By Beth Krom

 

It’s been fourteen years since we lost our son Noah. A fourteen-year journey that has been both painful and enlightening. I’ve often thought that grief needs its own vocabulary. It’s like we’ve eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and know a world we were never meant to know. Nothing prepares you for the words “Your son Noah died last night.” That those words came just a week before his college graduation made everything that much more impossible to process. Instead of celebrating his graduation, we’d be planning Noah’s funeral. Ironically, the news of Noah’s death was delivered just moments after I had helped to open the annual American Cancer Society Relay for Life. I was a local elected official. This was my last official obligation before our planned trip to Santa Barbara. Somewhere there is an archive of photos from that day with me happy and smiling. A day that had started uneventfully, with no hint that the date would be forever seared in my consciousness, June 6th would cease to be just another date on the calendar. It’s now an emotional speed bump, endured annually, along with Noah’s birthday and Mother’s Day in May and graduation season and Father’s Day in June. For years I referred to May and June as my “rainy season,” the sequence of days that would hit wave upon wave as we attempted to navigate our way through the disorienting world of grief.

 

 

As I was driven to my parent’s house to tell them that their eldest grandson had died from an accidental fall from the Isla Vista cliffs, I remember looking out the window and seeing people going about their daily routines. I wondered how their lives could go on seemingly undisturbed by the shattered reality I had been cast into. It seemed so wrong. I feared the news of Noah’s death would kill my parents, that they would both drop dead on the doorstep and I’d be burying three people. Instead, despite the immense grief they felt, their parental instincts were to care for, worry about and support us. We were all angry and confused. My mind would not allow more to seep in than I could absorb. In those early hours, days and weeks, it felt like my spirit had died and things I might once have taken interest in, reacted to, or resisted, I no longer had the strength for. Friends stepped in to help. “Can you call the hotel and cancel our reservations?” I asked a friend who had called, unaware of what had occurred. My campaign manager, who was a longtime friend in my political world, posted people on our doorstep to receive flowers and cards, knowing we needed rest and space to just be numb. Another friend advised us that since Noah had completed all his work to earn his degree, he should be entitled to receive it posthumously. He was. The day after he died, Noah’s older sister and younger brother told us they wanted to walk for him at graduation. The night before they left, the fog lifted just enough for me to realize we had made no arrangements to get Noah’s belongings from his apartment. My sister and brother-in-law offered to travel to Santa Barbara with Abby and Hershel to handle that. In a week’s time, we had endured not just Noah’s death, but all that goes with a sudden loss, including dealing with those investigating his death. He had died Saturday night, but we were advised the autopsy could not be done until Tuesday. Even in death, there are people ahead of you in line. We encountered the necessary but unpleasant business of death. In many ways finding a plot at the cemetery is more like a real estate transaction. Noah’s body was not returned until Wednesday so we could not bury him until Thursday. As Jews, we handled everything as traditionally and ritually as possible. I would learn weeks after the funeral and burial that after everyone had placed a shovel of dirt on the casket and left the cemetery, Noah’s childhood friends — none of them Jewish — asked the workers to let them fill Noah’s grave, which they did. When I learned what they had done, I told one of his friends that in the Jewish faith, there is no greater honor. “Did you know it was a mitzvah?” I asked. “No,” he said. “We just knew we had to do that for Noah.” I still get choked up imagining what attending Noah’s funeral must have felt like for his friends. They were all around 22. Far too young to bury a friend.

