From Here to the Great Unknown

When her mother’s assistant called at 5:30 on the morning of July 12, 2020, Riley immediately knew something was wrong. Her brother had shot himself. Before she could truly absorb the enormity of this tragic news, Riley and her husband were driving to wake Lisa. Riley knew the news would kill her mother; she “couldn’t imagine her living without [Ben]” (241). They left the twins with a nanny and rushed to the house. On the way, Riley called her father, who immediately caught a plane to LA. The house where Ben had died was already barricaded and surrounded by police cars. The officers wouldn’t let them into Ben’s room, so they waited in Lisa’s room, where Riley and her mother lay together on the floor. Finally, the police officers agreed to divert from protocol and let the family see Ben’s body. Riley describes his face as “perfectly intact” and “beautiful” (244). Her mother became hysterical, holding her son’s head and spreading blood everywhere. Riley was in shock as she watched the coroner’s van take her brother’s body away.

Danny moved into Lisa’s new house with Riley, her husband, and the twins. Lockdown for COVID-19 had recently begun, and the family was isolated in both their grief and fear of the new virus. Riley couldn’t speak for two weeks. She felt incredibly heavy and could do little more than lie down. Usually the “responsible one” in the family, she couldn’t do anything to plan her brother’s funeral and left all the arrangements to her parents.

Riley describes Ben as “an angel,” and everyone felt like his death had been “a colossal error.” Even though she was close with her brother, Riley learned several things about Ben in the aftermath of his death. She didn’t know, for example, that he could sing until she found a voice note on his phone. She also had no idea he had thoughts of self-harm. The only clue she found was a text to their mother two weeks before he died, where he told Lisa he might “have a mental health issue” (246). Riley was devastated by the reality that her brother had never had the opportunity to try and remedy his depression, and his family was consumed by “the myriad ways [his death] could have been avoided” (248).

To Riley’s surprise, her mother stayed sober after Ben’s death. Lisa wanted to “honor” her son by doing something to “help others,” but she was irrevocably “broken” by her loss. Lisa kept Ben’s body on dry ice in their house for two months after he died. Having this time with his body allowed her to process the loss and “parent” her son for a little while longer. When the family began to get the impression that the extended wake was “getting weird,” the funeral was finally scheduled. They said goodbye to Ben in a “beautiful” ceremony led by Deepak Chopra, but Riley found that she had to keep her eyes closed and “disassociate” to “bear” the pain of the day. His body was sent to Memphis to be buried at Graceland, and Riley slipped the yellow Nikes he’d loved from Japan into his coffin.

After the funeral, the family remained in a “Covid and grief pod” for six months, talking of nothing but Ben (254). Lisa was determined that the family “experience” their loss and led their “Ben-centric” period of mourning. Riley articulates a “tremendous empathy” toward her brother and feels a weight of responsibility for his death, as though she failed as an older sister. Although Ben’s death was a heartbreaking tragedy, it was also a “deeply transformative experience” in which Riley learned to “surrender” to her pain in order to “free [her]self from it” (255). It taught her “to hold joy and suffering and indifference and hope simultaneously” (256).

Lisa “chose to live the rest of her life in mourning,” but she also surprised her family with a new presence and will to live (157). She traveled to Hawaii, where she went snorkeling and zip-lining, reached out to old friends, and connected with other parents who had lost children. She wrote an op-ed on grief and considered starting a podcast. She “stopped wanting to die every day” and “became obsessed” with her new granddaughter when Riley’s daughter was born in August of 2022 (259). However, despite all these efforts, her family knew Lisa would “die of a broken heart” (260).

Lisa described her sadness as starting when her father passed away. Since then, her grief imposed a “permanently” “limited” view of the world—something that never goes away and changes who you are. She described herself as a passenger with her grief “driving” her. Sometimes, she felt as if there was nothing left for her in life, but then she remembered she must keep fighting for her three remaining children. Despite the determination to keep going, Lisa’s health began to deteriorate, but she was always reluctant to see a doctor.

In her interviews, Lisa hopes her autobiography will “help other people somehow” (265). She wants people to know how she persevered even though she is “not strong.” She says she kept her focus on her daughters and didn’t follow Ben into death, no matter how much she wanted to.