What is family?
For years, I thought I had everything you could ask for: loving parents, a nice home and plenty of presents under the tree at Christmas.
Sharon, my mom, went above and beyond her responsibility. When she married my father, Will, and gave birth shortly thereafter to my brother, she stopped working and focused on being the best mom she could be. She drove us to T-ball games, helped us with our homework and rubbed Neosporin on our cuts and scrapes.
I went to the best schools, ate the best meals and lived a happy life.
Then, almost seven years ago, that all changed. The worst part is that the signs were there. We should have known it was coming.
When she first broke the news, he broke down. A SWAT team had to be called. He holed himself up in our home inside Hidden Hills Country Club, which up until that night was, to me, a sanctuary, a haven from the lives of those not “privileged” enough to live behind its gates.
After trying for nine months to convince Sharon, his queen, not to leave him after 26 years of marriage, he couldn’t take the pain any longer. He did the unthinkable.
The .22-caliber bullet entered underneath her left eye, penetrating her skull and lodging in the brain stem, causing instant death. Her body fell over in a heap. Will kneeled near her, the mother of two of his four children, and pulled the trigger again. I never got to say goodbye.
Soon after their deaths, Carla and Traci, half-sisters from my father’s first failed marriage, decided that the will he left behind wasn’t fair. They sued. That’s how I know where the bullet entered Mom’s brain, how she fell to the ground.
Carla and Traci’s lawyer thought it would be a good idea to show us pictures and diagrams, explaining the scene like something out of a bad episode of CSI. It could be a setup, they said. There could have been a third person, they said. How do we know Matt or his brother didn’t do it, they asked.
This is family? This is what loved ones do?
For years after, those memories have haunted me.
They still do.
After questioning my future, questioning the meaning of family and my own self-worth, I pushed through the pain and put in the work to get to where I am today — graduating from the only university I have ever wanted to attend as the sports editor of one of the best student newspapers around.
There are plenty of people who would tell you that I would never have made it this far. I did it for them, and for her. Mom deserved to see her son become a success, whether she could truly see it or not.
Throughout my two years at the Alligator, I have been the punchline of joke after joke about my age. Some of you knew why I was such an old bastard. Some didn’t. But none of you ever treated me differently because of it.
Everyone — there’s too many to name — at this paper has touched me in a way I will never forget. Finally, there’s not any questions. Finally, I feel at peace with where I am in life.
And finally, I have a meaning of family I know I can believe in.
Contact Matt Watts at mwatts@alligator.org.
