This is not a traditional obituary. This is not a sanitized story of a happy, social girl who brought love and light to everything she touched. But it is Holly's story, warts and all, and she died for someone to tell it.
My baby sister was born April 13th, 2001. Friday the 13th -- a sign of things to come. I remember the day like it was yesterday; I already had two little siblings and was so excited about the third. My parents, Rob and Suzie, were trying in vain to keep me away from the hospital room to the point a nurse had to come in with a whole stack of coloring books taller than I was. The earsplitting cry that rang through the hallway haunts me to this day.
Holly was a high-maintenance, colicky baby, who grew into a high-maintenance, angry child. At school, she constantly got failing grades and bullied other girls relentlessly. She seeked attention at every turn and eventually got it, falling in with a 'popular crowd' in fifth grade that proved very self-destructive. She exploited the money and social status of our parents for that popularity and begged for clothing and useless trinkets, to the point of repeated attempted credit card theft starting at age 11 and continuing until she was granted her own card, which was instantly maxed out. She manipulated and screeched at family members, throwing tantrums she never grew out of, even when they stopped getting her what she wanted.
She developed bulimia at age 9, discovered after two months when Mom caught her purging. She spent the next six years in and out of treatment centers, juvenile halls, psychiatric hospitals, and the occasional normal hospital for self-harm or suicide attempts starting at age 13, and stacked up diagnoses like a house of cards -- depression, anxiety, bipolar, conduct disorder, all with a rotation of drugs and therapies. I firmly believe psychiatric intervention worsened her mental state and contributed to her eventual suicide. Holly developed an institutionalized view of herself, seeing the world only in terms of labels, and assuming she was nothing more than a pile of words on a paper.
Holly was so much more. She hurt people, but she loved them, too. Holly was a huge fan of anime and Japanese culture, of pretty dresses and makeup vloggers, of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. She wanted to be a hairdresser, or a college professor in Gender Studies, or a hairdresser who also did adjunct Gender Studies teaching. She wanted to move to California and be part of a new hippy movement. She wanted to make the world a better place, and cared deeply about finding out how to save it. She felt love truly and deeply, so strong a human body could barely contain it, and she had no idea where to direct it.
Around the age of 13, Holly became even more withdrawn than usual and spent more time on her room in the computer. She didn't talk to her friends as much, and she didn't go out partying -- or when she did, she was even more self-destructive, coming home with bruises or drunk out of her mind. Everyone was worried; the last time Holly had been so withdrawn, it turned out she was dating an internet pedophile. It turned out she had gotten highly into certain subcultures on the blogging platform Tumblr, infamous for its restrictive faux-liberal 'Social Justice Warrior' culture. Holly -- now going by Valtyn -- was a natural fit. She was a self-destructive consummate liar who only found solace in make-believe. On Tumblr she could pretend to be transgender or Native American, and with those made up facts she could get unlimited sympathy for the things that really troubled her. She could reference her physical and psychiatric disabilities or the diseases running in our families and get the attention and love she desired, and she could play with alter egos in a twisted version of the tendency of teenagers to try on new identities. She could use Tumblr as a substitute for interaction, for happiness, for love.
In retrospect, we should have taken that as a much greater warning than we did.
Holly was never hugely active on Tumblr itself, but she lurked constantly. She found love through it, a girl in Mississippi three years her junior, and friendship. She also found the motivation to act out even further against her family and abuse me verbally and emotionally when I came out as transgender for real. She ran away to live with random people to the point we could no longer track her down, and there was a two-month space when we had no idea of her whereabouts. We found no help from the police due to her prior history.
Holly lived the last few months of her life with her preteen girlfriend in Mississippi in a trailer park, far from her wealthy upbringing. We were in close contact with her and visited regularly, constantly trying to coax her back to returning but unwilling to force her. We still had important, significant contact with her, and the love between us never diminished. Her 15th birthday was a high point, with a signed promise she would return soon -- before the end of 2016.
She called us every day, starting to repair the relationship, but she would never come home.
At 8pm on the 13th of May, I got a terrified call from her girlfriend Carmen. Holly had drank some kind of unknown mix of cleaning chemicals and was in excruciating pain, and Carmen had no idea how recent this was because she had only just got home from being out all day and nobody had been with Holly. I got her to call 911, and Holly was rushed to hospital. My memories of this are blurry and streaked with crying, but the whole family packed into the car, rushing to drive interstate only to come too late.
Holly passed away at 9:11pm on the 13th of May, four hours after the fact.
There is nothing I can say that will accurately capture Holly or the experience of living with and loving her, and nothing that will ever do justice to the beautiful, loving girl and the pain she lived and died in.
Sleep easy, Holly.