July 19th, 2018 was a Thursday.
That morning at work, I settled into the week’s downhill slide with a warm mug of coffee and a covert scroll through Facebook. The blow fell with a whisper, as I almost scrolled past an old picture of Libby wearing her newborn baby in a sling, dressed for winter, her face puffy and tired, that distinctly postpartum look about her eyes. It was a picture from at least a year before. But this was summer, and her baby was lengthening into a toddler, and the oddness dawned on me slowly and then in a rush as I thumbed back and saw there below the photo, “MISSING PERSON” in all caps, the worst words. Confusion unwound into a curl of fear as I read on:
“Yesterday, Libby — dealing with severe depression & anxiety — drove her car off the side of the road in Plano and fled on foot. She’s now been missing 16 hours.”
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Libby. We met when she was still called Elizabeth; I was six and she was four. Her uncle was married to my aunt and later, when I was eight and she was six, they would produce a cousin for both of us (and later, two more). For lack of an official kinship term, we called ourselves “cousins-in-law,” but the substance of our relationship fell somewhere on the spectrum between cousins and sisters. Our families lived abroad and over the years we spent birthdays and Christmases and Thanksgivings together, more real to each other than our blood relatives back in America. We called each other’s parents Aunt and Uncle.
At some point in our early childhood, I declared to her mother that Libby was sunshine. I don’t actually recall the conversation, but she does, and it’s been canonized in our family lore. I imagine my childhood self making that revelation with a mixture of admiration and envy; where Libby was gregarious and funny and full of life, I was quiet and serious and shy. This tension was dynamic in our friendship, our differences sometimes complementary and sometimes chafing. Once, when I was 12 and stewed to the gills in preteen hormones, I overturned a board game we were in the middle of playing—literally flipped it to the floor and stomped away—rather than lose. Libby thought it was hilarious. She laughed so hard she fell off her chair.
I shared the missing person post and called my mom, who told me that Libby’s husband and parents had organized search parties. I wondered if I should leave work to join them. In the end I remained at my desk for the balance of the workday, capable of little besides refreshing my Facebook feed every few minutes.
11:55 am: The Dallas Morning News picked up the missing person story: “Family, police hunt for Plano mother with depression who drove off turnpike two days ago.”
2:15 pm: The Dallas Morning News posted a correction: “An earlier version of this story said Libby Davis went missing Tuesday. She’s been missing since Wednesday afternoon.”
Midafternoon, a post from her husband, “… We did have one lead from the lead investigator who says she may have been spotted at a hotel near the crash site.”
The last time I saw Libby was on May 6th, 2018, at our mutual cousin’s wedding in Arkansas. All the branches of our families converged on that little college town like a giant, giddy swarm of locusts. The rehearsal dinner was at a park, the day before the wedding, an island-style feast in tribute to our family’s overseas heritage. I happened to be walking through the parking lot as Libby and her husband pulled up. We grinned at each other through the windshield, and they rolled down windows to shout a characteristically exuberant hello.
The joy of that afternoon: a gift. Our babies played together. We elaborated on our existing plans for them to marry someday, since our childhood scheme to become legal relatives with the marriage of our younger siblings had never panned out.
The next evening, after the ceremony, we took the kids outside to run around and talked about our mental health: the strains of motherhood, the constant exhaustion. She told me she’d been wondering if her bizarre experience with steroid psychosis four years prior hadn’t been an accident. Maybe it was the spark to a preexisting wick. Bipolar, she wondered. We teetered in our heels on the gravel path and pondered that thought together.
Sometime around 5 pm: the article was updated to include a line that dropped through me like an anvil. “… police discovered a body face-down in a creek Thursday afternoon.”
5:09 pm: I texted her, “I love you so much and I’m praying for you.”
The drive home: a long exercise in bargaining with God. Please God, please God, let her be safe, please God let her be safe please God. Oh God Oh God please.
Dinner: distraction, fear, a growing certainty that the worst was true. Waiting with dread. The sword suspended by a thread above us all.
6:42 pm: Twitter, @PlanoPoliceDept, “#Breaking News: We are sad to announce that the body found today near Ohio & PGBT has been identified as Elizabeth “Libby” Davis, who went missing yesterday after a car crash. Please keep the family & friends in your thoughts and prayers. Foul play is not expected.”
It’s strange how seeing the official confirmation of that which your heart is bitterly certain can still be such a blow. It cut my legs from beneath me. I had been pacing a frantic circuit through the living room, kitchen, and my son’s room, and there in my little boy’s room, a step away from the kitchen, I crumpled to the floor, holding my phone like a sybil’s curse in front of me. Even as I sobbed, as my mom joined me on the carpet and my son climbed into my arms, I clung to that phone as if it was my last connection to her. Which, in a ubiquitously twenty first century way, I suppose it was. I dialed my sister in Chicago and gasped, “They found her body,” and we all wept together on speakerphone, the airwaves between us rippling with grief.