Noah’s life was filled with chapters yet to be written. My mother said he was like a shooting star that burned bright but faded way too soon. My brother said he had a “great short life,” which he did. He had a joyful spirit, loved his friends and sports and was so bright. When Noah was around five years old I was quizzing him on states and which states were adjacent to other states. I had to rely on a map to confirm his answers, but he had memorized them and got all the answers right. He said, “Now give me the name of a country and ask me what country is next to it.” “I can’t, Noah,” I said, “I don’t have an atlas. I wouldn’t know if you were giving me the right answer.” To that he responded, “I will be.” Although smart, I didn’t always feel Noah was working up to his potential. After he died I remember thinking what a tragedy it would have been if he had spent his life with his nose in a book and never really got a chance to live. Noah always made time for friends and fun. He thoroughly enjoyed his semester abroad in Cordoba, Spain. The memories shared were the greatest gift we could have received. Each story confirmed that Noah was the person we knew him to be. Noah died at the very point in the arc of his life between college and what might come next. It was a clean break from this world. No girlfriend or wife. No employer or possessions of any consequence. What he left behind was a legacy of smiles and happy memories. Pieces of Noah are carried in so many hearts. One of his close college friends told me, “If this had happened to someone else, it’s Noah we would have gone to for advice and wisdom.” People who attended his memorial but had never met him said they felt like they knew him through what was shared. What I know to my core is that Noah’s life will never be defined by the circumstances of his death. 

When we learned Noah had fallen from a cliff, my first thought was, “Noah doesn’t hike.” What we learned from authorities is that he fell from a cliff near his apartment in Isla Vista. For those unfamiliar, Isla Vista is a densely populated student enclave adjacent to UC Santa Barbara. Think open-air student dorms with overcrowded apartments, most in marginal condition, but all of which rent for prices that rival the fanciest communities in California. At the time, Noah and his five roommates paid $4600 a month for a three-bedroom apartment at a property on Del Playa, the street that featured properties with ocean views overlooking 60’ cliffs. Noah was not the first to lose his life to those cliffs, and he wouldn’t be the last. At least six young people have died from cliff falls since we lost Noah. My repeated trips from Irvine to Santa Barbara to meet with public officials, university administrators, the Sheriff and others, advocating for better fencing and a comprehensive effort to improve safety in Isla Vista, never produced the results I had hoped for. I knew that for any effort to succeed, there would need to be buy-in from all stakeholders, including the students whose desire to fit in, sense of invincibility and as yet undeveloped capacity to think beyond the moment most certainly compounded the risks already inherent in college life. That UCSB consistently ranks in the upper echelon of party schools doesn’t help. I advocated for a holistic approach to protecting the health and safety of students. I wanted to see a culture change in Isla Vista. Some improvement to the fencing eventually occurred, but only after a May 2014 massacre by a deranged student who killed six people before taking his own life put Isla Vista in the national — and even international — headlines. Sadly, just weeks before, there had been yet another cliff fall. A young woman, and only child, fell to her death. We had been in Isla Vista the two days previous for meetings on safety in Isla Vista. One of Noah’s friends who was working at UCSB alerted me to the death. News of the massacre distracted anyone who might have cared about Sierra’s death, just as Michael Jackson’s death at the Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara county just weeks after Noah died was the excuse used to explain the unreasonably long time it took the Sheriff to produce the report on Noah’s death. As is the case in many California counties, the Sheriff is also the Coroner. That never gave me any comfort.

