TERRI ANNE’S STORY AND ANALYSIS

Terri Anne’s son, Peter, offered a ride to a stranger, whose ultimate goal was to steal Peter’s car. When Peter refused, Chester, just 17 years old, shot and killed him. Terri Anne’s entire identity was bound to Peter and now to Chester. Terri Anne acutely felt the injustice of her son trying to help another, who then turned on him. These feelings were tied up in her religious upbringing but were also racially driven. Six times Chester backed out, but the final time Terri Anne felt Peter was right beside her showing her this was the right decision. During their dialogue Terri Anne became a sort of mother to him, absorbing the trauma of his childhood while also holding Chester accountable. At the end of the dialogue Chester washed Terri Anne’s hands in his tears, giving herself and her pain over to God and to Chester, where it belonged.

When my only child, Peter, was a senior in college, he gave a young man named Chester a ride. Chester insisted that Peter give him his car and when he wouldn’t he shot him—“The dude wouldn’t give me his car, so I just shot him.” He didn’t know Peter but said, “He was littler than me and I knew I could take him down.” Chester’s brothers turned him in because they thought they would get a reward. Chester was 17 when he murdered Peter. I couldn’t believe a 17-year-old could walk around with a pistol, point it at someone and kill him. That’s not how Peter was raised.

I got very involved in the criminal justice system. I read countless books, trying to understand how someone could do something so horrible to someone who was nice to them and gave them a ride. It took me nine years before I could say Peter’s name without totally falling apart. That’s how awful it was. I would wake up every morning thinking, “I hope he dies today.” I never changed that feeling until the day I met him. Chester got 14 years flat time and mandatory release after 25 years. I got a notice 11 years into Chester’s sentence that he was up for parole review. That letter took me to my knees. I was balling and squealing and, frankly, hysterical. I called Victim Services about it and was told that sending out these notice letters was automatic and done a year in advance. It became a reality, at that point, that he might get released.

I found out about the VOD program and decided to meet with a woman who was the first person in my state to have met with her offender in order to learn more about her experience and what was involved. After that, I started to meet with a facilitator who directed the program for the Department of Corrections. In court, it was clear that Chester was uninvolved and hardened. My goal, therefore, was to make him look me in the eyes and feel what he did.

The preparation for the meeting lasted one-and-a-half years. During that time, I examined a lot of emotions that I had buried. The intent of doing the work was to help you better manage your reactions to the offender during the meeting. I kept complaining to the facilitator about the injustice of having to do all this inner work when all Peter was doing was trying to be nice to Chester. However, the introspection helped me see how I felt about who I was. I’d been Peter’s mother for 21 years. I had no identity other than Peter’s mother. He was the focus of my life. My career came second because it supported my first priority. I was number three. So I had to totally rearrange those priorities after Peter’s death. I knew I wanted the death penalty, however, and I never changed my opinion about it no matter what I learned about Chester.

During the preparation, the facilitator would have me fill out questionnaires and then journal about my feelings. He also shuttled back and forth between me and Chester. He would have us write letters to each other about our feelings about what had happened and the impact of the murder on our lives. He reviewed the letters prior to delivering them to each of us along with his notes. I knew from the established rules that I couldn’t belittle Chester. But I also know that he’d been put down all his life and he didn’t need that from me. So instead I told him how devastated and hurt I was. I poured out my heart. In response, Chester was cold. It was like Peter was a chair that he just moved across the room. I couldn’t get over his lack of feelings. I would tell the facilitator, “He doesn’t even call his name. He doesn’t even acknowledge that he was a human.” The facilitator would reply, “Well, you know, he’s probably stuffed his feelings.” I’d tell the facilitator that Chester needed to get them unstuffed. I had no mercy.

My own family was not supportive. I’m White and Chester is African American. My father was a Pentecostal minister and kept saying, “God made red birds and blue birds smart enough not to build a nest together. We don’t associate with people of other colors.” I grew up with that philosophy but that’s not how I raised Peter. I never taught him color. My family, however, told me that if I had raised my son right, he wouldn’t have given Chester a ride. When your family blames you for your son’s murder, you move on. I stopped talking to them about my pain and grief and instead read lots of books about grief, victimization, and criminals. I probably have 3000 of them.

In doing the preparation, Chester backed out six times. I asked the facilitator to keep trying and finally he was persuasive enough that Chester consented to meet. The facilitator had told me to write down the questions I wanted to ask in the meeting. I just wrote why, why, why, why, why. That was my cry. “Why did you do that? He was trying to help you. How can you be that mean?” What no one knew, however, was that I had other plans for after our meeting together. I was going to leave the planet because I wasn’t needed anymore. I couldn’t live with the pain. I hated God, the world and the horse it came in on, and everything about life. I hated to wake up in the morning. I would pray to die in my sleep. That’s how deep the pain was. I did not ever tell anyone my plan. There was no reason for me to be here. Paul was dead so why should I stay? I didn’t tell the facilitator because it wasn’t his business. I figured that when I had met with Chester I’d be free and could get out of here. I wouldn’t wake up.

The night before our meeting, I walked the floor all night. I didn’t close my eyes. I obsessed going over my questions and rehearsing what I would say, but nothing happened the way I expected it would. To begin with, a strange event happened as I checked out of the motel to go to the prison the next morning. I had ordered a red Corvette for Peter as a graduate present three months before he was killed. I had planned to give him the keys when he walked across the stage. After his death, I would freak every time I saw a Corvette. The sight of the car would trigger my anger and the injustice of having lost my son. But this time was different. When I went to leave the motel the day of the meeting, I found my car was sitting right next to a shiny new red Corvette. I took it as a sign from Peter that I was doing the right thing.

When we got to the meeting, the facilitator had everything in place. The table was six feet long and two to three feet wide. We were to sit across from each other. But I had problems with that arrangement. So I insisted we sit across at the long ends because I didn’t want to be too close to him. I didn’t want to breathe the same air. I worried that he might touch me with his long feet. I was just a monster. The facilitator convinced me not to change the arrangement because the meeting was being videotaped for later review by Chester and myself. The videotaping for post-VOD debriefing was standard practice in the early years of the program in my state. The facilitator was also worried that my making a change could impact Chester’s willingness to participate. The facilitator said to me, “We worked very hard to get him to this place. You want to talk to him. He has finally consented to do it. We’ve got him here and he’s standing waiting. It would be helpful if you would just work with us.” Chester too had had last minute misgivings. He had written me a letter the night before. It was very terse and said, “Don’t expect me to cry. I’m a grown man. I know what I did when I killed that kid.” It was not sweet. The facilitator explained that Chester had a right to his feelings but that he was willing to talk to me. I figured that I wanted to talk to him badly enough that I would just deal with whatever he had said in his letter later, if at all.

Chester came in in handcuffs and shackles. I was pleased to see him bound because I didn’t want him near me. He had killed my son. At the time of the meeting, Chester had accumulated 153 disciplinary cases while he’d been in prison. I had to get special permission to meet with him because he was so violent and would attack the guards. He was one of the worst prisoners in the facility. The warden told me, “He’s worthless, not worth anything.” Through my connections, I had also read Chester’s juvenile records. He was first arrested at age 11 and then let go because of overcrowding in the juvenile facility and returned to his neighborhood. His mother had moved while he was imprisoned so from then on, he lived on the streets. When he was 12, he watched his brother stab a man to death in a drug deal. He was arrested again. He had nine felony convictions at the age of 17. He had five brothers in the same prison for murder. He’d had a terrible life but I didn’t cut him any slack. He had killed Peter and would get no sympathy from me.

The facilitator had told me that I would start the dialogue and to write an opening statement. I started talking to him in a soft voice. Peter used to ask me to talk to him when he was sick because of my voice. He’d say, “You’ve just got the sweetest little voice.” At any rate, I simply said, “Thank you for doing this. I won’t be unkind to you in any way.” Chester started crying. I just kept talking but to the right of me was a box of tissues. I handed him a tissue across the table and said, “Here.” He just shook his head. He couldn’t speak because of his tears. It was unbelievable that I had any bit of kindness in me but we went on for hours. I showed him Peter’s picture and made him say his name. I asked that he keep Peter’s picture in his cell for a year. I talked to him like a mother. I was aware that Peter had known love from me. He didn’t know what it was like not to be loved, adored, and encouraged. It was never “if” you were going to college but where and when. But I knew what Chester didn’t have before I met him because of reading his records. I just had no mercy for him until this day. So then my mothering of him just came out. I believe that I was the one to set the tone for the way the day would go.

We went through some of my questions but as we talked I felt I didn’t need to ask all 77 of them. He had given me the information I needed. He had opened up to me and would have done anything in his power to bring Peter back. He said to me, “I wish I could give you something. I don’t have nothing.” That’s when things switched for me. I said, “What you can do for me is turn your life around. I know how you’ve acted in prison. You’ve attacked the guards and choked them. You’ve been a terrible person. You don’t have to do that. You can go to college in here. You can make something of yourself. That’s what you can do for me.” Chester was incredulous. It never crossed his mind that anyone would take an interest in him and care. He said to me, “I felt more love in that room the day I met you than I’ve felt my whole life.” He never said he was sorry and I never said, “I forgive you.” The way I describe it is to say that we came to a place of peace.

The meeting was extremely lengthy. I was just exhausted by the end. I had given him my soul. I’d relived the pain all over again and was drained. I had spent my soul, my heart, my brain, my head and I just couldn’t do any more. I thanked him 17 times. But I also said, “You can do this. You can make something of yourself, better yourself.” I just encouraged him in every way possible. I gave him a book called Out of Madness: From the Projects to a Life of Hope. Coincidentally, the author had lived in the same neighborhood as Chester. His mother was a crack addict and he was a writer. I gave him the book and said, “Look what you can do. I don’t care if your mother used to smoke dope with you, you can make something out of yourself.” When I said this to him, he was sitting across the table with his head down, just overcome with emotion. I heard God talking to me. “Terri Anne, put your hand across the table.” I said, “No. I’ve sat here all day. I’ve tried to encourage him. I’ve given him a book. I’ve told him I’ll write to him. I’m going to buy him a GED2 book. I’m going to try to help him get an education. Now what do you expect of me?” I reminded myself that if I put my hand out, I’d be holding the hand that held the pistol that murdered my child. I felt I couldn’t do it. So I said, “God, I can’t do that by myself.” I had my eyes closed but I stretched my hand across the table. I didn’t say, “Give me your hand.” God was just there. Chester took my hand in both of his, pulled it under his face and washed both our hands with his tears. At that moment I let out a guttural scream of anger, hate, and rage that I had contained for 13-and-a-half years. After my scream, no one in the room was breathing. You could have heard a flea roll across the carpet. It was the most powerful spiritual thing that has ever happened to me in my life. I thought giving birth was spiritual but it was just painful. At that moment the rage, hate, and anger just lifted. It was gone.

I still want Peter back every day. The pain of missing him and of the murder has never changed. If you saw me at the cemetery on his birthday you would think he had died just the day before. People think that just because you do therapy or forgive that you just forget about your loved one. Maybe the pain is a little bit less but I wish Peter were here holding my hand when I let go of life and I won’t have that.

Chester and I continued to exchange letters but they still all went through the facilitator. He wrote me every day and I would write him one letter a month. I still have all those letters in a file drawer. After our meeting, I put money in Chester’s trust fund that the inmates have for incidentals, sent him books and did everything to help him. As long as I communicated with him, he was not in trouble. He did not get another disciplinary case at all. None. However, Chester started calling me his godmother and telling me he loved me. Someone in the Department of Corrections decided he was forming an inappropriate attachment to me and forbade me to communicate with him anymore. I begged the person to reconsider, saying that the conclusions drawn by others about Chester’s attachment were wrong. But it made no difference and I was forced to quit writing him. He was all right for about a year and then he lost hope again. Nobody cared. Nobody came. I had seen value in him and I believe he wanted to live up to that and not disappoint me. I warned the Department of Corrections that he’d slide back and he did. He started to get into trouble again. He attacked a guard. They finally let him out but he’s been in trouble ever since. He’s back in now.

