Today is a somber sort of day for me. Thirty years ago today, Richard Aaron Van Meer died. He was seventeen.
My husband and I first came to know Richard when he was fourteen, when we were both working at the state mental hospital. Richard was a patient on the youth unit, hospitalized because he was considered a danger to himself or others. Freckled, buck-toothed, with curly blond hair and a great smile, Richard was the survivor of an abusive and challenging childhood. He had had over three hundred suicide attempts, all of them calculated not to be serious enough that he couldn't be saved. One night he was locked down yet again for another violent incident. Patients had to have a one-to-one watch if they were in isolation, and my husband, a psych tech, spent the night sitting with him and talking.
At one point my husband asked Richard why he kept doing these things. Why didn't he try to behave so that he could get out of the hospital? Didn't he want to get out? Richard's reply brought him up short: "No. I don't have anywhere else to go."
My husband explored this with him, and Richard admitted he felt no one wanted him. To which my husband replied "We want you." He told Richard if he could become healthy enough to leave the hospital, he and I would take him into our home as part of our family.
From that night on, Richard had no more suicide attempts. He worked hard to control himself, buckle down, and dump his demons. He finally felt someone cared whether he lived or died. My husband gave him a key to our house as a token to remind him of his goal. We ran into some opposition from the hospital unit director, who said it was a conflict of interest for us to take Richard home (even though other staff had done the same with other patients), and ultimately, after some power struggles, my husband ended up moving to a different unit, and I quit and went to work at the police station. But we kept working with Richard and the state foster system. To get around obstacles, he was released to a different foster home and then transferred to our care, and at last we were able to bring him home. As I recall, the foster system housed him with us, but we weren't officially foster parents and received no financial support from the system. I wouldn't have wanted it anyway. To my mind, Richard was family, and he felt the same toward us. I still have a brief note he wrote to us, telling us he thought of us as his mom and dad. We looked into formally adopting him, but they wouldn't allow it because I was only six years older than he was. (Yes, I was a young bride!)
Richard was of a sunny disposition, despite his rough start in life, and we never had any problem with him. He listened to Alphaville and was at that awkward age when he wanted to appear to be an adult but still had stuffed animals on his bed. His only quirk was that he didn't like to eat white foods, like potatoes. We enrolled him in high school, bought his new school clothes, painted his room blue. We had a newborn at the time (Son #1), and Richard was tolerant and patient of the baby's crying and fussing.
To make a long story short, Richard lived with us for a long while without incident, and he managed to reconnect with his birth sister. When it came time for us to move to Canada, we offered to bring him with us, and after much debate he decided to remain behind and try to build a relationship with his sister to see if some part of his family could be salvaged.
A few months later, I received a call from a friend who was a nurse at the mental hospital. I remember my back against the wall of the kitchen, sliding down to sit on the floor, holding the phone, as she told me the news. Richard had ended up back in foster care, had pulled a gun on his foster father, gone to juvenile detention, and then ended up back in the mental hospital. Once there, he was back under the care of the antagonistic unit director we had been in conflict with earlier. Suicidal, Richard was placed by the psychiatrist on a one-to-one watch, meaning he couldn't be left alone for even a moment.
The unit director, however, ordered Richard's one-to-one staff member to a staff meeting, against doctor's orders, and Richard was left alone for twenty minutes. That was long enough for him to hang himself in his bedroom closet. I feel sure it was yet another attempt made with rescue in mind; he probably trusted that his one-to-one would be back shortly and would save him. He never meant to die; all of his earlier attempts had been cries for help and attention and not deliberate attempts to kill himself, and there's no reason to think this time was any different. The unit director knew Richard's history of attempts and surely must have been able to predict what would happen when he pulled the staff member away against orders. The official cause of death was suicide, but to my mind it was murder.
I had to tell my husband when he got home.
There was never an inquest. Richard had no family who was able (or maybe cared enough) to demand an investigation, and we had no legal standing to demand it because we weren't related. There are a lot of questions around it, and no repercussions happened for the unit director. Even as we were first grappling with our grief, though, I knew that I needed to be able at some point to let go and forgive, or I wouldn't be able to survive it. The unit director would have to deal with his own conscience and face God about it. Only he knew the truth of it. I had to find some way to move forward. I might not be able to forget it, but I could let go of the anger.
It has been a struggle. I've flip-flopped and squirmed and tried to get this jagged rock in my shoe to fit in some way that I could live with. I told myself Richard was too damaged, ultimately, to have been able to live a "normal" life. He would have struggled with mental health issues all his life. I told myself he was now at peace. I envisioned him hanging out with my late grandfather, being taken under his wing, not alone. I tried to console myself that at least, during Richard's short time with us, he got to experience a happy home and what a family felt like. I reminded myself that now I had a different perspective that could help me comfort others going through the same ordeal.
In the end, I'm not sure the consolation worked, but ultimately it boiled down to this thought: I had tried. I had given it my best. I couldn't control the outcome, but I made the best decisions I could at the time, and even though it didn't end up how I wanted, I could say that at least, when I saw a child hurting, I had done something. Maybe that's all we can say about anything, really.
Thirty years later, I feel a quiet sadness, and on the anniversary of his death, I find myself talking to Richard. Asking God to watch over him. Wishing things had gone differently.
One of the healing moments over the years was when we petitioned and received permission to have Richard sealed to us in the temple. In our religion, it is essentially like a posthumous adoption. In the eyes of God and the church, Richard is our son, the same as our other boys.
We have had other children come to stay with us over the years---another foster son, a Syrian refugee, a deaf homeless boy, the son of friends who just needed a break, various young renters. We've had our three boys, and now we have grandchildren. When we gather together, Richard is always there, hovering at the back of my mind, and when people ask how many kids I have, I say four.
