Episode Transcript
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. This is e Ruth from the coffee table and we are talking about and exploring a lot more of how we felt when we found out that our father died. And
of course, trying to get through it is definitely difficult because if you can imagine, no one expects. Their parents to pass away or really anyone, but it's a special case when it's your mother or your father. So we wanna take some time in this episode to really talk through our entire experience, finding out about our father passing away, and how it made us feel in that moment.
And hopefully you'll connect to our story and. Hear us out for what we went through and also ask some more questions. Baby, we haven't come up with at the time of learning about everything, as well as going to our Facebook page, justice for Carlton, also going to our GoFundMe and sharing and supporting, liking our page, following our page, and also commenting respectfully, of course, because we are still dealing with the loss of our father.
It's very fresh to us. And we're still some days, I know I'm shocked. I look at pictures of us at his grave site and I see him on a video talking and I put the two and two together that my father is in the ground. And that's not an easy place to be. Some days are good, some days are not. And I wanna talk a little bit more about how my day was going that day that I found out.
And a large part of us finding out was by asking questions and digging. Something that really didn't fit or make any sense was the narrative that I was getting from a step family member. After I started asking more questions for me, it was just a normal day. I was going about my day at work and my brother David, he sent me a couple text messages that.
To me we're like really cryptic. I didn't know what he was talking about. I was confused. And my sister, she reached out to me and let me know that I need to reach out to David. And this is one of my older sisters. We both, we all share the same mother, but we have a different father. And when she said that to me, I just thought, okay, this must be really serious because why would my sister be reaching out to me in this way for me to reach out to my brother?
So of course I go and I call him, and he's really distraught because the news that he had found out was that my father had been dead for two weeks, which was quite a lot already to know that two weeks had went by and no one, my stepmother, my stepsisters stepbrother, nobody said anything. Now, keep in mind, I wasn't, I wouldn't, I would have expected that my stepmother had said anything but.
Had she not said anything, I would not nec, I wouldn't be shocked because I, the way I thought about it at the moment was this was her husband. She's probably distraught herself. She's probably overwhelmed. She's probably in such a tremendous amount of grief that I can only imagine what she's going through.
Cause I'm married myself. So I could only imagine what would happen or how I would be feeling, and even how long it might even take me to say something to someone in my husband's family. About him passing away, I probably would've said something immediately, but everybody reacts to a death differently.
So I took all of that into consideration. But lemme go back a step. My brother sent me the text I then didn't really know was like, no, this is, I don't believe this. It doesn't sound that that can't be real, because someone would've called me and told me is what I was thinking in the moment. So I was actually in shock that news was even circulating, and I thought it was perhaps a rumor.
It wasn't until the next morning, I remember it the exact time, 8:48 AM or 8:47 AM was the first call I noticed, realized it got missed. And then I saw another call, 8 48 and caught it and that's when I missed it. But I called back and it was my stepsister, and she told me, the first thing she said was, I don't wanna get in between anything.
And I was still. Trying to track what she meant, where she was going with that, because I still didn't believe that what she was getting ready to tell me was really that my father died. I just thought maybe she would've been talking to me about, oh, my brother had sent her a text message. What's going on with him?
What is why? Why do we send something like that? That's what I thought she was gonna tell me, but I was also bracing myself for the fact that she could be telling me. My father died because it was so early in the morning. I never get a call from her like that in the morning, ever. Really? I don't really get much calls from her unless you call me back.
And so I listened to her tell me, I don't wanna get in between anything. And then she says, your father died. Your dad died. And I said, oh, And I'm waiting for her to tell me when he died because at this point I didn't share with her that it had been circulating, that he had been gone for two weeks because I figured I don't wanna pass any information like that around to further maybe even upset her.
And then I started telling her, I'm sorry for your loss too. I'm sorry. You know I said my condolences to you too, because you know he was your stepfather. So I know that this is a loss for you as well. Of course we got into that conversation a little bit, how she Yeah, yeah. It was a loss and so I started thinking about, oh, our father, my father, cuz I was saying our father, my father at the time, because I was thinking my dad or dad, I said, dad, one thing that Dad always wanted, he always wanted us to have peace between each other as step siblings.
Siblings. He saw us all as his children, so I know that. If he would, whatever he was going through, hopefully with all this stuff that he was going through, that he was in a better place. We, at the type of spiritual practice, we practice, we think about death in a different way. It's when you die, you go back to heaven.
