On the afternoon of Nov. 2, 2011, Rocky Huff was running late. It was a mild, cloudy Wednesday in Calgary, and he was to pick up his 13-year-old daughter, Keelee, from school. To her, the day seemed like any other. She was looking forward to ringette practice. Keelee and her older sister played on top-level volleyball, ringette and softball teams, and the family schedule was all sports, all the time. Rocky coached girls’ softball and volleyball, with weekends often consumed by out-of-town games. The softball team made nationals three years in a row. “Alberta’s best girls,” Rocky would boast, and the players and parents were equally fond of him. He seemed indefatigable.
Keelee waited for her dad. An hour passed, then another. Rocky finally pulled up in his 2003 Pontiac Sunfire. Keelee spotted her old LG cellphone on the seat in the car. Weird, she thought. It had stopped working a year prior. Rocky muttered something about getting it fixed.
He was acting strangely. That morning, he’d had a goatee. Now he did not. He told Keelee she couldn’t go to ringette today and they argued. After relenting and dropping Keelee off at practice, Rocky stopped at a liquor store for wine and beer. He called his wife, Debra. “Meet me at home,” he said. He was ready to tell the truth. The clothes he’d worn that morning, stained red, told part of it. He suspected his marriage would be over.
At their home in Auburn Bay, on the southernmost edge of the city, Rocky poured a glass of wine for Debra. He said he’d done something terrible and began to weep. Debra’s world began its implosion. Did he hurt somebody? He’s not violent; did he hit somebody while driving? The awful possibilities clattered around her mind. An affair?
That weekend, Debra composed an e-mail to be sent to family, friends, teachers and parents of kids Rocky had coached. “This is, without a doubt, the hardest e-mail I have ever written,” she typed. “The news is out—as some of you already may know—and it is the unfortunate truth. Rocky has been suffering from depression since his bout with cancer in 2006 and hit rock bottom on the morning of November 2nd. He robbed a bank.”
Rocky is now 47 and drives a tow truck for a living. His face is carved with deep lines. Although he looks like he’s led a hardscrabble life, he speaks with the thoughtful softness of a librarian. He moved to Calgary at age 19 to work in a cardboard-manufacturing plant after growing up in Medicine Hat and Burstall, Sask. Debra met him at a slo-pitch tournament where he was umpiring. He made a call she didn’t like. Debra kicked shale at him. “The rest is history,” Debra told me.
I learned of Rocky’s story unexpectedly this past January. I work with Debra, 49, at United Way of Calgary and Area, where she is an executive assistant. She’s the kind of person who ensures everyone on our team has a place to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, and if not, would they like to join her family for dinner? We assumed someone had quit when our team was summoned to a last-minute meeting one morning. That day’s Calgary Herald carried this headline: “Desperate, ill father pleads guilty to robbing bank.”
In 2006, after years of smoking, Rocky had received a bleak medical diagnosis: throat cancer. Subsequent radiation treatments destroyed his teeth, and he lived on Ensure, fed to him through a tube. Within months, he dropped from a beefy 255 pounds to a gaunt 156. He always felt cold and napped constantly. Sometimes he would sleep in the bathtub eight hours a day to stay warm, waking up briefly to add more hot water. Staff at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre informed Rocky and Debra of counselling options, but they never gave it any consideration. They thought they didn’t need it.
Despite his illness, Rocky dragged himself to Keelee’s and Casey-May’s games. He felt a little self-conscious, being so thin, but he wanted to be there. His own parents had divorced when he was three, and when Rocky played baseball as a kid he did so alone. “I think my mom came out to one game,” Rocky said. “I always resented that somewhat, because there was nobody to back me up. I think maybe that’s why I’ve gone overboard with our girls.”
He kept coaching, and in late 2007 it looked like the radiation treatments were successful. He gave his renewed energy to his daughters’ sports, starting a new volleyball club for girls who didn’t make other club teams. “The sports became almost an obsession,” said Debra. “He was very involved in a positive way, but that’s where he focused all of his attention. It was his escape. It was his happy place.” Parents valued Rocky’s passion but he was dedicated almost to a fault, as one family recalled later. How could you put that much energy toward youth sports and have anything left for yourself?
At home, Rocky was different. “Unless it had to do with sports, it almost seemed like there wasn’t really a purpose or drive for him to be part of it,” Rocky’s 17-year-old daughter, Casey-May, told me. “He was just tired all the time.” After the cancer battle, he wound down a promotions company that he and Debra had run for more than a decade. He worked from home, buying jewelry from American companies hit by the recession, and reselling it online. He had some success with this and other ventures, but his post-cancer work efforts never really took off. He lacked focus and had trouble concentrating. Debra noticed him becoming more withdrawn, lying on the couch for hours at a time. Rocky stopped going to church and no longer wanted to visit family friends. When Debra brought up his reclusiveness, he’d say everything was fine. “I denied it,” Rocky said. “I just thought I was lazy, and still sick to some extent.”
His behaviour annoyed Debra. She wanted to tell him: Get up and get going already. She figured he could cheer up if he chose to. “It was just that simple to me,” Debra said. “When I was growing up, if someone was depressed, we’d be like, ‘Come on. Shake your head. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. Get off the pity pot.’ But it wasn’t that simple.” The couple had no language for what was happening.
Rocky started borrowing money rather than earning it, and he told Debra he had jobs he didn’t have. On weekdays, he woke up early and left the house until she went to work. Then he’d come back home, go to bed and sleep all day. Unbeknownst to Debra, the Huffs were going deep into debt. “I was on this self-destructive course,” Rocky said. “I was drinking every morning and covering up lie after lie after lie. Outside of softball, probably 90 per cent of my life that whole year was a lie.” Sports were his only truth, and in September 2011, after softball finished for the year, that was gone, too. He entered a deep darkness and saw no way out.
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