To Selena, With Love (34 page)

“Come on, Chris,” everyone urged me. “You need to say good-bye.”

“Man, I don’t want to do that,” I told them. “I can’t see her like this.”

Everything felt surreal, and the whole business at the funeral home, which was packed with people, with many more lined up outside all night to get inside, felt like a spectacle to me. I hadn’t had any time alone with Selena.

I was clutching the ring I had bought for Selena to celebrate our second wedding anniversary, the ring I’d hidden in her pillowcase in Jamaica. I had it on one of my fingers and I kept twiddling it around in my hand.

Selena’s family, meanwhile, did a wonderful job of talking to people who came to pay their respects. When the viewing hours
were over, her uncle Isaac came over to me and said, “Chris, you haven’t gone up to see her. Why not?”

I was crying. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t go up there and see her.”

“Come on,” he said gently, and then Isaac literally picked me up off the chair by hooking an arm around my shoulders.

I didn’t resist. As we walked to the casket, though, my legs started shaking so badly that I nearly collapsed. I hadn’t eaten anything in two days and my clothes were already falling off my body.

“You know what,” Isaac said. “Stop right here for a minute. I’m going to get everybody out of the room. It’s going to be just you and her, son.”

I halted next to him. I couldn’t have gone anywhere without his support anyway. Just as he’d promised, Isaac announced, “Everybody out, please. We need privacy here.”

He led me up to the casket once the room was cleared and left me there. Once everybody else was gone, I felt, okay, the show was over.

“It’s just you and me now,” I whispered to my wife.

I stood there crying and looking at her for a minute. Then I gave Selena a kiss on the forehead and stroked her hand. She looked so comfortable and peaceful lying there in the coffin that I just wanted to get in there with her and lie down beside her, put my arm around her, close the top, and say, “Let’s go.”

After a few minutes, though, I got the ring out of my pocket and put it on Selena’s wedding ring finger. Then I got down on my knees right there and said a prayer, the tears still streaming down my face, and said my last good-bye.

The next day, we held Selena’s funeral at Seaside Memorial Park in Corpus Christi. My friend Rudy drove me there in his car. I don’t remember much of that day, other than the thick gray clouds gathered overhead and being aware of wearing my wedding ring. I was in too much of a daze to notice much beyond my small circle of pain. I had already said good-bye the night before at the funeral home, so at the actual cemetery there was really nothing left inside me. I was just a shell.

I heard later that more than sixty thousand people attended, and celebrities like Celia Cruz, Madonna, Julio Iglesias, and Gloria Estefan sent their condolences. Her fans lined up along Shoreline Boulevard for almost a mile to view Selena’s casket on the way to the service at Bayfront Auditorium. We had surrounded Selena’s closed casket with five thousand white roses, her favorite flower. We also asked those attending the funeral service to place white roses on the coffin. By the time Selena was buried, a two-foot pile of roses was piled on top of the coffin.

Selena’s death had such a widespread impact that news about it ran on the front page of
The New York Times
for two days running.

On April 12, 1995, two weeks after Selena’s death, then-Governor George W. Bush declared her birthday “Selena Day” in Texas. Selena was also entered into
Billboard
’s International Latin Music Hall of Fame.

I was oblivious to all of this. I was barely conscious, imprisoned inside the walls of my own grief. A big part of me had died with Selena. I was, for all practical purposes, dead myself after we buried her.

I would have given anything to have her back.

Somehow, I made it through the trial that October. The jury deliberated for only two hours before finding Yolanda guilty of murder and sentencing her to life in prison for murder with a deadly weapon. The trial judge ordered that the .38 pistol Yolanda used to shoot Selena be chopped into fifty pieces that were scattered across the bay in Corpus Christi.

From her cell in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Yolanda continued to maintain that she was innocent, saying that the shooting was an accident. She also tried to spread rumors about Selena and her family about everything imaginable—and about many things that weren’t. No one ever uncovered any evidence to support her ugly rumors.

I paid no attention. I was still numb and didn’t care about any of it. I was dimly aware of being glad that Yolanda had gotten life in prison. Death would have been too easy for her, and she deserved to have to live with what she had done. The justice system had done what it could. No verdict could change the fact that Selena was gone. Meanwhile, I continued to live, though many wouldn’t have called it that.

I stayed on in our house in Corpus for a while. I wanted to surround myself with Selena’s family, with her belongings and our dogs, with anything that could help me keep Selena close. The hardest thing was going to bed at night. Selena and I had a king-size bed; it was so big that sometimes I’d wake up and joke around when I saw her on the other side of the mattress, waving at her like we were standing across a river from each other. Selena would wave back. Now, when I woke up, I was alone on one side of the river. She had crossed it but I couldn’t see her.

