The Day I Lost You

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The sky was very blue in Beaver, PA on November 13th, 1998. There was a cop car parked down the block. I looked at it and wondered–did they put it there for me?

Had I planned a run to Canada I would have take off already.

People from our church came. Reporters came. They gathered around us in our pain.

Then the caseworker came.

I will never forget what happened between the house and my last glimpse of you in that car, but even after 16 years I don’t want to write it down.

Still too painful.

All of it, too painful.

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.

That Sinking Feeling

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For years, and categorically for the first nine months, I awoke each morning and lay in my bed wracked with dread.

Because the children were so punishing.

Trips to parks, grocery stores, the pool, church were all fraught with the certainty of sturm and drang. Sometimes interchangeably.

I remember waiting in Philadelphia for my husband to return after a medical conference. We had to check out of the hotel so for several hours I walked in downtown Philadelphia with the children.

One would begin to wail and would do so for blocks, eventually losing interest. Then the other would commence. Their verbal displeasure was noted by all who passed us.

Normal people.

I found a square and planted us there. The wailing planted itself with us.

The only pictures I have of them as babies–before foster care, before I met them–survived a fire.

All that remains of before.

The Day I Met You

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It was a beautiful fall day in western Pennsylvania when the caseworker called and asked if I could go down to Allegheny General with the other foster mothers to pick you and your sisters up.

You were all tiny, perfect, beautiful, wrapped in the quiet of the NICU.

They trained us in infant CPR and your apnea monitors then we bundled you up to “take you home.”

I put that in quotes because I believe your home is with your mom. Because I believe she never got a chance.

But I have to focus on the light.

My year with you was full of light. You were a wonderful baby and we loved you dearly. You are a wonderful young woman now, and we still love you.

We miss the years and pray the light always travels with you. And that you know, always know, you are loved.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and a Lesson in Free Speech

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The story goes something like this: a 50 year old man targets little kids at a water park and takes dozens of pictures of their private areas.

He gets arrested and prosecuted under a law intended to protect adults from non-consensual voyeuristic photography.

Two Texas courts upend the
conviction on the basis that the behavior of the defendant was a form of free speech.

I think they may have overlooked the difference between photographic predation and free speech.

So here are some examples of free speech:

Taking pictures of other people without consent for the purposes of sexual gratification is not free speech. It is a form of exploitation

Free speech.

What ass’s orifice do these people have their heads lodged in?

Free speech.

Have they lost any perspective on the implications for children of allowing them to be exploited at public parks and pools?

Free speech.

The defendant’s lawyers said the law is “Orwellian.” Perhaps all parties need to read Orwell before they drag him into defending a pedophile.

Free speech.

And last but not least–

News feeds are glutted with comments about the actresses whose naked pictures were hacked and leaked. I read this as a stand-alone article from an English news source.

Shouldn’t the lack of concern for the safety of our children be a bigger deal?

Free speech.

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.