CW: Suicide and gun violence
Author’s Note
Alex Ocken and I met last January. I was visiting Tri Lakes Cares, a social services group in Monument, to help my friend Sofie cast for her thesis film. We spoke to many women, mostly working single mothers, and learned about their lives in 15-minute segments. These meetings often felt rushed and shallow, and in many senses they were, but not with Alex. As soon as she started speaking, I was amazed by her warmth and her openness to sharing her life with us, both her triumphs and her traumas. She spoke with such a deep recognition and appreciation of her past but also as if she were an entirely different woman than the one in the stories she shared. I felt like I could listen to her talk for hours, and I soon would.
Sofie decided to cast Alex, and I decided to write about her. I was in a journalism class on profile writing, and our final assignment was a 2,000-word profile on someone in Colorado Springs. While Sofie was in Utah for Sundance, I started spending a lot of time with Alex: once or twice a week, I would walk to Good Neighbors or Wild Goose (fuck those places though!) and meet her for lunch. Afterward, we’d usually either pick her son Jupiter up from school or head straight to the hospice center in Monument where she worked. Sometimes, we would just drive around and she would tell me stories about the places we passed: the shitty and very racist trailer park she once lived in or the school she chose not to send Jupiter to, each part of her life now a Colorado Springs reference point in my head. I have seven hours of conversations recorded with Alex. During some, I was very reserved, just listening to her share whatever she felt drawn to; others have the tone of two close friends gossiping, my gasps and “you’re KIDDING”s caught on tape.
To spend this much time with a stranger (even if I only considered her that briefly), especially a stranger as warm, vulnerable, and selfless as Alex, has been one of the most special experiences of my life. I got to know this woman (and her child) so intimately, and that has had a lasting effect on me. We still check in with each other every month or so, and we have hopes of meeting again in Colorado post pandemic. I am endlessly grateful to Alex for her time and her stories. She touched my heart in a lasting way, and I hope that, in reading this piece, she will touch yours too.
I.
As she lay on her back in the middle of the road, sobbing and praying for a truck to hit her, Alex could hardly remember Florida. The palm trees in her grandparents’ backyard, the sound of stiff grass crunching under bare feet, the places and things she considered home—all of these memories were out of her reach. All she could think about was how much she wanted a truck to just fucking hit her. “You know those days when you wake up and just know it’s going to be a bad day? It was one of those.”
An hour earlier, in the midst of setting up the house for her and Chris’ 10th anniversary, Alex checked Facebook. Brooke’s page was flooded with condolences, RIP posts, and old photos. Alex’s husband Chris was best friends with Caleb, Brooke’s husband, and the four of them were all close. Disoriented and disturbed, she then went to Caleb’s page, only to be greeted by the same things. The world began to spin, her heart began to race. “I started calling everyone, even the people I hated, just to try and figure out what the fuck was happening.” Each voice refused to give her what she needed, most of them saying things like, “I’m sorry, Alex, I can’t be the one to tell you.” When she got through to one of Brooke’s friends, they finally told her. Chris and Brooke had had an affair. Caleb found out, and it was bad. Caleb and Brooke killed themselves. Chris had slept with his best friend’s wife, and Alex didn’t find out for a month—not from Chris, not until it was her anniversary, and not until two people were dead.
In the middle of the road on that cold October night, Alex thought her wish was about to be granted when she saw the lights of a semi-truck hurtling towards her. In that moment, she could hardly remember Jupiter. The bright blue eyes of her then 4-year-old son, the way his laugh could warm a heart, how his tiny hands curled around her finger; all of these things were out of her reach. But the truck stopped before breaking her bones and crushing her heart and freeing her from all the pain she felt in that moment. Instead, an angel appeared to her in the form of a white, skinny, salt-and-pepper-haired trucker, who laid down next to her in the middle of the road. “I begged him to hit me, I was weeping and screaming and he just turned to me and said, ‘Whatever you’re going through isn’t worth your life.’”
II.
Alex Ocken has never been afraid of death. The first time she saw a dead body, she was nine. It was during a brief period of time when Alex was living with her mom in “a shitty fucking apartment” in Queens. New York wasn’t like Florida. The buildings were huge and the streets were crowded and everything was concrete. It didn’t have Valrico’s sun or palm trees or bike paths. Alex’s mom used to leave her home alone while she worked, and Alex would spend hours feeling claustrophobic in the stale apartment. One sunny day, Alex decided she wanted to ride around the park across the street. When she got into the elevator with her brand new pink-tasseled bike, she found a body bleeding out. Little Alex wasn’t scared or sad—she hardly flinched. She simply made herself as small as possible, lifted her bike to squeeze into the corner, and went down to the lobby. “The cops found me because they were following bloody footprints, thinking they were following the murderer. Really they were just following little Alex to the park so she could ride her bike.”
The second time Alex saw a dead body, she was 14. She was sitting on the curb outside of her brother Adrien’s apartment in Brandon, Florida. The building was pale orange, like a washed-out SunnyD bottle, the kind of orange you only see in Florida. Adrien was 16, riding around the block on one of those cheap little motorcycles that looked a lot more like a dirtbike. When he got back to where Alex was sitting, a car was following him. A man got out and accused Adrien of cutting him off. A screaming match between the two of them ensued, escalating until the man took a gun out of his car and shot Adrien several times. Alex held her brother’s body on the side of the road, the same way countless other Black women have held their loved ones, weeping while waiting an eternity for an ambulance to come. “I lost a lot at a young age, and I’ve lost a lot throughout my life, but losing my brother was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with.” Alex’s brother died in her arms, changing the course of her life forever, while the man who killed him spent three years in jail for aggravated assault.
