Desperado: You’ve Got to Let Somebody Love You

“You’ve got to let somebody love you, before it’s too late.”

If you close your eyes, I bet you can hear that famous lyric from the Eagles tune playing in your head. For all my daughter did to embrace that line, too late came too soon.

Today should be Rivena’s 27^th birthday. She died by suicide in January 2018.

Introducing Kindness Lives On

What you’ve started reading here is not about lamenting her loss. It’s about remembering her and trying to make something positive come out of her experience.

For those who have seen some of what I’ve written in the past, you’ll notice this is being published under a new web site. I originally began writing about Rivena’s story under the banner of “The Unlikely Advocate” (An Unlikely Advocate). It was my way to help her – if even by helping myself – as she went down the path of being true to herself as someone who was transgender. For me as her dad, it gave me an outlet to do what I knew how to do – fight for my kids. But as time passed after Rivena’s death, it became increasingly clear that she would have wanted us to remember so much more about her than the singular fact that she happened to be transgender. Hence, we bring you Kindness Lives On.

This site is intended to celebrate Rivena’s memory and the legacy of kindness she left behind. It is dedicated to the kind, compassionate, and thoughtful soul we were lucky enough to know during her 25 years with us.

Why Kindness?

Having a kind heart was probably the one quality Rivena embodied most during her life. Not wanting anyone to take notice was what made her kindness so hard to ignore. I’ve talked in the past about some of the things we knew about while she was still with us… from buying day-old donuts to share with the homeless people she encountered on her walks home from the grocery store to donating a sizable chunk of her limited income to charities or her thoughtful gift-giving (if you were ever the recipient of any her gifts, you know exactly what I’m talking about), Rivena’s willingness to give of herself was obvious to all of us who knew her.

What caught us particularly off-guard, however, was something we learned only after she had gone. About a month after hear death, I happened to pick up a call that came to her cell phone as it sat on my desk. On the other end was someone asking about a credit card payment for a donation that had been declined. Given that I was the one who had canceled the credit cards, I explained the situation and proceeded to ask what the payment was to have been for.

The answer I got brought me to tears… Rivena had been sponsoring a young boy in Ecuador through an organization called Children International. And she had been doing this for more than two years before she died – long before she had a job that paid much more than minimum wage. I vaguely remembered her saying something about a boy in South America about a year earlier but had no idea she was acting as a sponsor on her own. We have continued to sponsor Rivena’s child, and he and his mother have both since written letters of condolence and thanks for Rivena’s generosity.

So, it should come as no surprise that we see promoting kindness as one of the best ways we can think of to remember Rivena. She embodied it. She lived it. And in a very important way, she didn’t…

Finding meaning in lyrics

The song “Desperado” came to hold special meaning, first with Rivena and then with us as her family, while she was still very much alive. In the fall of 2017, she had been living in a residential treatment facility, getting ongoing treatment for depression and suicidal ideation. One of our greatest fears as parents of an adult in treatment was what would happen if Rivena suddenly decided she was done and no longer wanted to voluntarily remain in the program. As an adult, she had the ability at any point to sign herself out; in the mental health treatment vernacular, this is what’s known as an AMA… signing yourself out “Against Medical Advice.”

In my very first Unlikely Advocate blog, I discussed some of what did in fact come to pass when Rivena AMA’d from her treatment program. Sure enough, we got a call on a Sunday morning at home in Denver that Rivena had signed herself out earlier that morning in Utah and walked out the door with nothing but her coat. We found out as we inquired further that she had not bothered to retrieve her wallet or phone before leaving – not good signs for someone who had already made several attempts on her own life, and who only days earlier had expressed an interest in walking into the mountains to die by exposure.

We now know, partially from what Rivena told us after wandering back into the facility a day later, but mostly from what she wrote in her journal, exactly how her very cold night on a Utah mountainside went down. She wrote about how as the night brought shakes and growing discomfort, her body’s natural survival instinct kicked in. Shivering in the frigid darkness, she found something meaningful:

“I sat behind the rock formation, looked out at the stars and the lights of the valley, and felt a sense of peace and ephemeral beauty. I thought that even if I was unhappy with myself and my own identity, this was not a universe I wanted to leave.”  

As the turning point of her night, that moment began to propel her forward. She made her way back down the mountainside and into civilization, collapsed exhausted and hungry on the sidewalk outside a McDonald’s, and then fell asleep on a table inside once their doors opened. Waking up to the sunrise, she decided to move to the Starbucks next door, where while staring out the window and feeling – in her words – sadness and shame, “Desperado” began playing in the store.

The lyrics of the song hit her hard – something she explained to her mom and I through tears after being reunited later that morning. The concept that you’ve got to let somebody love you before it’s too late is so true. And even in her darkness, Rivena knew it. She wrote after the fact, “I felt love, and sadness that I had ignored that love.”

Hearing that song gave her the resolve to return to the facility and her treatment. With no money, no ID, and no phone, she allowed herself to be helped by a bus driver who agreed to take her back to her starting point without fare, writing later, “I felt love, humility, and connectedness for having been saved by the kindness of strangers.”

It doesn’t have to be too late

The great dichotomy with Rivena was her abundant kindness toward others, her recognition of kindness from others, and her simultaneous lack of kindness toward herself. Her journal is riddled with self-loathing and negative self-talk, to the point that my heart breaks a little more every time I read through her progression of thoughts during her final few months.

While I’m no expert, and certainly no therapist, a lack of self-compassion seems to be a fairly consistent character trait among those who battle severe depression. For me to simply say ‘love yourself’ would be profoundly naïve. But to say that letting somebody love you starts in some small way with loving yourself is absolutely true. And this is something that for many of us (myself included) takes practice.

What I’m asking for on this, Rivena’s 27^th birthday, is for anybody reading this to help one another. Let’s give each other permission and the grace to be good to ourselves. It’s OK to take a few minutes for yourself today. Minutes that don’t have to be directed to chasing kids around, that don’t have to be spent in meetings, that don’t have to be spent making yourself look a certain way. Spend just a little time on yourself, whatever that means to you. And allow yourself to feel good doing it. Let kindness start with you.

For Rivena’s birthday, do something kind for yourself. I promise, it’s what she would have wanted. And if you’re so inclined, include it in the comments below to allow others to celebrate with you. Let’s work together to prevent too late from coming too soon for anybody else.