One mother’s healing heart
On the first Mother’s Day after her husband killed their two young children and then himself, several questions faced Zoey Mendoza: How do you survive a mother’s worst nightmare? How do you be a mother to kids you can no longer hug or kiss? How do you end
Mother’s Day 2011 came six months after Zoey’s husband picked up their kids early at day care, drove to his childhood home and shot each in the back of the head with his grandfather’s rifle.
In those days, Zoey could not sit still or stop crying. She could neither work nor eat. A friend followed her around the house, spoonfeeding her broth. Each night she and her mother slept in the same bed, the daughter afraid to be alone, the mother afraid to leave the daughter alone.
Today, Zoey Mendoza Zimmerman will observe Mother’s Day at the home here she shares with the man she married two years ago. She will get two flowers from her mother. And she will savor not just memories of Jada, who was 5 when she died, and Jordan, who was 3, but also what she describes as a continuing relationship with them.
Her epiphany: The bond between mother and child doesn’t have to be severed by death.
She proclaims this online almost every day, inspiring some of the millions of American women for whom the second Sunday in May is not about cards, flowers or breakfast in bed, but absence.
They are mothers who lost
“Mother’s Day is an acute reminder of what should be, yet what isn’t. There’s always a missing piece of the family.”
Joanne Cacciatore, Arizona State University expert on traumatic grief
children at Newtown and Columbine and Fallujah, in cancer wards and neonatal units, on prom night in a car wreck. Their numbers swell each year with the deaths of about 120,000 American children younger than 18.
For such women, “Mother’s Day is an acute reminder of what should be, yet what isn’t. There’s always a missing piece of the family,” says Joanne Cacciatore, an Arizona State University expert on traumatic grief.
Worse, Mother’s Day often brings pressure on the bereaved to “heal and move on,” she says. “Other people want us to be who we were before. It’s painful for them to witness our pain.” For Zoey, the day is a milepost. “Every Mother’s Day I’ve been in a new place,” she says. “I miss the ability to create new holiday memories with my kids, but I’ll always nurture our relationship. … Do I still feel like a mom? I do.”
DISASTER
On the last Mother’s Day before her world exploded, Zoey Mendoza got a gift that, frankly, disappointed her. Her husband, Kurtis Birth, gave her a photo of the children in a simple plastic frame — the sort of thing, she recalls, “he might have given me any day of the week.”
Kurtis was a black guy from suburban North Jersey. Zoey was a white girl who was born on a commune and grew up in Ashland, Ore. They met the summer she came east to work as a nanny and married in 2002. He was in sales at a cable provider; she was a school social worker.
But by 2010, Kurtis’ mood swings had become too much for Zoey. She told him in April she wanted a divorce. He resisted, apologized, promised to change.
In August, he made what his psychiatrist diagnosed as a “suicidal gesture” — a half-hearted attempt — by cutting his wrist with a knife. Afterward, he promised to undergo therapy and take medication for depression and anxiety.
Although Zoey still wanted out of the marriage, they continued to live together with Jada and Jordan in their townhouse in Pompton Lakes, N.J.
Kurtis, Zoey says, was never violent or aggressive. But on Oct. 17, 2010, while cleaning a downstairs closet, she found a rifle. Kurtis said it was an old BB gun he had come across at his parents’ place. She insisted he remove it from the house. He put it in the trunk of his car.
The next morning, Zoey drove the kids to day care. When she got home, she posted on Facebook: “Jada said to me, ‘Mommy, I love you as pretty as a magnolia. By the way, what’s a magnolia?’ Lol...”
The mother did not post another conversation that took place on the ride. Jada had asked her, “Why are all the leaves fall- ing?” Zoey explained about the natural cycle of death and rebirth. Jada replied, “Mama, I don’t want you to die.”
“Mommy’s not going to die,” Zoey replied. “Mommy is going to grow to be old.”
Zoey always picked up the kids at the end of the school day, and, since the suicide attempt, she hadn’t left the kids alone with Kurtis for extended periods. But early that afternoon, he texted her to say he would get the kids himself.
Concerned, she called the day care center but was told Kurtis had left with the kids. She called and texted him, demanding that he bring them home immediately. When she got no answer, she called the police.
She suggested they look at the house on a wooded hilltop in Ringwood, N.J., where Kurtis grew up, and which had been empty since his father’s death.
Police found Jada’s body on the front porch and Jordan’s inside the front door. He seemed to have been playing with his action figures. Kurtis’ body was in his car next to the rifle — in fact, a .22.
Zoey’s shock and sorrow was compounded by guilt. Why had she, a mental health professional, not seen what was coming — not realized Kurtis was neither attending therapy sessions nor taking his medication? Had she brought this on by allowing Kurtis to stay in their home? Should she have told the day care center about his suicide attempt?