Every accidental death seems senseless. You rewrite the story in your head and focus on the whys and what-ifs. You wonder how it might have ended differently, what actions by others may have contributed to or prevented the tragedy, and what you might possibly do to ensure no other parent has to suffer such a loss. Noah had finished his last final on what would be his last day on earth. We would learn that he and his friends had been celebrating at an “open bar” party hosted at a local bar owner as the “reward” for participating in a spring semester promotion known as “50 Club.” The bar owner had apparently been doing this for years, and despite it being a complete violation of his liquor license, nothing had been done to shut it down. The bar owner has two bars — one in Isla Vista called Study Hall and the other, O’Malley’s, in downtown Santa Barbara. 50 Club participants who purchased fifty drinks were promised a commemorative shot glass and admission to a private party with unlimited free alcohol. Noah’s friends said they would split a pitcher of beer at Study Hall and everyone would get a punch in their card. Authorities must have known this was going on. It was promoted through social media and word of mouth. There was a party bus called Bill’s Bus that transported the lucky winners to the night of excessive drinking that awaited them. One has to assume that alcohol distributors helped provide the alcohol dispensed at the party. Just imagine the economic clout those who distribute and dispense alcohol hold in a city known for the beauty of its coastline, that hosts a Top 10 party school, and whose primary industry is hospitality. Noah may have been the only fatality that night, but it’s not a leap to imagine others suffered alcohol poisoning, sexual assault or a at the very least a night with their head in the toilet. College students may look like adults, they may be defined as adults, and at times they may even act like adults, but neuroscience shows that the prefrontal cortex, which controls executive brain functions like impulse control and thinking beyond the moment, only fully develops around the age of 25. That’s what makes college students such a perfect market to exploit economically. It’s so much easier to sustain a system that ignores risks, turns a blind eye when economically or politically expedient and can so conveniently blame the victims if you ignore the risks and realities that claim lives every year. When you’re just a student, a transient with no perceived roots or familial connections in the place you’re attending college, it’s so much easier for people in the local community to not care about you. By dropping the line “drugs or alcohol may have been a contributing factor” in a press release or news report, you help absolve everyone else of responsibility — or even concern. The cyclical nature of college life guarantees that these tragedies will too soon be forgotten, erased from people’s memory as new classes of students, vulnerable to the same risks, are welcomed. 

I was a former mayor, current council member and congressional candidate when Noah died. I knew something about navigating bureaucracy. Irvine is a city recognized for its record on public safety. When people were injured because of faulty infrastructure, we didn’t blame the victim, we addressed the underlying problem. What became abundantly clear was that buck-passing and finger-pointing were the default approach in matters involving the health and safety of students in Isla Vista. Property owners were protected by outdated building codes and routinely allowed overcrowding in their units. The Isla Vista Foot Patrol, a division of the Sheriff’s Department had an unhealthy relationship with the student population, preferring enforcement to engagement. “Our biggest problem is residential burglaries,” a Sergeant overseeing the Foot Patrol told me. When I pointed out that landlords would give only three keys for a three-bedroom apartment that routinely had six or more students, requiring tenants to leave doors unlocked so their roommates could access the apartment, he claimed to be unaware. I learned a lot of things no parent ever wants to know about the environment their now deceased child was living in. Noah’s death has been a gateway to an education I wish I never had. Grief has been both painful and enlightening. I’m grateful for the growth, but the price of this wisdom and perspective is far too great.

The question of why Noah hopped a property fence between two properties near his apartment remains a mystery. The report on Noah’s death is short on facts and long on opinion, conjecture and innuendo. Authorities released a story to the press the day after Noah died suggesting he may have jumped out of a cab without paying the fare and was running from the cab driver at the time he hopped the fence. What became clear was that there was no evidence to support that claim. No incident report. No cab driver came forward. Just a story handed to the press by the Sheriff’s department. Needless to say, that allegation, along with the high blood alcohol level that an open bar party will produce, became fodder for certain press outlets. How do you protect a child’s reputation when they cannot speak for themselves and authorities are asserting facts not in evidence? Even before the official report was released it was clear there was no substance to that allegation. I called the Sheriff to ask how, given the lack of evidence, they were going to address the cab jumping story in the report. “We have to put it in,” he said. I pushed back, saying “I could understand if you said you have a theory you can’t prove, but if you put it in the report it will be viewed as fact.” I also pointed out it was a public document. His response enraged me. “Anyone who would use it against you politically, it would backfire,” he said. That he imagined my concern was political spoke volumes about where his priorities were. It would be a long time before I engaged the Sheriff again. 