I’m a better person now than the day Peter was murdered. I was raised to be very racially prejudiced, very judgmental. God has worked wonders in my life since he softened my heart. God thought I was worth saving. God knew I was not going to survive so I guess God figured, “I gotta do something or she’s going to kill herself, so let’s let this work.” I do lots of work in prisons now to try to help other guys turn their lives around. I often have one of the prisoners hold my hand in front of the others while I tell the story of what God did to help me reach over the table for Chester’s hand. Their hands get sweaty. It’s almost like they can feel what Chester and I were feeling.

Analysis: Crime and its aftermath

As a single mother, Terri Anne was completely devoted to her only child, Peter. Her role as mother was her sole identity and had been so for years. In many ways, he and she were companions and soulmates in their dedication to each other as mother and son. She had tended him well throughout his growing up, using her strong sense of the moral lessons in life as her guide. Peter’s upcoming graduation from college was to have been a marker event in both their lives and Terri Anne expected he would be next to her as she aged. When he was murdered, there was nothing left in her life to hold her up. She had no meaning and wanted to be with him far more than continuing to live with no purpose. In her mind, she was simply Peter’s mom. Her family cruelly exacerbated her aloneness and sense of injury by their righteousness about her mothering. Specifically, she felt disenfranchised because they criticized how she had raised her son, claiming that if she had done it right, he would never have offered a ride to someone of a different race, someone who was Black. Terri Anne, therefore, not only bore the pain from her son’s murder but also the guilt given her by her family and the unnecessary aggravation from the insensitive way in which she learned that Chester might be released.

Terri Anne chafed under the idea that Chester had intentionally targeted her son as an easy mark and taken advantage of his kindness and offer of help. From her vantage point, Chester’s behavior was incomprehensible. His coldness to the murder itself and reactions in court were seemingly detached, emotionless, and violated her deeply held principles about human beings and how they should treat each other. Terri Anne read voraciously in an effort to understand Chester’s thinking—“I read books about criminals like Inside the Criminal Mind to try to understand how someone could do something so horrible when somebody was nice to them and gave them a ride.” She also read loads of books on grief and victimization in an effort to figure out her own indescribable emotions. What she read offered little solace. She had ceased talking about her pain with her family, but, as always, felt determined to attend to Peter and what had happened to him just as she had when he was alive. For her, the circumstances of his death were far from complete.

Preparation

Terri Anne learned about the VOD program from her connections in the criminal justice system. As with everything else, Terri Anne researched it thoroughly before moving forward. Once she decided to meet with Chester, she prepared by learning everything possible about his past. As she absorbed the extreme deprivation of his childhood, the lack of any parenting, and the onslaught of constant trauma just to survive, she slowly realized, at a core level, that the true enemy responsible for her son’s murder was likely the inequity between Chester and Peter’s worlds. Specifically, Peter had been raised by a devoted mother and ensconced with strong moral principles and countless advantages whereas Chester literally grew up on the streets with no parenting and struggling only to survive from one day to the next. Although this realization did not change her daily wish that Chester die or resolve not to cut him any slack, it did begin to humanize him and give her direction for how to engage with him in the meeting so that she could reach him emotionally. Her determination grew stronger as Chester kept refusing to meet with her.

Although Terri Anne began to harness her energy in anticipating how to relate in the meeting, she also was intentional in deciding what to say to Chester in the pre-VOD letters she wrote. After having informed herself about his upbringing, she decided not to be destructive but rather shared the immensity of the pain she was living with. Even though Chester had little response, she never backed off but rather pursued him relentlessly.

As part of preparation, the facilitator had Terri Anne answer numerous questionnaires about herself and how the murder had affected her. It was through this process that she began to understand the significance of her mothering role and how lost she was without it. It also clarified for her the core question, which had to do with the inconceivability and immorality of hurting someone who was trying to help you. Indeed, it was Terri Anne’s need to answer that question and resolve the dissonance embedded in it that mobilized her to meet with Chester. Her detailing of 77 questions to ask Chester and repetition of the word “why” embodied the core question but was also more a statement of her outrage than an actual question.

Terri Anne’s privately held decision to commit suicide fueled her “go for broke” and “nothing left to lose” attitude in meeting with Chester. It was as if she had a mission to perform and then she’d be done, released, and ready to join Peter. Her mothering role had been taken from her. Indeed, for Terri Anne, the searing pain of no longer being needed matched the pain of losing her son and only child. Her hope was that “I won’t wake up anymore, it will be over, and all this pain will be gone.” Although Terri Anne had shared her pain through her letters, there had been no response from Chester to suggest, in any way, that he was open to receiving it. The pain differential, therefore, stayed stuck inside her as she endured his limited involvement, ambivalence about meeting with her, and a letter the night before the meeting warning her that he would remain walled off from her in the dialogue. As such, Chester and Terri Anne’s openness to each other was seemingly narrow and tentative. Indeed, Terri Anne wanted badly to reach Chester but otherwise did not expect to be personally affected by what he gave her. Specifically, she was open to sharing the impact of what Chester did on her life and to being done with the pain but was not expecting or open to it being transformed.

Dialogue

Terri Anne’s determination to take her own life and be with Peter after the meeting was interrupted by finding the red Corvette next to her car at the motel. Her interpretation of the synchronicity was that Peter approved of her decision to meet with Chester and she’d be fine. The conduit between them had already been established through the letters they’d exchanged and the facilitator’s sharing about each with the other during preparation. Terri Anne likely felt that conduit as she visualized sitting across from Chester and struggled to get emotional distance by pushing the facilitator for more physical space between them. The facilitator’s rebuke of her for her contrariness was actually a challenge to her to be more open. Chester may have also felt the conduit. Indeed, his letter the night before the meeting may have been his effort to establish emotional distance as well. At the beginning of the dialogue, therefore, both Terri Anne and Chester were in a stand-off but it reflected a similar worry about what would happen when they came together.

Chester’s crying in response to Terri Anne’s opening statement and her handing him the Kleenex is further evidence that they both had some earlier sense of what might happen when they met. In those first moments, Terri Anne discovered that she held kindness toward him and Chester discovered that he felt something akin to remorse. Moreover, in his sobbing, he showed Terri Anne his willingness to accept her pain and transfer it into himself. This exchange generated a profound shift for both of them, which resulted in Terri Anne talking to Chester for hours about what she had given Peter as a mother, who Peter was and the advantages he had, who she had been as Peter’s mother, what Chester had taken from her but all in the context of what Chester had a right to as a child but never got. In making the comparison, she acknowledged what she knew about his background from the records she had read, and all the pain and relentless trauma he lived with along with the unfairness of what Peter got and Chester didn’t. Chester just listened, absorbed Terri Anne’s loving energy and cried as he let in her caring and the mothering he felt from her.

The resonance between them was deeply felt and the energy flowed back and forth so fast through their verbal and nonverbal exchanges that it was difficult to track. Although Terri Anne had come to the meeting determined to show no mercy, she really could not appreciate someone being raised so differently from Peter until Chester was in front of her and she could see he’d had nothing good in his life. She began to nurture him. Chester felt the enormity of what Terri Anne was giving him and asked what he could do for her. Terri Anne jumped on the opportunity and told him that he could turn his life around. With that comment, she reinstated him as someone who had potential and worth. She gave Chester hope for himself but also set up an expectation for him in paradoxical terms. Specifically, she told him that he could redeem himself and in so doing, he would help himself but also heal her. As such, she joined the two of them together but with the message, in effect, that he was obligated to her for what he took from her life. Although her intent was loving, she put a net around him with her expectation that he go in a different direction. She fed the possibility by talking to him about the positive lives that others from his neighborhood had built. She gave him a role model by telling him about the author of a book concerning his neighborhood, the similarity in background and talent between himself and the author, the fact that this person made it out of the inner city, and then presented the book to him as a special gift.

This feeding of hope, spoon by spoon, hour after hour became almost a birthing process in which Chester experienced feelings and profound caring like he’d never known before. Although Terri Anne was seemingly giving to Chester, another birthing was also happening. Specifically, Terri Anne was gaining back, through Chester, the mothering role she had lost. She literally watched Chester’s transformation in front of her and how what she was doing was healing the wounds he had carried from his childhood. But something was incomplete. Terri Anne was spent and felt she had nothing left to give. She felt directed by God, however, to reach out to Chester across the table. At that point, the idea of giving of herself physically to the person who had killed her son created such revulsion and dissonance that she pulled back. She felt, at some level, that she couldn’t reinstate him to that degree. Yet she saw that Chester was “sitting across the table with his head down, just shaking his head” as if he could hardly contain what he had been given and what he was feeling. She ultimately resolved her discomfort by asking for God’s help to do his bidding and move past the barrier that was still between her and Chester.

Chester’s tears and holding of their hands together while his tears washed over them touched Terri Anne’s soul. He held her pain and all the anguish she had felt since Peter was murdered and she likely experienced his tears as healing. As she let him touch her with his love and gratitude, she felt her pain associated with the negative energy she had held transformed releasing all the rage that was stored inside her. Terri Anne experienced what she interpreted as their transcendent interaction as God directed and consequently indicated that she trusted what had happened implicitly. “It was just God that was there.” She reflected that she now felt complete. Not only was she unburdened but she also believed, according to her perception, that God felt she was worth saving. Indeed, she felt that God had helped her convert her hatred to doing something worthwhile.

Subsequently, she carried her experience and connection with God into the prisons with the idea of using her story and what happened between her and Chester to reach other inmates. In many ways, her mothering, through her meeting with Chester, was restored but she now ministered to a much larger group. Terri Anne described her sense of completion and the energy between them as coming to rest by saying that she and Chester had come to a place of peace.

For a while Terri Anne continued to befriend and mother Chester. The judgment from the person in charge about her relationship with Chester was heartbreaking as well as witnessing his deterioration, as he again felt abandoned and alone. However, by that point, Terri Anne was limited by the prison system in what she could do to change the situation. Moreover, she had developed into her own person and was living a life filled with purpose and affirmation. In many ways, Chester and Terri Anne gave each other life and mutual healing through the dyadic encounter and dialogue. Neither would have, or could have, moved without the other.

PORTIA’S STORY AND ANALYSIS

Mabel and her roommate were brutally murdered by Jackson, a man with no connection to them, who broke into the house and stabbed both women and Mabel’s boyfriend repeatedly. Portia, Mabel’s mom, dedicated her life to the court case, the trial, and subsequent appeals. Portia was living her life numb, in a binding but involuntary relationship with Jackson. Portia felt compelled to forgive because of her faith. Jackson’s upcoming execution date made preparation time limited. She anticipated a quick dialogue to share her decisional forgiveness but what she got was five-and-a-half hours of Jackson accepting responsibility for his actions. Portia was able to take back control over her life. Jackson requested and Portia agreed to attend the execution, sharing with her that he loved her and was thankful for her ability to show him love in return.

My daughter Mabel was murdered on her twenty-first birthday. Jackson also murdered her roommate and seriously injured Mabel’s boyfriend Remy. Jackson was a rapist who had been released by mistake from prison three months before he killed Mabel. He had been stalking Mabel’s roommate for a month. Mabel had alerted her boyfriend that she kept hearing something in the backyard but no one saw Jackson jumping back and forth over the fence into their yard. Jackson stabbed Mabel 28 times and she bled to death in a fetal position in the corner of her closet. She had screamed for Remy who tried to pull Jackson off of Mabel but Jackson then turned on Remy and stabbed him 19 times. Remy lost his left eye and almost died in the hospital. It was a horrific crime scene.