So it's not a loss for the person who dies, but it's definitely a loss for those of us who are still here. And so we talked about that just, oh, dad has been a better place and we hope that he is not, you're not suffering anymore. And that that was something that I focused on. It was like my safe space. It was like my safe place and me not getting choked up.
I again, it still was a shock to me, and that was just something that I was trying to figure out. How do I navigate? This with her? How do I continue to have this conversation? Then I tried, I started getting into more. Okay. Can you tell me more about when he died? How did he die? And I got ready to ask those questions, but I realized I was waiting for her to tell me and she never said it.
So I thought, let me just focus on the services. And I asked when is, is it gonna be services? If does, is there any help financially that you all need? I can try. I can chip in. Whatever I can do to help. And she just said, yeah, I'll, I'll keep you. Yeah, I'll let you know, or I'll check back with you, or something like that.
It, it wasn't really clear about where it was going, so I just put it out there and I let that conversation be done. And then as the day went by, I started thinking, oh my God, I gotta, I have to tell, I have to go reach out to my older brother Safari. I talked to him in a while and I was like, let me find who I know probably has spoken to, or at least kept in some kind of contact with him.
I go on Facebook, I reach out to. One of our wider family members, and I find I send, let them know it's important that kept to far know that our dad died. And I, if he doesn't wanna call back, he doesn't have to, but I think he should know that, that this happened. And prob, I don't know how the timeframe was, but I got a call back from him, or he asked me to, it was asked that I call him back and I called him back.
And when I called him back, he was puzzled because he was like, wait a minute. So when did, this is weird. When did you say dad died? And I'm like, oh, I didn't even know where he was going either. I was, I don't know why that matters. Like we, we know that he's, in my mind, I'm thinking like we know that he's dead.
I like the timeframe I was thinking was two weeks, but it in, when I say I don't know why it matters to me, because I was thinking like, Why? Why is he saying this? I don't know. I was just trying to process what's, where's this going? Everything that I had been learning as time went by was just me on this journey of not knowing exactly where I was going, and almost I was really afraid, like, I don't wanna know anything else other than what you should know.
Your dad died on Saturday, you know this past Saturday, or he died because of. A heart attack or some, something along those lines that was safe for me cuz then it was certainty, it wasn't me. Now wondering what else happened, what else worse could have happened. So then he begins to tell me, yeah, I'm looking at the military website.
Cause I was actually searching for obituary, burial, all kinds of stuff. I didn't see anything. And he's like, yeah, I'm seeing that dad died on February the second. And I just, I'm thinking how, because. I just got a text message from him in March, so that can't be possible. So I just, I was just trying to sit with a lot of this.
It just, I couldn't, I just couldn't. It just, I couldn't put it together. And so I'm thinking this, no, there's gotta be a way that there's some kind of hoax just being completely transparent. My step siblings have been involved in fraudulent things, fake websites, stuff like that. So I'm thinking maybe they created a fake website.
Maybe they're trying to, trying to somehow cause me to come out of my shell or reach out to them to see what I was gonna do. I don't know. I was just trying to make sense of it cuz none of it made sense to me. And so I started thinking, I'm go Googling. I don't see any Carlton coffee. Passed away, died anything anywhere, and I'm still puzzled and I've just decided, you know what, let me see if I can get more information.
So I go back and I text my stepsister and I'm like, Hey, you all can see this on the Justice for Carlton page where I'm texting some one of my stepsisters and saying, I'm getting ready to, I took some time off That took the day off to process all you basically to bereavement and. I can't find any information.
If my job asked me for it, which I was already going through some things at work, some stress related things at work, what am I gonna do to present this information to them? And I don't get a response back via text. The next day I get a call back from her and she's, oh, again, she says, she starts with, I don't wanna get in between it.
Any, anything. And I'm still like, why does she keep saying this? What is there to get in between? My dad died. Your stepfather died. We just carry on to deal with the funeral services like any other person would do or family would do. And then she goes into, all I know is that Dad died and if you want more information, reach out to her mom, which is my dad's widow and her oldest stepsister, I'm sorry, her oldest SI sister, which is my oldest stepsister.
Which my father was living with both his widow and his oldest stepdaughter. And immediately when I heard, when she said that I got really uncomfortable, no, this is not, no, this is not sitting well with me. Why do I need to reach out to them specifically to find, you're the one who called me to tell me that my dad died.
