Fight
By Doug Forbes
Elena and I have not fought at all since Roxie drowned. We have been inseparable.
Until today.
A subcontractor recently attempted to steal money from us. He was referred by Elena’s colleague. This sub asked that he be paid in full, although he had three items yet to complete. He had no intention of righting wrongs. And until he was cornered, he never felt it necessary to explain himself, or at the very least, apologize and make amends.
Roxie’s brutal, wholly preventable death puts the concept of trust in a wholly different light. Trust during agony is like an unyielding fog. You see faint outlines of the world you think you know. But you can no longer trust that the fog will lift and the world will reveal itself as you thought.
The Di Massa family — owners of Summerkids camp — waged an irrefutable, wholesale assault on trust. And truth. And in doing so, they endangered hundreds of other children, they aggressively dispatched a battalion of lies about Roxie’s health and the reasons for her death. They misled hundreds if not thousands of parents in order to protect their reputation, their assets. And they live on as if this is passable. They drown Elena and me a little more every day. They know it. And they simply do not care one way or another.
But the awful truth about them will indeed come to light in the very near future, largely because we so desperately want to remove children from harm’s way…and because indisputable facts are on our side. This is critically important in our mission to use teachable moments — no matter how traumatizing — so that we can eliminate preventable drowning.
When someone preys upon you in your darkest hour, it only adds to the chaos already churning and burning throughout your entire being.
I finally had a very heated moment over the phone with the sub who essentially stole from us. I demanded our money be returned. He made unfathomable excuses. Elena intervened a week later. She gave him another chance.
Hence, our fight.
Elena and I are neither right nor wrong. We are in agony. We wrestle with so many whys. And we are desperate to return home after renting a house for a year — a rental where our daughter spent her final minutes and where we are located only five houses from her beloved public school. Every day, the resonant voices of children on the playground remind us how they grow up so fast and how Roxie is forever stuck in time.
Roxie’s room has barely budged since her death. We have donated or returned a smattering of toys and books. But her clothes remain in their drawers, her sheets remain on her bed, her presence remains in every square inch—ghostly, overwhelming.
This house feels like a coffin.
Trusting people to do the right thing should not be in question. But it is. And while a myriad of community members have rallied around us, for which we are eternally grateful, we must still watch others engineer breathtaking, bewildering, beyond hurtful breaches in trust and truth.
Adults must believe that trust and truth and goodness and plain old love are our most precious commodities. Otherwise, our fight for our children has no chance of triumphing.