Jackson ran away from the house covered in blood. He told a friend that he had gotten into a fight with another drug dealer and was cut, needed to shower and change clothes. Jackson stuffed his clothes is a plastic bag and had a girlfriend drive him out of town so he could toss the bag with the knife and bloody clothes off a cliff but the police found it. Jackson was found guilty and given the death penalty for the multiple murders. I was in the courtroom with him for 13 months. I was so close to him at times that I could just reach over and touch him. I was fortunate because his attorneys who were court appointed came to me and apologized for having to defend him. In response, I’d say to them, “Don’t apologize to me. You give him the best defense you can because I don’t want him getting out of prison again through some loophole or mistake. You defend him like you’ve never defended anybody and that will be your thanks to me.” At the trial Jackson kept looking around at Mabel’s girlfriend’s sister. Every time he would turn to look at her, I’d get in the way of his view so I could protect her because I didn’t have my daughter any longer to protect. During that time and afterwards, I took jobs to support myself but never committed to them so that I would be available for anything that happened during the appeal process. I could not let him go. I could not let him get away.

With Mabel’s death, I was thrown into a world that I knew absolutely nothing about and I had to become knowledgeable about all kinds of things. Moreover, I had to find a place to put myself, to put my life in the middle of all the chaos. I literally lost myself and walked through the next 12 years deaf, dumb, and blind. Because of my numbness, my two other children suffered. They lost their sister and their mother in the same night. My son is still afraid to let me get close to him. He’s very cautious and withdrawn. My daughter has come around some. Some people whose loved ones are killed never get past their anger or hatred or the question of “Why?” I never cared why. I had other relatives whose child was murdered and I watched them die full of hate and anger. I just thought, “God, please, please, please do not let me do that.” The hatred and anger just destroys everything inside your body.

For a long time, Jackson was the focal point of my life. I felt a strong drive to sit down and talk. I tried to see him in jail but I wasn’t allowed in. I tried again when he went to prison but I couldn’t because I was the mother of his victim. I just wanted to see him even though I didn’t know why. I think I just wanted to see what he was really like. In the courtroom all I saw was a monster. I’d look in his eyes and they were just vacant. The lights were on but nobody was home.

I thought about Jackson a lot. Because I’m Catholic, I also obsessed about forgiveness but I had a struggle with it. I didn’t want to forgive him. One day, I was driving back home and listening to Christian radio. A speaker was talking about forgiveness, which sparked one of my many conversations with God. On that day, I was crying while I drove and exclaiming to God, “How could I ever forgive Jackson for what he did? How can I do that? There’s no way I can do that.” Surprisingly a voice answered from the back of the car and said, “You don’t have to forgive what he did. You have to forgive him.” I was shocked. I pulled off the side of the road and sat there. I just cried and thought, “How do I separate the two?” It took me five years before I could separate Jackson from Mabel in a way that I could forgive him. It wasn’t an easy struggle because I fought it the whole way. I still didn’t want to do it. I was instructed to do it.

At the time Mabel was murdered, the VOD program was not available to victims whose offenders were on death row. So even though I wanted to see Jackson, I wouldn’t have been eligible. I had been vocal about wanting to meet with Jackson but had no idea how to accomplish it. Out of the blue, a facilitator called me who was with the Department of Corrections and asked if I would be willing to participate and that I’d be the first victim to have a dialogue with someone on death row and close to execution. I remember saying, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re calling me. I’ve been trying to do this for 12 years.” There was little time for preparation because Jackson’s execution date had already been scheduled. However, in the time we had, I found out a lot about myself that was sometimes not so pretty. I just had to look in the mirror and say, “Yeah, that’s true too” and accept myself. So I went into the meeting believing that I would be there just to tell him I’d forgiven him. I was planning to say, “I can never forgive you for what you did, but as a person I have to forgive you.” I had expected the meeting to last 30 seconds but it went on for five-and-a-half hours.

When I went into the meeting I was apprehensive and tense. I didn’t know what to expect but it was nothing like what I thought it would be. I sat down and then he sat down in front of me and started crying. In the courtroom he had no eyes but in the meeting I could actually see life in his eyes, which had not been there before. He was remorseful, I could tell. He had changed in a lot of ways too and I could see the changes. See, I grew up in the streets too so I knew what to look for and he couldn’t fake everything, believe me. However, I know it was only with the grace of God that I was able to really see him as a person rather than the monster I had seen 12 years earlier. That was a big shift for me.

We had had some correspondence through the facilitator before the actual meeting that was traumatic. Jackson had apologized and said all kinds of things. I, of course, wasn’t interested in apologies. I was set to go in and say, “You know what? God commanded me to forgive you and I forgive you, not for what you did because I could never do that. But as a person, I forgive you.” At the meeting he said, “Well I don’t deserve it.” I replied, “No you don’t. But you have it.”

Jackson talked about the fact that he had become a Catholic. He had been going through catechism and classes to become Catholic. He learned that forgiveness was something that not everybody could give. I felt his becoming Catholic as another slap in my face. Now he’s not only taken my daughter but now he’s taking my God. I was totally offended. But then my whole demeanor changed. I felt this warmth and peace come over me. I started breathing and my brain came back. I was able to think clearly for the first time in 12 years. When I say it was a transformation I meant that literally. I came back to life. I had been walking around dead for 12 years. I came back to life right there on death row, absolutely back to life. I started to feel more at peace, which I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt more relaxed. I could breathe. I could think.

In the meeting, we just talked back and forth. He talked a little bit about his drug history and the changes he was trying to make while he was in prison. We also talked about some of the things he did during his sentence and how I fought him all the way. For example, he went to the state Supreme Court and tried to get a new trial because he was an abused child. He tried to be an organ donor from death row. He actually was working with Jack Kevorkian trying to get an organ bank from death row inmates all over the country. In my state it’s a problem because of the effect of the lethal injection on an inmate’s organs. So if they were to be executed they would have to have their organs removed while they are still alive. That means that a doctor would have to agree to be the executioner. Jackson explained that from his perspective, he wanted to donate his organs in honor of his victims. He wanted to take out some of the darkness that he put into the world and put a little brightness back into life. I told him, “I’m going to have to think about that. I don’t think it’s going to be allowed but if it is, I’d rather you be discreet because I still have two other children that I have to protect.” I told him however that if it happened, I wouldn’t fight him anymore. Thank goodness, it never went through.

Jackson also told me that he was an abused child but I told him, “I don’t know anybody that’s ever had a perfect childhood.” I myself was raised in a totally dysfunctional home but none of my siblings ever killed anyone. So I said to Jackson, “I can’t accept that as a reason you murdered my daughter. I’m sorry, but it’s just not a good reason.” I just couldn’t allow him to use that as an excuse for taking the lives of people he didn’t even know. Throughout the meeting, Jackson let me say whatever I wanted to say and I did the same. It was the first time in 12 years that he didn’t have any control over my life. I had control of the meeting and I wasn’t going to let him take it back. So the meeting for me was life giving. I took my power back. I got to tell Jackson what he had done to my family. I told him that my children had gone through hell. I told him that one man, one act, had affected five families on a single night. I said, “You have no idea what you’ve done and how it will never go away.” He answered saying, “No, ma’am, I don’t know.” I told him, “It is astronomical the number of people whose lives you’ve affected.” I could express to him the powerlessness, the hopelessness, and the helplessness about Mabel’s murder and everything I had to deal with afterwards. For example, at the trial I was not allowed to have any part of anything. I was dependent on a whole room of strangers and they had my life in their hands and I couldn’t say anything about it.

We also talked about the death penalty and his execution. Jackson agreed with me that his being executed was morally and ethically correct. He asked if I would be there and I said that I would. He was just very genuine. At one point we talked about his mother and he started to cry. I said, “Jackson, I’m really sorry that your mother hasn’t come or called you. I can’t imagine that my kids would do that or that I wouldn’t be there whether I agreed with my child or not.” Jackson started to cry and said to the facilitator, “Here she is, a person who should hate me and she’s giving me more love than my mother ever showed me.” That touched me.

When I walked out of there, it was like somebody had just lifted a thousand pounds off of my body. I walked out of there a new person. I found myself accepting him as a human being, which I never thought I would be able to do. That was a pretty big transformation right there in that death row chamber. It was horrible but it was life giving at the same time.

Two weeks later, me and my family attended the execution. Remy was with us. Jackson told everyone he was sorry. He told me that he loved me and thanked me for the last two weeks of his life. He had no family. His mother lived out of state and never came to see him even once. He talked with her a few days before he was executed but that was it.

After the execution I met with Jackson’s foster mother. She had him from the time he was 14. She had asked to meet with me. I found out he had two daughters. His ex-wife would have nothing to do with him. He was extremely abusive and she was trying to keep the children from him. The foster mother was the only one who had tried to help him, hoping to change his life. She told me some of his history. She said that when Jackson first came to her home he would refuse to take a shower. He wouldn’t take his clothes off. The other boys in the home would get him and scrub him down but he would fight the whole way. Then his foster mother found out that his mother had sexually abused him since he was eight years old. It must have been in the shower a lot. The foster mother would tell Jackson, “You go into the shower because you cannot be going without a shower for days. You go inside and lock the door and I will put a chair right here in front of the door and sit here until you are through. I will make sure nobody comes into the bathroom.”

When his foster mother heard about the murders on the news, she was just devastated. She felt Jackson had a good heart but never had a chance. Learning his background was a different story for me. I was thankful the execution was over but my heart broke for her because she had seen something in him no one else ever had. It didn’t change the fact that he had murdered my daughter and her roommate and almost murdered a third person. It was just sad and so tragic.

For me, forgiveness is between you and God, not you and the other person. I had to forgive Jackson because I wanted to live. I wanted to be able to love my children and grandchildren without any restrictions and ill feelings. It’s a very private personal issue. Forgiveness goes against everything in human nature. It’s a long hard process because you have to search your heart and soul to be able to give true forgiveness. I learned through this process to forgive other people but also to forgive myself. I felt God nearly beat me to death with forgiveness until I finally reached the point that I knew what he was talking about. What is most important is that my completion of the forgiveness happened on death row when I saw Jackson’s eyes and his remorse and when I saw he was a human being and not a monster. The pain never goes away. It’s just not as severe. It’s an accepted part of my life but the dialogue gave me back my power. Forgiving Jackson took away the control he had over my life and gave it back to me. From there, I could take my life back because I was in control. I thank God every day for the meeting because my other children wouldn’t even have a life today if I hadn’t had that meeting.

Analysis: Crime and its aftermath

Jackson violently intruded into the home and encroached on the presumed safety of Mabel and her boyfriend who were celebrating a marker birthday into her adulthood. He similarly broke into Portia’s world changing everything about her life forever. His extreme dangerousness and rage were indisputable and marked by the number of times he stabbed each of the girls and Remy. His deviousness was evident as indicated by his voyeuristic stalking, efforts to run away, lying to a friend so he could clean up after the crime, and disposing of the evidence out of town.

Portia directed all her energy to keeping a close and almost obsessive watch over Jackson to be sure he didn’t slip through the cracks. Being a serial rapist, he should never have been released and certainly not as an early release parolee. Portia fought for a strong defense so that the outcome of the trial could not be undone by an appeal challenging the adequacy of Jackson’s representation. She stalked him at the trial, making sure he had to see her whenever he turned around in the courtroom trying to engage the sister of Mabel’s roommate. Portia kept herself available so that she could be present for any legal procedure. She was possessed and singularly responsible for tracking Jackson and tracking the system to be sure he did not get away.