I shut myself off from everything. I didn’t want to go anywhere,
do anything, or see anybody. I was just trying to be. There were periods when I slept a lot and other times when I stayed up for three days straight. I started to drink heavily.

The months crawled by. People kept trying to pull me out of my well of grief. Nothing worked. I slept with pictures of Selena, snapshots of her doing ordinary, everyday things, like dusting or playing with the dogs, because that’s how I saw her. I even carried stacks of photos around with me, so that I’d have her with me everywhere I went. I’d go to a friend’s house, maybe, and be surrounded by well-meaning people, but I’d still be that weird guy sitting alone, off in a corner with my pictures of Selena. I ached for her every day.

Occasionally, Abraham would insist that I come over to Q Productions. He, A.B., and Suzette all went back to work, coping with the murder of their beloved daughter and sister in their own ways. They were trying to keep Selena’s memory alive and hoping to bring me along with them into a future where I no longer felt like I had a place. Why would I want to live in a world without Selena?

Whenever I did make that rare appearance at Q Productions, I would walk in and hear a gasp from Selena’s aunt Dolores, who worked at the front desk. Dolores scarcely recognized me anymore. I was so thin that my pants didn’t fit and my shirts were just barely hanging on my body. People kept trying to make me eat lunch or dinner with them, but I’d always say that I wasn’t hungry. That was the truth, too.

My mother visited regularly. She was trying to help me rejoin the living any way she could: talking to me, cooking, cleaning the house. One day, she was scrubbing out our bathroom when I heard something crash to the floor.

I snapped out of my stupor and ran to her. “Mom? You okay?”

She was standing in the bathroom with a hand over her mouth, staring at a pill bottle on the floor. It was a bottle of folic acid tablets—pills that women take during pregnancy. My mother looked at me, a question in her eyes.

“I know what you’re thinking, but no, Mom,” I said gently. “Selena wasn’t pregnant. She took these pills for a while because she’d heard that folic acid is good for your hair.”

The truth was that Selena and I had been talking about having children just before she died. Once the mainstream album was released, once we had promoted it and played some shows, we had decided it was time to move forward with our own family.

If Selena had lived, would she have become the next Gloria Estefan, conquering the pop charts? I thought so, but in a way it didn’t matter. Selena and I already had each other. We were ready to build our dream house on those ten beautiful acres of land in Corpus and get started on the next chapter of our lives.

Now I was thankful that at least Selena wasn’t pregnant, and that I hadn’t lost my child as well as my wife.

After about six months, Selena’s death no longer felt like that constant, piercing pain. Instead I had an empty, hollow, sad feeling that I imagined would never go away, punctuated by silent howls of despair when something reminded me on a deeper level that Selena was really gone—like when I picked up the phone to call her, and realized how much I missed hearing her voice. I tried to dull my emotions with drugs and alcohol, slipping further out of the life that seemed so pointless now.

Occasionally, though, I began to have moments when I’d force
my grief into a corner and try to start over. “She wouldn’t want you to do this,” I’d remind myself. “You have to keep on living for her.”

When I could, I wrote a little music and lost myself in my guitar. Somehow this was possible: I could express my grief through music, when words just wouldn’t do it.

Around this time, I met a charismatic, talented singer named John Garza who became my friend and, in many ways, my protector during my darkest times. John moved into my house and made sure that I made it home in one piece each night no matter what I did to escape the body that trapped my soul inside it, preventing me from joining Selena.

John and I started working on music together, just a little bit here and there. I admired John’s voice, because whenever he sang, it seemed as if he could convey the rush of feelings behind the words I was writing.

John didn’t know me before Selena passed. He saw the crazy lifestyle that I was leading, but to his credit, he never judged me or made me feel bad about the things I was doing to myself. He understood what I was going through and simply watched my back as I struggled to find some meaning in my life again, even though I was looking for that meaning in all the wrong places.

Once, John and I found ourselves in a hotel in San Antonio. I was preoccupied with some football game that was about to start. We didn’t have any alcohol, so I said, “Dude, I’m going to run out and get some beer real quick.”

We took off from the hotel. I was in a hurry because I didn’t want to miss the kickoff. I started jogging across the parking lot, John maintaining a steady pace beside me.

All of a sudden, I realized that my mouth was moving but no
sound was coming out. I knew that I was talking. Yet, I couldn’t hear anything but this incredibly noisy wind in my ears, or maybe it was inside my head.

I stopped running and froze in place. John stopped beside me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My heart stopped,” I said.

John put his hand on my chest. There was nothing, he said. No sound. Then, suddenly, “boom boom,” my heart started beating again and my hearing returned.

I went right on over to the liquor store and bought some beer. That’s the state of mind I was in.