I find myself drawn, lately, to the Old Testament prophets, to whom God spoke in metaphor and visions, and yet gave such strangely specific instructions. I long for some holy tasks like these, through which I might knead my grief like dough or bury it or burn it. I crave instruction and action.
I read about Ezekiel, whom the Lord instructed to lie on his left side for 390 days with the sins of Israel upon him, and on his right side for 40 days to bear the sins of Judah. God himself ties Ezekiel up with ropes during this bizarre pageant, tells him what to eat and how much and at which times, and how to cook his food (with human excrement, presumably his own! This is the only point to which Ezekiel objects: oh God, it is too much! And God says ok, fine, use cow dung instead). It’s weirdly appealing.
I like reading about their exhaustion. Elijah performs a miracle on Mount Carmel, taunting priests of the false god and then sending up a water-soaked altar in a pillar of holy flame. Afterward, he kills all 450 prophets of Baal and a heavenly deluge arrives to quench the three-year drought that’s been ravaging the land. Elijah tucks his cloak into his belt and runs just ahead of the chariot-mounted king Ahab all the way down the mountain and back to town in the BCE equivalent of a flamboyant middle finger. Then Ahab’s dread wife Jezebel, righteously ticked off about the prophet-slaughter, sends a message to Elijah along the lines of: So help me Baal, I’m going to murder the living daylights out of you. Presumably he forgets the miraculous works of a few days prior because he is terrified for his life and flees into the wilderness. He finds a broom bush and sits beneath it and prays for death: ““I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”” And then, in the way of true despair, he goes to sleep.
My favorite is Jonah, with his petty yet overwhelming anger, sitting under a withered plant in the scorching sun and wishing for oblivion.
“But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.””
Poor Jonah! So bitter and so human. I find him utterly relatable.
On Friday, the day after Libby’s body was found, my mom and I went to her parents’ house to be with her family. Her dad took us aside and recounted the whole story: how her depression meds had gone off after being left in the car during the spring heat of our cousin’s wedding; how she’d been struggling to find equilibrium. We learned the events of the day she went missing and the day she was found, her suspected paranoia, a possible rekindling of the mania from four years prior. Unknown cause of death.
We all sat in a big circle in the living room and shared our memories of Libby. I kept glancing over to the kitchen bar to see if she was there. I was in a fog of numbness. All my tears from the night before were dried up and gone and I felt self-conscious about this, like maybe I didn’t look sad enough to earn my place in that circle.
While her parents talked of memorial plans and cremation, I felt a bubbling panic. This was not right, I thought, she couldn’t be waiting alone to be burned up after having died alone too, no. I wanted to sit shiva with her body, wash her and sing to her and pray the Psalms over her. I wanted her not to be alone.
Before we left, I shared my idea with her dad, explaining that in my church’s tradition, the entire Psalter is read over the deceased. I suggested that doing this could be an opportunity to bend the narrative of her death. By offering a loving goodbye to her physical body we might deliver an antidote to the loneliness of her last hours. He listened graciously. We drove home.
In the first few days after her death, I’m convinced my body metabolized grief by sweating. Granted, it was July in Texas, a sweaty time even under the best circumstances, but I had to go out and buy a full-strength aluminum antiperspirant to replace my Schmidt’s Bergamot + Lime natural deodorant that had suddenly stopped working. My armpits were constantly prickling with moisture.
For a long time—nine months? Maybe a year?—I thought about her compulsively, every day, many times a day. Every morning when I woke up, the shock of her death flooded through me, a fresh surprise. I would think about her as I dried my hands at work, taking two paper towels instead of my usual three. “For Libby,” my brain would tell me. She was a conservationist, a thrift store shopper and recycler, and this small action felt like an abstract Charon’s Obol I could offer on her behalf. Her death had wrenched our relationship into a place of prominence from the secondary plane where it had languished in the years of our adulthood. The irony was not lost on me. When she was alive, I thought of her infrequently, really only when the algorithms of social media thrust her into my sightline. She loved sharing car selfies and pictures of her baby, cross posting from Instagram to Facebook so I’d see all the same pictures twice. I despise myself for being stingy with likes. When I scroll through her Instagram feed, I can see that I liked only one in ten of her posts. I still feel sick about this.
Job, the original authority on suffering, said: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And maybe I can access an inner well of tranquility and peace when it comes to the many losses in my life and say yes, the Lord is good. Maybe this holy fire through which I’ve walked has trimmed off some unwholesome parts of me like fat and I can muster gratitude for the sovereignty of a God who has allowed my suffering. But I cannot bring myself to bless the Lord for Libby’s death. Not for the cruelty of the way she died. Not for the loss of her extravagant goodness, not for the widowing of her husband, not for the orphaning of her baby, not for the ugly amputation of her from this world. I will not.