Portia tried to quickly master a legal netherworld about which she knew nothing while feeling brain dead. Because of her numbness and fixation on Jackson, the rest of her life receded into the background. In that process, she emotionally abandoned her other two children and did little to take care of herself. Indeed, she felt like she became a different person because Mabel’s murder changed the way she thought, did things, and treated others—“It changes the way you think about people. You’re more cautious and suspicious. It’s just there from now on.” Portia’s big concern was that she would not wind up with the anger and hatred that had consumed her relatives after their son was murdered by his wife on Christmas in his own home—“Some people never get past their anger, the hatred, or the question of why.” Indeed, she had watched as their unrelenting anger destroyed their bodies and ultimately took their lives.

However, in the midst of her grief and numbness, Jackson remained a focal point. She tracked him, trying to see him first when he was in jail and later when he went to prison but to no avail—“I don’t know what I was going to talk to him about but I just had that drive.” Portia, however, was haunted by the blank look in his eyes and wanted to talk to him to see what he was like, whether as a monster or otherwise. It was as if part of her mission was to have an encounter with him. The seeming intent of such a meeting was also that he’d have to see her and in so doing be held accountable for what he did by the mother of the woman he murdered.

It was a long time, however, before Portia gained insight into her drive and her unfinished business with Jackson. The unfinished business had to do with forgiveness. Specially, being Catholic, she was supposed to forgive others in order to be forgiven by God. Portia was bothered, however, because she felt she had zero motivation or even ability to forgive Jackson until God directed her to forgive his being or soul, not what he did in killing her daughter. Although she perceived that her conversation with God clarified what God expected her to do, it left her in a quandary about how to separate the person from the act. After all, how she saw and felt about Jackson was directly related to what he had done. So she continued to fight because she still had no will to forgive.

In the aftermath of the crime, therefore, Portia fixated on Jackson as if with purpose but actually had no direction for the negative energy that kept spinning around without an outlet. She felt driven to see Jackson but didn’t know why and couldn’t gain entry. She was plagued by her God-given need to forgive but had no personal desire to do so. This state of affairs reinforced her sense of powerlessness and helplessness to be able to impact the circumstances that had permanently changed her world.

Preparation

The call from the facilitator inviting Portia to be the first person to do a VOD meeting with a death row offender was, for her, overdue. She had been waiting and preparing for 12 years. There were some letters exchanged plus an apology from Jackson prior to meeting him but it had little impact because of Portia’s single-minded agenda. She simply wanted to encounter him so she could see who he was, express her forgiveness, clarify that she was not forgiving what he did and quickly leave. She had no need for answers or information.

In terms of preparation, the facilitator had worked with her on recognizing and accepting her own human failings as part of establishing common ground between Portia and Jackson in their upcoming meeting. Events prior to their meeting, such as Jackson’s claiming her religion as his own or his attempt to donate his organs, were aggravating to Portia. They reinforced her view of Jackson as manipulative, hell bent on delaying his deserved execution as well as the necessity of her maintaining a close and vigilant watch over every move he made. Portia’s openness to the meeting, therefore, was grounded in what she needed to do to complete her journey but she otherwise had little time for Jackson. Her struggle with the dissonance of viewing Jackson as a monster and inhuman and seeing him as human paralleled the tension between her not wanting to forgive and forgiving. Although none of the dissonance was resolved until the dialogue, her decision to move forward with the meeting was an important step in shifting her internal stalemate.

Dialogue

Portia and Jackson met on death row in a small confined space two weeks before his execution. They were separated by a glass partition and could only talk together using a phone. Indeed, the physical distance between them was slight. As such, Portia could readily see Jackson’s face. Portia sat down feeling uneasy and nervous. She was not prepared for the genuineness and impact of Jackson’s remorse and the change in his appearance since the trial. The eyes that had been so vacant before were now full of life and expressive. She felt a deep shift inside her as he moved in status from monster to human being. Even without her directly sharing the pain differential, his response and openness to her were evidence that he had taken the pain for what he had done into himself. This obvious transfer and spontaneous combustion of positive energies quickly established a stronger conduit between them than Portia had ever imagined and created an atmosphere of safety and openness for her as well.

Portia shared the forgiveness she had practiced and planned to give but the dialogue continued for over five hours. Each shared important parts of their journey and life story with the other but with conversation and commentary. Each of them let the other have the space to express and emote without trying to tightly control the dialogue. The dialogue, therefore, had a natural quality that took on the aura of getting to know one another. For example, they discussed Jackson becoming a Catholic, the changes he had made while in prison, the efforts Portia had made to block his attempts to delay his execution, his current motivation to become an organ donor and her concern for the upcoming publicity about his efforts and its impact on her other children. She told him a lot about how his killing Mabel had shattered her world, how disenfranchised she felt by the criminal justice system, and what he had done to her son and daughter.

The reciprocity between Portia and Jackson had powerful energy. Portia’s concentration on Jackson over the years was as if he had absorbed part of Mabel and the last part of her and her existence resided inside the man who had killed her. Mabel’s life, as such, was continued through Jackson, which created a distorted dependency for Portia in terms of what he held and what she needed for her freedom and completion. Consequently, although Portia needed to give him her pain, which rightfully belonged to him, he needed to give Portia the power, which he was still holding from the murder.

This transfer was accomplished in several ways. Specifically, as Portia shared and transferred her pain to Jackson, she did it in a way that simultaneously took back control by holding him accountable to her for what he had taken from her, and his many questionable decisions. Jackson responded with heartfelt sorrow as if Portia was the rightful judge of his actions and, as such, transferred his power over to her. For example, Jackson acknowledged Portia’s indictment that he would never know what he really did saying, “No ma’am. I don’t know.” Portia’s tone in holding Jackson accountable was instructional and declarative of a more honest reality. For example, she could both refuse to allow him to use his abusive childhood as an excuse, but could also tend the pain of his mother’s cut-off. Within her show of accountability, Jackson felt Portia’s love along with her refusal to cut him any slack. As such, the commentary they gave to each other on various issues served to reshape their current realities. Portia felt visible and acknowledged, which shifted her feelings of powerlessness. Jackson felt parented and accompanied, which likely shifted his sense of aloneness and the terror associated with his pending execution. This manifestation of their reciprocal influence on each other helped alter the nature of the energy between them, changing it step by step into a positive flow. Indeed, Jackson asked Portia to attend the execution and told her in the death chamber that the last two weeks of his life had been positive and that he loved her. For Portia, she rested within the paradox of being close and disclosing with the man who murdered her daughter while experiencing, for the first time, that he was not controlling her life.

Paula left the VOD meeting a new person. During their time together, Portia felt a significant shift in energy as she moved from apprehensive to relaxed and from numb to feeling her brain start to work again. She felt the newness of actually breathing fully and without impediment and had a deep awareness of having dropped the burden and sense of responsibility she’d carried since Mabel was murdered. “It was like somebody had just lifted a thousand pounds off my body.” Indeed, her intense focus on Jackson over the years had been infused with negative energy, which bound her to him and reinforced her sense of powerlessness. As the negativity was transformed into something more positive, she experienced the release.

The irony of coming back to life while on death row was striking. She felt a similar paradox in the death chamber. Specifically, in her comments about the execution, Portia recognized how the pain she had carried was tied to Jackson’s criminal status as a kind of negative energy identification. She said, “There was a pretty big transformation right there in that death row chamber. I felt that I had slept with him on death row for 12 years and I was ready to get out of there. It was horrible but it was life-giving at the same time.” Perhaps the greatest paradox was that within the abnormality and horror of a state mandated death, the events, conversation, and growth within and between Portia and Jackson felt so natural.

Portia’s reinstatement of Jackson was demonstrated by her acceptance of him as a human being rather than a monster. Indeed, it was through her acceptance that she manifested her forgiveness of him as a person. Her meeting with his foster mother post his death was a further expression of her acceptance. She was able to hear differently and with compassion now about his past, his victimization at the hands of his mother, and his response to the trauma. She could both feel for him and his foster mother and hold the emotional reality of his having murdered her daughter. Portia’s journey, including her meeting with Jackson, stretched her way beyond what she had known prior to Mabel’s death. Being able to contain and live within seeming opposites gave her a purview on life that allowed her to encompass more and more and to grow in her comprehensiveness as a human being. She could encourage Jackson’s defense attorneys in addition to the prosecutor to excel. She could work toward forgiveness while fighting it. She could see Jackson as a manipulator and decide not to fight him over the organ donation. She could parent Jackson, cry with him about his mother, and accompany him at his execution while also believing that taking his life was a necessary penance for the life he took. Finally, she could hold all those worlds while moving into a space where she felt free and unencumbered in her living.

The dissonance between Portia’s religion and its mandate to forgive and her resistance to that mandate had been partially resolved prior to the meeting through her conversation with God. Specifically, she had perceived what God had said as a directive to distinguish between Jackson’s behavior and Jackson as a human being. Portia determined that she had to remove the association between Mabel and Jackson in order to accomplish God’s bidding. Portia felt she had accomplished the separation and wanted to meet with Jackson, in part, to convey her forgiveness, thereby completing the task. Although Portia had come to terms with forgiving Jackson, her effort remained at a decisional level and arguably more centered in her relationship with God than with Jackson. Jackson’s remorse and acceptance of responsibility, however, revised and deepened her forgiveness by moving it into a relational and emotional realm. Moreover, God’s instruction to forgive Jackson as a person emerged through the dialogue as Portia accepted Jackson for who he was and who he was becoming. This shift that was rooted in her ability to fully accept Jackson happened as a result of the quality of the dyadic flow between them. The movement from decisional to emotional removed the remaining dissonance and allowed Portia to achieve congruence both with her religion and within herself. Portia experienced this movement as God influenced. Indeed, it is through the dialogue that Portia also repaired her relationship with God specific to her struggle with forgiveness. As such, she finished the dialogue and execution with a sense of completion and wholeness.

LIZETTE’S STORY AND ANALYSIS

Karmen offered assistance to two young men one night at a gas station. Unbeknownst to her, Gamal and Antonio had stolen a car and were on the run. They intentionally misled her with the purpose of raping her, and afraid of being identified, shot and killed her. Lizette, Karmen’s mother, gave Gamal and Antonio little emotional energy, focusing on her granddaughter and going back to school. Lizette felt she had done a lot of healing, especially after working in the prison system, but researching VOD as part of her dissertation showed her more healing was available. She was primed for it. Lizette and Karmen’s now adult daughter met only with Gamal; Antonio was not appropriate for the program. Lizette sensed Gamal’s need to tell her everything, including the forgiveness her daughter had given him moments before her death. Lizette’s forgiveness came in parts, before they met with the release of negative energy, implicitly through physical touch during the dialogue, and then explicitly in letter form, cementing her hopes that Gamal would forgive himself one day.

My daughter Karmen stopped for gas on her way home from visiting a friend. She befriended two 15-year-old boys, Gamal and Antonio, who had filled their car with gas instead of diesel fuel and it wouldn’t start. Karmen didn’t know the car was stolen. In addition, one of the boys gave her a sob story that his father had kicked him out and he had nowhere to go. When she offered to give them a ride, they intentionally misdirected her down a lonely abandoned road and sexually assaulted her. At first, they figured they needed time to get away, so they shot her in the leg. When they realized she could identify them, they killed her.

She went missing for five days. At the time, Karmen was pregnant with her second child so we concluded that she had left town to think through her decisions. My husband and I were taking care of her daughter, Amanda. Although we justified her behavior, my husband and I both walked around the house with a sense of dread. We identified our jitters as anger for her irresponsibility and believed what was the least painful. I know now that we never really believed she left town to reflect on her life. On the first night I had said to my husband, “My head keeps thinking how mad I am with her, how angry I am.” He replied, “My gut is scared to death.” I then fessed up, stating, “I feel exactly the same way.” My body was on alert for those five days. I couldn’t eat and had trouble sleeping. I kept my granddaughter and myself as busy as I could. I process stress by talking so I stayed around people as much as I could as well.

