There was a line.
I stood in front of an older man wearing a faded Florida Gators T-shirt. A Hispanic couple, murmuring in Spanish, stood behind me while looking over their passports.
Visitation started at 9:00 a.m., and I planned my arrival time to coincide. The night before, Andy and I had managed to attend a Holy Thursday service—the only Easter-related service we could make. Ann was shot on Palm Sunday, and our struggles seemed to be growing, unfolding, and swelling along with the story of Christ’s Passion. By this time on the morning of Good Friday—the actual Good Friday—Christ had just spent the night in prison. As I stood there in the Leon County jail, nervously wondering what awaited me inside, I could easily imagine the Messiah in his cell. Stone. Dark. Alone. Christ’s imprisonment felt real to me for the first time.
The man in the Florida Gators T-shirt moved ahead in line, so I shuffled forward as well. I wondered if Christ had visitors. His disciples may have tried to be with him, but the men surely left. Were the women, so culturally insignificant, allowed to stay? Did someone tend to Christ before his death?
I pushed these thoughts out of my mind. To my left, about a dozen people sat in plastic chairs, while a television screen up in the corner flickered the latest news. Apparently they were waiting because the jail was divided into pods. Only so many visitors were allowed in each pod during a certain time period. A man stuck some coins into a vending machine to get a soda, a child in a chair ate chips, and everyone else mindlessly watched the screen. On my right, another room had a row of chairs facing each of two walls. In front of each chair was a television monitor. Several people talked with prisoners on the screen. Apparently, some visitors could go inside the prison and see the prisoner through the thick glass, but others could only teleconference over the screen. I wanted to get as close to Conor as possible.
A hallway, maybe about fifteen feet wide, yawned before me. On one side of it, visitors placed their belongings in a plastic basket before walking through the metal detector.
“They will only allow you to have your car key and driver’s license,” Julie had warned me. “Everything else you should leave in the car, or you can use a locker in the waiting room.” My car would do fine.
In the middle, a woman sat at a desk that came up high, all the way to my chest. It was rounded at the front and went back into the hallway, making a long horseshoe.
“Next,” she said, nodding toward me.
“I’m here to see Conor McBride,” I said. I handed her my driver’s license as I’d seen the man in the Gators T-shirt do earlier. Then I took a deep breath.
She tapped my name into the computer, but then sat up in her chair. Her eyes darted from the screen to my driver’s license, back to the screen, and then squarely at me.
“Are you the victim’s mother?”
“I am,” I said, my stomach churning.
“Step over here for a minute,” she instructed. It was neither kind nor harsh, but I could tell by her tone that I was not her typical visitor. I understood her reticence. Being there felt unnatural for me too. Almost otherworldly. “I need to call my supervisor,” she said.
I stood there for what felt like an hour, though it was probably about two minutes. Eventually, a short woman dressed in a Leon County Sheriff’s uniform approached with my driver’s license in her hand. She was frowning.
“Kate Grosmaire?”
I nodded.
“You’re here to see the man who shot your daughter?”
“Yes.”
She paused, the moment full of unspoken protestations.
“Well, you’re on his list and you have your ID with you,” she said, “so I’m going to let you go up.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“But let me warn you,” she said, eyeing me seriously. “I don’t want you pounding on the glass.”
“I’m not here to pound on the glass,” I said.
She led me to a wall where they snapped a photo of me, printed it out on a sticker, and wrote a time on it—half an hour from the moment it came out of the printer. “This tells you when you’re supposed to be back,” she said. “Don’t be late, or else the prisoner’s visitation privileges will be suspended for the rest of the month.”
She handed me a badge with a pod number and directions to Conor’s pod. I had exactly thirty minutes—including the time it took me to walk up to the pod and back through the labyrinth of hallways. The corridor’s glass windows let in the morning sun, which made the un-air-conditioned hallways warm and suffocating. The concrete floor and the cinderblock walls reverberated with a harsh echo upon every step.
At the end of the hall, I came to a small entryway next to a bank of elevators. I pressed the number printed on my badge and noticed Conor’s pod was designated as a medical pod. For a moment, I wondered why he’d be there, until I remembered. Michael had told us he was under suicide watch. I walked down another cinderblock hallway and noticed a room through a big glass window. Inside, a couple of officers, sitting in front of a row of screens, monitored everything going on in the pods. They opened the heavy metal door, which was layered with drips of hard, brown paint, and I walked into a room with an intercom.
“I’m here to see Conor McBride,” I said into the little box.
“One moment,” a voice from the other side said.
