![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 25th, 2011 09:11 amWhen I was ten, shortly after my mother died, my dad took my brother and me to Switzerland for a retreat. I don't know the name of the group he was there with; my memory is entirely of being in a tiny village on top of a mountain accessible only by cablecar, with a profusion of wildflowers everywhere you went, and lots and lots of cows. I had a sense that the people at the conference were slightly... something. I wasn't frightened of them, but there was an intensity there that I knew wasn't the norm. That was okay; the flowers were endlessly awesome. I still have pressed flowers somewhere.
It was some sort of psychological conference/support group. My dad was there grieving the death of his wife. I know now that he had contemplated suicide -- he'd never use that word, but that's effectively what following your wife into death is. I'm sure there were people there with mundane things they were working on, but those aren't the ones that stick in my memory.
Some of the meetings were in a church. I remember sitting up high in a window alcove in the church on a sunny afternoon, watching a facilitator work with a man who was wrestling his demons. The man started by wrestling with the facilitator, but then he spun off wrestling with his invisible demons. It made a strong impression on me as a kid.
After the conference, my dad told me about another man there who was a mercenary. He was addicted to killing people, and was trying to figure out how to stop, how to break that addiction, when it was his only way of living in the world, and his whole identity. This is the person who made the strongest impression on me, and continued to be a figure in my imagination and in my writing.
I have always been glad that there was a place for this man to go, to learn how not to kill. I don't know his story, I don't know if prison would be a better option; I don't know anything about him. But this was a real-life person, not a novel, and that made a deep impression. The possibility of redemption when lost, I suppose.
Until this morning, I never put that together with my work against the death penalty. The possibility of redemption is something that I believe every single person is capable of -- I don't believe in absolute evil (all evidence to the contrary). It's one of the few unshakable beliefs I have.
The mercenary showed up in a novel I started in college. His name was Stephen, and he was lost and awful and the entire cast of characters hated him, and he was just beginning to realize that he had created this hell, but also struggling against it, and against the other characters. It was hard to write him, not only because he was so different from me, but also because he was so much the same.
I suppose there are people in this world who go through life not realizing that they have the capacity to murder. They can believe that somehow they are different fundamentally from people who kill and commit evil. I was not given this luxury. The feeling of wanting, with my whole being, to kill the man who raped and murdered my sister, is a feeling I will never forget. The murderous rage isn't something that I can explain away. I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to hurt as much as I hurt.
It wasn't a fire I could bank; it would have consumed me. I knew it, immediately. I knew I had to forgive him his crime because otherwise I would feel this way forever until it ate me from the inside out. I had to look for the good in him because otherwise the dark would win.
It occurs that forgiving myself is much harder. It's strange how at every age, one has to reinterpret the formative events of one's life. After 20 years, I'm still processing my mother's death. After more than 15, the most profound moment in my life remains finding redemption for the man who destroyed my family. But the way I relate to it has changed over the years.
...This is the first year that I haven't marked the anniversary of Rachel's death. It's not that dates matter that much to me, but somehow I have remembered every year, and this year I didn't. I think Rachel would 42 this year. She died 17 years ago, this month.
It was some sort of psychological conference/support group. My dad was there grieving the death of his wife. I know now that he had contemplated suicide -- he'd never use that word, but that's effectively what following your wife into death is. I'm sure there were people there with mundane things they were working on, but those aren't the ones that stick in my memory.
Some of the meetings were in a church. I remember sitting up high in a window alcove in the church on a sunny afternoon, watching a facilitator work with a man who was wrestling his demons. The man started by wrestling with the facilitator, but then he spun off wrestling with his invisible demons. It made a strong impression on me as a kid.
After the conference, my dad told me about another man there who was a mercenary. He was addicted to killing people, and was trying to figure out how to stop, how to break that addiction, when it was his only way of living in the world, and his whole identity. This is the person who made the strongest impression on me, and continued to be a figure in my imagination and in my writing.
I have always been glad that there was a place for this man to go, to learn how not to kill. I don't know his story, I don't know if prison would be a better option; I don't know anything about him. But this was a real-life person, not a novel, and that made a deep impression. The possibility of redemption when lost, I suppose.
Until this morning, I never put that together with my work against the death penalty. The possibility of redemption is something that I believe every single person is capable of -- I don't believe in absolute evil (all evidence to the contrary). It's one of the few unshakable beliefs I have.
The mercenary showed up in a novel I started in college. His name was Stephen, and he was lost and awful and the entire cast of characters hated him, and he was just beginning to realize that he had created this hell, but also struggling against it, and against the other characters. It was hard to write him, not only because he was so different from me, but also because he was so much the same.
I suppose there are people in this world who go through life not realizing that they have the capacity to murder. They can believe that somehow they are different fundamentally from people who kill and commit evil. I was not given this luxury. The feeling of wanting, with my whole being, to kill the man who raped and murdered my sister, is a feeling I will never forget. The murderous rage isn't something that I can explain away. I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to hurt as much as I hurt.
It wasn't a fire I could bank; it would have consumed me. I knew it, immediately. I knew I had to forgive him his crime because otherwise I would feel this way forever until it ate me from the inside out. I had to look for the good in him because otherwise the dark would win.
It occurs that forgiving myself is much harder. It's strange how at every age, one has to reinterpret the formative events of one's life. After 20 years, I'm still processing my mother's death. After more than 15, the most profound moment in my life remains finding redemption for the man who destroyed my family. But the way I relate to it has changed over the years.
...This is the first year that I haven't marked the anniversary of Rachel's death. It's not that dates matter that much to me, but somehow I have remembered every year, and this year I didn't. I think Rachel would 42 this year. She died 17 years ago, this month.