In the year after his death, we began reading about the opiod crisis and realized that Roger was a victim of something larger and more impossible in scale to fathom. There are hundreds of thousands of mothers, just like me, grieving the loss of their sons and daughters. There are fathers, sisters, brothers, and grandparents. They are our co-workers and friends. Some days, the scale of this loss seems infinite. So many stories of beloved children, once alive, whose mothers and fathers bear the pain for years and years. 

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Stumbling in the darkness of grief, so many parents and family members were oblivious, confused, aware, outraged, or heartbroken, as the nature of the addictions varied. But while the stories are different, the grief binds us together. We are an invisible clan, united in pain. 

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My son was a crime writer. A storyteller. A dreamer who experiences the disorientation, confusion, and dread located in the in-between spaces of waking and sleep. Just another human who confronted the overall meaningless of life. After Roger’s death, I am just coming to understand how the genre of crime allows for the examination of topics that are foundational to our culture. Part of the appeal is the rags-to-riches fantasy, where the protagonist achieves success on his or her own terms. The crime genre allows readers and viewers to temporarily escape the existential crisis of living, the pressures of society, and the inadequacies of our own flawed identities.

 

It still saddens me to think that Roger added to the culture of violence as a successful crime novelist himself. He embraced the anonymity of Internet culture for entertainment, companionship, and escape, interrogating nihilism and the loss of value and meaning in people’s lives. In the search for meaning and the search for adventure, the lure of violence can be compelling. It can be thrilling.

 

Roger learned to wear armor to protect himself from a dangerous, cruel, and seemingly meaningless world, temporarily overcoming feelings of inadequacy in his social and personal relationships. But it wasn’t enough.

The paradox of transgression and transcendence was the challenge Roger became wrapped up in. He would have told me that ‘transcendence’ comes from the present participle transcendens, of the Latin verb transcendo (trans + scando), which means to cross over or climb. To transcend is to rise above. Transgression has the same root, of course, but here it designates disobedience, rebellion, and ignoring norms, customs and laws.

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Crime writing was a way for Roger to explore the nuanced relationship between these concepts. Wrestling with the meaninglessness of personal identity, Roger was caught between transgression and transcendence. By imagining and writing stories that embody the transcendent transgression of violence, was Roger wrestling with how to gain freedom from his own identity, the self? Great thinkers across the ages have used poetry, art, and literature to reflect on the dissolution of identity and the emptiness at the core of the self. 

 

Freedom from yourself is the ultimate freedom. Roger didn’t mean to die that cold November night in 2016 in Portland, Oregon at the Edgefield Hotel. I really want to believe this. But he was enmeshed in both an existential identity crisis and a crisis of addiction that I am just beginning to understand.

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Roger deserved a second chance at life.

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I would trade my life for his if that would bring him back.

 

But I now understand that although everything can be taken from me, one thing always remains. In dealing with the death of my son, I return to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who once showed me a way out of my own existential crisis.

 

In my search for Ghostman, I am the creator of meaning; I hold on fast to “the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” as Viktor Frankl once wrote. In trying to live an authentic life as a grieving mother, I must trust and honor both my son’s life and his death — and in doing so, I celebrate my own complex mess of feelings that swirl in an interplay of fact and fantasy, darkness and light.

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Certain triggers call up my Ghostman and bring him especially close to me. Once, I saw an elderly lady walking on a city sidewalk with her adult son, and I dissolved into tears. My Ghostman was near. Another time, I fell completely apart when I saw a teenage boy and his mom walking on the street. The boy was explaining a powerful enchantment in Magic: The Gathering. It brought Roger right back to me. I had to stop for a cry as they passed me by, oblivious to my grief. My Ghostman was by my side.

 

Roger’s absence is now etched permanently into my soul. My family and friends can sometimes tell when these moments come upon me; other times, it’s all in my head.

 

My most intense grief still occurs in hotel rooms in a city far from home. There, I remember how Randy and I holed up in that hotel in Portland, how wandered the streets in our madness, sorrow, and desperation. Where was he? we asked as we walked through the city. How could this happen? What did we do wrong? Overwhelmed and exhausted by grief, we took solace in the anonymity that hotels provide. Emptied of everything, the hotel provided temporary shelter from the impossible feelings of disbelief, rage, sadness, and guilt swirling in our heads.

 

Retrograde movement. Messenger to the gods. Mercury is closest to the sun. Three times a year, the planet Mercury appears to travel backward across the sky, creating confusion and frustration for many. In those months before his death, it seemed to us that Roger had abruptly switched directions and was starting to move in reverse. Something was wrong but we had only a vague sense of the problem. Had the stresses of his meteoric career been too much for him? Was he plagued by self-doubt and insecurity? Was he experiencing depression? Had the recent news about the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States triggered a crisis as he faced the rapid shift in our country’s values and sense of direction?

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Sharp writing, clever wit, and out-of-the-box thinking would not be enough to rescue Roger. The power of addiction was too great.