We knew nothing until the police came to our home after they found Karmen and had caught the boys. I was out of the house with Amanda when they arrived. On my way home I remember seeing a sign that said, “Those who love the Lord never see each other for the last time.” For some reason, I just knew I needed to hold that in my heart. As I drove in our driveway I saw all the cars. No one needed to tell me what they meant. I didn’t want my husband to know I was home because he’d come outside to give me the dreadful news and I just didn’t want to hear it in front of anybody else.

I remember just feeling hollow, having a dry mouth and eating through two to three sacks of Halls for weeks. In terms of the boys, they had long juvenile records. I figured they were thoroughly bad guys, really bad. Frankly I didn’t give them a lot of my time. I had my granddaughter to raise now and was working to gain custody after her paternal grandparents refused to send her back from a Christmas visit. I felt in limbo for a long time—in limbo with the civil court system because of Amanda as well as the criminal justice system. Specifically, the boys hadn’t been sentenced, they hadn’t come to trial and we didn’t know if we had custody. It was an awful way to feel. All I could do during the time was vegetate. I sat in front of a space heater in my den just so cold that I wished I could crawl into it.

I tried various things to cope. I attended a victims’ group for about a year and tried to match my anger with theirs. Folks would say to me, “Boy, it’s a shame those little bastards can’t get the death penalty, that they are too young.” When I found myself thinking the same thing, I realized I didn’t fit in very well. The members were keeping me in a state of anger. Recognizing that I was a square peg in a round hole, I decided to quit.

I figured the one thing I could have some control over was school so I decided to go back and finish my college degree. That was something I could do for me. I decided that I wanted to be a grief counselor and an educator of deaf students. Because I had read voraciously about grief and loss, going back to school just seemed the right thing for me to do. I got my bachelors and my masters and began teaching in a community college. I wasn’t thinking about Gamal and Antonio at all. One day someone asked me their names and I got them mixed up. I couldn’t remember which one’s last name was which. I thought, “Oh how horrible. I can’t even remember their names.” But that’s how much emotional energy I gave them.

Following Karmen’s murder, our family was rebuilding their lives. With school and teaching, I was happy, healthy, and fulfilled. The only difficulty in my life was that I had that hole there that was never going to be filled in. One day, I asked my students what they thought should happen to a mother who had recently killed her children. It was lethal, all the ugly awful things they were going to do to punish her for what she had done. That little conversation absolutely crystallized my thinking. I remembered the victim support group I had attended years earlier where the response of the members was to repay violence with more violence. It was like they wanted everyone to be on the same level but that level was low and amounted to “get mad and get even.” I began looking for something that was non-violent.

A year later I discovered restorative justice by accident. I had gone to a Presbyterian meeting and found a pamphlet produced by the Presbyterian church titled Restorative Justice: For Non-violence. That title just grabbed me by the throat. I read it cover to cover and thought, “Oh, my goodness. This is what I’ve been looking for.” At that time I was working on my doctorate, teaching and doing adjunct work at a university. I was also teaching in prison, which was more healing than anything I’d ever done. As I learned about restorative justice, I determined to focus on my dissertation research on the VOD program. I went through the VOD training to be a facilitator so I could see what was involved. I also interviewed victims and offenders who had done VOD meetings. That’s what made me want to do my own. I actually felt that I had had enough of my own personal healing but when I realized that more could happen, it made me go from not needing to feeling that talking with either of the young men who killed Karmen would be the ultimate completion of my healing process.

I did preparation for about a year. Amanda, who was now 20 years old, decided to do the VOD meeting with me. The plan was to meet with Gamal because Antonio was not considered appropriate. We had a female facilitator assigned to us who checked in with us regularly. She had us do a lot of psychological inventories or questionnaires. The victim inventory was particularly helpful. It was ten pages long and we each had to answer very deep, soul-searching questions. We also had to answer the questions from the perspective of the offender, which was Gamal, as well. Doing these inventories was the first time I thought about Gamal as a human being. It was the first time I gave him that status in my mind and heart.

When I walked into the meeting, I actually wasn’t that nervous. I had been in prisons many times to teach. I had been trained myself to be a VOD facilitator and I had interviewed VOD participants for my dissertation. So I felt really comfortable with the whole process. Our dialogue preparation and the meeting itself were being filmed for a documentary so I had a little nervousness about the taping but the crew had already been filming the preparation so they weren’t strangers. If anything, we were excited to get started. Everyone in the room was keyed in on it and anxious in a good way, exhilarated, and incredibly supportive. It was like we had a cheering section with us and it felt wonderful.

At the meeting, Gamal was so remorseful and started crying from the very beginning. He never cried when he talked about his own upbringing and his abuse at the hands of others but he sure cried when he talked about what he had done. It was just more than he could bear. The new piece that came out of the dialogue for me was Gamal’s sharing the information about Karmen’s last words. She knew she was about to be killed and was pleading with the boys to spare her life. The last thing she said to them was, “I forgive you and God will too.” The last moments of her life were the hardest for me to think about. It was a place I never went. Learning what happened at the end was amazing and incredibly helpful. Interestingly, I never actually asked Gamal about Karmen’s last moments. I had asked him why he had committed a violent crime when he’d never been violent before except to himself. He misunderstood the question but once he started going down the road and talking about Karmen, I found it hard to stop him. I think part of me realized he needed to say it. Once we learned about Karmen’s last words, it took some pressure off of me. Not only did I feel better but I think it relaxed him once he saw the shift in me.

I, of course, wanted to know about Gamal and his background. He talked about it in a matter-of-fact way. He also talked about the family of another inmate that had “adopted” him as one of them. We, of course, talked about our own family and ourselves and the impact the murder had had on all of us. It was painful for him to have to hear about all the damage and ripple effects of what he had done. We showed him pictures of the family and you could see the pain. It was hard for me to see his response because it felt a little like the football penalty where they all pile on top of a player.

Gamal was very careful. I think he had done a lot of reflection over the years about what he had done and how he felt about it. He tried very, very hard not to revictimize us with how he said things, how he framed them, how he couched them, and the language he used. A member of the film crew commented that Gamal and I were protective of one another. I knew exactly what he meant. Indeed, I’ve seen that protectiveness many times with offenders I’ve worked with in prison. That’s one of the overarching reasons why I can see them as human beings and not monsters or judge them for just that one thing they did.

We never talked about forgiveness. I think it was clear to Gamal that I forgave him by the fact that I approached him for a hug. I reached out to him with my hands but I never used the language. When I got home, I wrote him a letter and said it to him in words. One definition of forgiveness is letting go of any negative emotional power that something holds over you. I had done that long, long, long ago. But when I did the preparation I personalized it for the first time. I mean, I obviously had let it go if I couldn’t even remember the names of the killers. That astonished me. So in my letter I said, “It’s probably obvious to you that I forgave you but I just want you to know, for sure, and I hope that some day you can forgive yourself.” I always wondered about Gamal, however, and his pain and if there was support for him in the prison.

Gamal and I wrote four to five letters back and forth after the meeting. When he made parole, he sent me a long letter on a card. He had written lines on this card so that he could write straight. It was the tiniest little writing you ever saw in your life and I struggled to read it. He wrote all over the card. He also said, “I hope I don’t offend you or hurt you by saying this but I would love if we could go and talk to offenders together, people on probation and especially juveniles.” I would love to do that with him but it’s cumbersome. I saw him again about a year ago after he was released. We talked quite a bit. I know that what he did still causes him pain. I don’t know if he’ll ever forgive himself. I think he tries to put it behind him but I don’t know how much help and affirmation he gets. The facilitator kept in touch with him for a while but I think she too has lost touch with him.

Analysis: Crime story and its aftermath

The murder of Lizette’s daughter, Karmen, catapulted Lizette into a flurry of activity. Caught initially between her anger at her daughter for her presumed irresponsibility and dread about the possible reasons for her disappearance, she burrowed into caring for her granddaughter, staying as busy as possible, and keeping as many people around her as she could. She also made the decision, early on, not to spend energy on the boys who had killed her. These early reactions defined how she would handle herself for many years. Specifically, she tried to fill the hole inside herself with distractions and distanced as much as she could by not giving the killers any of her emotional time. She felt successful because, over time, she couldn’t remember their names or got them mixed up. Indeed, Lizette channeled her emotional energies into self-coping and caring activities for her family members.

Lizette’s activism took center stage in her life. When she was threatened with the loss of custody of her granddaughter, she filed a civil law suit to gain it. She managed the slowness of the criminal justice system and existing in limbo by attending a homicide victims’ support group. When she recognized the mismatch between herself and the group specific to cultivating anger toward the offenders, she left and decided that she could help herself through her grief and the aftermath of her daughter’s murder by furthering her learning and returning to school. This turning outward was empowering because it gave her a stronger sense of control and a constructive way to deal with Karmen’s murder.

Although Lizette, subsequent to the murder, was moving forward and feeling productive and fulfilled, there would be critical events that resonated internally as if she were also on a quieter journey. For example, in addition to her dissatisfaction with the support group, the conversation with her students about punishment for murder helped solidify her thinking on non-violence. Likewise, her discovery of restorative justice seemed to be an avenue to politically express her convictions. It was like having a trail that took her to new destinations, each of which further defined her next steps. The discussion with the students led to restorative justice, which led to her dissertation, which led to VOD training, which led to interviewing VOD participants, which ultimately led to her decision to do a meeting with Gamal. She made the decision early on not to let anger about the loss of her daughter build up inside her or determine her future. She saw the tie of anger to violence and refused to cultivate it in herself or to subscribe to the punitive agenda of the criminal justice system, which, from her perspective, repaid violence with more violence. She chose, therefore, a constructive rather than destructive outlet for her feelings and did not perpetuate the negativity of anger and resentment that many others have.

Preparation

Lizette’s decision to do a VOD meeting with Gamal emerged from recognizing that her healing could go further. Because she had taken the VOD training and interviewed participants for her dissertation research, she now had knowledge about a possible avenue that was available to further complete her process. Moreover, she had already committed to working with victims and offenders of serious crime and to restorative justice as a non- violent response to violence. As such, openness to expanding her vision and comprehension was, by the time of preparation, an ongoing process. That openness conceptually included meeting with one’s offender, but it was not personal and had not included Gamal whom she had intentionally detached from after Karmen’s murder. Indeed, Lizette had positively engaged with offenders for years while keeping Gamal at a distance. The dissonance between her being open and closed became apparent in answering probing inventory questions from the perspective of Gamal. She realized she was feeling non-cognitive empathy for him for the first time—“I really thought about Gamal as a human being and gave him that status in my mind and heart.”

For Lizette, her decision to meet with Gamal made good sense. Up to that point, she had used her energy to “do” things. She had attached it first to her processing her loss of Karmen and the amount of grief she felt and then directed it to her education and working in prisons, and ultimately to restorative justice. Once she had determined to do the VOD, she harnessed that energy and narrowed it to a focus on Gamal. However, she had little sense of needing much herself. Letters had been shared between herself, Gamal, and Amanda prior to their meeting and Lizette already knew that Gamal was remorseful. She felt, therefore, that the meeting would allow Gamal to express himself directly to her and Amanda, and that she could learn more about his personal history.

Dialogue

Given her familiarity with the VOD process, Lizette felt little anxiety about meeting with Gamal. She was already heavily involved with the filming which had begun much earlier and included scenes of preparing for the meeting. She, therefore, was comfortable, as well, with the filmmakers and actually saw them as key supporters who were accompanying her, Gamal, and Amanda through this unique experience. Instead of dread, she felt excited, in part by the magnitude of what they all were doing and the difference that the showing of film could make in the “free” world.

