When I was 17, I was friends with this girl who lived across the street from my grandparents in Orem, Utah. I’ll call her Heather. When we were growing up, we’d go to church together, and play together when I’d visit. Her family was the typical Mormon family, like everybody else’s on that street. But then her parents got divorced, and one of her brother’s friends started hanging out at the house. The neighbors started to feel a little uncomfortable, these guys were clearly not the church-going crowd, and drugs were rumored to be over there. Heather had stopped going to church, so I didn’t see her as much, and by then I had already made my own judgments about her family.
Then something crazy happened. A body was found in a church parking lot. A 911 call had been made from a young girl who had “found” it. Eventually the whole story came out… Heather’s older brother was on heroin, and he had injected his girlfriend with it. She died. He didn’t know what to do, so he had his little sister, Heather, help him load her up in a sleeping bag and they drove around looking for a place to dump her body. The anonymous 911 call was made by Heather. Her brother ended up going to jail, she was underage.
But what happened next, what I said and THOUGHT about the situation makes me physically ill to this day. The neighbors were talking. Some had found candles in their backyards, and they all came to the conclusion that Heather, who had gone through this traumatic experience that quite frankly, none of us could possibly comprehend-was now into satan and satanic rituals.
I remember saying….(oh this makes me sick…)
…I said that I thought it would have been better if Heather was dead, if Heather had physically died before any of this happened, because now she was not going to be able to go to the Celestial Kingdom with the rest of us. She was screwed. Her physical death would be much better than her spiritual death.
How Andrea Yates can you get?
And when I said that, nobody thought anything of it. None of the adults around me thought that I had said anything disturbing in the slightest. They may even have agreed with me.
But that’s how Mormons think. And that’s how I thought. And if I were to ever run into “Heather” again, I would give her a huge hug and tell her how sorry I am that I wasn’t there for her at a time when she needed support in her life, and not condemnation.
“Heather”….I’m sorry. I am so sorry.
**this pic is my little devil, vegas**
**he promptly ran off and hid the costume after we took it off**
