I'd love to change the world - but I don't know what do
So I leave it up to you...
***
It's a rainy but not unpleasant day here in Southwest Michigan. The soggy corn stumps in the muddy fields await the turning of the tiller, as do we all, the face of Springtime America badly in need of a shave.
This is exactly what it was like on the day that a stranger approached me in the cemetery almost 10 years ago. I was only there for a moment, having pulled in on my way home. Just to visit the kid.
The stranger asked, "Are you the Uncle?"
"Yeah."
***
The stranger was actually a neighbor. He lived a couple of blocks away. One of his boys was friends with Charlie. He told me he had read the blog (this one), which had barely a dozen posts on it at that time, having been launched only a few weeks before.
He told me that he thought the finding of Suicide was wrong, that the County coroner had misclassified my nephew's cause of death. (Everybody who knew Charlie agrees.) Then he told me his horror story.
He had a daughter, he said... Anytime anyone uses the past tense to describe one of their children, you know they have felt pain that they should not have had to feel. He pointed off to a different part of the cemetery, and said she was buried over there.
He said he believed she was killed, but no one was arrested, no one went to jail. No one did anything about it. She was just a teenager. He said nobody listened, he said nobody cared. I said, I know.
And he gave me some words of encouragement, in a soft and sad way, that I've never forgotten. They weren't really wind in my sails so much as they were oars in the cold water.
Others have since expressed similar sentiments to me: I wish I could do what you are doing. I wish I had a way with words. And I always tell them, I'm not doing this for myself.
10 years have passed since Chapter One - Never Trust a Normal Day was posted. As noted here previously, all of the principals involved lost their careers over this. None of them are doing now what they were doing then.
That's not perfect...
But it sure is something.
pH 5.18.26
***