Gamal set the tone by crying from the moment he entered the meeting room and saw Lizette and Amanda. Because of the exchange of letters during the preparation process, the conduit between them had already been built. Moreover, both Lizette and Amanda had shared a lot about their pain in their letters. Consequently, Gamal’s tears likely reflected, in person, the transferring of their pain into himself. Lizette immediately recognized and felt the enormity of his remorse but because she had already done a lot of healing over the years, her response to his heartfelt transfer of pain was not for her needs but rather concern for his wellbeing. Indeed, she responded to him in a motherly way, being careful not to give him more than he could handle. She noted that his tears were directed solely at what he had done to hurt her and her family, and felt how desperately he wanted to do something to help all of them. She felt his care, as well, in not wanting to cause any further harm and how sensitively he communicated with her and her granddaughter. “I know about me being protective of him, but I also realize that he was protective of me and us.”

Lizette’s core shift and transformation occurred as Gamal told the story of purposely misdirecting Karmen down a country road to rape and subsequently murder her. Just as Lizette had disengaged, over the years, from Gamal and Antonio, she had also sealed off thinking about Karmen’s last minutes before she died. “That was just a place I never went.” Indeed, the focus on this part of the murder story came from Gamal. Lizette let him continue because she felt he needed to talk about it. Karmen’s words to the boys at the end of the story were pivotal for Lizette. Gamal’s report took her right into the heart of the pain. Gamal’s responsiveness and emotionality actually confronted Lizette with her own distancing that may have been natural given her time as a professional. In contrast, Gamal was experiencing and exploring for the first time. He could cry for Lizette’s daughter and wasn’t afraid to go into the pain, unabashedly transparent. Gamal’s opening of this door, which was directly associated with forgiveness, helped open up something in Lizette that she had closed off and could now let herself have, given the new knowledge of Karmen’s last words.

Lizette’s personal encounter with that pain and with Gamal as the offender ironically served to reduce it. Gamal’s account provided new truth and meaning-making, which helped relieve some of the pressure that Lizette didn’t even know she had been carrying. Her relaxation had a resonance and reciprocal influence on Gamal who relaxed as well, moving both of them into a conversational territory where the back and forth energy flowed fluidly as they shared more fully about their lives. This critical event in the dialogue was an important dyadic moment that illustrates how what Gamal gave helped Lizette and her response, in turn, helped him. The truth-telling that occurred could only have happened through their dyadic interaction. Moreover, Lizette’s use of the word “relaxation” in response to the impact of her response on Gamal is important evidence for the energy shift between them since it is an energy-dynamic term that means loose or loosen in Latin.

The palpable resonance of this story on both Gamal and Lizette increased the closeness between them. They exchanged information about their lives, the impact of Karmen’s murder on Lizette and her loved ones, and things they had in common. What they learned about each other brought forth more pain in response to the empathy each felt for the other. Their responses to each other were caring and affirming of what they each had been through. At the end of the meeting, Lizette asked for a hug, which for her was both a reinstatement and a measure of forgiveness—“I think it was clear to him that I forgave him, by the fact that I approached him for a hug and that I reached out to him with my hands.” Lizette was explicit about forgiveness in the letter she sent to Gamal after their meeting.

Clearly, Lizette’s giving to Gamal helped her heal. Since Karmen’s murder, giving, not getting, had been the source of wellbeing. She realized that no one could give Gamal what he needed but her. As such, her forgiveness mattered because she hoped that it would help him forgive himself. She was concerned about the amount and relentlessness of the suffering he endured. Lizette continued to follow Gamal when he was released. Even though he wanted them to talk about the crime together to juveniles, Lizette’s primary interest remained focused on his emotional health and doing what she could to protect him from the severity of the rules from the criminal justice system that defined the conditions of his parole.

Lizette’s meeting with Gamal was part of Lizette’s larger vision about cultivating non-violence. Lizette’s raising of Amanda was, in some ways, a replacement for her daughter. It kept her terribly busy for years. Lizette lived in the middle of the dissonance that included the violence around her from her crime, the criminal justice system’s response and the crimes around her that stood in contrast to her deep commitment to non-violence. She had partly resolved the dissonance through restorative justice and her work in the prisons but she had not resolved it in her personal life. To do so, she had to go back into the pain of her daughter’s murder, humanize Gamal, and allow the non-violent process to work on her through the blossoming of the dyadic connection between her and Gamal. The catalyst for her shift was her daughter’s last words, which relieved her because, in her eyes, her daughter had accepted her fate and did not suffer. Her own forgiveness of Gamal had occurred years before their meeting. However, forgiveness took on new meaning, not only because of her daughter’s final words but also because she realized that Gamal’s suffering pre-empted her own and that of her daughter. She hoped that being explicit about her forgiveness might help Gamal to forgive himself, thereby reducing his pain.

THERESA’S STORY AND ANALYSIS

The morning Gerald was set to be sentenced to prison he raped and murdered Theresa’s sister, Samantha. Theresa was determined to live her life, making healing a choice, which left her emotionally repressed. It wasn’t until she was raising her own two daughters that she began to experience the injustice and rage associated with losing her sister. The content of Theresa’s VOD with Gerald was extremely difficult, but Theresa was determined to feel everything. Her decision to forgive him was based more on a fear of regret than any mutual connection she felt. Gerald later sent Theresa a letter, reaffirming his remorse and waiving his trial, choosing to be committed to a sex offender treatment facility. The VOD was more a part of Theresa’s journey towards healing than the culmination of it.

My sister Samantha was murdered by Gerald, a man who volunteered at a substance abuse treatment center where she worked. He had a history of sexual assault and killed her the morning before he was to have been sentenced and incarcerated yet again. It was his final act of revenge against the system. My sister and I were in college together. When she didn’t show up for a night class, I went to her apartment and found her dead.

Gerald took a plea and I attended his sentencing hearing a month after her death. I’d never seen him before but he looked normal, chatting with his lawyer like he was at a business meeting. I looked at his hands, wondering how someone could kill someone else. I just couldn’t comprehend it. But there were police all around and I realized that I could easily have a gun in my hand and shoot it at the back of his head and not feel any remorse. I’d never had that kind of feeling before. I remember thinking, “This is what vengeance feels like.” Something about feeling that coldness was a significant moment for me. I vowed that I would not let my sister’s murder make me a hard, cold, angry, bitter woman. I was only 20 years old and had my future in front of me but I realized that if I fed the anger, I could become that woman. I determined to fight my feelings of hatred. He was sentenced to 25 years but would be released in 16 years 8 months. I assumed that the memory of my sister’s murder would have faded by then and I would have moved on.

Each of my family members, including my eight siblings, had their own process with the murder. For some of us, the outcome was for the better while for others it was worse. Each of us, however, became deeper people and are teachers or social workers, all in caring professions. My brother was the exception. He was close in age to my sister, became a chronic alcoholic, and unfortunately died of liver failure. Her death escalated his behavior and we couldn’t really get him back.

After my sister died, I finished college. I figured that if I stayed in the game, didn’t back off, isolate, and give up that I’d eventually heal. I wanted to get as far away from the crime as I possibly could, so completing school was part of my decision to move on and have hope. My sister had taken a course on death and dying the semester before she died. One of the assignments was to journal about what she would say to loved ones if she had a terminal illness. I memorized it because it was a message of hope—“I would like to tell everyone to live on and to learn to live fuller days, to have a positive attitude about my death and not to feel sorry for me. I’m at peace with God and I will continue to be happy and I want all of you to do the same.” Had I not had her message to hang onto I would have felt sorry for myself and sorry for her and gone to a dark place that would have been hard to come out of. Her message gave me permission to live on.

I got married and we had two daughters. Having daughters who were sisters brought up a lot of the trauma, pain, and anger but I didn’t understand what was happening or that I had stuffed my feelings because her murder was just too traumatic to feel. It seemed strange that I had only shed a few tears over it. I guess the anger and trauma seemed to have numbed me and was starting to have a hardening effect on me. But I felt a lot of anger that I had to raise daughters in a world where the sexual assault and murder of my sister could happen to girls. I began to realize that, regardless of my earlier commitment to reject anger, her death had made me bitter anyway.

At the ten-year anniversary of her murder, I determined that the health of my marriage and my daughters was at stake if I didn’t look at some of this. I was feeling a generalized anger at men that was coming out on my husband who was otherwise kind and loving. One morning I got very, very angry at him. I went to our room, slammed the door, and threw a picture across the room. My little two-year-old daughter came walking in. It didn’t hit her but she was really scared and started crying. My husband picked her up, looked at me and said, “I don’t know what’s going on here and why you are so angry but we need to get some help or I am going to need to take the girls and get some space from you.” I was stunned. I had thought I could move on and not deal with it but here it was and it was hurting the people I love the most. At one point my husband said, “I know I’m not perfect but I don’t think this has anything to do with me.” I said back, ”You’ve never had anyone brutally rape and murder someone you love and leave them there for you to find.” That’s when I finally realized the role her murder was playing in my life and that I needed help. That awareness was a really, really big relief because I knew all my feelings were just sitting in this big pressure cooker waiting to blow up and I had to deal with things before that happened.

I didn’t know where to begin so I called the police and asked if I could look at my sister’s folder. I’d never dug into the details of the crime before. The police connected me to a victim advocate named Loretta who herself was a homicide survivor. She gathered everything about my sister’s case for my husband and me to see. We read statements, looked at crime scene pictures and all kinds of other stuff. The day was a good start for me. I remember saying, “I’ve turned a corner here and there’s no going back to denial.” As I faced the seriousness of what happened, I began to get curious about Gerald, the man who killed her, where he was right now, and if he had changed over the years. I realized he’d be coming out of prison soon and I wanted to know what he’d processed. When I mentioned my questions to Loretta, she said, “Well, that would be possible if you were interested in talking with him.” I learned then that VOD was an option.

I was ready to do whatever was necessary to start healing. Over the years, I’d wake up in shock and start remembering things about the day I found her. But then those memories would disappear so I couldn’t get them back. I’d convince myself that finding her wasn’t so bad. She just looked like she was sleeping. Perhaps she hadn’t suffered that much. Telling myself these things made my life livable but now it was time to face it all and not run away.

My daughters still talk about the season where I cried a lot. It was a time when everyone was getting me back. I framed a picture of Samantha and me and cried every time I looked at it. This happened for as long as it took because finally I was grieving her death, shedding tears over what happened to her, and the fact that she was gone. There were so many things I had to mourn—the fact that my sister was no longer a college student with me, that she wasn’t able to graduate from college and be a teacher, that I wasn’t going to experience nieces and nephews or a possible husband she might have had one day. Instead of just feeling anger about the injustice of her death, I could now feel deep sorrow. Although there was a ton of pain, it was a healing pain because I was releasing everything I had stuffed and buried. Moreover, each step I took made me want to take the next one because I started feeling more alive. With the pain came my desire to meet with him. Indeed, my reason for doing a VOD was that I wanted to feel something again.

I called Loretta and asked her to facilitate the meeting. She made contact with Paul who ran the local VOD program and together they met with Gerald to assess his eligibility for the meeting. They decided to proceed, which started the whole nine-month process. For me, it became the culmination of my forgiveness journey. Having processed through the anger and hate already, I now had to face actually talking to Gerald about the crime and asking what had happened. He had her last moments and I wanted to know what she had gone through. As part of my preparation, I continued to read about restorative justice and also about forgiveness. I kept thinking about the courtroom day and the Lord’s prayer where it says, “forgive fellows who have sinned against you.” Forgiveness felt wrong to me initially. Murder is too big to forgive and it hurt so many people besides me. But during this time, I also gained some clarity that simplified it. For example, I just had the desire to forgive Gerald for my own sake and because I’ve been forgiven for things I’ve done. I also felt that forgiveness would open up my whole world again to the people who matter and that I could care about others as well. So this meeting became a spiritual journey for me.

