When the sword grows heavy

I can't go on. I'll go on.

I get a letter every fifteen months or so from the California Board of Parole Hearings. At the top in all caps it says

NOTICE OF HEARING

and then the familiar information: his name, his prisoner number, the date of the hearing, which is usually 3 months away. And the participation deadline date, which is 3 weeks before that date.

When I first received this letter, in 2018, I hadn’t had to think of him much since the trial, which was in 2007. He received 16 years to life for murdering my mother. It would have been 15 years, but he got another year for using a knife. Someone had to come up with that algorithm, someone decided that murdering a person with a blade, versus all the other ways you could murder someone, would cost you another 12 months in the slammer. I never bothered to check how much the other weapons cost. Would it have been more with a gun? Probably, if you added “Illegal possession” to his charges. (It was in California, where they actually try to mitigate gun deaths.)

I wrote about all this in “And These Too are Defensive Wounds”, which was published in The Sun last summer (wonderful, considerate, human-centric Sun, whose founder and editor emeritus Sy Safransky is very much on my mind as he struggles with Alzheimer’s). You can read it there, the retraumatizing of facing it all again, finally ordering the trial transcipts, something I knew I wanted to do for my memoir (if not this one, then the next one) but avoided because I didn’t feel ready, and then being forced to face them when the next parole hearing came, in 2021. And at the end of that piece, the Deputy DA suggested this would come up again in a year and a half. And it did. And now again.

In the original draft, I wrote that I felt powerful because I’d been afraid of my rage but managed to hold it in my body and wield a pen and do something for my mother, for women. But that I was not so sure I could do it again and again. I hoped I could, and I envisioned a hero, weary and in a cave atop a mountain, watching the messenger come up the long walk with yet another call to action. Then I worried it was melodramatic, and I ditched the imagery but kept the sentiment.

The editors were right about it not landing with the same power the rest of the story had, and I love a good editor because they trust you to find your way to it. I believe he’d said something like, I often find that the answer lies somewhere in the beginning of the piece, and I’d laughed a little because: me too! It always works. And when I went back to the beginning of the piece, it was my mother. And so I ended the piece on her, because ultimately it’s about wanting something I can never have. It’s about wishing he would redeem himself, redeem all of us, redeem the world.

As I write this, an unchecked megalomaniac cult leader runs roughshod through our democracy, breaking the bones of the economy, beheading education and the free press, and therefore an informed and empowered citizenry, and shredding an already tenuous social contract.

I started and abandoned multiple posts about how certain Gen X friends and I compare the current catastrophe to the way our childhoods felt. Childhoods in which the roles were reversed and the children cowered or disappeared into video games and books or left the house while adults raged, indulged themselves, or chased fantasies and unmet needs elsewhere. There was nothing you could do so you avoided. You held a nugget of rage and defiance inside of you and trudged on, taking care of yourself, forging a dream for your future and a value system that prioritized equality and justice and social care because you had none of that as a child and it sucked.

But fighting? We didn’t learn to fight. We learned fighting was broken bottles held to throats, was a rock thrown through a window, was a threat, was getting arrested, was heart-shattering things said by the people who should have loved you and protected you more than anyone else in the world. We held our fingers in a peace sign and held a cigarette in the other and said “whatever.” We thought surviving was enough.

Surviving is enough, but it doesn’t end. I am so tired. I let this parole board letter sit on my desk for 3 months. Today is the deadline to participate. I sent an email, my heart pounding. I still don’t want to be on video, don’t want to be there live. Do I? I also once didn’t want to participate, but I did, and I survived it; I once didnt want to take a stronger stand, but I did, and I survived it. I didn’t want to face the trial transcripts, relive the trauma of finding out what her last moments were like, relive the trauma of finding her body, hear the neighbors give an account of a relationship I didn’t know had gotten so bad because I had to walk away at some point. But I did and I survived. But I am tired and I want not to have to do this anymore.

If he would complete the domestic violence workshops, I would not have to do this anymore. If he would admit that he killed his girlfriend and had a pattern of violence against women before her, I would let this go. Hell, I’d be the first to say, Thank you, please go. It’s all right there in the essay, what I want. And until that happens, I have to show up and fight. For her. For the 1 in 4 women who have been severely harmed by partner violence in America. For the many, many more women unaccounted in this statistic because of fear, and for the many, many more women who are already being harmed by partner violence because they are trapped in pregnancies, in a country where hatred of women is being increasingly normalized because the president is a rapist and serial cheater who breezily called women “pigs” and proclaimed he could grab em by the we all know we all know we all know.

It’s okay to be tired, I’m saying. It’s okay not to want to pick up the letter, to type the email. Give it til the deadline, if you must, then see what your old instincts make you do. You might be surprised. Survival is exhausting. Holding hope and kindness and compassion in the same body where you hold rage and grief is exhausting. But it’s the good fight and I don’t do it because anyone tells me I ought to, I do it because I sleep best at night when I have no regrets. And because I’m lucky: what I must do is clear. The larger fight? Still unclear, but getting clearer all the time. Flood their phones, their inboxes. Send a shit in the mail. Or a dick. That’s very Gen X. Draw cartoons making fun of cybertrucks and wheatpaste them all over town. Resist in petty ways and in bigger ones. Gather ye good resources in the comments, while ye may.

Good heavens, are you still trying to win?

Perhaps it’s because I saw The Princess Bride in 6th grade (and 100 times since). Inigo Montoya, beaten back, exhausted, unable to lift his arms. The sword comes down and he manages one lift to defend. Then another. And then: he remembers his mantra. His purpose. He says it again and again it until he is swinging, a juggernaut, a golem unthinking and determined.

I want my mother back, you sonofabitch.

But I will settle for redemption. And keep showing up for it.