Jessica Jade

Have you ever felt like someone was dead because of you? Ever wondered if you made one decision differently that person would still be alive? Worried that you are the cause of all of the bad things that happened to someone?

No? Consider yourself lucky.

This is a feeling I have lived with every day since April 10th, 2017.

So, let’s talk about it.

I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was standing in my mom’s dining room looking at the calendar trying to plan what I was going to be doing that coming week for doctors’ appointments with my boys. My phone went off telling me I had a Facebook message from a friend of Jade’s who was constantly trying to help me get her into rehab. All it said was she needed to talk to me ASAP, I assumed Jade was in a really bad place again and she needed my help trying to pull her out of it. I called her through Facebook Messager, she answered and didn’t even say hello. Just the words I dreaded hearing since the moment I left Florida in 2008. I could tell she was hyperventilating, as she gasped for the air just to spit out the words, “Jade is dead girl. She’s dead”. Like someone had stuck a vacuum directly into my lungs all the air I had was gone. I suddenly couldn’t breathe, I dropped to my knees and began wailing, screaming, crying uncontrollably. I was inconsolable. I didn’t even say anything back. I’m not even sure if I hung up. My mom came running and wrapped her arms around me, asking over and over what was wrong. Eventually I spit out her name. “Jade” and my mom already knew. We sat there and cried together.

I knew I was going to lose her one day. I just wasn’t prepared for it to be that day.

Jade and I met when I was fifteen. She was actually the despised ex-girlfriend of my current girlfriend. I hated her because she was always calling and texting the girl I was dating and like I said before co-dependency = jealousy. When the girl I was dating moved to Alabama we broke up, I was devastated at the time because she was my first girlfriend. So, to get over it, I went with my big brother to a battle of the bands show that my school was hosting. I was standing in the ticket line when I got a tap on the shoulder. When I turned around to see Jade standing there, I immediately got irritated but instead of saying a word she handed me a piece of paper, when I asked her what it was, she said “you look cute in that shirt” and walked away. I waited until I was in my seat to open the folded piece of paper and all it said was, “JADE- and her phone number”. I was half tempted to throw it in the trash, but I didn’t and I am so thankful for that.

I waited a few days before I texted her, we made plans to hang out that weekend and we were inseparable from then on. Jade had a pretty hard life. Her mom left when she was 18-months old, she was addicted to drugs and just couldn’t handle being a mom, I guess. She and her dad had a pretty rocky relationship, she was always getting kicked out and crashing at friends’ houses. My mom had no idea that Jade and I were in a relationship or even that I liked women, so when I asked her if Jade could stay with us, she was on board.

Living with Jade was the best thing that could have happened to me. No longer did my stepdad beat me because Jade was always there, there were no more sexual comments, or acts because Jade was always there. I didn’t go to sleep scared or anxious and I didn’t wake up terrified to leave my room. Finally, I was able to breathe. Unfortunately, trauma had already altered my brain chemistry in a way that was beyond immediate healing, and although I thought I was “fixed” and “everything was perfect” I soon realized that was not the case.

I had already been smoking weed prior to Jade and I meeting, and I had already had my fair share of alcohol but that’s really all I had done. It wasn’t until I was about fifteen and a half when I decided I was going to leave home with Jade and start partying more with our thirty-year-old male friends, that things spiraled out of control.

First, it was ecstasy for weeks on end, rolling until I literally couldn’t anymore because the lack of food was going to kill me. Weeks on end partying and having sex all night and then sleeping all day. All of this while still a student in high school. I ended up only attending a total of 22% of that school year and I somehow still managed to pass.

A couple of girls had moved to the area and were on my bus, they lived in the house diagonally across from mine in the back. We ended up getting close and when my mom caught Jade and I having sex and kicked her out, Jade ended up moving in with them. I would sneak her in my window and night, I would sneak out and go there, and after about three months of getting caught on a nightly basis my mom realized she wasn’t keeping us apart and finally just gave in. However, during those few months I spent a lot of time with my neighbors to be close with Jade.

Then, it was Xanax. Their mom was an addict, at the time none of us really knew because she was also suffering from a lot of mental health stuff, so we just assumed her medication made her “sleepy”. Until those first few days of Xanax, I realized very quickly what a nod was, I learned how much I LOVED blacking out and not remembering anything (which included all my internalized pain and trauma) I realized how much I loved being numb and not having to function for any reason other than to get high enough to not function all over again. It was the perfect storm, free drugs, supplied by an adult who let me do them in her house, a partner to do them with who loved them just as much as me, and a cure for all of the pain I was in.

Shortly after, my mom had left my stepfather and we all moved to New Smyrna with my aunt, but Jade, Jade wasn’t allowed to come with us. I’m sure you can imagine how that affected me... again co-dependent. We fought all the time, I didn’t trust her, she didn’t trust me, and being high and paranoid all the time just made it that much worse. Eventually, we left my aunt’s house and finally Jade could come back.

