BEFORE YOU
She walks across the parking lot, frisbee in hand, to the small patch of grass opposite her apartment building. There is a slight breeze this evening—perfect for being outside, she comments, coming to a stop in the middle of the field. Then there’s something else about being busy with work and needing to take her year-old dog out for a brief moment, before she finally throws the frisbee across the yard.
The toy lands, and now, with the dog distracted, she can begin dwelling on her past year of life. The conversation starts with her mother’s Destiny.
Destiny Lewis.
“My mom didn’t grow up with her parents, either of them,” she says. “My mom and my dad both had really bad childhoods and they named me Destiny because they really believed that I would be their new destiny, their new lease on life.”
Just over a year after her mother’s death, Destiny says her name defines what her relationship was like with her mom: she was the “source of her happiness.” When one did well, the other did too, and when one felt down, the other would too. They were two souls in perfect harmony, in perfect sync, more perfect than her mother’s two failed marriages.
“It was me and her against the world,” Destiny says. “We were like sisters, like best friends. She was my mom. I was her mom. We were pretty much each other’s everything.”
YOU WERE GONE
It was the spring of her junior year at the University of Texas. After a fall that injured her head, Destiny’s mom needed brain surgery. Rushing to Beaumont after receiving the call, Destiny arrived at the hospital just as the surgery ended. With relief, she found her mom fine in recovery.
“I treated it just as another thing that we were going through,” she says, adding that she never imagined her mom would be anything other than okay at the end of it all. “She was getting better and then all of a sudden she wasn’t getting better.”
Her mother had caught pneumonia.
Just like that everything changed. In a hard-to-believe chain of events, her mother went from being ready to be discharged, to declining quickly much to the dismay of an overwhelmed Destiny.
“She was fine, we were talking, everything was great, and then all of a sudden, next time I came to visit her, she was declining very rapidly and they didn’t understand,” Destiny says.
Now, looking back at her mother’s history of drinking and depression, she says, “her body was not prepared to handle that at all.” But in fact, neither was Destiny.
“I went home to kind of take a rest or to relax, ‘cause they were like ‘well, she’s pretty stable now.’ And then I get woken up with a phone call that’s like ‘oh, just kidding. She’s not stable, and she’s in fact not gonna make it,’ so then I had to rush back to the hospital,” she says. “By the time I got there, maybe thirty minutes later, she actually passed away.”
Unprepared for her mother’s death, it all seemed strange to Destiny. It was all too fast. All too much.
“My therapist thinks it’s normal, but for me, this is a really hard transition to make just because the way that it affected me,” she says. “It wasn’t like I knew she was going to pass, or like I even considered it being a possibility. Through that entire time, it didn’t even cross my mind.”
As she gets ready to wrap up her senior year, Destiny says the effects of the trauma still linger.
“When something happens so quickly and so unexpected, it’s like your brain is still trying to catch up with your body.” She says, “that’s kind of where I’ve been the past year.” Playing catch-up.
AFTER YOU
She used to ask herself how it could be that a person could sleep all day. She didn’t understand then. Those were the days where she took care of her mom through her depression without really comprehending what it was like. All Destiny knew was that she loved her mom unconditionally, and that was enough.
Now, on the brink of commissioning as a Naval officer and the inevitable uproot that comes with it, Destiny finds herself finally understanding the crippling effects of depression that her mom felt as she heals bit by bit from her own depression.
In the immediate months after her mom’s death, Destiny says the support she received in her school life was all but helpful.
“Unfortunately, the school counselors that deal with family tragedies, they kind of urge you to drop out of school,” she says. “And I know they don’t really mean it like that. Their job is to kind of, take care of you, but it seemed like when they were talking to me, they were just like, ‘you need to focus on yourself, we can help you drop out.’ They weren’t giving me enough resources to stay in.”
For Destiny, her support system and strength to relentlessly move forward came through the exact thing that made it hard to move forward: her mother. Her mother’s Destiny.
“I was ready to quit ROTC and quit school,” she says. “If it wasn’t for a few of my mom’s friends who really understood the kind of vision that my mom had for my life, if it weren’t for them reminding me... I don’t know where I would be. I definitely wouldn’t be in school.”
When she finally immersed back into the swing of things, Destiny began to see her way out of the depression she was in.
Depression for her meant that she was doing one of two things: sleeping all day or crying all day, or a combination of both.
“You don’t really know who you are anymore, and certain things like waking up to call your mom ruins your whole day because you realize that you can’t do that,” Destiny says. “That kind of thing makes you shut down.”
Even though she was previously ready to quit ROTC, she says it ended up helping her live day by day. It gave her a checklist of things to do, with early morning workouts, Naval classes, leadership labs and other battalion events. It drained her energy, but it kept her going. It gave her no chance to make excuses or to shut down. There was no room for that.
“I felt like people were depending on me,” Destiny says. “I felt like this is my career, this is what I’ve invested so much into. My schedule being so jammed packed, it didn’t give me enough time to be depressed all the time.”
Still outside playing with her dog, the conversation moves to the topic of her commissioning in two weeks. This whole time—which feels like forever as she thinks back on life but has actually only been a few minutes—her voice has remained steady and strong, in a way that is hard not to admire. Though as she begins to talk more on the matter, she turns her head away, hiding the watering eyes that one can only imagine go with her now wavering voice.
“It’s been kind of hard recently,” she says. “I’d gotten to a place where I was comfortable and things felt as normal as they could be.”
Coming up on the celebrations, she finds that her excitement is still yet tinted with solemn thoughts that say, “my biggest supporter is not there, my biggest fan is not there...what am I doing all this for if I look into the crowd and the one person that I care about being successful for isn’t there.”