The memorial was on July 28th at the beautiful old Methodist church where Libby and her husband were married. My sister met her own husband at that wedding, and two years later they were married at the same church. Two weddings and a funeral.
We brought bouquets of flowers and left them on the stage around the lectern where an oversized picture of her face was smiling down at us. Guests had been encouraged to forego the traditional black and wear bright colors to honor the vibrancy that defined Libby’s life. I chose a Kelly-green dress with a pink and yellow floral pattern I had bought for Easter earlier that year. It seems strange to me now that I would have chosen for her funeral a dress I first wore to celebrate the Resurrection. There’s a kind of coded symbolism to it that I can’t crack. The dress still hangs in my closet. I can’t get rid of it, but I can’t wear it either. It’s a verdant stripe of pain draped on a hanger, a bright reminder every time I open the door.
“Therefore I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul… Yet if I speak, my pain is not relieved; and if I refrain, it does not go away.”
Job again, the godfather of grief. There is so much I don’t understand, but I particularly do not understand the book of Job. The book opens on Satan slinking into God’s heavenly courts and needling him re: the authenticity of Job’s spectacular holiness and God agrees, in an offhand fashion, to let Satan torture Job a bit by financially ruining him and killing his children. “But on the man himself do not lay a finger,” God says. That goes down and Job mourns but doesn’t curse God. Satan returns to complain to God again, and this time God lets him set a plague of boils from Job’s head to the bottom of his feet. And still Job will not blame God for his troubles, though he’s sitting in a heap of ashes and scraping his festering skin with a shard of pottery.
Enter his three lousy friends, who come and spend 23 chapters victim-blaming Job for his own misfortune and Job still refuses to curse God. He does get pretty angsty about his suffering, and really wishes he were dead instead of arguing. Finally, the friends leave and the Lord himself shows up to lecture Job in a beautifully poetic yet sarcastic diatribe. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!” It continues in this vein for four chapters, which seems to me not just excessive but unbearably cruel. But what do I know. Like Job, I wasn’t there when God laid the earth’s foundation or marked off its dimensions. I’m just an armchair observer from the smoking ruins of the twenty-first century.
After Elijah gives in to his despair and goes to sleep, he is awakened by an angel who has brought him food and water. He eats and drinks and sleeps again. The angel returns with more food and tells him, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”
I’m gratified by the humanity of this scene. The journey is too much for you. Eat, for you are weary. Drink, sleep, for your exhaustion is real. A few verses later, Elijah is asleep in a cave on the mountain of the Lord, and the Lord speaks to him. “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
He responds with the kind of bald honesty born of desperation: “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”
I am the only one left. I have done what you asked of me and look what happened. It is too much.
Instead of replying to Elijah’s despondency, the Lord instructs him to leave the cave and stand on the face of the mountain to witness God’s presence pass by. A wind comes, so powerful that rocks are torn off the mountain and shattered, but the narrative tells us that God is not in the wind. An earthquake rumbles through and then a fire, but God is not in them either. Then—a gentle whisper. “When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.”
There came a gentle whisper. He shrouded himself and went to meet the Lord.
I think about other times God revealed himself in the Old Testament. Mountains feature heavily in these theophanies. On Mount Horeb, a flaming bush is not consumed. On Mount Sinai, a thick darkness descends with thunder and lightning and trumpet blasts. There are always instructions: Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, for the place where you stand is holy ground. I will place you in the cleft of a rock. I will cover you with my hand for my face must not be seen. It is always a spectacle so fearsome that the witnesses tremble and fall face-flat to the ground.
The spectacle, the terror and awesomeness of it, is what interests me. In the weeks I’ve spent composing this narrative, as I think of Moses and Jonah, Ezekiel and Elijah, it’s become clear that I’m shying away from the most obvious revelation of God: the tender baby, the gentle Man.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” He promises. I don’t have the heart for tenderness right now. I’m too tender already, pulverized by grief and divorce and the yearlong isolation of a global pandemic and yet another raw breakup. It’s become clear that I would prefer the pyrotechnic display of a mighty voice emanating from a pillar of cloud or flame, a mountaintop covered in darkness and lightning. I want to cover my face and bow to the ground, take off my sandals and prostrate myself in holy terror before a presence so big and unavoidable that I have no choice but to tremble. Fear, I understand.
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls,” He says. But I cannot face the gentle balm of love. I do not want relief from my burdens. I want to thrash around in this grief and anger until I am mute and bound and red-faced. Let me cover my head. Let me sit in a pile of ashes. Let me cradle this pain and snarl at the kindness that threatens to relieve it. This anger is all I have left, Lord.
