“Like many parents, I had occasionally thought about how I would react if something like this ever happened,” Mr. Roche reflects. “I was sure my brain would explode, I would have a nervous breakdown, my body would crumble into ashes, and that would be that. You could bury us together. I had these thoughts, and pushed them out of my mind as quickly as possible, knowing that my sanity would not be able to survive it.”
But after the realization sank in that his beloved daughter was gone, “none of that happened,” Mr. Roche recalls. “Instead, I went into shock very quickly, and I went very numb. For the next few days, I had waves of numbness and very extreme emotion. But then her friends started coming to our apartment, and it was the act of comforting those children that made me realize I had a choice.”
Mr. Roche made that choice four days later. At a candle-light vigil held last Thursday afternoon in the churchyard of St. Paul’s, organized and attended by hundreds of Imogen’s friends, “I was surrounded by all of these people who loved her, and were in pain,” he recalls. “I got to talk to dozens of her friends, and all the stories were consistent,” he notes. “The stories were that she was the one that they cried on. She was the one who put other people’s feelings ahead of her own. She was the one who looked out for kids who were suffering, or were lonely or afraid. Her teachers remembered that she would volunteer to be the first to speak or answer a question, when she knew the person next to her was afraid or nervous. One of the things that made Imogen special was her ability to connect to other people through pain. The vigil was not only cathartic and beautiful. I came away proud and inspired.”
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Theseus and Imogen Roche share the podium at a 2017 ceremony marking the completion of a Manhattan Youth student film program that he founded, and in which she participated.
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“She was grounded in a morality of compassion that was bigger than me,” he says. “She really had a way of living it. For a teenager, she talked a lot about empathy. She would come home sometimes carrying that weight and would talk to me about it.”
Mr. Roche, who was raising Imogen as a single dad, living in the Financial District, “tried to protect her from the things that were stressors for me. I usually didn’t share with her the things that were really troubling. But the few times that I did, she was so happy. She loved when I confided with her adult problems, things that were dilemmas, and had no solutions. When I would share these things with her, it was like a weight lifted off of her.”
“I’m not carrying guilt and I’m not carrying regret,” he notes. “I’m not carrying guilt, because I know that I did everything that I would expect a parent to do. And I’m not filled with regret, because I know that we left nothing unsaid. I told that I loved her every day of her life, several times a day.”
In the days after the Thursday vigil, “we picked a space in a cemetery for her, up in Hamilton Heights,” he says. “The thing about it is, there’s a part of the decision that’s fairly arbitrary. How you deal with the earthly remains of a human being? But it was clear that this is a place where I’m going to spend a lot of weekends. When we went up there, there was one available spot that was acceptable to me. It became very, very clear right away. There’s a place to sit, there’s grass, and a little marker with her name on it, under a tree.”
“It’s a nice spot for her,” he muses, “but she’s not really in there. I’m carrying her around with me, and a lot of other people are carrying her around with them.”
“When Imogen was born, I felt like I recognized her,” he remembers. “When I got to know her, in the first month of her life, I didn’t feel like I was getting to know someone new. I felt like this was someone who had always existed. And if she had always existed, then I was always her father. After a while, I no longer remembered a time when I wasn’t her dad. Even today, when I think myself as a five-year-old boy, I think of Imogen’s father at five years old.”
“My brother, Alex, and I have been walking around and running into people the last few days. People don’t know how to react to me. Alex said that one disconnect is that everyone else is afraid and I’m not. And I’m not afraid, because I have nothing else to fear. So I’m a lot of things, but I’m not afraid.”
“People are having a hard time, and I imagine that is going to go on for a while,” he adds. “I’m not sure if I’m always going to be someone who is now outside. Do I carry with me this thing that is to be feared — something that is too frightening for people to face — perpetually? Am I the father who lost his little girl, forever?”
“What I find very interesting is that it doesn’t happen with children — only with adults. That’s probably why we work with kids.” (Mr. Roche is the director of after-school programs at Manhattan Youth, and his brother is that organization’s chief operating officer, as well the director of its Downtown Community Center.)
“One of the things I share with my staff before we start every school year is that idea of the significance of the now for all the kids we serve.” (Manhattan Youth provides after-school programs at dozens of public schools, reaching a population of many thousands of students.) “I say to my staff that childhood cannot be just a preparation for adulthood. There has to be enjoyment in this moment; there has to be meaning in this moment. Because the moment they are in now is part of life, and it may be the only moment that they have. Because not every kid makes it to adulthood.”
The realization that his daughter was one of the children described by these unintentionally prophetic words has left Mr. Roche grasping for a way to reorient his view of life.
“The best analogy I can think of is that people have described to me what it’s like to have abdominal surgery. You suddenly discover how many things you didn’t realize you use abdominal muscles for, until you can’t use them. You turn your head, you sneeze, you cough — everything is engaged, everything hurts.”
“As Alex and I started walking around the City, getting something to eat, looking at the newly opened subway station at Cortland Street, I realized that every thought that occurs to me, everything I try, everything I see, everything I notice, everything I observe, everything I enjoy, I store away in my brain with the explicit purpose of sharing it with Imogen.”
“If I were given the choice to do it all over again, and knew that I would get only the time we had time, and would suffer immeasurably when she was gone, I would absolutely do it all over again,” he says. “It’s like asking somebody, ‘would you rather have love in your life and lose it, or never have any love at all?’ What would be the point of living?”
“In so many ways, she is the joy and love of my life,” he reflects, pointedly clinging the present tense. “She inspires me, and gives me purpose and focus and a reason for doing everything. I wouldn’t trade a minute of it, except for the last week.”
“I don’t know what I’ll use my kitchen for now,” he wonders aloud, “because I don’t cook meals for myself. I loved cooking for her. When she was young, she would wake up to waffles I had made from scratch. And when she was a little older, we’d stop at the store on the way home from school, and see what was on sale. Then she’d do her homework while I cooked, and we’d sit and eat together. I loved those moments.”
“There’s a lot for us to do to get through tomorrow’s service,” he anticipates. “But then Sunday happens, and intermission is over, and the rest of my life starts. For the rest of my life, things are going to be different. I’m not yet sure how I’m going to get through. I do know I’m going to be looking for a new pathway to find joy. I’ll have to find venues for doing that.”
One way of reclaiming and redirecting his life will be through a new non-profit organization, which Mr. Roche and his brother founded this week. “We’re setting up a foundation,” he explains. “It’s going to be about supporting the well-being of children with programs and services. For now, we are trying to keep its mission broad. I don’t know yet what the things are that we’ll want to fund. But I know it will focus in part on humanitarian issues that she was beginning to push for as she started talking about college and a career. She talked a lot about children entangled in the legal system, whether it was kids who had been hurt, or children who needed representation because they were in the middle of family dysfunction. In all of these systems, there aren’t enough adults working to support kids in the way they need. So for people who want to send flowers, we are asking them to consider making a donation, instead.” (The organization’s website is: ImogenFoundation.org.)
“Imogen was not done with the work that she was doing,” he says, “because she was showing her peers, and everyone who knew her, how to love unconditionally. And I can’t stop doing that, either.”
Looking to the future, Theseus Roche says, “Imogen raised a strong father.”