Cortney McGhghy at the Water’s Edge

By Demetra Paizanis,
Enrollment Marketing and Communications Manager –

Cortney McGhghy went into the bedroom to tell her husband, Duane, it was time to leave for their son’s seventh birthday party. Her mother was screaming through his phone. The call was not on speaker. The children were in the living room. Someone had found Cortney’s brother, Jerry, dead in bed. Cortney could not stand. She did not believe what she heard, but she wanted to keep the day normal for her son, Austin.

Cortney cried when she heard the news. They went to the bowling alley and held the party. She cried again afterward. The party itself was blank.

“I’ll never forget the wave of fog that came and how we still had that surprise party so that the kids weren’t thrown off,” she recalled.

Afterward, they went home and packed for Arkansas. Duane called relatives to tell them the news. Jerry had died of an overdose.

Granny and Pa’s House

Long before that phone call, Cortney and Jerry lived in a trailer behind their grandparents’ house in rural Arkansas. Granny and Pa were the parents of Edward, Cortney’s adoptive father. When Cortney was seven, her mother needed medical treatment, and the family stayed with Granny and Pa during her recovery. Back in the trailer, her mother slept a lot, and the children heard their parents fighting. In third grade, Cortney and Jerry went to their grandparents for a sleepover, only for Granny and Pa’s house to become their new permanent home.

Granny’s beauty shop was attached to the house. Coming in through the carport, the children could open a door into women talking in the shop or turn towards cartoons and Pa’s news. Once, Cortney and Jerry played in the wash sink and let go of the hose for water to uncontrollably spray across the room.

“I have so many memories of the smell of perm mixed with greens cooking on the stove. It probably sounds disgusting to most, but to me, it was granny’s house,” she said.

A golf cart Pa acquired in a barter became the children’s vehicle. They circled the house and drove toward the pond and creek. Granny sliced strawberries, sprinkled them with sugar and refrigerated them for Cortney to take along. Jerry could operate the machines around the property and was always taking things apart and putting them together again.

During the custody disputes, the children worried someone would take them away. Many nights, they slept on their grandparents’ bedroom floor because they were afraid to stay in their own rooms. Cortney loved and missed her mother, but Granny and Pa’s home felt safe. Whatever else the adults disagreed about, they agreed that the siblings should stay together.

In counseling, they sat on Mrs. Susan’s couch, talked and received little toys. When she brought the family into a session together, Cortney hoped everyone might get along again. She often did the talking for Jerry.

“Jerry never would talk in counseling. He never told anyone what he was feeling, but at night he would ask me to sing sometimes to him,” she said.

Cortney wanted to do what Mrs. Susan did, to give people somewhere they could talk about their feelings.

She met Duane in ninth grade. By her senior year, she was living on her own, working at McDonald’s and a gas station to pay rent while finishing school. After graduation, she moved with a friend to DuBois, Pennsylvania. When rent and roommate problems left her struggling, a friend’s mother took her in, arranged job interviews and helped her work through her bills. The siblings checked in sporadically, taking turns reaching out. There were stretches of Jerry’s life Cortney knew little about and stretches of hers he did not know.

Jerry later lived with Cortney and Duane during their first year of marriage. When Austin was a baby, Jerry was afraid to hold him, worried he might hurt him. Once he did, he loved it. He often had music playing during visits. Sometimes, Cortney watched him play video games.

As her family grew, Cortney started and stopped college, sometimes because she was not ready and sometimes because she was raising children. A first-generation college student, she was working toward her associate degree at Temple College with the intention of pursuing counseling. Jerry knew about that ambition and told her she would make a good counselor.

When Jerry stayed with her, Cortney wanted to keep him there because she worried he might use drugs again after leaving. She believed he would get better. He talked about getting himself together and proving himself to people he felt he had disappointed. During one particular visit, Cortney asked Jerry to take a walk. She wanted to find out how he was feeling, and when he spoke of the legal matters worrying him, she pressed him to talk about them. He told her she would not understand. As he saw it, she had everything. Life had worked out for her with Duane and the children. They kept walking. Back at the house, Jerry threw a football with Austin in the front yard.

“I wanted to fix things so badly for him and I didn’t know how to just be there as his sister,” she said.

Creek Fridays

After Jerry’s death, Cortney withdrew from her classes at Temple College. She knew she needed a break and still intended to finish her degree.

“He always said ‘hey sis’ to me. I’d love to pick up the phone to that again,” she said.

The children were young, and explaining their uncle’s death took many small conversations. For a time, they understood that he had taken medicine when he should not have.

She took her camera on nature walks, looking for Jerry in everything. Some of her favorite photographs came from those walks. In the summer of 2017, after an argument with Duane, she went to sit by a creek. She called him and asked him to bring the children. Their outings became ‘Creek Fridays,’ visits to the water whenever they could manage them.

Around Jerry’s birthday that July, her grief counselor asked her to picture the creek where she and her brother played. She was carrying hopes for a future he would never have, including the family she had imagined for him. In the exercise, she pictured putting those hopes in a bottle and letting it move downstream. She cried. The visualization became a tool she continued using when grief returned.

The following year, Cortney planned a trip to Arkansas to photograph a wedding. She wanted to get away from Duane and the children. An ice storm cancelled the trip. She cried and told Duane how tired she was of feeling everything.

 “I remember feeling like I was clawing my way back to joy for the kids and for Duane, but I was so tired and I just wanted everything to stop,” she said.

Duane listened without judging her or panicking. He encouraged her to keep seeking the help she needed. She joined a recovery program at their church in 2018. The children drew her into play and kept moving when she felt exhausted.

In 2021, she started ‘Hey Darlin Plants’ as a way to keep growing. She delivered plants to doorsteps and eventually used a smaller trailer for popup events. Through the business, she told Jerry’s story and listened to other people tell theirs. Relatives and friends supported her as she grieved, and she also grew close to people whose own losses helped them understand hers.

“There are so many people I know now and think how much he would have loved them. I have caught myself saying if he would have only met you,” she said.

Still in Session

After returning to school and completing her associate degree at Temple College, she earned her bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M University-Central Texas in 2022. She continued into graduate study in counseling and reached practicum, the practical training stage of her studies. Her father, Edward, had often told her how proud he was of her work toward the degree. On Sept. 18, 2025, he came to surprise her for her birthday. They ate cake, and the next morning they went thrift shopping in downtown Belton.

On the walk to lunch, Edward said he did not feel well and held the side of a building. They got him to the ground, and Cortney called 911. When Edward lost his pulse, men nearby performed CPR before the ambulance arrived. Emergency responders restored his pulse. With Edward in intensive care, Cortney hoped he would recover and felt selfish for not wanting to withdraw from practicum. She withdrew from practicum to be with her family.

“I felt like I was failing by giving up on school and him,” she said.

Edward never regained consciousness. After 14 days with him in intensive care, the family agreed to withdraw life support. Faculty supported Cortney’s return and the clinic held her place in practicum. She went back and completed practicum. Internship was next and she hoped to graduate in spring 2027. Continuing felt like a way to make her father proud.

“I worked through my lowered empathy and learned more curiosity,” she said of the semester she returned.

Cortney still had questions for Jerry. She wanted stories from people who had known him during the years she and her brother had been out of touch.

“He wasn’t his disease. He was hurting and goodness, he was trying. He needed so much more help than I could give him,” she said.

The creek visualization still helps her let go of what she cannot control, but it has not made her stop wishing she could. At home, she found ways to keep the sound of running water near her, first with a fountain and now with a pool. And from time to time, she still goes to the creek.