For 19 months, I’ve lived with unanswered questions about Charlie’s death. Why was he found dead in a hotel room days after I was told by someone close with him that he was camping? Even after I expressed concerns about Charlie’s wellbeing, why did this same person file a missing person’s report without telling me or Harley, the mother of his children? They filed a missing person’s report on a Thursday night. Charlie’s body was found Friday morning in a Sacramento hotel room that this same person had been paying for. And why was his phone turned off within a week of his death? (Yes, the same person paid his phone bill and the phone was shut off while it was still being held by the police as evidence.) And the biggest unanswered question: Was his death accidental, intentional, or was someone there with him and then they left him?
Those are some heavy questions to live in a mother’s heart for nineteen months, and no one else seems to want to know the answers. Since Charlie had struggled with addiction it was too easy to just blame him. If your child died under the same conditions, wouldn’t you do whatever you could to find answers? And at the very least, try and get the phone unlocked to read his last text messages and potentially discover who gave him the fentanyl-laced drug? When his case was closed by the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department without any investigation, I was told they were too busy with other cases. These are all hard truths for a mother.
While I can’t give you the exact day for sure when he died, I can tell you that from July 25th until I got the call on July 29th, I felt like I was going crazy. I hardly slept and knew something wasn’t right. I knew the moment I was pregnant with Charlie in October 1994 and now I understand that my soul also knew that his spirit was leaving his body during the week of July 25th.
On a spiritual level, I can accept Charlie’s death. For ten years he told me that he believed he would die young. He also told me he had angels around him. And in the months before his death, he’d experienced a clarity about life and the chaos of his childhood and teenage years. He deserved better, more compassion and support, instead of betrayals and abuse. But he told me, “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Even before he died, Charlie seemed to be living between his physical time on earth and a spiritual world that I’ve only experienced with people as they were in hospice or end of life care. In those moments, a person whose body is dying may spend hours or days unconscious and then suddenly they wake up and speak about seeing a deceased family member, or angels, or God. It’s a moment of awakening before death. But for Charlie these moments of enlightenment weren't in his last hours or days, they were during the last year of his life as he was living between two worlds. One that held his pain, and another that healed him. One that held tough love, and another that held angels.
The morning I found out Charlie was dead, I was compelled to talk to Suzie Guillette, an astrologer, friend, and healer who has her own deep experiences with grief and death. During the call, before I knew he was dead, Suzie called Charlie an earth angel and we talked about his life purpose. Just as I finished with Suzie, I saw my ex-husband was on the line. He never calls and the minute I picked up, I knew what he was going to tell me.
Astrologers can give us a blueprint of our lives through reading a chart based on the day, time, and location we were born. Astrology has often helped me make sense of challenging times. Six months after Charlie’s death, I asked Suzie to look at Charlie’s chart and how it aligned with his death date (we went by what was estimated based on the condition of his body). Suzie had never met Charlie but she knew him through his chart. And even though ‘death date’ readings aren’t something that she normally offers, a few weeks later she sent a recorded reading that I listened to just before I offered Charlie’s ashes to the Ganges River in India. Her image of Charlie was of him sitting in a bathrobe with a lopsided crown on his head smiling and chilling out. Her description made me laugh. Charlie preferred bathrobes over any clothes since he was about five years old. The last gift I bought him before he died was a blue bathrobe we picked out together when we went shopping for his 27th birthday.
Suzie’s final insight was that Charlie’s death was a message, the way he died was a message. “The dude abides,” she said, and I could hear Charlie’s big laugh as she said it. It’s a line from The Big Lebowski, a movie where the main character ‘The Dude’ is a charming guy played by Jeff Bridges. The Dude constantly gets into all sorts of trouble and always talks his way out of it. He’s very Zen and very philosophical. He’s a slacker and also a deep thinker. He’s a big talker and a good listener. Charlie was all those things.
I recently found a text from Charlie sent to me on Sept 16, 2020. He wrote, “This is by far my favorite Alan Watts quote.” The quote doesn’t give me answers to all the hard questions I have around his death, but it does offer answers to his spiritual growth while he was alive.
Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. ~ Alan Watts
There was nothing normal about Charlie’s death and all the unanswered questions. And there was also nothing normal about Charlie’s life. All I can think to tell you now is, well, that was pretty great.
(I love and miss you, Charlie.)
Betsy, my heart is with you. I know Charlie is with you, and I think that the work you are doing to publicize the fetanyl crisis will help many others, and I feel that may have been Charlie’s mission in his lifetime. Sending love.
I share a love of bathrobes and that movie. Thank you again for your essays, in a period I feel stuck processing your fluidity and honesty make me hopeful.