May 20th was the day that Taylor got the call he dreaded. He had been hanging on for months waiting on a girl who had been sent away and was emotionally abused by her parents. They didn’t like taylor and I think it was only cuz of the house I lived in (a fixer upper) and that I was so young. They were judgmental and started stalking and terrorizing him 5 months before and shipped their daughter off to another county. They slapped us with no contact orders which the girl was trying to break by emailing him constantly with pleading and later, suicide threats she was posting on myspace.

Long story short, he was upset for months and we were due to go to court that fateful day, May 21st to defend another no contact order. My son was totally following along and not contacting her as they wanted. I wanted him to date a bit and forget about her ass and I think he did a bit more of that than I realize. He was always home but he was always “saving someone” on the computer too. Anyway, the fat father of the girlfriend had a doc appt and wanted to cancel the court date. My lawyer negotiated with a letter and their lawyer never would accept or respond so we went…. along with another deal I’ll someday explain later….

So hes upset as pure hell and all I can do is convince him that it will pass in a few days… he had an underlying depression due to mostly his dad slowly ending contact with him by phone or anything. He lived 4 hours away!

Anyway, so as long as I’m hearing the phone ring and I know he’s downstairs in his room answering, I knew he was talking to friends and getting the support he needed. He had learned the importance of that through counseling off and on for years and I still am so proud of him for reaching out by simply calling a friend.

The bus comes the next day at about 3 pm….. I was at the courthouse between 9 am and noon…. he asked me the night before like 3 times what time I was going and how long I’d be gone. I told him 9-12 or so…. Well I didn’t know he was planning on being dead in that timeframe!!!!

I start calling friends the moment I realized he didn’t get off the school bus. One friend said he hadn’t been to school!!!! I’m thinking at this point that he took a bus and went down to beg the girl to come back to him or some crap like that… but he NEVER would have NOT checked in with me. I decided to wait till after we fed our 8 and 9 year old kids. We picked up some movies right after pizza because we figured that we would be sitting at our home with sheriffs doing missing person reports all night.

Something was eating at me though. My mother called while we were having pizza and was feeling the same way I did. She said she and my dad were gonna come to my home and search the rest of the house but she said she just couldn’t. I told her I knew and I started to cry. I text messaged a friend on the way home and told her that I thought this might end up being the worst day of my life because this was so unlike him and he was more upset the night before than I had ever seen him in his life.

We pull into the driveway and me and I told my boyfriend how one of the friends I had talked to told her not to worry that when he gets upset he goes down to the water… I live on the water so this would be my backyard basically. We agreed that HE would search the downstairs and I would search by the water once we cancelled out the idea of finding him.

I stand at the top of the stairs anticipating… freaking out inside… listening to shower doors open and shut, etc etc…. The kids are upstairs being hyper and playing. My boyfriend, Doug, says everything looks ok. So I trot downstairs relieved and go into his room to look and see if he left me a note that he was going out of town or whatever the case may have been. Well, while I was in his room I heard Doug say “Taylor”…. then “TAYLOR”…. THEN EVEN LOUDER, “TAYLOR!”…. I came out of the room all happy because I thought that he found him outside watering his carrots or hanging at the beach or something.

I come out of Taylors room and meet Doug face to face in the doorway of the “basement” storage “music” room…. We had drum sets and some guitars in there plus a bunch of stuff we hadn’t put away yet since we only lived there for 3 months. Doug had a look of horror on his face and his eyes were huge and his skin was pale… he said “Baby, it’s bad… it’s really bad”. I busted into the room to find my son in fetal position face first on the ground with his head right next to the base drum. He was wearing shorts and you could see that the blood had settled into his lower extremeties at whatever point his heart had stopped. I knew he was dead before I felt him.

I was in total shock. I silently screamed and nothing would come out. I was in total disbelief… We frantically got me on the phone with 911 and Doug got his mother to come out immediately to get the kids. They were told that we found Taylor and he was hurt but we didn’t know how bad. I sat with him wailing into 911 and all alone with him. I was totally out of body. I had no idea.. but I did.. but I didn’t. How could my son hurt so bad to have done this to himself over some dumb bitch???? I was removed from the room once the sheriffs and coroners got there…

Somehow my parents got a call from Doug in all this and I just remember no tears coming out until my dad came down the stairs. I could hardly breathe and I turned a chair towards the wall just outside the room where they were in there taking pics and all that. My dad came in and hugged me and we sobbed in hysterics…. My son was DEAD!!!! Holy shit my son is dead!!

They made me go upstairs where my mother, my father, my brother, and boyfriend were along with 2 support police, a few sheriffs, the coroner, and fire dept people etc were all over my house. I remember sitting on the couch while the coroner asked me his name, birthdate, and I don’t remember what else and I was in total shock thinking I was watching a horror movie and I was thinking “That poor woman just found her son dead”…. I still do that from time to time. I disassociate… I was told that I could say goodbye once they were done “straightening his body out” and I should leave to upstairs cuz of the noise it would make. I couldn’t look at him in a body bag. I had seen enough.

He had hung himself from the rafters with some clothesline tied to a wire. I never saw the rope though. I don’t think my brain could process it cuz I just looked at the sheriff pics last week for the first time and I never saw a rope! My mind must not have been able to process anymore than the fact he was dead… “riggered” and stiff… He had wrote his suicide note at 10:45 am and ended the note at 10:59 am… I got home at noon and worked on the computer all afternoon with my dead son in the house and no idea!

It’s hard to write this cuz it takes me right there…. but we never think our babies hurt THAT bad… he couldn’t possibly be so bad that he couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel… well he saw the light at the end of the tunnel alright… to a place where I can never reach him again.

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