I couldn’t believe the inefficiency of this system. Not only did I have to spend precious visitation minutes walking to the pod; but also the officers didn’t even call him until this moment. I looked around the room, trying not to think about the ticking clock. The room was divided into four areas—each with a plastic bucket chair with metal legs in front of a plexiglass partition. Miniature walls between each visiting area gave one the impression of privacy, though the chairs were very close together, and—presumably—the officers in the other room were observing every movement and recording every word. I’m sure they’d been warned: Watch this one. She’s the victim’s mom. On the right-hand side in each area was a phone.
“I want you to know . . .” I whispered to myself. I had prepared a speech for Conor, one I hoped to have the composure to deliver.
I was on the second floor, and from one angle in the pod, I could see down to the first floor. There was an area with chairs and a sofa facing a television. A cafeteria table sat in front of another glass wall, which had a small recreational room behind it. A man was shooting hoops alone at a basketball goal. To the far left, a door led to a grassy area. To my right was a row of metal doors with small glass windows. Cells.
Against the backdrop of the sun pouring in through the glass wall, I could see the outline of a man coming toward me. I could only really see his silhouette, but I’d know Conor anywhere. He’d had some muscle damage in his legs when he was young, which made him sort of swing one of his legs. As he got closer, I noticed he was wearing a bluish-gray jail uniform. When Andy visited weeks later, he told me he had expected a monster to walk up. Conor would have raggedy teeth, long fingernails, and be drooling—because only a monster could do something this terrible. Unlike Andy, I wasn’t expecting some scary apparition. I expected someone who’d made a terrible mistake. That’s just what I got.
He sat down on the other side of the glass. When our eyes met, his eyes immediately filled with tears. So did mine. He picked up the phone. I picked up the phone.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, beginning to sob. “I’m so, so, so sorry.”
“I know,” I said, putting my hand up to the glass in my desire to connect with him in some way. It must’ve seemed so corny, since this dramatically futile gesture happens in every fictional jail-visitation scene. Conor instinctively reached out, placing his hand on the other side of the glass. Even as our hands rested just millimeters away from each other, I realized it didn’t count. The glass was smooth and transparent, but it was primarily a divider. We made an effort to reach each other, but we couldn’t connect in any meaningful way.
“How is Ann?” he asked.
“She’s holding her own,” I said.
Holding her own was the phrase I’d chosen—an ambiguous expression that could apply to a boxer in a ring, a toddler with the flu, or a politician in a hotly contested race. I figured it could also apply to a teenager who would soon be disconnected from her life support. But I didn’t tell Conor that.
The guards in the monitoring room were probably sitting on the edge of their chairs, watching with bated breath, and wondering, What is she gonna say to him? I got the feeling that they were waiting for me to lose it, to start screaming and pounding on the glass. They may have assumed they’d need to pull me out of the room. As I looked at Conor, my rehearsed speech evaporated from my memory, so I began with the one thing I knew I was supposed to convey.
“Mr. Grosmaire wants me to tell you he loves you and he forgives you,” I said. Conor’s eyes widened a bit. Could he trust what he was hearing? Of course, Andy had it easy. He’d expressed his sentiment to me at home. He didn’t have to look Conor in the eye and form the words.
“Conor,” I began. I definitely wanted to forgive him, but I just didn’t know—in the moment—if my body would cooperate. “You know I love you.” At the word love, my voice broke. By this time, tears were falling down my cheeks. I cleared my throat. “And I forgive you.”
I did it, I thought with much satisfaction. God’s presence empowered me to say what I needed to say, what I wanted to say. When the words actually made it out of my mouth, Conor dropped his head, folded over into himself, and wept.
“I forgive you.” Saying that sentence created a bigger reality into which I could step. Up until this point, I’d felt it. I’d thought it. But now, having said it out loud, I knew it was true. In that moment, I put on forgiveness, and it was even more a part of me than when I’d walked into the jail.
Shortly after I told Conor that Andy and I both forgave him, a woman came in and sat down at one of the other phones. When her significant other arrived, I expected it might be awkward to overhear a loving conversation that would’ve been private in an ideal circumstance.
Of course, this was not an ideal circumstance.
When her boyfriend showed up, she let him have it.
“I can’t believe you got arrested!” she shrieked. “What did you think you were doing?”
He hung his head, without saying a word.
“We have bills to pay! We need money!” she yelled. “How are we going to pay these bills? How am I supposed to buy groceries?”
Again, no response.
“You’re sitting in here, and I’m out here. What am I supposed to do?”