BY JOSEFINA MANCILLA
BEFORE AND AFTER
You
A DOG, A BOY AND GOD
Destiny chuckles as she looks back at her dog, Cookie, who is by now jumping in the mud and drinking from puddles. The question was what else has gotten her through the past year of her life.
“Cookie. My dog,” she says, followed by some more laughter. “She definitely helped me out with the healing process. My cousin gave me Cookie the day my mom died.”
In an attempt to console her, reach out to her, do some sort of helpful thing for Destiny, she said her cousin just gave her a puppy. And perhaps for most people dealing with a fresh trauma, it may not be the most helpful thing considering the responsibility that comes with it, but for her, it gave her a reason to get out of bed.
“I don’t think I’ve ever really told him how much it helped me,” Destiny says. “Because she needs to go out, she needs to get fed. And I got her when she was six weeks, so she was not at all caring about my life or what I was going through. She needed to go out, and she needed to eat, and she wanted attention.”
Destiny’s boyfriend, Calvin Green, also played a major role in her healing process, after moving to Austin in the weeks after her mother’s death.
He saw a side of her that others didn’t see: the shattered parts that lay broken in her bed all day as she tried to hold herself together.
After seeing her sleep her depression away, in an act of tough love, he gave her an ultimatum of finding a therapist to talk to or he would find one himself and speak to her ROTC instructors, as well. Destiny had some “colorful” words to say to that, but looking back now, she says she really needed that push.
“I had to literally, on three-way, schedule an appointment while he heard, and go to it before he backed down,” Destiny says. “Some people, that might not work for them, and for me it pissed me off, but it got me in there and I did start going to therapy, and I did start getting out of bed, and things did get better.”
Despite the fact that he helped steer her in the right direction, Destiny says people like Calvin, who have either never experienced the loss of a loved one or are not close to their parents, are sometimes hard to talk to. They often say things with the right intentions, but instead are far from helpful.
Her mom is exactly the person she would go to in times like these, but it is exactly her mother that she doesn’t have. And the people that are like her mother, she says, are few and far between.
“There’s no one that’s like her,” Destiny says. “People step in when they can, but if you’re looking for a specific thing, obviously you’re not gonna find it. You can’t recreate some people.”
Even though Destiny’s family understands this loss too, it’s not something she’s very open about with them.
“That’s when I feel it the most, when I’m around my family,” she says about the reunions when she can’t help but notice her mother’s absence.
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She talks about her grandmother, who calls her often. But much like the way she carried her mother as she grew up, Destiny continues to act as the strong one, the one that is supposed to help other people.
“It was hard for me to lean on people because I felt like they weren’t strong enough to hold me up, and if I leaned on them we were just both gonna fall,” she says.
So she doesn’t talk to her grandma about her mom.
Later she mentions an occasion where she felt she had adjusted to life again, only to be emotionally knocked down suddenly after seeing her cousin share a post about her mom on Facebook. It hit her like a fresh wound, and though she understood her family members grieve too, she couldn’t help but get upset over it.
In the wake of it all, her family members weren’t the only ones Destiny was reserved from. For months after her mother’s death, she found herself distant from the God she once prayed to.
“We’ve been through a lot of tragedies, both of us, you’d think we’re a Lifetime movie,” she says. “But this one was the only thing that really made me not want to have any kind of faith or spirituality at all.”
For Destiny, it was all a series of events that led to her faith’s demise. In the midst of thinking about her mother’s passing, she mentions her mother’s dying faith before her death. Unrelated to the tragic event a year ago, Destiny talks about constantly praying for her mom’s mental well being in the years before.
“You can’t pray that hard for someone, and you can’t ask people to pray that hard for someone, and you can’t ask God and cry to God… and not feel abandoned when it doesn’t work out,” she says. “In my version of the story, God would have intervened at this time… And we all have our versions of how life’s supposed to go, and then God didn’t see it that way, cause that’s not how it went.” The story went: she died. Her mother died.
These conflicting versions caused Destiny to be repelled from her faith for months. In the midst of that, she remembered she’d promised God she would be faithful even in the storm, but she says this storm came harder than ever before. It was hard to keep that promise at first.
“It’s harder when you’re in pain to do what you know you’re supposed to be doing,” Destiny says. It’s a process, much like the rest of her healing. A process that requires unraveling layers and layers of pain, that sometimes she doesn’t even know are there until she gets there.
To this analogy, Destiny answers with an example of a time she uncovered one of those layers.
She remembers going dress shopping for her previous formal, and describes an image of happy mothers and daughters perusing through prom dresses while her excitement dampens as she quickly realizes she’s surrounded by all these mothers and is, herself, motherless.
“I just sit in the dressing room and I cried for like 30 minutes,” she says.
Before her mother’s death, Destiny says they frequently missed each other’s calls, but would always leave voicemails. Her mom never failed to call back.
That day in the dressing room, she says she called her mom’s cell phone, let it go to voicemail, and talked as if she was gonna pick up later. Destiny found herself doing this often in the months after her mom’s death.
“I would just leave a voicemail, crying, and be like, ‘hey, I just went dress shopping and you weren’t here, and it really made me sad. I really miss you.’ Just to feel like I’m still talking to her.” Destiny says. “And then I stopped doing that, so that was one of my first signs that I am now accepting the fact that she’s not here.”
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As she prepares for her Naval career in the coming year, Destiny talks about feeling excited for a fresh start. Though, she knows that eventually she will hit other layers of pain that will also need healing when she gets to the big moments in life like getting married and having children.