Why would I need to reach out to them to find out the details of him dying? Cuz clearly, cuz you're calling me to tell me this. And so, She goes into all I can tell you again, she repeats herself. All I can tell you is you need to reach out to, if you want more information, you need to reach out to my mom or her older sister.
So I said, I know you said you don't wanna be in the middle of it, but you are in the middle of it because you're telling me to reach out to somebody else for information that you have that they have. And this is, something's wrong with this. I said, this is some, there's something wrong. And I went on to say, there's a lot of distrust in this situation and I'm very uncomfortable, and I won't call them because I'm just very uncomfortable.
I said, I, I will find out the information I need to find out. And I went on to say, everybody's in the same exact situation as me. She's a stepdaughter to her biological father's wife. She's a stepmother to her husband's. Biological daughters, all of my stepsisters have a stepmother because the younger three of the step siblings have the same father and a stepmother.
And the older two stepsiblings have a father with a stepmother. And so I said to her, I said, you're in the same exact boat as me. You're in the same exact position as me, cuz I want her to think about this. What would you feel like if this was done to you or you had done this to. Your biological daughter's father or them, and I didn't say all that.
I just, the question I asked was enough to imply, think about what you all did. And because we're in the same social circle, I said, we're gonna have to talk about this further because just character wise, there's a lot of questions in the character choices that were done in this situation that I know I can't pretend.
To act like I'm not affected by this. I can't pretend like we're not really dealing with the fact that it's almost three months later and no one in my father's side of the family, his brothers, his sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, his own biological children, don't even know, didn't know that he was dead until nearly three months later.
And I just cried. I just cried for I. How lonely I think I felt like he was in this situation, like I can't imagine me dying and people that I knew that I loved, people that I talked to, people that I grew up with or called friends for years didn't know. Like I thought about, oh my goodness, like what? They must think of him.
Not notifying them or what they must be thinking about their relationship with him. Did he really care about their relationship? I just thought about my father's reputation as he's buried in this in the ground for all these months while people are worrying and wondering and then their is reach out to these two people who didn't reach out to anybody.
And of course, I later on learned that. There was all this narrative thing going on about how I was ungrateful and cuz they had bought, and I'll, we'll talk about the narrative in another episode, but at the moment of learning about it and still trying to figure out more information, I just started asking more questions like, why wasn't my husband called?
Like why wasn't? My, my father was a priest in a West African spiritual tradition, and it's custom to contact other priests whenever there's a priest that passes away so they can go through their normal spiritual rights, their process, their whatever they do, which is customary, I believe, in most religions where there's a pastor, you say prayers and things like that.
He didn't even get that. So that just put me in such a spiral in such a depression because I just started thinking like my father. Was alone in a grave for all these months with nobody knowing that he had died with nobody praying for him, with nobody wishing him to rest in peace or ascend in power or rest in whatever people say once body passes away.
He didn't even get that, and it was just heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking for him, and it was heartbreaking for us because. He didn't even get to have his own children with him. He had us for the first eight, some of us, depending on our age, eight to 10 years of our lives before we ended up becoming a blended family.
All I knew was my father growing up as a little girl, that's all we had was my dad because my mother was sick. So at, for at the end of his death, he didn't even have his children. When he was in the hospital, which nobody notified us, no one told us anything. I was around all these people all throughout the last and the fall, texting me, text messaging, texting with them, them asking me questions about when I was gonna be going on vacation, all these different things.
And so he had just the fact that they put him in a position to be so alone, it was heartbreaking and ugh. I don't, I wish this on no one. I wish that anyone that's finding themselves in a situation like this, you'll think twice about the consequences in the long term and how people feel about a loss, because we can't get him back.
We can't go back and reverse the tape and just pretend like we're in a space where this is not something that. It's not as if it's not real. It's real. This is a real thing. Like I literally know I cannot go to a house. I cannot go to a park. I cannot go to a store. I cannot pick up the phone and call my father and know he's gonna pick up on the other side because his body is in the ground.
His spirit has moved on and it left without ever getting the peace that we always were in the process of trying to get. Whether he was frustrated with me for any reason or what have you, one thing we always try to do was make whatever the amends and he died without ever being able to make the make amends.
So I found out in a very terrible way and I'm dealing with that right now and we're trying to get answers and so it's going to be important for you to know for each of us, Saara David. About what it was like for us to find out about our dad dying, as well as what, how that made us feel based off of the relationship that we did have with him.
