THE NIGHT JARRONN DIED

Mighty Pursuit: So there was this night in late 2009, July where he went out on his bike. Tell me about what happened that day. Jessica Rice: Yeah. So I came home just like any other day. He was there, greeted me excitedly. His godson and his best friend were there. They were playing on the Nintendo Wii in the living room. And, I was just kind of relaxing and decompressing from the day, and they said, oh, well, we're going to take my godson home, drop him off, and then we're going to hang out like a mile from where we live. In the shopping center where, you know, people just hang out and meet up with the other biker bros or whatever you want to call them. And, so he kissed me goodbye, said, I'll see you later. We'll have dinner. We'll have the cheesecake that he had brought home that was in the fridge. I didn't feel great, like physically my stomach was kind of upset and I was just thinking, I'll just take a nap and maybe I'll feel better when I wake up. Jessica Rice:So it was a little after 9 p.m. and the doorbell rings and I'm curious, who could that be? So I hop up and I open the door, and when I do, it's the girlfriend of the friend who had been over at our house earlier, and she tells me Jarronn had been in an accident. And immediately, I'm feeling that rush of panic kind of coursing from the top of my head down to my toes, and she quickly reassures me that. It's okay. He's fine, he's fine. He rode in an ambulance to the hospital, but he's fine. And she's like, if you put on your shoes, I'll give you a ride and I'll take you over there. So I am like, okay, great. Hop in her car. We're riding to the hospital, you know, and I'm kind of just. Trying to stay steady. I'm cracking jokes as I do, and we get to the hospital. We're first in the parking lot. And that friend again, who had been there at our place earlier, meets us, and he has tears in his eyes, and he tells us that, you know, he's in bad shape. He has, I think, a broken foot. And he was complaining about some chest pains. But he's going to be okay. He's going to be okay. And so I'm like, okay, well, let me just get into this hospital and check in and see what's going on. And, when I do, they quickly introduce me to a nurse, and that nurse shows us to a family waiting room. So, as opposed to the general waiting room, they take us through some doors and into a private room. And I'm kind of confused as to why we need a special room. There's a couple of his other biker friends who are there too, in that room. And the nurse, he's telling me, "I really just need you to be strong right now." And I'm like, okay. Yeah, I can be strong. That's fine. You know. Mighty Pursuit: The nurse was saying this? Jessica Rice: The nurses said that to me, and I'm like, yeah, I can be strong, no problem. He's like, yeah, just need you to be strong. And so then I'm like, okay, but I can be strong, but what do I need to be strong for exactly? Because my understanding is we're talking about a broken foot and we're talking about, I don't know, maybe a broken rib. What do I need to be strong for? And the nurse said, well, they're doing everything they can to keep him alive. And at that moment, I'm in that room. I am overwhelmed, of course. And I call my mom and I tell her mom, Jarronn's been in an accident. We need to pray, and we pray and,I hang up that phone and I say to the other people that are in that room, I say, Jarronn is going to be okay, because I am just so confident that he has so much to live for. And I mean, he just got promoted. He just got married. His whole life is ahead of him. Like he wants to do so many things. He wants to be an amazing godfather to this little boy who was just in our living room playing the Nintendo Wii. He wants to have kids of his own. Like he has to be fine. And I am just so confident of that. And a couple of minutes go by and we're just kind of sitting in silence in the room. Jessica Rice: And this time when the door opens, it's a doctor, the surgeon who comes in and he asks for me, and, I raise my hand and he tells me that Jarronn had a lot of internal bleeding, a lot of internal injuries, and that they had drained the blood out of his body and tried to give it back to him. But the stress of that and the strain had been too much for his heart. And the doctor just said, I'm sorry. And at that point, I just jumped out of my seat and I was like, no, no. I was saying no. Like I was a broken record. I couldn't stop being a broken record. Just saying no, no, no, that can't be true. You have to go back. And I'm like, pleading with the doctor, like you have to go back. You have to try again. You have to try to do something. And the surgeon just said, I'm sorry. And he leaves the room. These men in this room, his friends are covering their faces and crying. And I am just like, what is happening? And at that point, I had to make the hardest phone calls I've ever made in my life. I had to call his parents. I had to tell them. And the shock, you know? You know how? how? And so it's like my heart broke two more times. And then slowly but surely, I called some friends who came to the hospital, and his parents came to the hospital. And eventually I was even in this place of trying to