Jenn is a beautiful human being, inside and out. Her tale of love and loss is tragic and redemptive; shocking, yet told with poise and pure heart.

This is the final installment of Jenn’s incredible story. Her message to the public is simple and profound, and her courage is nothing short of admirable.

Settle in and reflect. Share Jenn’s wisdom with others.

Thank you to The While Whales for the music for this piece.

NOTE: You’ll want to check out Part One and Part Two of Jenn’s story before moving forward 😉

Jenn:

Our wedding was planned for April 11, 2008 and then the accident was four months before our wedding.

This is the part where I’m probably going to cry a lot.

We were both really busy. We had both been working a lot. But we realized that we were spending so much time apart from each other and neither one of us was truly happy because we were happiest when we were together.

We decided that November 24^th was going to be our day together. And then I had an opportunity to pick up hours at work and I almost said yes, but I had a very strong feeling that I should say no. And I just had kind of a feeling that he needed to stay with me that night.

And I asked him to stay over. He said that, no, he and his brother were going to be going to the gun range with his dad the next morning before his brother went back to college. And so I understood, and I said okay but I couldn’t shake that feeling. And so I asked him again, “Will you just consider staying?” He still was pretty adamant that no, he had to go home.

So then when we said goodbye, the kiss felt different when he kissed me goodbye. It felt really different. It’s weird for me to say this, and I get weird looks when I say this to people, but it felt like a real goodbye-forever-kiss. And then when he walked to the door and he turned around and waved at me it felt like a little voice said in my head, “Take a really good look. This is the last time you’re going to see him.”

It’s something I struggled with a long time that why didn’t I try harder to make him stay?

Our ritual is he always calls me when he goes home and he always calls me when he’s at home. I always call him when I’m leave his house and I make it home safely. We were terrified of losing each other.

So he called me when he got home that night but he sounded different. He sounded weird. I didn’t feel right after we hung up, something didn’t feel right to me at all. So I waited about twenty minutes and then I called him back. And I just told him, “I need to know that you’re okay, that everything is okay because something just doesn’t feel right. Just promise me you’re going to be safe, something’s not right. Just promise you’re going to be okay and you’re going to be safe.”

And he kind of chuckled a little and he’s like, “I promise, Jenn, I promise. Everything’s just fine, it’s fine. We’re fine.” He said, “Okay, and I love you.”

“I love you, too. So much.”

And then we hung up and that was our last phone conversation.

I’m very glad that I called him back because at least I knew that he was okay. Otherwise I would’ve been wondering this whole time. He loved me, and I loved him. He knew that. So we were able to have that last conversation with each other.

I went to bed. My mom came down and woke me up. And she was telling me that I need to get up and I need to come upstairs. And I just kind of brushed her off like, “Whatever, mom, whatever,” and I went back to sleep. And she came and woke me up again and said, “Jenn, you really need to get upstairs. We have some bad news.”

So I was kind of half awake, half asleep. She was really irritating me because she would not just leave me alone. And finally I said, “Mom, just tell me! Why do I have to get out of bed and go upstairs? Just tell me. Whatever it is, just tell me!”

And she kept insisting that I had to go upstairs but finally she said, “Jenn, Richard’s dead Jenn.”

And I just jumped out of bed and the first thing I grabbed was my phone because I’m thinking, I’m going to call Richard! Because that was my first reaction whenever something bad happened, I’m calling Richard.

So, as I’m walking upstairs I’m thinking, this is a really mean joke that they are playing on me. And then as I walk up the stairs I see a police officer standing in the kitchen and my first thought was, oh look they got someone to dress up as a police officer. They’re really going far with this joke. This is just ridiculous.

And then the police officer just kind of looked at me and kind of held his hands out to me a little bit and just said, “I am so sorry.” And at that point it hit me that this was not a joke. I just looked at the police officer and collapsed on the floor.

And then I looked up at him and I said, “He’s not all dead, is he? He’s just a little bit dead. If he’s just a little bit dead you can do something, can’t you? He’s not all dead?”

[pauses]

I just didn’t want to think that he was really completely gone and that was it.

[pauses]

I don’t remember really very much of what happened after that. Halfway down the stairs I remembered my manners and I turned around to the police officer and I said, “Well, thank you for coming out here and telling me.”

I decided that I wanted to go to the hospital. I didn’t want it to be real so bad. I just felt that if I could get there there’d be something I could do.

I remember a lot of sitting in a waiting room. I remember his mom coming up and hugging me. I wanted to see his body. It didn’t seem real until I saw him. There was a lot of waiting around until he was ready to be seen because they had to clean him up.

They had him covered in a sheet except for his arm and his head. The rest of his body was just too badly damaged to be seen. I could tell that his jaw had been broken. I could tell that there was some trauma. But it still looked like him, but at the same time it didn’t look like him because the essence that made him who he was wasn’t there anymore. It was just a body, it wasn’t Richard anymore. And that’s when it really hit home to me that he was really gone.

As I was leaving they surprised me with a paper saying that I was the one that was identifying his body. And I wasn’t expecting that at all. And I was actually kind of angry that they wanted me to do that. How could I identify him? That wasn’t him! It was, but it wasn’t.

It was truly and awful feeling having to sign that paper, a very different feeling from how when you sign the marriage license. And instead I was signing the identification of his body. And that’s actually what was going through my head when I signed that, that this is so wrong. This is not the document we’re supposed to be signing. His signature is supposed to be right there, too.

The worst day of my life. Ever.

Somehow his brother lost control of the car when he was driving and they ran off the road and they hit the one and only tree in the entire landscape, basically. Shortly after the accident I went there with Lucas and we saw the tire tracks and we saw the impact in the tree. I found Richard’s hat that he had been wearing that night on the ground.

His brother is still alive. He does have extensive brain damage. His parents and I are really close now. I took their last name as part of my middle name. It was important for me to do that because I really needed his family to know that it’s not the same, but I’m still here.

The kind of love that Richard and I experienced is a love that not many people experience in a lifetime, and I was lucky enough to experience that.

I did find archery a couple of years ago and it’s therapeutic. You can just kind of disappear into your own little world where all that matters is you and the target, and the bow and the arrow.

The days following Richard’s death were very dark, very depressing days. I truly did not see how I was going to live without him. So I am, not glad, but at least he doesn’t have to experience this pain.

I actually did try to commit suicide. I had everything all planned out, I had a letter written with instructions on where to put my body, how to do everything, what I was supposed to be wearing and then I overdosed on my sleeping medicine.

The amount that I took should have killed me. And I tried it twice. And both times I woke up totally fine the next day.

Shortly after that I had a dream, a very, very, very vivid dream. In that dream I was walking along that path that Richard and I would walk together and he was with me. And in my dream he had come back to life. And I couldn’t understand why he came back to life when there was nothing but pain and heartache in life. Why didn’t he stay dead where he could be free from all of that?

He said that he came back because he needed to spend the rest of my life with me. I needed to live the rest of my life. That was the biggest, biggest message that just really seemed to slam itself into my head. I had things I needed to live for.

Don’t take life for granted and don’t take the people in your life for granted. I so strongly believe that if you’re not happy with someone, let them go. If you are happy with them and they’re making you upset, talk to them about it. Don’t just give up on someone.

Last message that I want people to take is to people going through hard times: this is really going to make you so much stronger. You’re going to learn so much from this. You’re really not going to have to feel this kind of pain again. I really believe that. You’ll feel other pain, but you’ll be able to handle it better because you’ve known that you’ve been able to get through something like this.

Everyone has a purpose. The life that you have, you are so lucky to have it. So use it.