“I did my own thing after that, I turned to destruction.” Within a year of Adrien’s death, Alex had started driving for a gang that lived in his building and was regularly using cocaine. Within two years, she had used a fake ID to move into his old apartment, leaving her grandparents’ beautiful Valrico home to live in a dingy two-bedroom with Vanessa, her best friend since third grade. On the surface, Alex seemed like a typical 16-year-old; she attended a big public high school, she wore those mid-2000s Hot Topic flat-brim hats, and she took flash selfies with her friends on flip phones. But she also took bumps of coke in Walmart bathrooms, purposefully provoked cops, and threw parties so outrageous international drug lords would make the trip to Brandon.
Alex was happy. She was living a life that was fun and exciting and always busy. She wasn’t caught up in the past. There was no time to dwell on its pain, and there was no need to think about the future when the present was so vivid. Yes, she was doing cocaine every day, but she wasn’t addicted. She didn’t have a problem. She was still functioning like a normal person in the world, not like any of the crazy drug addicts in Youtube videos or movie scenes she had seen.
That’s how Alex saw it, but some people in her life disagreed. Time and time again, Vanessa asked her to get help, which Alex adamantly rejected. By 19, she had been using cocaine for almost five years, becoming increasingly dependent on it. Vanessa decided to step in. She called Alex’s estranged father, a military doctor stationed in Colorado, and told him that Alex was a drug-addicted gang member. He then called Alex and demanded that she move out west. Alex didn’t want to go; she didn’t want to leave her life behind. But her best friend had sold her out, and the man she was seeing told her there was a better future for her in Colorado, so what reason did she have to stay? Within four days, she had packed up an entire life and moved across the country. Alex didn’t speak to Vanessa for the next two years, addiction and a deep sense of betrayal nearly bringing a lifelong friendship to an end.
III.
Colorado wasn’t Florida, but boy, was it something. Alex and Chris started dating soon after she moved; they had met two years beforehand when Alex was working at Disney World and Chris’s family was on vacation there. They lived in Palmer Lake; rows of mobile homes lined a dirt road before the looming backdrop of the Rockies. The entire scene looked like a postcard: tall snow-capped mountains, pines as far as the eye could see, a red barn off in the distance. It was beautiful, but Alex and Chris were an interracial couple living in a trailer park in rural Colorado. There was an abundance of racist neighbors and even threats to burn down their home. “I love Colorado’s mountains and I love how beautiful the state is, but I’ve met more racist [people] here than anywhere else I’ve lived.”
“I pushed through cause I knew I was only there temporarily … the trailer park was temporary, that became my mantra.” For the most part, everything was so new and refreshing. It felt good; it felt healthy. She patched up her relationship with her father, who still remains a crucial part of her life. She hopped around working in fast food for a while, eventually making her way up to a high-ranking position at Arby’s (where, of course, she wasn’t paid as much as her white male predecessors). Alex stayed clean-ish. She didn’t touch cocaine, but Chris introduced her to a whole new world of drugs: Colorado’s potent weed, magic mushrooms, LSD—the kind of drugs that make everything feel warm and fuzzy. Alex and Chris had a rose-tinted kind of love, psychedelics giving everything a golden light, as if they were swing dancing through life with no issues and the world working around them. “Life doesn’t seem bad when you’re on drugs every night.”
Then came Jupiter. Thrown into the world on March 3, 2014: a blue-eyed, cocoa-skinned, full-lipped bundle of energy and laughter and warmth. Born nearly two months early, he was so tiny, delicate, and helpless. Bringing a child into the world was beautiful, and also terrifying. All of a sudden, things were so real: there were responsibilities and obligations, diapers and baby food, and this tiny, tiny person with a beating heart and fragile bones.
The two of them grew together. “Jupiter has taught me to be a better listener, to breathe, and just assess the situation. I’ve learned to have patience.” They’d spend car rides singing along to the radio, afternoons dancing around the trailer, and bedtimes telling bad knock-knock jokes. “He has taught me about love, proved that it can be truly unconditional.” After the kaleidoscopic honeymoon phase of her relationship with Chris began to fade, Jupiter was the person in the world she could count on the most. “I hate that, putting that kind of pressure on a kid, but it’s true. He’s my world.” In these moments, she could hardly remember her old life. Outrageous underage parties, spending nights in jail, drug-hazed evenings: all of these memories were out of her reach.
“I’m not scared of dying, I’m scared of leaving my loved ones not knowing what to do without me.”
As she lay on her back in the middle of the road next to a stranger on that painful night, Alex remembered Jupiter. She thought of her little boy, the funny faces he would make, how he would say ‘I love you’ every night before bed. “The way he laughs, watching him grow. I live for him.” Before Alex would go on to divorce Chris and work in hospice and move into her own house and fall in love all over again, she had to stand up. When she picked herself up off the ground, she did not accept the trucker’s hand to help her. In that moment, she did not think about Chris and how badly he had hurt her. She did not think about Florida and how much she had grown. All she could think about was Jupiter. I live for him. I live for him.