Conor and I continued to talk, but I wasn’t allowed to ask for details of the day Ann was shot. Not only was it difficult to talk through the glass; now this woman’s screams drowned out whatever awkward conversation we conjured. Even though the entire Leon County Sheriff’s office had been eavesdropping on our conversation, there was just something intrusive about having others in that room with us. I knew, and he knew, that we’d had our moment.
Because we couldn’t talk, Conor and I just looked at each other as we listened to her screed. Finally, in the absurdity of the moment, we couldn’t help it. We both started laughing. Our intimate spiritual experience of forgiveness and love had been interrupted by the most angry, profanity-laced tirade imaginable.
Suddenly, it all seemed so very awkward. Laughing when our reality was miles away from funny.
“I better get back downstairs. Good-bye, Conor,” I said. I hung up the phone, turned, and walked out of the room.
I arrived at the hospital at nearly eleven o’clock, where a few friends had gathered. I’d sent out word that we’d be taking Ann off life support, so people—out of respect—gave us our privacy.
The nurse came into the waiting room and went over the procedure with us again. “Ann will be removed from the ventilator, then we’ll transfer her to the hospice floor,” she said. “There’s room for family there, room to stretch out.”
“Then what happens?” Andy asked.
“Then, you wait.”
“How long?”
“It’s hard to know. Hours, days? We can’t be sure,” she said.
Hours, days . . .
I remembered when they briefly had removed her from the vent a few days before. It had been such a struggle for her to draw a breath. Her whole upper body heaved over and over in a laborious effort to live. That test had only lasted a minute. Now it might be hours, days? How were we supposed to sit with her and watch that struggle? Yet I knew I would be by her side until the last, whatever it took.
It was April 2. Sarah’s birthday was April 4, and I didn’t want Ann to die on her sister’s birthday. Sarah and Allyson were there, along with Janis, Kathleen, and Ann’s best friend Khadijah. Father Mike, Father Chris, and Father Will were once again all there.
“May I go in to say good-bye?” Khadijah asked.
“Of course,” I said.
We stayed in the small waiting room, which had grown quiet now. The silence was interrupted by a gentle knock on the door—the music minister for the hospital. She was a young woman, with a guitar slung over her shoulder and a little notepad.
“Do you mind?” she asked, motioning to a chair. “I thought I might come by and play songs while you’re in the hospice room.” I looked at her—she couldn’t have been more than thirty years old. But there she was, confident, caring, and offering up her God-given talent to simply help us in our moment of grief.
“Are there any specific songs that you would like for me to play?”
“Do you happen to know ‘Angel Band’?”
She bit her lip. “Sorry,” she said, jotting down the name of the song in her notebook. Though O Brother, Where Art Thou? was a popular movie at the time, most people wouldn’t necessarily know that song off the top of their head. I, however, knew it backward and forward because I played the soundtrack frequently in the car. Since it was Ann’s favorite hymn, she would put that song on repeat as I drove her to school in the mornings.
Khadijah was gone for a long time. Her father had died just a few years before, and she had struggled with her grief. Since Ann and Khadijah had the same classes at school that semester, Ann helped her with all her homework assignments. Her assistance allowed Khadijah to keep up with her academics while her personal life was so challenging. After she came back to the waiting room, Sarah and Allyson went in for their time by themselves with their sister. We don’t know what they talked about, but when we went into the room afterward, Ann had a dollar bill tucked into her hand. Payment of an old debt? The ferryman’s fee?
As we waited for a hospice room to become available, I became more anxious. Then, suddenly, it was time to remove Ann from the ventilator.
Father Mike had to return to Good Shepherd. On Good Friday many Catholic churches hold a stations service at three o’clock, the hour that Christ died. The stations of the cross recount his final Passion, from “Jesus is condemned to death” to “Jesus is laid in the tomb.” It is a solemn reminder of his sacrifice for us.
Slowly we filed into Ann’s room to say bedside prayers: Father Chris and Father Will, her aunts Teresa and Patti, her grandmother, Andy, and me. The room didn’t seem crowded, as we all just took a place at her bedside. I stood on her left side and held her uninjured left hand. One of the nurses was there as well as the respiratory therapist.
When the palliative care doctor arrived, the respiratory therapist walked over to the ventilator. It was a large machine with a number of flashing buttons and digital readouts. Over the week, I had learned about the machines and how to interpret some of the numbers. Her heart rate; her pulse ox, which measured how much oxygen her lungs were able to send into her blood; and her respirations, carefully controlled by the ventilator. I had learned to recognize what the nurses had called “riding the vent”—those times when the machine was doing all the work—and the other times, when Ann’s body was drawing in air on its own. A yellow line indicated the sharp intake of a breath and the slow release of another, then another. A rhythmic whooshing was constantly in the background.