decide, do I want to go back and see him? Like I just didn't know what state he was in. I didn't know what I wanted my final memories of him to be, his parents had gone and they had been with him and finally I felt like, no, I definitely need to go. And so I went in there and he looked like he was sleeping. I mean, he looked peaceful, but I also just had this overwhelming sense as I was standing there and looking at him, that both he and I, the best way I can describe it, were communing at the same time and being like, how in the world did we get here? Like, what is happening? And so eventually, I mean, more people were showing up at the hospital, and I had to leave. I had to leave the hospital. I had to go home. And I was 26-years-old and widowed, and it just felt like everything had shattered. Mighty Pursuit: I'm so sorry. How long were you married for at that point? Jessica Rice: We had only been married for two and a half months. Mighty Pursuit: And so you go home and what happened when you were at the house? Jessica Rice:That night I had a dream that I came downstairs into the living room and Jarronn was sitting there on the couch and I said oh my god, you're here. You know, like we thought you died last night, but you're here. This is just amazing. And then I woke up from that dream and realized, no, that is not reality. And my mom arrived. She had driven down from New Jersey, and my father arrived. He drove up from Virginia, where he was living. And. I mean, the next few days in some ways are a blur. In some ways I only remember this because I have looked at photos of this like we had a vigil, with a lot of friends, for him, close to where his accident had happened. There were always people at the house. They were trying to find a location where we could have a memorial service and figure out when that was going to happen. There were moments of me just not being able to eat. I think I lost 10 pounds in a few days. And there were even tense moments of really trying to navigate how to make sense of it all as a family. Like me, what I believed about the world and faith and our relationship in general. His parents having their own experience, his brother having their experience, aunts and uncles of his. And so it was just a lot. It was a lot of trying to figure it all out. And there were moments of tremendous sadness, a lot of tears. And then there were also flashes in that first week of moments of hope and clarity, like I would be there at the dining table, trying to pull together documents and figure out things for life insurance and all kinds of things. And I would just have this overwhelming sense of, this is crazy, but you are going to be okay, Jessica. Mighty Pursuit: Even in the first week you were feeling that? Jessica Rice: Even in the first week, it would last for 10 seconds. And then I would be back down into the depths of what is going on and why do I have to do this? And, you know, having been married for such a short time. We had hardly gotten to the place of even putting our house into both of our names. The house was still in his name. You know, I think I had maybe barely even changed my name legally. In terms of figuring out where paperwork and certainly not having conversations about what would you like your memorial service to be like? So it was just a whirlwind of time trying to figure out what am I doing and what would he want me to do in these moments? Mighty Pursuit: You started having recurring dreams in that time period too, right? Jessica Rice: It was like my subconscious. My conscience, I don't know. Everything was out of order and trying to make sense of what was going on. And so I would have these dreams, pretty regularly. And the scenarios or the details would kind of change. But the overarching storyline was kind of always the same of realizing Jarronn wasn't, in fact, dead. He was alive. He just had been on some business trip for six weeks, or he had been stuck in a remote place, like a cave in the middle of nowhere. And then I'm discovering, oh, he's not actually gone. He's here. And I'm grappling with like, okay, so how do we pick the pieces back-up and how do we continue and go on? And it was always that feeling of waking up in the morning and being like, no, that is not the case. And man, it was hard. I mean, waking up in the morning, having the reason to get up and get out of bed was a struggle. Because I guess, in my early moments, like my cry out, I can remember laying in the bed and just weeping, my mom standing next to me and trying to comfort me, and me really being like, I don't know who I am in this moment because so much of what I hoped and dreamed for, was wrapped up in this person, right? This was my person. We had made this vow to each other. We were going to do our life together. We were going to build dreams together. We were going to enjoy all the things together. And suddenly he's gone in an instant. And it just felt like the pieces, you know, we're all broken. And it's like, where do I even begin to put this back together? And who am I in all of this? When this future that I've imagined had this person in it, that person is gone. So what is the future for me? Jessica Rice: And, I was so grateful to have a really dear friend