The last few weeks of writing have opened up something in me, something dark. It’s hard to say, of course, what came first: the depression that makes me think of her, or the thinking of her that fuels my depression. It’s your classic chicken/egg situation, set against the backdrop of months ten and eleven of COVID and a fledgling relationship that ignited, briefly but oh so vividly, an old hope for an alternate future where I might not be alone. Reader, he politely declined that future with a textbook, “It’s not you, it’s me.” My tricky brain says that it is me, though. It’s because I wear my sadness like a veil, and I will never be free of this; my losses will trail behind me loud and ugly like tin cans from a fender for the rest of my days. Still, I am compelled to peer into the darkness, reaching for what I find and cauterizing it with words.
The darkness reaches back. It feeds me visions I don’t want: the hardware around my house capable of suspending a deadweight. The bottles of pills waiting patiently, full of their deadly potential on the high kitchen shelf I can only reach on tiptoe. The split-second flick of a wrist that would send my car veering off-road and into a telephone pole. I thought I had slain this particular darkness with the grueling work of therapy, but here it is again, resurrected in all its grim potency.
Guilt is a sleek, swift weasel in my mind, rushing ahead to hold open the door to hopelessness, his head bowed with an obsequious, “After you, madam.” Guilt tells me I should not be writing this. It tells me that Libby’s fate should have been mine, with my history of depression and intrusive thoughts. It tells me that the depression is my own fault, something I perpetuate by dwelling on my grief. It tells me that I have overinflated my sadness, that I don’t deserve to feel this way about Libby’s death because I had neglected our friendship in the years before she died. It tells me that my anger and sadness are proof of a lack of faith in the God I have devoted my life to. “And what is the value of your life,” it whispers, “if you turn yourself over to anger in the face of a God whom you have always believed is love?” And yet—how can I surrender this anger? To surrender would be to admit that the weasel speaks truth, that Libby’s death was not an altering of my very self.
I try to push back against the weasel in my mind. You have not lost your faith, I tell myself. To everything there is a season. The journey is too much for you, you are weary. Sleep, for your exhaustion is real. Perhaps there will come a time when accepting the angel’s food and drink will not feel like a betrayal of my love; perhaps there will not. I am no stranger to paradox.
On Saturday, two days after her body was found and one week before her memorial, I said my last goodbye to Libby. Her parents had taken my suggestion and reserved a funeral home chapel where a small group of us gathered in a shifting circle around her closed casket. Her brothers brought a sprig of fresh rosemary and laid it on the glossy chestnut wood above where I imagined her heart was. Rosemary for remembrance. I had envisioned some kind of formal ceremony akin to the high church liturgy I was accustomed to, but what emerged felt chaotic and secular. I leaned uneasily against a wall and watched the scene unfold.
I thought about her body enshrouded beneath the wood. She was “not in good shape,” we had been told. It was over 100 degrees on the day she went missing, which is presumably the day she also died, and just as hot the next day when she was found. I’ve seen enough crime procedurals to have some idea of what that might do to a body. But it was still her body in there, the same one I had spent so many hours and years with. My impulse from the day before was still there too; I wanted to hug her and hold her hand and weep over her face, no matter what she looked like. Even in corruption, her flesh was still precious.
Eventually the circle eddied and dissipated as we all broke apart and returned through the chapel doors to the atrium, and then to the glaring parking lot and our heat-baked cars. Before I left the artificial cool of that darkened room I paused self-consciously beside the casket and laid my hands palm down on the rich wood. I lowered my forehead to rest over hers for a long second, my eyes closed and dry. “I love you,” I thought, directing each word like a bore through the wood that separated us. “I’m sorry.” I tried to smell the rosemary but there was no fragrance.
On the year anniversary of her death, I wrote a tribute on Libby’s Facebook wall, reflecting on our friendship and the way it always felt like no time had passed whenever we were reunited. I cringe, now, at the facile sentiment of seeing each other again, “in the presence of God and the fulfillment of all things.” It’s not that I don’t believe that anymore, because despite all odds I do, but to my bitter heart it feels a lot like a cop out, so easy and accepting. It’s a tidy resolution to the gauche stain of her absence.
Libby, my oldest friend, my cousin, my sister. I do not know why the Lord took you and left me or any other person in this gorgeous, rotting world. Libby, I’m sorry.
I reject my perennial desire to tie it all up in a neat bow and end this with a note of hope and resolution. O Death, where is your sting, I am tempted to remember. Yes, I snarl back, and in this valley I have no hope. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. What comfort, I howl. There is only loss, and loss, and loss.
I rend my garments at the ugliness of a world without her in it. I sit in my grief like a pile of ashes, weeping the tears I could not cry over her casket. This is my fragrant rosemary. It is my whole burnt offering. It is all that I have. Please, God, do not take it from me too.