It was hard for her even to think about what she had lost, let alone make sense of it or share it with the world.
DESPAIR
One night, less than a month after the murders, Zoey was in bed. Her mother was asleep, and she herself was chanting, “I miss you/I love you.” Earlier, she had read a book about how children don’t really die, but live in the hereafter — what she called heaven.
Suddenly, she says, she heard her children giggling.
She sat up. The room was filled with a bright light, as if the sun were out, and she saw a white staircase. Jada and Jordan were standing at the top, smiling at her. Then they came down the stairs, and they all hugged. She said, “You’re here!” but they said nothing.
From the first hours after the murders, she says, she had felt a need to look for her children — “I knew they weren’t really gone.” Her vision confirmed that, she says; now “I had to figure not only how to reach them, but also how to feel them reach out to me.”
She spent hours in her bedroom and other warm, quiet places, talking to and listening for Jada and Jordan. When she dreamed of them, she would wake and thank them for staying close.
Zoey tried to be open to signs of their presence. It might be Jordan’s name on the side of a school bus or the sight of a magnolia — the tree, or something else by that name, like a bakery. “The more I affirm them,” she believed, “the more they present themselves.”
When the TV in her bedroom recently switched on inexplicably, she chalked it up to the kids “messing with us.” When a name tag on a pickup grocery order was inadvertently left in her shopping bag, she noticed the stocking clerk’s initials were “JJ,” as in Jada and Jordan.
On Mother’s Day 2013, a little girl who reminded Zoey of Jada, even though she was white, blond-haired and blue-eyed, came up while Zoey was waiting in line at Starbucks and suddenly spanked her on the butt — Jada’s way, Zoey’s reported happily on Facebook, of wishing her a happy Mother’s Day.
But experiencing her children wasn’t enough. Zoey also needed to share them with the world, if only to show that Jada and Jordan’s happy lives meant more than their horrible deaths and that the joy of mothering them outweighed the pain of losing them.
Kurtis, ironically, proved crucial to Zoey’s project.
An avid photographer, he left an archive of about 13,000 photos and hundreds of videos — links to the children he took away from her.
Almost daily, Zoey has posted on Facebook these images and her own memories of her children. She is shamelessly proud and endlessly fascinated by their antics, outfits and expressions. She refers to them in the present tense, with the result that some new readers don’t realize the children are dead.
Hundreds of friends and followers post their appreciation of a mother who, no longer able to bathe her children or wipe their runny noses, tends now to their memory.
And, she says, the children tend to her: “I feel their strength and love all the time, but especially when I am feeling overwhelming sadness. I can literally feel the weight of their arms around my shoulders.”
INSPIRATION
Last Sunday, Zoey faced an audience of several hundred crime victims and their relatives at a ceremony in Paterson, N.J. Photos of those lost to violence were on stage behind her. Jada and Jordan were in the middle.
“I have never spoken in front of an audience like this,” she said. “It’s nerve-racking.”
This year, Zoey has moved beyond Facebook to talk about her experiences, including interviews with journalists.
It’s daunting, in part because she still feels vulnerable to skepticism about how she relates to the kids and to criticism of her failure to leave Kurtis.
The Paterson audience was no stranger to violence or loss, but there was a collective gasp when Zoey revealed hers. “There is no template for this kind of loss,” she said. “There’s no book that helps you understand.”
Those on Facebook understand. They range from mothers of stillborns to a woman whose two children were suffocated while asleep in bed by a 100pound python that escaped from an exotic pet store.
Linda Sanchez, a San Francisco mother who lost her 19-year-old son to an adverse prescription drug reaction, calls Zoey “a beacon of hope to the bereaved.”
She tries to help the newly bereaved who reach out. Zoey’s friend, Angela DeLeon, recalls her taking such a call while they were hiking on a mountain in Oregon.
She shares what worked for her — inspirational books, intensive therapy, a new relationship with God, a session with a medium.
Above all, she says, try to experience the loss rather than numb yourself to it.
These days she works as a social worker at a public high school in Paterson. There are still ups and downs, she says, in “this tornado that I call life.”
DeLeon describes her as “delicate” and “the strongest person I know.”
On Mother’s Day, she and husband Curt Zimmerman plan to work in the yard, where they’ve planted magnolia trees, butterfly bushes and an ironwood in memory of the children.
Two benches bear the names Jada and Jordan.
“I hope each Mother’s Day for a kind of renewal,” she says. “But it’s sad for me. It always will be.”
“There is no template for this kind of loss. There’s no book that helps you understand.”
Zoey Mendoza Zimmerman