Coincidentally, the meeting was held on the same day I first met Loretta. She also had the same birthday as my sister and was motivated by her Christian faith as I was. We all drove to the prison and I felt very peaceful and thankful for the opportunity. Although my primary motive was my own emotional and spiritual healing, I knew he would be released soon and hoped this meeting would take him further down the road to some kind of peace. The meeting lasted from 9 until 3 in the afternoon. Although in court, I felt I could easily shoot him, I didn’t feel anything overwhelming when he walked in and I had my first eye-to-eye contact with him. In the morning he told his story of killing my sister. I realized I would have more to grieve because now I’m hearing my sister’s suffering. I again felt my commitment not to let this new information harden me. So while he talked, I just kept thinking that I was facing this information because I wanted to grieve it, forgive it, and heal. People who can suffer and cry have no idea what a gift that is. I’d lost that ability and now was getting it back.

Gerald was thorough and comfortable in telling me what happened to my sister. I learned later that his comfort was a reflection of his sexual offender treatment where the inmates have to tell what they did over and over again. It was hard, however, to hear about my sister’s tears and her begging him to stop. Indeed, as he would tell me the details of what happened, I could talk to myself saying, “Okay, this is what happened” so as not to fall into my previous habits of filling in the gaps, denying things, inflating them, or minimizing them. By the time he was done, I felt all my questions had been answered. I’d been able to ask about his coming to my sister’s apartment on campus. “Did she answer the door right away or did she ask who was there?” He said, “No, she asked who it was.” So then I knew that she recognized who was at the door before she answered it but was obviously clueless about how dangerous Gerald was. She had fought him off, which contradicted the newspaper’s account, but Gerald’s version sounded more like my sister.

Because the morning was so hard and overwhelming, I was hesitant to go back and meet with him after lunch. But Loretta and Paul told me that the most healing part of a VOD for victims was telling the offender how they had been affected. So I stayed in and told my story, but I told it differently to him than I had anyone else because now I had the eyes and ears of the person responsible. Telling him how his actions impacted me was empowering. His listening, eye contact, and head nodding at the right times felt genuine. I began to see him less as an evil beast of a person and more of a human being who went in a horrible, bad direction. I also saw some humanity in him because he was willing to engage in this journey and have our lives intersect so I could come to some peace. Toward the end of our meeting, I shared Samantha’s journal entry and one of her favorite Bible verses. I didn’t know if the forgiveness words were going to come out of my mouth but there was a point that I just felt done. So I just stopped talking.

The facilitators asked if we had anything more to say. Gerald was nervous and fidgety. I could tell he had something on his mind. He looked at me and said, “I know this means really nothing in some ways but I want and need to say it. I am really, really sorry.” His words just hung there. I was surprised and didn’t know how to respond. I had read What’s So Amazing about Grace, a book of short stories about people who had gone through tough forgiveness stuff and the mercy and grace of God. There was one story about a murder where a person had apologized and the other person regretted not saying, “I forgive you.” When I read the story I thought, “If that comes my way, I would love to have it in my heart to be able to say, ‘I forgive you.’” The ability to do that seemed really, really freeing, like it would be a key to get out of living with a lot of bitterness in my heart for a long, long time. I wanted to say it and I wanted it to be genuine but I didn’t really know if it was going to come out of my mouth or not. I just looked at him and said, “I forgive you and I will need to continue to be on that journey probably the rest of my life.” It was a good thing for me. I needed to say the words.

I had brought a medallion with me from a treatment center that had been named after my sister, as well as a little New Testament. I hoped it would bring Gerald peace as it had me. I also felt, as part of that peace that I wanted to touch and shake his hand, so I said, “Could I touch your hand and shake your hand?” He just right away said, “No.” I replied, “That’s okay.” That is how our meeting ended. I did get a follow-up about why he wasn’t able to let me touch his hand. He told the facilitator that he just felt really dirty.

I received a long letter from him a few years later. He had been rejected for mandatory release and was committed to Trunk Bridge for Sex Offenders. He explained that he gave up his right to a trial about being committed to this facility and instead admitted to everything. He is still there to this day. In the letter, he wrote, “I’m sorry” for 26 different things that came up during our meeting. He also said, “These are things I couldn’t express in the meeting but I need to express now.” He specifically apologized for every one of them.

Overall, our meeting was not between two people connecting. There were a couple of back and forth exchanges but I was scared and did not want him to feel any kind of bond with me. I knew he was a rapist and a murderer. My meeting was very victim centered and never about what he would get from it. The only back and forth dialogue happened in the last hour when I knew the meeting was coming to a close and we both had things that needed to be said.

The day was kind of surreal to me. In hindsight I would wonder if it really happened or was I making it up. It really did happen. I’m thankful for every bit of it and have no regrets. It had a big impact on both my husband and me. Some of it happened in the meeting and some of it happened before and after doing the VOD. I had more grieving to do after the meeting because of what it opened up. However, I’ll never be able to go back and see Gerald as a ruthless animal. He’ll always be human to me now. I know he grew up with years of abuse that my sister got caught in. The meeting also affected how I see my daughters. I wanted to go through the VOD so that they would grow up not to hate men and to have faith and hope. Both of them are lively and opinionated and at the same college together. That reality brings up a little jealousy and this longing to somehow get those years back with my sister that we could have lived together. Anger has never been a coping skill for me, however, since the meeting with Gerald. Instead, I have to acknowledge this sadness about my sister and me so it doesn’t create its own little world. Indeed, those moments don’t control me anymore as long as I’m just honest about them. I used to worry I’d never live a normal life again and that a normal life was important. Now I feel like I want to live engaged and I don’t necessarily want just normal life.

Analysis: Crime and its aftermath

Theresa was a college freshman on the brink of her adulthood when her sister, Samantha, was killed. Her murder upended what had otherwise been a peaceful, fun, and productive time for her. Suddenly she came face to face with the horror of finding her sister’s body, the evil intentions of a vengeful, serial predator, and the reality that she would have to chart her own path alone and without the security and close companionship of her older sister. Her experience in the courtroom with Gerald was a moment that defined her reaction to her sister’s murder and her future identity. Specifically, Theresa realized that she could easily shoot Gerald and feel no remorse but only hatred and coldness. Her self-identification with Gerald’s vengefulness and what she could become frightened her. She determined never to allow the murder to turn her into a hardened, bitter, and angry woman.

Believing that she was honoring her sister’s edict to move on, she intentionally put the murder and her feelings aside, finished college, and married five years later. Indeed, Theresa credited her sister with her decision to “live on and move on” and felt proud that she did not allow the murder to make her a victim who felt sorry for herself or take her to a dark place that would have been hard to break through. Instead, she accomplished her goal, which was to live a normal life as an antidote to becoming bitter. The irony is that she had to stuff her feelings and dissociate in order not to be consumed by hatred or controlled by anger. She had little awareness of the cauldron inside herself until the birth of her two daughters, whose existence as sisters was a stark reminder of her loss. In spite of her resolve, she began realizing that she felt little or nothing and was becoming hardened. She began having marital problems and felt a generalized anger toward men, which culminated in a rage attack. Her throwing of a picture scared her two-year-old daughter and propelled her husband into action. Her husband’s limit-setting in response to her out-of-control behavior provoked her realization that her free-floating anger was about both the brutal rape and murder of her sister and visceral onslaught of having been the one to find her body.

With this initial release of stored energy and new awareness, Theresa faced a pivotal but dissonant moment. Her husband’s threat to leave endangered the normalcy of the life she had built. Moreover, this goal of normalcy had tied her to her sister and gave her a sense of being worthwhile. Theresa realized that if she continued as she was, she would lose that normalcy. However, if she fully faced the impact of her sister’s murder, she might also lose her normalcy. Either option was problematic. Her continuing to stuff and deny her feelings assured her bitterness while resurrecting the crime and the true loss of her sister had no known or guaranteed result.

The disparity between where she thought she had put the murder mentally and where it really was shifted her awareness. In spite of her reluctance and sense of foreboding, Theresa made the decision to open herself up to her grief. This was a healing shift point before the meeting that brought her to terms with her inner emotions. Specifically, this undertaking opened her to her emotional self, the reality of her sister’s murder and loss, and her denial of the larger impact of the murder. In many ways, this opening was the life-changing event and core energy shift for Theresa.

Preparation

Theresa’s decision to lift the emotional lid on her sister’s murder brought forth the reality of Gerald who otherwise had been banished from her mind and even the idea of forgiveness—“The whole idea of forgiveness was on the scene pretty quickly with me… I knew this was going to have to be part of this journey but it was going to have to be an honest one.” With Loretta as her guide, she began to feel again as she finally grieved the tragic loss of her sister. Theresa’s decision to meet Gerald was a part of her healing plan. In referencing it, she said, “I wanted to feel something again… I remember thinking, ‘Whatever I need to do to start healing from this, I want to do it.’” As she broke through her denial and minimization, she began learning and trusting that the pain that emerged actually was leading her to whatever next steps she needed to take on this journey and those steps led directly to Gerald. Upon hearing her questions for Gerald, Loretta introduced her to the possibility of a VOD meeting. Theresa started reading about restorative justice—“I was really excited to be exposed to all this literature…[It was like] when a student is ready, the teachers appear. I was hungry and eager to learn and heal and grow.” Feeling spurred on by the process and the role that forgiveness could play in her life, she decided to go forward with meeting Gerald. For Theresa the VOD was part of an evolutionary process toward greater openness to life and something more than just a “normal” life.

There was some dissonance in her push to move forward. Although she had spent time reflecting on and contemplating forgiveness, it felt wrong to Theresa. Concomitantly, however, it was also becoming part of this life-giving process that began to take its own path and had its own energy. Similarly, as Theresa opened the door on her sister’s murder, she realized that she knew nothing about Gerald so he was an unfinished part of the story. Her lack of knowledge was not about denial. Rather, she had to have dyadic engagement with him to complete her process. However, she did not feel open to seeing him personally.

Although the preparation took nine months, it fit hand in glove with her ongoing mourning for her sister and her sense of awakening through the pain to life. “Meeting with him was somewhat of a culmination of an emotional forgiveness journey rather than one that started it.” Consequently, the preparation focused less on her feelings and more on her expectations and the kinds of questions she wanted to ask him. Samantha was clear that she had no interest in building a relationship with Gerald. Rather, this would be a one-time endeavor focused solely on her needs.

Dialogue

The meeting filled in a lot of details for Theresa. She learned about her sister’s last moments. However, the giving of information did not grow out of the interaction between Theresa and Gerald. Rather he was dispassionate in reciting his story as she fought internally to absorb his brutality and her sister’s struggle and suffering. In contrast, Theresa noted that she was sharing her story differently than usual because she was saying it directly to the person who was responsible for her pain. She watched his body language as he absorbed the pain differential and felt empowered by what she had done.

The conduit between them existed only for this telling of each person’s story and conveying the pain. Indeed there was little responsiveness or energy flow between them except at moments along the way and toward the end when the flow accelerated because of limited time. Indeed, the VOD was not about connection and dyadic engagement but rather about managing the bond so that what happened between them did not raise expectations for additional or closer contact.

There is some evidence that Gerald transferred Theresa’s pain to himself during the meeting. He listened, made eye contact, and nodded his head at critical points as he heard Theresa’s story. She felt his responses were genuine and could feel her opinion of him change from evil beast to human being who went in a horribly bad direction. She also recognized his humanity by virtue of his willingness to meet and help her through embracing the VOD process. Moreover, as he recognized that this meeting would be his only time to directly apologize, he also said he was truly sorry, which contributed to a sense of completion for Theresa. The true transfer of pain, however, happened after the meeting and was reflected in his letter when he apologized specifically to Theresa for each thing he had done based on what she had enumerated in the meeting—“These were things I couldn’t express in the meeting, but I needed to express now.” Through this exercise and ritual, Gerald expressed some remorse and, in effect, held himself directly accountable to Theresa.

