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Untitled Part 2

Snowmeadow is a small village with an even smaller population, hidden in the peaks and valleys of the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia. 20 minutes in any direction from a ski park, three hours from any decent sized town. Smalls shops dotting Main Street, some diners, a small gas station, an old as the hills school and a bank. Nothing special, nothing fancy. Just a simple small town, perfect for the needs of the locals and a great tourist attraction, if you’re a retired couple looking to ooh and ah over the quaintness, annoying the locals to no end. A town where everyone knows everyone and you introduce yourself by using your parents and grandparents names. Quiet, peaceful and slow paced. And way too small for McKenzie Ryan.

McKenzie had the perfect childhood. Born on June 24th, 1993 on a beautiful early summer evening. Flowers in full bloom, light breeze blowing through the full branches of the trees. She had the perfect parents – a mom who was like her best friend and a dad who was always there, no matter what. Friends around the block that had known her since they were all in diapers, going through elementary and middle school together, and every moment on the way. If you would have asked her then, she would have said her life was perfect. Perfect family, perfect friends, perfect town. Everything was perfect. Until it wasn’t.

Her world came crashing down around her in October of 2008. She and her mother had noticed her father losing a dramatic amount of weight. He always complained about pains and not feeling well, but he refused to go to the doctor. After a few months, he finally relented to their pleas and went to the town doctor, Mary Connors. Early in January 2009, they received the news they feared the most. Her father had very advanced cancer in his stomach, liver, and esophagus. There wasn’t anything they could do. Operations would do nothing. Radiation was out of the question. Nothing. She watched her father wither away quicker than she could have imagined possible and cried with him as his pain became unbearable. He may not have died until March of that year, but she knew she lost her father as soon as he gave up the fight. After having been told he had a year to live, his heart finally stopped it’s painful beating on March 8th. McKenzie felt as if any pain he had was nothing in comparison to hers. Her heart physically hurt. Her body refused to go on. She felt as if her soul had been ripped from her body and shattered into a million pieces. Surely she couldn’t be expected to go on with her life, pretending to be happy, without her father being right beside her the entire way.

A few weeks after he passed, her mother forced her back into school. She went but had no desire to do anything. She sat in the back of the class, ignoring the teacher and being ignored by the students. She shut herself out from the world, losing contact with her friends and losing any will to get back into the swing of things and live her life. Her grades began to suffer and she actually failed the tenth grade. She couldn’t believe it. Up until then, she was always an honour roll student. Top of every class. The teacher’s pet that everyone actually liked. Her numbness prevented her from caring about the massive amount of catching up she would have to do to get back on track over the summer. The teachers would allow her to pass into the next grade if she did the work, but she didn’t. Her life went from being that girl at the party that everyone wanted to talk to and be friends with to being that girl that no one wanted to even invite to the party. But of course they did – they had to pretend they cared about her, even if she didn’t feel that they did. She was invited to every party but declined every time. Eventually the invitations stopped coming. So did the visits from her life-long friends, then the text messages and phone calls. Eventually the only person she interacted with was her mother who had bounced back to her lively self too quickly for McKenzie’s taste – she was already dating someone.

She was referred to various therapists and begrudgingly went but with no luck. It seemed as if no one could help her. She knew she was severely depressed. She never said anything to her mother or therapists, but she had thought of suicide multiple times. She couldn’t take being so sad and numb all of the time. For a while it was fine, it felt like it was the right thing to feel, but after feeling the same for months on end, she was sick of it, she was tired, she wanted it all to end.

She never could recall the exact day that it happened. She stopped keeping track of the days after she dropped out of high school, not bothering to try and catch up and pass into grade eleven. But there was one day in the fall, perhaps the next spring. She didn’t really know.