The second anniversary of Grace’s death arrived on June 9th. I took the day off work. I went to the cemetery early before the heat of the day set in. Her grave looked the same as always, peaceful, well-maintained, a permanent reminder that my daughter existed, that she mattered, that she was loved.
I brought strawberries and placed them beside the headstone. Grace’s favorite fruit.
“2 years,” I said aloud. “2 years since you left me. It doesn’t feel shorter. It doesn’t hurt less. People said time would help. They lied.”
I sat on the grass cross-legged the way I used to sit when we had picnics in the park before she got too sick to leave the hospital.
“I destroyed them. Grace, everyone who hurt us. Vanessa’s in prison. Mom and dad lost everything. They’re old and broken and alone. I did that. I made it happen.”
The morning sun filtered through the trees, casting dappled shadows across the graves.
“Vanessa said you’d be disappointed in me. Maybe that’s true. You were so sweet, so forgiving. Even when you were in pain, you never wanted anyone else to hurt. But I’m not you, sweetheart. I never was.”
“I tried to be good. Tried to be the bigger person. Tried to forgive and move on. It got me nothing except more pain.”
I traced her name on the headstone again. The ritual I performed every visit.
“I don’t regret it. That’s what you need to know. I don’t regret making them pay for what they did. They deserved every bit of suffering I caused.”
“But Diane was right. Revenge didn’t feel the emptiness. It just gave me something to focus on besides missing you.”
A groundskeeper was mowing grass in the distance. The sound a low hum in the quiet morning.
“I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how to live without you and without the mission of making them hurt. I don’t know who I am when I’m not grieving or planning or executing revenge. That scares me more than anything.”
I stayed until noon talking to my daughter, crying, remembering. When I finally left, I felt hollowed out, but somehow lighter, as if speaking the truth aloud had released something I had been holding too tightly.
That evening, Julia came over with dinner. We ate Thai food on my couch while a movie played that neither of us watched.
“How are you doing?” Julia asked. “Really doing?”
“I don’t know. I accomplished what I set out to do. I made them suffer. I got justice or revenge or whatever you want to call it. But now what?”
“Now you figure out how to live.”
“I don’t know if I remember how.”
Julia set down her food and turned to face me.
“You’re one of the strongest people I know. Mera, you survived watching your daughter die. You survived being abandoned by your family. You survived grief that would have broken most people. You can survive this, too.”
“What if I don’t want to just survive? What if I want to actually live but forgot how?”
“Then you learn again. One day at a time, one choice at a time.”
We sat in silence for a while. The weight of loss and possibility hanging between us.
“Do you think I’m a terrible person?” I asked. “For what I did to them,” Julia considered carefully before answering. “I think you’re a person who was hurt beyond measure and struck back. I think you made choices I might not have made, but I also think they earned what happened to them. They chose cruelty when you needed compassion. They face consequences now.”
Vanessa said, “I weaponized the legal system for revenge. You exposed legitimate crimes. The revenge part was choosing to do it. But the crimes were real. The victims were real. Maybe your motivations were personal. But the outcome was justice. Justice that I only pursued because I wanted to hurt her. Does that make the justice less valid?
I did not have an answer.
3 months after the second anniversary, I made a decision. I contacted a lawyer and had official cease and desist letters sent to my parents and Vanessa. No contact through any means directly or through intermediaries for any reason. Violation would result in legal action. It felt final. The last door closing on a relationship that had been dying my whole life.
I also made another decision. I started volunteering with a pediatric cancer support organization. Working with families who were navigating the same nightmare I had survived. I helped them understand medical jargon, navigate hospital bureaucracy, find resources they did not know existed.
It was hard. Every child I met reminded me of grace. Every desperate parent reflected my own past desperation, but it also felt meaningful in a way revenge never had.
One evening, I sat with a mother whose 5-year-old son was in endstage leukemia. She was young, maybe 25, and completely overwhelmed.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered. “How do I watch my child die?”
“You just do it,” I said. “One moment at a time. You be there. You hold his hand. You tell him you love him. You make every second count.”
“What comes after? How do you survive it?”
I thought about grace, about the past 2 years, about everything I had done and everything I had lost.
“You survive by choosing to. Every day you wake up and choose to keep breathing. Some days that’s all you can do. Other days you can do more. But it starts with the choice.”
“Does it get easier?”
“No. It gets different. The grief changes shape. The pain becomes familiar instead of shocking. You learn to carry it. But easier? No.”
She cried then and I held her. This stranger who was living my nightmare all over again.
When I left that evening, I felt something shift inside me. Not healing exactly, but maybe the first whisper of purpose beyond pain.
The months continued. Vanessa remained in prison. Her appeals denied. My parents stayed in Oklahoma, aging and isolated. I heard through the family grapevine that they had tried reaching out to other relatives, attempting to explain their side of the story, but found little sympathy. The court of public opinion had ruled against them permanently.
I learned that Vanessa’s new house had been sold to cover her restitution payments, that my parents had declared bankruptcy, that the weight of their choices had crushed them as thoroughly as I had intended.
