t miss my presence if I went to nap in the other room? Fine. I’ll hold the baby myself, since that’s all you care about.
Oh no. The scowl on my face doesn’t mean I’m mad. This is all perfectly normal.
Before I left, Jared showed me the business center of the apartment building, the place where he’d send me pages and pages of emails from. We talked about the move and during that conversation he said he’d officially decided to move them to North Carolina. I was so confused the next day when he announced that they were instead moving to Northern California. Chrystal couldn’t tell one day from the next what type of day she was going to have.
On the way home, my grandma told me that she was so frustrated with Jared’s incessant talking that she’d been tempted to hit him just to shut him up. She had already tried to explain to him verbally that he was being too loud but he hadn’t cared. He reminded her of my grandpa, which was usually said about people in an exhausted way.
This visit was when my concern about the situation started, though I was still privy to very little. I didn’t know that Jared was duct taping the lights on or how he spoke to Chrystal behind closed doors. I didn’t know that he’s forced Chrystal to pack up the apartment while still recovering from her C-section or how often he was disappearing with no explanation. There was a lot more to come.
Jared sometimes exuded this overly fake considerateness. Like when we went to a vegan restaurant and with full smugness he said he could ask if they had any lard in the kitchen for my salad if eating healthy was too much of a change for me. I eat salad the regular way, thank you very much. I’m not even fully sure what lard is but I was still offended.
He would often ask in the beginning of phone or text conversations if you had the time to talk. Sometimes he would admit his lack of self awareness and request that you let him know if he was blathering too much or if the topic made you uncomfortable. But then regardless of if you told him you actually didn’t have much time or that no, you didn’t think you wanted to see the up close photos of his biking accident, he would blow past the requested feedback.
These requests increased after he went on the ADHD deep dive and made his adult diagnosis his entire personality for a couple months. He said that he realized he was sometimes hyper fixating, so he started setting a phone call conversation timer, and then just continuing to talk through that when it ran out. Because I also have ADHD, he would ask me to be his reminder of the social norms he might be inadvertently overstepping if he was too excited.
So in text messages I had no reason to think we’re worth documenting at the time, I reached out to him when I got home. I reminded him of his requests for feedback and told him that I had something to say out of love and nothing else. I told him that I was concerned that he may be manic, which can happen from sleep deprivation. I asked him to please get some sleep and to recognize the importance of sleep for everyone else in the house by trying to stop bouncing off the walls. I also encouraged him to talk to his doctor or a therapist about his energy levels. I packaged this message with many caveats around how it had been nice to see him and how happy I was to meet the baby, hoping he would see I was coming from a good place and actually listen. But in my conversations with other relatives about the matter, my demeanor was much more frightened.
Back at the memorial, I’d excused myself to a hallway to cry and accidentally locked myself out of the event space. It at least made me feel like nobody else was going to see my grief so I could let go before I figured out how to get back inside. I was caught off guard when Chrystal and her immediate family members walked down this very hallway and tried to wipe my face quickly. This was a celebration, after all.
She didn’t need to, but Chrystal grabbed my hand and we walked into the community room together. It meant a lot that she gave that reassurance while going through her own hell.
Ellie’s preschool teacher read a beautiful but devastating poem at the microphone. I thought about how she was yet another casualty of Jared’s rampage. I couldn’t imagine being her and trying to show up for the rest of that pre-k class knowing that one of the toddlers was missing because she’d been murdered. Every single day, Ellie’s peers would develop new skills and reach new milestones that she wouldn’t have the chance to.
Other friends shared sweet stories of playdates and fancy tea parties. I learned how much Ellie loved Twilight Sparkle, and that she was the “Beyonce” of My Little Pony.
Chrystal explained once more that she was still in a state of disconnect between what happened and the fact that it happened. Bringing flowers to try and beautify the landfill she was found in didn’t make it feel real. Seeing her lifeless body at the morgue didn’t do it either. She was still in shock, numb to all feelings except for the fear of what it would be like once reality set in.
She described herself being in a place beyond sadness, thanked us all for helping to raise Ellie, and we all cried together.
