Category Archives: grief

Hae Min Lee

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Like millions of other listeners, I have become deeply entrenched in Serial, an episodic treatment of the murder of Hae Min Lee in 1999.

The podcasts are mostly riveting and leave the listener grasping for answers.

But some things demand to be confronted emotionally, not just in the clinical language of forensics, but in the enduring vortex of loss and grief.

I have hunted for archival traces Hae Min Lee–glimpses of the girl from before her life taken and then reduced to jurisprudential conjecture.

Who was Hae Min Lee to those who loved her? A picture, a memorial–something. I found this– a piece on her memorial.

She played lacrosse…

left a grieving family…

…a family whose grief is indicated mostly by their present silence. Surely they would be appalled by the surgical reduction of this vivid girl to…a piece of evidence not properly disposed of.

I keep returning to the snowstorm; days her family must have spent hoping and praying for her safe return.

When she could not.

Would not.

Ever.

Because she had been rendered helpless, cold, and alone in the shallow grave, in the silence of falling snow.

It seems to me American justice requires a return to that quiet wood and all the things that were stolen from Hae Min Lee.

Perhaps we are all too accustomed to our fictional procedurals to realize that real crime leaves empty places in the heart and a grief that never lifts or relents.

Maybe Splendor

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Maybe splendor
Is a girl
Rowing her younger brother to the
Far shore

She tells him she he will be
A cowboy there
He asks her how he can be
Without a hat

She tells him
you will make one
From the twigs and branches
And leaves there

And you will have a cow you will name Horse and another named Ted or Fred, he said

Yes.
She says, and a chicken…now get your clothes and race me up the hill.

A chicken named
Get-your-clothes-and-race-me-up-the-hill,

When the rain comes

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In the years of this drought I have questioned–what if the water does not return?

Sometimes we have gone months and months without a drop.

There are people in my life whose lives are desert-y lives. Not just sit on the couch desert, full-blown felony and addiction desert.

They challenge my faith. So I tell God–I believe, help my unbelief.

And He says–

It is unfair to the desert to judge it definitively when there is no rain.

Rain changes things. Rain brings life and washes away the dust. Rain makes rivers in the desert, streams of water where nothing could grow.

So I pray for rain.

Jesus says he is living water. Living water poured out for us. He does not just bring the rain, he is the rain.

The narrow road

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We talk about the two roads: (notice there are no others) one narrow, one broad.

I picture the broad one littered with neon signs, carnival-lit and well-paved.

The narrow one is hard to find, off the the side, obscured by overgrown vines and branches. Because, let’s face it: not much traffic.

You climb through the overgrowth to get there and once on the Path the going is any but easy. Rocks, besetting ills, humiliations, and the echoing loneliness of it all.

But always the figure of the Man in front of us. Stick close to Him. After all He is the way itself. The narrow path to life–home waiting at the end.

There we will belong.

Foley and Sotloff

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I grieve for these lost men
Think about their brokenhearted mothers
Avoid an accounting of the days and the pain and dogs of souls

who could exact such cruelty on…ordinary men

It is easier not to go
To the places these men went
And the place where they were
Cut to pieces

But we must

Ask ourselves what has become of
Us, the Geneva Convention, the boundaries of

Words, only words
strung words together
No guns, no knives, no ammunition
Pictures taken of war
If you can even call it that

They say they got Capone for tax evasion
Not murder
And I wonder if these boys who hide their faces and play “gods and men”
Like a game without a score

Know the second commandment (say nothing of the 6th)
Still applies to their eternal souls:

Forget all else you have done
And understand you owe God for life
For these pictures you have taken
Of Foley and Sotloff

There will be
Forever
Nowhere to hide.

Changing the paradigm for protecting our young

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I am haunted by an image on a nature program–a young zebra stallion savages a newborn foal to death because the foal was fathered by a predecessor.

We turned the television off, but not before the narrator states that the foal’s “ordeal is over” and will not survive the attack.

I understand the rules of natural videography: don’t obstruct the narrative. I just believe it is time we change the rules for animals and men.

I have little doubt that the film crew could have saved the foal and found a place for it in sanctuary. They simple did not.

We simply do not as well. We avoid conflict with humans even when it is their own children they savage to death.

Abortion is an extreme form of child abuse. Yet we treat it with temerity, speaking gently of “a woman’s right to choose.”

Some choices are unacceptable: cruel, inhumane, deadly.

It would have been humane and appropriate for the men who watched the foal die to intervene on its behalf. They did not because they wanted the narrative, because the paradigm has not been sufficiently challenged.

Time to challenge it.

If we stand by and watch children, anyone be savaged, victimized, or harmed by another and do not intervene, we are culpable.

If we stay quiet in the face of injustice, then we must own this narrative. The crime belongs to all of us unless we are willing to speak up, intervene, challenge the paradigm for our dead and missing children.

My Monster

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My monster sits
At the kitchen table
Gnawing on the hollowed bones
Finding scraps of meat left on them
they say you can choke on these broken shards of wings, thighs
The breasts of flightless birds

Few eat their filigreed
Hearts
But when they do you can see through
Each vivisected chamber

He mutters only phrases
Like girl, you know…girl if only…
If only you had..
He is so very clever to leave out
All the
Proper nouns
Dependent clauses
Merciless verbs
years and years of completely merciless verbs

Ellipses for teeth
Never dulled to the task
Of separating bone from marrow
You tell me the vultures
Are being decimated
By poison and other modern perils
Leaving the dead all alone
In their towers of silence

And I know this must be true for Rizpah will shoo them off
Until God chooses to relent…

This drought will define us
Cotton-mouthed and bone-dry
So cavalier about our own now-
Forgotten prayers
For rain

Dearest Triplet B

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When I lost you
I knew you were never really mine

You have your mother’s face
Your father’s hair
Eyes all your own

For years I marked the days
Knew when your birthday came and went
Saw your face in every crowd

Missed you and wished you well
Because that is what love does

It never stops beating
Down every door for you

I saw every fairy tale through a different lens
Knowing how easy it could be
Excuse me, was…
For Rumpelstiltskin to steal a child
And teach her a world of untrue stories

But in real life
Truth
The Truth
Always sets us free