It is a note on my phone, metonymy for bottomless loss, I call her name every day, aware that lost causes are lost causes are lost causes
How will we ever heal?
How will we be whole again?
I would ask the boy on the other side of the over-priced desk
If I had the heart to keep
Picking my battles
I call her name
Stalk the neighborhood
Take the dog
Print out sepia copies of
Her sleeping, staring pensively at the lens
Reminding of me the others
All gone missing
You look at wonder every day
For love or pay
I look for love
Every day
See the missing
You.
She sat in a chain restaurant twenty years ago, this time of year, not knowing that she would forget her purse there so close the federal courthouse. Retrieve a purse; retrieve a child. Strange calculus of loss.
The Parable of the lost mother–
Waiting for the baby who does not remember who they once were together
So long ago.
He asks is something bothering you?
She says I am worrying about three things
Oh, he brightens, only three?
His shoulders rise and fall in what might pass for a shrug but translates as:
I have tons more than that! Never occurs to him
Three things
Could be anything.
We live our lives between Christmas and Easter
All that matters in between.
First there was the shock-shock, which I would describe as a blanket of cotton, a fog, a zoned-out staggering thing. I am not sure how long this stage lasted, but it began to ebb when the nice women at the crisis center gave my five year old and her sisters their crime-victim quilts, hand-made, with such kindness.
The quilts underlined the permanent nature of the gift–beautiful crime victims. Undoable. Irrevocable.
Our story seemed one way for years, then just as things got safer because we knew and could protect them
The truth rolled over us, applying permanent tattoos everywhere.
I did not realize I had a thrill-seeker, risk-taker issue until the months of hunger, tears, and fighting were over…all technically either lost or a draw. Until after I wrote the book. Until after people began to disappear.
By then I had begun to walk through cold water.
Now I know why I do it. I do it because…I do it because
Because when I walk in cold water I can see you there
Through the dust
The crush of angry humans
The agony of your bedraggled well-wishers.
Your own pain indelible on your bloodied face
Dying for me
Deep
In cold water.
I miss you girl
Miss your sister
Your nieces, nephews, cousins, children
Used to sing
Break-up songs for lullabies
Wish I could write you and me
A happy kind of story instead
No lost loves, no broken promises
Hope changed into
The steady gaze of a man who can build with his own two hands
Homecoming tabernacle
For all us, broken
What would Jane say about the unspeakable crime scene? The girl already broken but still living? The final blow that ends the life.
Sometimes forensic science is not parsing out the rape, murder, and prosecution of the unspeakable crime. String of crimes.
Sometimes it is asking who decides what level of “good behavior” lets the murderer go on a shopping spree, walk alone in a mall–surrounded by the blissfully unsuspecting? Walk into the crowd.
And why all these years to wake us from slumber to
look for him
Among us?
I am a bit of an outlier when it comes to organized religion. I used to go around to the laundromats in our town and leave Bibles. This seems like a frenzied but well-intentioned activity now, but review of this stage of my life defies easy adjectives
I was such an evangelical type then, and in my heart I still am. What has changed has never been Jesus. His love, his sacrifice, his constancy, and his friendship are defining, priceless, immeasurably worth it.
I have lost nearly all my faith in people, in churches, in the clubs we sheep join.
I did not lose my faith (in people and their institutions) when I found out my children had been abused by their adopted brother.
I lost faith (in people and their institutions)
When friends disappeared
Churches turned against us
Pastors got ghostly quiet
Family supported the abuser
The courts and LEO refused to prosecute all the offenses and the appropriate felony level.
He abused children after his juvenile sentence and police did nothing.
The victims were marginalized, treated like they were, we were, contagious.
But Jesus is there. He is the God of the marginalized. He is the voice in my head telling me that despite all my disaffection, I should write all this down.
When I have wailed to God about this incipient loneliness he says in his steady voice–I am here.
And one glance at the Cross reminds me of what that cost him,
Being there for me.
Carrying Light 