who, for the first several months, would call me in the morning, just to check in on me and give me almost a reason to wake up and talk to someone and get out of bed. We didn't have to talk about anything consequential, but just to have the rhythm of somebody calling me at 7 a.m. and saying, like, "Jessica, hey" was the impetus I needed to just even get out of bed and and and keep going. I mean, I was so blessed and fortunate to have a workplace that was very understanding and put no pressure on me to come back to work. I took a trip to Jamaica and probably within ten days after, once the memorial happened, I took a trip to Jamaica and there was something therapeutic about getting in an airplane, going up 30,000 ft in the air, and kind of almost getting above everything that was happening in the chaos of my life. From a metaphorical standpoint or whatever. I was like, nothing's really changing, but just even that elevation to get above it all was healing for me. But I remember also being on that plane and having a window seat and just crying the whole time, and that was my safe place to just lean against this window, look out this window, cry. And I imagined that the people in the row next to me were imagining I was going through like this lady who's crying for four straight hours on a plane, and then got to Jamaica and just went to the spot. Went to our spot, spread some of his ashes at our spot. Went on the water, cried in every place, doing all the things that I knew he loved and we had done together. Jessica Rice:And then came back and really went back into work because I felt like I needed to. I needed something to kind of put myself into so that I wasn't just lost in my thoughts and silence. But it was definitely this really rough journey of having to excuse myself and go into the bathroom stall and lock the door and cry. There were coworkers who would come up like, hey, do you have the... oh, and then they'd be stopped immediately, seeing that I was in the middle of a moment. And they were very understanding. But yeah, there was just it was moment by moment. It was just a moment by moment thing of, I'm just trying to get through this day and sometimes even the next 60 seconds, where I just feel overwhelmed. And it was also this crazy feeling. I remember riding the Metro in DC, walking to work, in DC, and feeling like people are going by me. People are picking up their bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. People are going to meetings. Doesn't anybody know that my world has just collapsed? Like it's such a weird feeling. I think when you go through such a significant loss like that, it's fully consuming. And yet the world is still moving. The world is going on. It's nobody's fault. It's not like the world should stop, but it's just this crazy feeling of how is everybody going about their business right now when the love of my life just died? So it was a wild time. Mighty Pursuit: People process grief in all different sorts of ways. But you started a blog like, very soon after that. Jessica Rice: Yes. Mighty Pursuit: So why did you do that? Jessica Rice: Yeah, a big reason was because I was getting a lot of calls and text messages from different people checking on me to see how I was doing, and I was grateful for that love and care and concern, you know, to be in your mid-twenties. Both me and Jarronn and a lot of our friends are the same age. For many of us, no one had experienced a loss like this, even a close friend or whatever does dying suddenly. And so, there were a lot of people who were reaching out and just worried about me, but it was to the point where it was overwhelming and I knew that I couldn't respond. I'm not good at responding to text messages on a good day, so I knew I couldn't respond all the time. And so I had actually read a blog, followed a blogger before all of this who was a widower and really was inspired by his writing. And so that kind of inspired me like, oh, this could have some good, some good aspects to it on multiple levels. One, it's a place where I can update people. If people can't reach me, they can just go to the blog and they can see this is how Jessica is doing today. But I always liked writing as well, and I was feeling like I just had so much swirling around in my head and I needed an outlet to get that out. And so what writing on the blog did was it forced me to kind of pluck one idea out of my brain and sit with it and process it a little bit, and put it out there and not try to sugarcoat anything. You know, I really tried to be clear from the jump that this was not going to be a space where I wrapped up every blog with, but everything is going to be okay or this is the good thing. It might just be the bad thing. It might just be the fact that I went to pick up the dry cleaning, and the woman who loved Jarronn asked, where's your husband? I haven't seen him. And I had to tell her that he had died. And, you know, just like the sadness of those moments. But what it did was it just gave me such a release, and I felt like once I did pull one thing out and spend some time with it, I made a little bit more space, and I got a little bit clearer in my brain to kind of navigate those days, that were just so hard.