Softball tournament in Darmstadt for the prevention of suicide

AThis weekend, Joel Rhodes, who everyone calls “Dusty,” will be speaking for five minutes and they’re going to push him to the limit. He will stand on a sports field and say thank you that so many have come. And then talk about his 13-year-old daughter, Ciarra Joi Rhodes, about what happened that day in December 2013. It was a Tuesday and Dusty was about to leave for work. Then he heard his wife scream.

Dusty’s wife had found Ciarra in her closet, hanged with a scarf. The night before, Dusty had stumbled across a box of scarves in Ciarra’s room, wondering why they were standing in the middle of the room. “I repeated the scene a thousand times in my head,” he says in English. “That I should have asked her why it was there.” There was no suicide note, nothing. “Guilt and failure, that’s what dominates me the most, still. But I feel no shame. That’s a difference.” Talking about the pain dominates his life because he forces himself to do it.

Dusty still lives in the house where his daughter saw no way out but death, on a quiet street in Gross-Gerau. He’s American, from Cleveland, Ohio, a burly man in his fifties with tattooed arms and gel in his hair. “The worst thing is when people say how strong I am,” he says. “I had no choice.”

It started with a headache

Dusty served in the American army for a long time, was also stationed in Iraq, knows how it feels when people die who were just there, perfectly healthy. But nothing compares to what happened quietly in his own home. “I’ll never understand why,” he says. “That’s why I stopped asking myself that question.”

Dusty’s eyes turn red when he says Ciarra’s name, but he doesn’t stop speaking. Silence, he knows, can be deadly. On the wall in the living room there is a wooden emblem with Ciarra’s initials “CJR – In loving memory” and a photo of her underneath. The art on his arms is also reminiscent of his daughter – and his wife, who died three years after the child’s death.

It started with a headache, says Dusty, then her condition worsened over months in the hospital. The doctors could never identify a biological reason why she died. Dusty thinks she just couldn’t handle life without her daughter.

So at the weekend he will have to talk again, in Darmstadt. A softball tournament will commemorate Ciarra there for three days. The idea came from friends, it has been held annually since 2014. And Dusty has to inject some tension into what is actually a relaxed atmosphere, at least for a moment. “I would literally rather run a marathon. I love-hate this weekend,” he says. He doesn’t want attention for himself, but suicide and its prevention need to get that kind of attention.