Truth and Justice

The following is my reaction to the article published at http://www.star-telegram.com/189/story/1413519.html?storylink=omni_popular earlier this week.

Truth and Justice

“I have held my peace for

A long, long, long, long time

And in my silence you thought

That I was all together like you.

And in your heart

you were settled in complacency

You said, '[S]he won't even respond.

'You said, '[S]he's not interested.

"You said, '[S]he's dead and gone.

"But I've been silent for such

A long, long, long, long time

But I'm about to gasp, to pant,

To cry out, to cry out,

I'm going to shout!”

Misty Edwards (People Get Ready)

Monday, I learned that the trial will not happen. The reason? The district attorney’s office finally (after three years) decided to polygraph their own witness, the informant upon whose testimony at least half the weight of this case rested. To say he failed the test would suggest that he subjected himself to the polygraph in the first instance. According to the DA, what he actually did was blatantly attempt to beat the test.

As I try to integrate all of this, I am comparing the handling of the state’s chief witness to the treatment I received as the victim’s daughter. The police would not let us rest and would not consider any other suspects, until my family and I had been polygraphed and finger-printed, had our blood drawn and been informally accused (directly and by implication).

I am left with a nasty taste in my mouth. The day after I heard, I had to leave work. I was overcome by rage. As I drove, I screamed. I let out loud screeching sounds that originated deep within me and burned my throat on their way out. I screamed until I couldn’t scream any longer. I am angry! In fact, twelve years of anger too long suppressed in politeness and fear is threatening to break forth in earth shattering dimensions. I am tempted to try and convict a whole passel of people, if not God himself, for the things I have suffered. Some part of me wants a pound of flesh, not just from the man who killed my mother, but also from those who cut new wounds over and over again: the police, the prosecutor and now, the (apparently) false witness.

Of course, this rage I feel over the new wounds should not detract from the old. It is just that the original wounds seem trapped in the past or, perhaps buried there. It is as if those wounds are lost in the moments I spent stepping over the puddles of my own mother’s blood and in the moments when I saw the brutality of the attack reflected in the drops of her blood that covered everything from the ceiling to the overturned furniture…little bits of her spirit spilled senselessly and without regard for the life she had lived, the memories she held, the moments we will never share. In those moments, I thought the great chasm would swallow me whole. But it didn’t. I survived.

I survived! I pulled my life back together and went on in spite of the tragedy. But I have never been left in peace to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Closure has never come for me. Instead, my fledgling orchards have been cut down again and again each time I was forced to relive this ordeal, and now my harvest has been spoiled once more by what seems, from my vantage point, to be a travesty of justice, and a stunning display of carelessness and disregard, for me, my family and the accused. These new wounds are open, weeping, aching. Their effects may yet ripple through the years in ways that I can only imagine. They are made up of the mental and emotional resources diverted from my daughter at a time when she needed all that I could offer; the cost of lost opportunities in a new job; moments of precious free time spent in mourning and tears shed in the place of laughter; a family torn asunder again by the suspect’s proximity to my brother; my splintered insides; my exhaustion and the last dying embers of faith in a system that I feel has failed, if not violated my family and me, over and over again. I am left with the legacy of misplaced trust and false hope. Yes, there is a part of me that wants more than a pound of flesh. It is the same part of me that wants to divide life into neat categories of victims and villains. It was this part of me that knelt down years ago and asked God for the truth about my mother’s death. At that time I had a particular truth in mind. I wanted to know who and why so that someone could be held accountable (if not punished) for my pain. Since then I have learned that truth is relative.

For a long time, just as I thought truth existed as an entity, fixed, predetermined and discoverable, I thought my pain was my own. I have since learned that my pain, my loss and the endless black hole that opens in my center when I think of it all, are only mine in the sense that I am a part of this great whole to which we all belong. I am a part of the story we are all weaving. But I do not own this pain. It was brought to me on the wings of other people’s choices. I do not own the truth either. It is fluid and dependent upon one’s vantage point. Even within my own soul, truth is an elusive, ever evolving, living, breathing, intangible thing.

I am struggling at this moment to hold these realizations in my heart next to my pain and to resist the urge to create victims, villains and neat categories of truth. At the same time, I am searching for my voice. I am desperate for someone to hear me, to receive my story and be changed by it. In fact, the impersonal nature of this whole experience is what bothers me, perhaps even more than anything else. I am struck by how some of the key players seem not to have been moved at all by my family’s humanity. I feel as though we have been lost in a drama in which everyone is actively pursuing their agenda, and so interacting with the other characters, while remaining essentially untouched by their unfolding. I can’t help but also note that my mother’s memory has been sullied by it all. She has not been honored in the least. The particulars of her life and her death appear to have gotten lost beneath a rush to judgment fostered by some vast need to hold someone, anyone, accountable. Indeed, her story seems to have gotten lost in the marshalling of facts and the proving of a case.

What has happened to us and to our sense of community and relatedness? What has happened to our capacity to sit with things as they percolate, our willingness to take in the nuances and our ability to interact with the stories and the people that cross our paths? In this context, it feels as though these things have been irredeemably lost in the quagmire of retributive justice in which restoration of the community and the caretaking of survivors take a backseat to the promotion of careers, politics, the molding of stories by disinterested professionals for the sake of a conviction (or acquittal), the clearing of caseloads and the meting out of punishment to no one in particular.

In the final analysis, I feel a bit like my family and I are more like collateral damage than the central focus of this whole exercise. We stand here naked, holding our insides in our hands, wondering when the winds will stop howling. Meanwhile, the district attorney’s office (and their snitch), much like the killer(s), have seemingly moved on with scarcely a hint of sincere sorrow for the mess they have left behind. I will, however, commend the police department, as they have not closed the case and remain accessible to us.

At this moment, I am also struggling to hold on to some higher ideal. I am struggling to allow myself to be touched in my deepest recesses by the truly sorrowful nature of it all. And I am struggling toward a new hope: the hope that somehow, in some way, we will all be changed for the better by these events, if only by the retelling of them with awe and with compassion for all involved. In spite of everything, my mourning heart is filled with compassion. I feel compassion for the prosecutor who looks at murder all day long. I feel compassion for the detective who walks among thieves and liars every day. I feel compassion for my mother and for all the memories she will never make and for the ones she will never impart. I feel compassion for my family in whom this sad legacy will always reside and for the future generations whose lives will be shaped by the things that have stunted our lives and our ability to parent as we might have. I feel compassion for the man who may have been falsely accused. Most of all, I feel compassion for the false witness (if indeed he is a liar) and for the killer(s). What great malady of the human heart drives a person to such things?

Dear God, be with us all. Touch each of us in the ways that will matter the most. Bless us with your love and your presence. Though I am in the valley of the shadow of death, I place my trust in you and in the healing elixir that is your divine love. Pour it into us in buckets full. My mother would have wanted it that way.