The respiratory therapist turned off the machine. The indicator lights all went out, and the ventilator deflated and remained still at the bottom of its chamber. No click signifying a new breath. Only silence and a dark screen. I was shocked by how immediate and complete it was. On television there’s a beep-beep-beep indicating a heartbeat and a digital display that slowly counts down the end of life into a flat line. But in real life, there was no visual sign, no auditory signal. No line jumping up and down on the screen, one heartbeat slowly distancing itself from the next.
No, just silence.
Quickly, silently, professionally, the therapist removed the tape attaching the ventilator tube to Ann’s face, and in one swift motion she pulled the tube out and placed it out of sight. With no sound, it was if the room was frozen. Everyone stood completely still. The spell was broken by the nurse, who turned to Father Will and said, “Isn’t there something you want to do? If so, you need to do it now.”
It slowly sank in. Ann was not heaving as she did with her breathing test before. Her breaths were shallow, barely even noticeable. Father Will walked from the foot of the bed to stand next to me, taking the space left vacant by the technician. He opened his Bible to 1 Kings, chapter 19, and read about the prophet Elijah, who begged God to take his life. He was hiding from his enemies in a desert under a broom tree.
“He came to a broom bush,” read Father Will, “sat down under it and prayed that he might die. ‘I have had enough, LORD,’ he said. ‘Take my life’ ” (v. 4).
Father Will then read to us that Elijah fell asleep. When he awoke, an angel touched him. “Get up and eat,” the angel said, “for the journey is too much for you” (v. 7).
After Father Will read the words of the angel, he took a small medicine bottle with a dropper out of his jacket pocket. Part of the last rites administered to the dying is one last Communion, or the viaticum, which means “strength for the journey.”
Ann’s mouth was slightly open. When Father Will leaned over and placed a few drops on her tongue, her tongue seemed to reach out to receive it. We all looked at one another with wide eyes, so surprised at the purposeful movement.
I rearranged her hand in mine so I could feel her pulse. It wasn’t strong, but it was steady. I looked at her face. She looked so peaceful, I could have easily imagined she was sleeping in some Saturday morning before heading off to work. But all her work was done. The rhythmic beating of her pulse began to slow.
This was it.
Now.
We won’t have to move her, I thought. It won’t be prolonged. I felt her pulse weaken and slow. Dr. Sheedy, the palliative doctor, took Father Will’s spot and placed his stethoscope over Ann’s heart. Her pulse grew faint. I could feel her hand begin to cool in mine. Her face was pale. Dr. Sheedy glanced up at the clock.
“Three twenty-five p.m.,” he said, and the nurse made a note of the time.
After announcing the time of death, Dr. Sheedy stepped away.
“May I hold her?” Andy asked through his tears. He came around to where the doctor had been standing and practically climbed into the hospital bed. He picked her up, drew her into his chest, and sobbed.
In that moment the song came to me. We all stood silently, as Andy held her and cried.
How could I sing at a time like this? Since Sunday night, I knew this moment was coming . . . that it was coming no matter what. It was right to let her go. It was right to send her off with a song, her favorite gospel song.
The room had become so quiet, so silent. It begged for something to fill the silence.
Everyone in the room had a different experience of loss and grief. My sister Patti says that she saw angels come and carry Ann’s soul up to heaven. I felt that my daughter was already gone, and just her body remained. Perhaps just a thread remained, because I know I saw that last purposeful movement to receive Communion. I guess we don’t really know what happens at the point of death, when the soul is liberated from the body that had housed it here on earth.
I just know at that moment, I was calm. It had been a chaotic, shocking week. Then, her death was all so very peaceful. And in that calmness, I sang.
“My latest sun is sinking fast . . .”
I sang the first verse and paused just a moment for the words of the second verse to come to me. When I finished, the last note hung in the air for a moment, followed by a brief silence.
“May I have a lock of her hair?” I asked the nurse.
“No,” she said sadly. “I’m so sorry, but Ann’s body is evidence.”
“Her hair?” I asked, fighting a tidal wave of emotion. “Her braid?” She nodded.
We left the Neuro ICU to tell those in the waiting room that Ann had died. When I returned to the room to collect her things—and to say good-bye one more time—the nurse came up to me and handed me a small cloth bag.
“Here,” she said. “It’s her braid. I’ll deal with the medical examiner if he has any questions.”
And just like that, Conor’s charge was changed to murder. In fact, the grand jury later charged him with murder in the first degree.