I can’t tell you how quickly it went from those Xanax pills to cleaning elderly peoples trailers in the trailer park for little bags of miscellaneous goodies, or to cleaning condos for just enough cash to cop a bag, or sleeping on the beach because I had lost everything and didn’t care because I was content high and in the sand, or even to taking my clothes off for money to support my habit. But what I can tell you is that it was so fast that I didn’t even have the time to acknowledge what was happening until it was too late.

I had gotten to the point that going to work every night, taking my clothes off for creepy men, was just triggering me and I could no longer get high enough to get that feeling to go away. There were plenty of nights that I would scrub my skin so hard that I thought it might all fall off just to not feel like their fingertips ever grazed my arm or my leg as I walked by. So, I decided it was time to try and get clean.

It was 2008 when we traveled to Massachusetts to visit family for Christmas, no one in my family had addressed that I had a drug problem, and at the time I didn’t realize how much that contributed to me even having a drug problem. Just another thing that they wanted to sweep under the rug, I spent my vacation using with my old friends who were now also in active addiction until one day I just couldn’t take it anymore. I told everyone I wasn’t going back to Florida, I needed to get clean, and I wasn’t going to do that if I stayed in Florida with Jade. She didn’t want to be clean, and we fed each other’s habits in such an awful way. So, that’s what I did, my mom decided she was going to come home with me, and we drove to Florida packed all of our stuff and left. It wasn’t until I was halfway back to Massachusetts that Jade went home from work and realized all my stuff was gone. I felt horrible leaving, but I knew that if I had seen her, even for a moment, my heart would have never let me leave that day, and I needed to leave.

For the next six to eight months, I drove and flew back and forth to Florida sometimes every weekend sometimes every other, going to trap houses, hanging out at our old spots, walking the streets until I would find her. I would beg her to come home. I would beg her to come to rehab with me, I would promise her that I would take care of her, I would promise we would get healthy together. Every time she refused. Until finally one day, I just gave up. I stopped fighting because I was ready, and I knew she wasn’t.

I ended up getting clean carrying on with my life, but I never lost contact with her. Every few months we would talk I would make sure she was okay; I would beg her to get clean and every few months it got worse and worse. She had Hepatitis C, endocarditis, abscesses that would get MRSA and then she would end up with MRSA in her blood, she got numerous cases of cellulitis and then eventually she needed a pacemaker. I would call her in the hospital and find out she was kicked out for shooting meth into the ports in her heart, or her friends getting caught sneaking in drugs, the hospitals had about enough with helping her and how could I blame them it was same story every time. But I hated all of them for giving up on her. For not trying hard enough.

About a year before Jade went in for her heart surgery, the friend who always tried to help me get her clean would find her and detox her, I had bought her 3 separate bus tickets to get here during those times. All well over 500 dollars, each time she had been clean for about six days, and each time the night before she was supposed to get on that bus, she would sneak out of her friend’s house and take off.

After the third time I told her I was done, I was done going without just for her to run, I was done trying to fight for her if she wasn’t going to fight for herself, I was done listening to her cry in hospital beds telling me she didn’t want to die, I was done hearing the pain in her voice knowing that as badly as she wanted to be clean she just didn’t have the will power for it anymore. She was so tired.

The next call I got from her was just a heads up that she was having heart surgery, they were finally going to give her the pacemaker and she was going to go to rehab as soon as she got well enough too. Her stepmother had been spending time with her in the hospital and was learning how to care for her at home so Jade could recover there. Finally, I was going to have my Jadey Babe back, her heart surgery was successful, and she was doing well in the hospital.

The next call I got was from her friend.

Telling me that Jade was dead.

How the hell could this have happened? How could she have died? She finally got what she needed to keep her alive and now she’s dead?

Jade signed herself out of the hospital AMA not even two weeks post-op. She left with someone she was actively using with. Apparently, they had gotten into an argument and this girl punched Jade in the chest. Because her heart wasn’t healed, it loosened the wires to her pacemaker and killed her. Her body was dumped on the back steps of someone’s summer home, days later she was found, because of the extreme heat her body was mostly decomposed and she was considered a Jane Done until they retrieved the numbers from her pacemaker. There was no funeral, there was no obituary, there was no goodbye, there was no closure.

Often, I blame myself for her not being here right now.

I should have fought harder to keep her safe.

I should have just taken her with me without giving her a choice.

I should have never left her there. I should have stayed.

I should have been with her at that hospital.

I should have flown there so she wasn’t tempted by them.

I should have done something, anything more than what I had already done.

If I would have just chosen her instead of choosing me, maybe she would still be here. Maybe we both would. Maybe that one choice could have saved her life.

I’m sure I will never have the answers to all my “what-if’s” and no amount of saying “I should have” is going to bring her home. But the guilt I live with every day by just being alive without her is enough punishment for ever.

I could have never imagined when I was 14, a straight “A” student, a ballerina, a runner, a good friend, a good partner, and a hard worker that one day, I would be blaming myself for the death of the one person who saved my life.

But here we are.