The Sheriff did refer the bar owner who ran the 50 Club promotion to ABC (Alcohol and Beverage Control), the state agency that regulates and licenses establishments that sell alcohol, for investigation. I was certain the bar owner would lose his license. In California, you can’t offer a free ham sandwich to induce people to buy alcohol, let alone an unlimited supply of free alcohol. A few days before the hearing, I was advised by one of the lawyers for ABC that they were working on a settlement. The bar owner got what his lawyers demanded. A mere fifteen-day suspension in each bar — but it’s worse. He got to take the suspension in Isla Vista during the last two weeks of December when all the students were away on break and the suspension at the bar downtown the last two weeks in February, undoubtedly the lowest volume of sales between the popular winter and spring holidays. It’s hard to imagine anything making the pain of losing Noah worse, but that did. What if those who turned a blind eye had acted to shut the promotion down years earlier? What if ABC had held the bar owner accountable? What if the county had taken actions to protect those living in aging properties protected under outdated codes and built fencing that delineated the point at which eroding cliffs posed a deadly risk? The hardest question to answer is, who was really being served and protected by their actions? 

In hopes of moving efforts to address health and safety risks in Isla Vista, I set aside my resistance and met with the Sheriff to ask if he would convene all the relevant stakeholders. I knew that he had the platform to do so, but he declined. He made it clear that, in his mind, the problem was the students, not environmental risk factors. They just needed to consider the consequences of their actions before engaging in risky behavior. What he said next, in an effort to assure me that he was indeed concerned, was that he routinely warned his officers not to chase kids toward the cliffs. What he didn’t know was that I had feared that was what happened the night Noah died. Had Noah been chased by an officer rounding up kids who were drunk in public, which they surely would have been doing that night? He certainly was drunk after a night of celebration at an open bar party. My thought was that his officers had ignored the directive not to chase kids toward the cliffs. That he didn’t know — hadn’t put the pieces together that his officers were at the fence Noah jumped, acknowledged shining a flashlight over the fence and seeing a shoe in the foliage but choosing not to go down to the beach to see if someone had fallen. Instead, Noah was found by his friend’s girlfriend and two of her friends as they walked the beach at sunrise. The pieces had never added up. There was the story I was told by the lead investigator about Noah’s wallet falling out of the bag that held his personal effects after I discovered it was missing. After first claiming they may never have had his wallet, I reminded the investigator that they told me they had identified him from his driver’s license. Miraculously it was found the next day. When I asked how it could have fallen out of the bag, the investigator told me it’s like when you have a bag of groceries on the seat of your car and it tips over and the lettuce rolls onto the floor. Given the unsubstantiated story about Noah jumping out of a cab, I wondered whether they might have held on to his wallet and planned to plant it somewhere to lend credibility to that story. I’m not given to conspiratorial thinking, and I would like nothing better than to know exactly what led to Noah’s death, but it’s hard not to wonder what the truth is, and what facts might have been suppressed, to ensure that all accountability was buried with Noah.

We will never really know what happened that night. If there were witnesses, they never came forward. Your mind keeps rewriting the story in search of better conclusions that never come. I’m grateful to Noah for the lessons he continues to teach me. I’m grateful to my daughter, now a Marriage and Family Therapist, for her insistence that I get therapy. I had never gotten therapy, despite dealing with some traumas in my life. I thought it was a superpower to find another space to tuck the pain away in. I feared therapy, thinking I would be like a champagne bottle uncorked with everything I’d been holding inside unleashed. The truth is, therapy was my salvation. I was blessed with a great therapist who specializes in grief. At a very basic level, therapy was a safe place to cry — or to wail, as grief compelled me to do. I never understood what wailing was, but grief taught me. Therapy helped me accept and let go, but that was a long and complicated journey. I tell people the greatest lesson I have learned is just how little I control. I have no power to control what others think, do or say. The second greatest lesson is that all the stress I’ve endured throughout my life is because I didn’t understand lesson number one. I know Noah’s death was beyond my control to prevent, but of course, the guilt remains. What is a parent for if not to protect their children? Therapy provided a perspective I would not have gained on my own. Mostly it provided a platform to understand myself better, to be kinder to myself, and to see patterns that served me and those that did not. How I wish I could do life differently with the benefit of wisdom I acquired on this journey. All I can do is start where I am, apply the lessons I’ve learned and do the best I can to extend Noah’s legacy and impact.