Cady Groves is dead.
She died of ”complications from chronic ethanol abuse”. In other words… she killed herself. Like her brother and her sister.
This was back in May, although the cause didn’t come out officially until a few weeks ago.
Thank God I didn’t know about any of this back then.
Selfish, yeah, but… wow. God, ouch. Oof. Of all the endings to my… relationships, this one is the worst. By far.
I wrote a few times about Cady, hoping to help us both. I remember wayyyyy back….. then. Like 2014, when she was… my favorite. I LOVED her. LOVED. Sometimes I get like that with my girlfriends. I lose reason, perhaps because I have to. For the sake of her, or me.
Or in some some extreme cases, like the one between Cady and I, for us both.
Look… I knew she was hurting. It was obvious, and it was part of the reason why I was so protective of her. I wrote about celebs mostly, back then. But Cady wasn’t famous, not even close, really, but I still wrote about her. I wanted to help her, to protect her. To assuage her ego. I knew she was disappointed in things, in life, in many ways, and I knew that she was at risk if things didn’t turn out. At the time I knew her family history, and of her siblings’ suicides, and in fact I mentioned all of this in this post, here.
Please read again, if you want. Very bittersweet, that one is. Too much so; it stings.
Ouch.
Oh, Cady.
Why?
I didn’t know it was that bad. I’m sorry, Cady. There, I said it finally. I’m sorry.
Sigh…
We had a complicated relationship. I needed her back then; she was one of my few non-famous girls in the industry. And because of that, she didn’t have the walls of others; there was no glitz coming in-between us. It was very personal, very direct. She tailored her twitter and her insta directly to me, and I responded in kind. I was more honest with her than my other girls, and I lavished attention on her.
I still have my archives of her songs- I leeched her entire soundcloud and youtube channels back then. Hundreds of youtube vids, and I watched every one of them and still have them all; dozens of original songs, and they still hold a place of honor in my “pop” directory. I downloaded her entire instagram, including every caption to every one of her pictures. She put so much effort into making me happy that it touched me. It meant something to me, so much so, much more than perhaps anything given to me by any girl has ever meant to me.
I loved her. A lot. And she loved me. A lot. It was like… we filled each other’s emptiness.
I still have the pages and pages I saved from her twitter feed of the often hilarious and always poignant status updates on our relationship she would give me. She was so… funny. And kind. And BEAUTIFUL. I remember a prank she pulled when she moved to Nashville: she pretended to get engaged- literally out of the blue- and presented it in such a way as to deliberately give me a heart attack. Yikes, I thought. LOL. I mean as time went on it was clear that she was just fucking with me but… wow, lol.
She was GORGEOUS. Tailor made to my tastes. I mean, if you look at her back then, and you know me… you can tell, she was IT for me, especially back then.
We… drifted apart, though. I thought, after so much teasing, maybe… she didn’t need me anymore. And I started thinking maybe she would be happier without me- maybe that prank she pulled was her way of saying, subconsciously, that maybe she had outgrown me. And truth, I kept watching her videos, and she seemed so happy and free in her new house, so happy with her mother and other siblings, and… I got a bit jealous. Here she was, Cady Groves, normal chick, and she was more advanced than I was at the time- in some ways, she was outpacing me, at least as real life is concerned, and she knew it, and didn’t hesitate to rub it in my face, if only teasingly, and as funny and touching as that was I… drifted away, verrrrry slowly.
And so did she.
After awhile she stopped posting so much on instagram, and started, I think, to close up a bit on the real “her” and tried again to make it work again in the music industry. Her pictures became more airbrushed and posed and she started to look artificial, which I thought was not something that suited her so much, but that was her choice… and then… I don’t know. We just went our separate ways. I think, or at least, I did, because I thought I had to, I think.
I don’t know.
The last time I looked at her insta was last year, during a hospital visit. There was nothing there. Nothing new, at least. Nothing happy. I got the distinct vibe that something was very wrong. She seemed defeated, sad. Empty. Contrasting what I found there with the Cady I thought I knew, and her fun, ecstatic, happy self, was jarring. I just left.
At any rate, I was in the hospital. What could I do?
And then… I developed a dependence on prescription painkillers and had problems with them very similar to those that led her siblings to kill themselves. Yikes, yeah, but I would think about her sometimes, with all of that. But something told me to stay away. To avoid her, maybe to protect her, or myself. A nagging feeling, I guess.
So I did. And then she died, apparently by suicide, and looking at her insta now… yeah, I see it. She was sick. Extremely so, and it started to manifest publicly a couple of years after we started to drift apart.
I don’t know.
With all of that said, I just don’t know what to say.
I had her in the back of my mind, always. I just wasn’t sure, I was apprehensive. I don’t know.
I am sorry, Cady.
If there was a chance, I had always kept her as a possibility for me IRL, and in fact, she would be perfect now for me, for where I am.
I’m sorry, Cady. I can see it now in your posts. I know you loved me and I will always always cherish everything we did together and all the memories and everything we created together- every song, every video, every ecstasy, every smile, every laugh.
I want to tell you please, please don’t go. Please don’t do this, to yourself, to others. To me. Please don’t do this to the world, you are better than this.
Cady: I am selfish, maybe. Maybe I should have known earlier but if this was to happen, and it would have hit me when you died, I don’t know, I had and still have the problems your dead siblings had. I needed to not know. Do you understand?
I’m sorry, Cady.
God… I don’t know.
Would you have listened to me? What did you need? Cady? Can you hear me?
Maybe.
But not now.
I’m not interested in crying, not tonight. I will not look at her pictures, or anything. No memories. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember coming home from work every night for a year and logging on as soon as I got home to see what she might have given me on instagram. No, I don’t want to remember that, or the fact that I love her music and take more pride in what we two created than essentially anything else. No, I don’t want to remember that, or even worse, to even consider the idea that I may have let her down. No, I don’t want to think about such things, not now, I have a whole weekend ahead of me to think about things slowly and peacefully, up in my room. I hope.
I just want to remember her beautiful face, and all that it meant to me, once upon a time. That beautiful girl, blowing me bubbles and tossing me kisses in her social media and teasing me because she was oh-so-happy and free and she knew how much I cherished her.
That I want to remember, and nothing else.
Am I selfish?
Cady, am I?
What do you think, love?
Please Cady, don’t go. Please.
I’m sorry, Cady.
I’m so sorry.