Afterword: Two Years Later
We are approaching the two-year anniversary of my mom’s death.
Much has changed.
And yet, in some ways, much remains the same.
For a long time after she died, I struggled to find motivation.
Things I once loved stopped feeling meaningful.
Only recently have I begun to feel more like myself again.
My dad was left dealing with a mountain of debt accumulated during the final years of my mom’s life.
He has been painstakingly working his way through it.
He doesn’t complain much.
He simply keeps going.
So do I.
There is something I realize this book has not done enough.
I have told you a great deal about my mom’s decline.
I have told you about the scammers.
Her struggles with mental health.
The arguments.
The money.
The hospitals.
Her death.
But those things are not who my mom was.
So before I leave you, I want you to know a little about Tracey.
My mom loved animals.
Sometimes I joked that she loved them more than she loved most humans.
She volunteered at a local animal shelter, and she loved being there.
During that time, she fell in love with a blind dog named Duke.
Animals were a constant presence throughout my childhood.
At one point, we had seven dogs.
My mom was a strong advocate for animal adoption, and her favorite breed was the Dachshund.
We had several of them over the years. My first two dogs were Dachshunds.
Before I was born, one of our Dachshunds, Pebbles, would guard my mom’s belly.
After I was born, Pebbles became my best friend.
I was an only child, and that dog was one of my earliest companions.
My mom loved Ford Mustangs.
She owned a white 2001 Mustang before eventually getting what I considered her dream car: a gold 2012
Mustang.
That car was her baby.
After she died, my dad gave it to me.
I still drive it.
There is something strange and comforting about that.
Something she loved still carries me down the road.
She loved Supernatural and Charmed.
She loved horror movies, including The Exorcist, The Lost Boys, and Salem’s Lot.
She was also a big kid.
She wore merchandise featuring characters she loved: Tigger and Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, GIR from
Invader Zim, Zero from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Cheese from Foster’s Home for Imaginary
Friends, and Frankenweenie.
She loved music of all kinds, but rock and metal were especially important to her.
Linkin Park.
Disturbed.
Iron Maiden.
Depeche Mode.
Metallica.
Evanescence.
Music was part of who she was.
And, as I wrote earlier, I believe there had once been a part of her that dreamed of becoming a singer.
Then there were the Green Bay Packers.
My mom grew up in Upper Michigan, surrounded by Packers fans.
She was one of them to the end.
She got to see the Packers play Washington twice.
Her favorite player was Clay Matthews.
Whenever she talked about him, she would make this ridiculous growling purr.
It embarrassed the hell out of me at the time.
Now it makes me smile.
She was a character.
During games, she was loud.
Very loud.
She cheered, yelled at the television, and made sure everyone around her knew exactly how she felt about
what was happening on the field.
Those are the kinds of things I want to remember.
Not because they erase everything else in this book.
They don’t.
But because the woman in the final chapters was not the entirety of my mother.
There was a woman before all of that.
A woman who loved animals.
Who loved Mustangs.
Who loved horror movies and strange cartoon characters.
Who loved loud music.
Who yelled at football games.
Who made inappropriate noises about Clay Matthews just to embarrass her son.
That woman was my mom too.
I wish she could have watched her grandchildren grow up.
I wish they could have known more of the woman I remember from before the events of this book.
But here we are, nearly two years after she died.
Life continued.
It had to.
And I have spent a great deal of time wondering what I should do with everything that happened.
I cannot change it.
I cannot give my mom another ending.
But perhaps I can give what happened some meaning.
That is why I have decided to make this memoir public.
I do not want to profit from my mother’s death.
This book will be available freely to anyone who wants to read it.
I want her story to exist somewhere outside my own memory.
I want people who have watched someone they love change in ways they don’t understand to know that
another family has lived through that confusion.
I want people who have been manipulated by scammers—or who love someone who has—to understand
that intelligent, complicated, vulnerable human beings can be deceived.
I want families living with mental illness to know how messy love can become when nobody knows what to
do.
And I want people grieving a suicide to know that the questions they carry may not always have answers.
Most of all, if you have made it this far, I want you to understand something that took me a long time to
understand myself:
You matter.
Your life matters.
Your existence matters.
There may be times when you cannot see beyond whatever you are experiencing.
I will not promise you that every problem disappears or that every low inevitably becomes a high.
Life has taught me otherwise.
But things can change.
People can change.
Circumstances can change.
And sometimes surviving today is enough.
If you have lived through something like what my family experienced, you are not alone in having
complicated feelings about it.
Love can exist beside anger.
Grief can exist beside relief.
Forgiveness can exist beside things that can never be undone.
You don’t have to make everything that happened beautiful in order to keep living after it.
I spent years trying to understand my mom.
I still don’t.
Maybe I never completely will.
But I know this:
She lived.
She loved.
She struggled.
She hurt people.
She was hurt by people.
She was more complicated than either the best or worst thing she ever did.
She was Tracey Jean White.
She was my mom.
And I will carry her with me for the rest of my life.
Keep going.
—Devin