Theresa had been in a struggle with the concept of forgiveness since lifting the lid of her denial. She had convinced herself that she needed to give it in order to receive it from God. She also believed that giving it would further her path with her children as well as herself. The forgiveness she felt she could give, however, was decisional rather than emotional. She felt pressured in response to Gerald’s apology and their limited time together to act on what she did not feel. She was caught in a double bind. If she said it, she might regret it and if she didn’t say it, she might regret it. She pondered, as well, the consequences of forgiving or not forgiving him. Theresa’s dilemma was also caused by the fact that true forgiveness is commonly seen as an intimate sharing which she did not feel. Indeed, she was resolute about keeping any emotional connection distant. Consequently, despite their physical presence to each other, she could not make the decision about forgiveness from within the relationship because she was not that close. Indeed, she had to lean on a homicide survivor’s account in a book to motivate her still further. Because her choice, therefore, had to be decisional rather than dyadic, she could only use logic about possible outcomes, which generated more internal conflict.

Theresa resolved the multiple forms of dissonance by making forgiveness an ongoing process, which took away the expectation of finality. As such, she responded to the pull for forgiveness by giving it but claiming that it would be an ongoing journey for her.

Theresa did not expect a sense of completion from the meeting because she experienced it as just the next step on her course for healing. She had already transformed the pain prior to the meeting by putting her anger in a different place. However, she did find that the meeting changed the availability to her anger such that now she goes straight to the pain underneath rather than getting stuck in it. Moreover, because of putting pieces about the murder into place, her grieving the pain of her sister’s loss and numerous other consequential losses became paramount over the pain from the crime.

Theresa was able to do everything she had planned for in the dialogue. She expressed forgiveness and gave Gerald the medallion and New Testament as symbolic mementoes from their meeting. She wanted to touch and shake his hand as well to convey a sense of peace between them. Gerald, however, refused because he did not feel acceptable in the aftermath of what he had done. Indeed, he refused to be morally reinstated. He not only turned down Theresa’s request but also gave up his right to a trial thereby cementing his permanent incarceration in a facility for sex offenders. As such, Gerald declared, in effect, that he saw himself as unfit societally and undeserving of moral reinstatement. Although sensitive to his humanity, Theresa, too, saw him as having severe problems and likely being an ongoing danger to society.

Theresa did the major part of her healing and transformation prior to meeting with Gerald. Moreover, the dyadic relationship was minimal between them on both sides. Gerald was flat in his affect and not ready to receive a connection whereas Theresa was conflicted and not ready to give it. However, she needed the dyadic encounter to complete her journey. Indeed, she had pushed herself in her own healing as far as she could go alone but needed a connection with Gerald to complete the next step in her process. Her getting the full story of the murder from the murderer himself and not removing herself emotionally from the horror solidified her strength and commitment to face life differently from that point on.

KEISHA’S STORY AND ANALYSIS

Her entire life Keisha was told lies about the identity of her biological father. Almost by accident, she learned of his whereabouts and his death after he and two others were killed by a drunk. For four years she researched his life, craving the knowledge she didn’t know was missing. Keisha’s emotions were full of contradictions: anger at the drunk driver, Adam, but also towards her father for not being a part of her life. Keisha was struck by the fact that no one had represented her father during the trial and she saw VOD as a way to honor his life. Keisha’s mother who was diagnosed with terminal cancer accelerated preparation. Keisha was able to find empathy in similarities between herself and Adam and hold Adam accountable for his involvement in denying her a relationship with her father. Keisha felt that God had the ability and the capacity to forgive Adam and they’ve continued the relationship, sharing with others the deep connection and healing they experienced together.

As a private detective, my job is to solve crimes through locating missing data. I never expected it to be about my own life. Specifically, I discovered several years ago that I had a half sister who had recently died in a car accident. Coincidentally, I also found a picture of my biological father’s headstone along with an appellate court’s decision that a drunk driver named Adam had killed him and two other people while they were biking. This information turned my world upside down. A man I thought to be my actual father had raised me, but, at age 16, my mother told me that she had had an affair and that my biological father had died in Vietnam. Actually it turned out that my stepfather was my biological father’s superior officer in the military. He told my mother a lie, which was that my biological father had been sent to Vietnam and was killed in the war. He and my mother agreed not to tell me anything about this man. My mother and stepfather divorced, however, when I was five and my mother, believing my stepfather’s lie, told me about my real father and his alleged dying in Vietnam when I got older. My mother knew nothing about my biological father’s background or family. She had no pictures of him and didn’t even know his real name. My mother was truly shocked when I found him.

I spent the last four years researching his life. I found that I had family on the East Coast and Illinois, that I look like my real father, and that he had been a military police officer and a homicide investigator like me, except that I work for the defense. I also learned that our personalities are similar and that my father grew up with a stepdad under comparable circumstances to my own. I wanted to know who this man was, why he was a biker, and the mitigating circumstances that led him to be riding his motorcycle in Webster Falls and being killed by a drunk driver.

The most difficult part for me was discovering that my real father was alive the whole time I was growing up and that he actually had lived only two blocks away from me. My first reaction was anger that he was dead and that I had been denied the opportunity to confront him about his leaving my mother and me. I got into the library archives and read all the newspaper articles about the accident, trying to understand what had happened. I also ordered all the court records, which my mother read with me because she too needed to have answers and closure. I learned that Adam had had a .22 blood alcohol level; that no one was present at his trial to stand up for my father or to say that my father’s life mattered or had made any difference. None of the bikers he’d known came to court because bikers don’t do that. It hurt deeply, therefore, that he’d died and nobody said, “This person’s life was important.”

I further learned that Adam during the legal process had written letter after letter to the judge taking no responsibility and expressing no remorse. I started writing him a letter but I wrote and rewrote it over and over again because I could not express what I wanted to say. I was angry at him but I also had empathy and understanding because of my own circumstances. I, too, had been an alcoholic and quit drinking only after I discovered that Adam had killed my father. I identified with him because I too had drunk and drove but hadn’t gotten caught. I also understood, as a private investigator, that we tell our clients to keep their mouths shut in court, fight like hell, and appeal anything you can to avoid 35 years in prison. So I felt conflicted in my feelings and reactions. Because I’d never been given a chance to speak at his trial, this letter was my way of writing a victim impact statement. At the same time, I didn’t know if Adam’s lack of remorse was actually his fighting for his own life and reducing the prison time he’d been sentenced to serve.

While struggling with the letter, I started poking around on the Department of Corrections’ website. I inadvertently found the VOD program and contacted the staff for information because I wanted to face this man. I had no idea what I would say but I felt internally that I had to meet with him to have closure. I also realized that I needed to tell him who my father was, that his life mattered to me, probably more than anyone else.

I prepared for approximately six months working with two chaplains who were to facilitate the meeting. During this time, my mother was diagnosed, unfortunately, with terminal cancer. I, therefore, almost backed out but I knew I had to meet with Adam and that my mother too needed closure before she died. The chaplains serving as facilitators sped up the process. I went through every emotion with them. They were consistent and focused, and I trusted them implicitly. My big concern was whether Adam was truly remorseful. What I had read told me nothing. I needed to see his eyes, hear the tone of his voice, see his facial expressions, and engage in an intimate face-to-face conversation to truly know if he was remorseful or not, which would determine the direction of what I was going to say to him. Right before doing the meeting, my mother and I drove to the scene of the accident at Webster Falls and put three crosses on the side of the road. In effect, we buried my father.

The meeting lasted two hours and 15 minutes. It was an intense time walking into the prison and down a very long corridor to the meeting room. However, I felt like I was ten feet tall. My chin was up, my shoulders back, and I was so proud of myself. The setting was very private, such that other inmates were not watching either of us. When Adam came into the room, the very, very first thing I noticed were his eyes. He had the softest, most peaceful and loving eyes and I knew right then and there that he was a Christian. He looked nothing like his prison photo. Rather he was fit, strong, and very muscular. He was the same age my father would have been if he were still alive. I introduced myself and shook his hand but he would not look at me. He had enormous shame, guilt, and remorse, which I could see immediately.

I’d asked prior to the meeting that he begin the dialogue. He’d written a one-page letter that he had folded, creased, and re-creased over and over again. That showed me his nervousness and fear. All of his body language and tone of voice showed true remorse. I now could see the direction of the meeting. After he finished, I told him that I was a Christian and a recovering alcoholic. I could see the relief on his face. I shared further that I also drove drunk in the past and would not harm him. However, I wanted to share my father’s story and how much he mattered to others and me. I told him about my father, the similarities between us, the things that hurt my father in his life, and his accomplishments. I also shared my history that included the abuse I endured because I wasn’t my stepfather’s real child, the lies I’d been told, and how I learned about and searched for my father. I made clear that Adam was responsible for my father not being in my life and for taking away the opportunity to have found him and confronted him or possibly to have had a restored relationship with him.

Adam told me that he was also a Christian and active in Alcoholics Anonymous. He wrote letters to different AA groups and had used his experience with my father to give testimony to help others about drinking and driving. He took full responsibility for not listening to the courts, his family, or friends. He also told me that his son who lived near Webster Falls had seen the three crosses on the side of the road and asked if I had placed them there. I shared that I had buried my father that day.

I told Adam all about my father because nobody did in court. I stood up for him. Then, I turned the topic to Adam and me and how his killing my father had affected me. I enumerated all the things he took from me, including the opportunity to ask my father all the questions of “why.” You know, “Why did you do this?” “Did you ever look for me?” “Did you ever actually find me?” “Or were you ever scared to approach me because you abandoned me years earlier?” I named every question I had for my father and after each one I said, “You took that from me. You robbed me of that opportunity and that chance.”

I also talked about forgiveness. I told him that I could not forgive him for killing three people because that harm was only between him and God. However, I could forgive him for never being able to get answers to questions I had of my father. I can’t describe how I could say it with such certainty but I told him I forgave him and that I could live with not having those answers. I also asked for the letter he read at the start of the meeting. He bowed his head and started to cry as if he was unworthy of my forgiveness. I remember saying, “God’s forgiven me for so many things that I have done and for the harms I’ve caused other people and I can forgive you.” I was trying to tell him that he could let the burden go and that the slate was clean for me and for him. As I reached across the table for the letter, I laid my hands in an embrace on top of his hands and he started to pray. For the first time in my life, someone prayed for me. He prayed for my healing. He prayed for my heart. He prayed for my protection. He prayed for my safety. He prayed for my comfort. Never once did he pray for himself. That’s how we ended the meeting.

It was magical. I have never been in a situation where I had to earnestly forgive someone and have it make such a powerful impact on my life. It wasn’t something I was prepared to do. It just happened. His praying was so genuine, honest, and healing. I felt I had done what I set out to do. This long, long journey that started before I was 16 all came to an end right then and there. I asked if I could write him a letter because I felt our connection wasn’t over. He responded that he would write me back. We write each other once or twice a month. For Celebrate Recovery, I gave my testimony about our meeting, the healing it brought me, and the closure it brought my mother. I sent my testimony to him, which he shared with the AA group he attends at the prison. Now he’s working on his testimony so I can read it for him at my Celebrate Recovery and other Celebrate Recoveries in my area. Of course his testimony is about his killing three people, one of which was my father.

Doing this meeting was something I felt I had to do regardless of the outcome. I relied on my instincts and true faith. I would never have had the closure I felt without eye-to-eye contact, hearing his voice, voice fluctuation and tone, and seeing his eyes and body gestures. It had to happen this way to have the magnitude of closure I’ve had. This whole part of my life had been such a driving force in terms of my dysfunction, poor choices, failed relationships, and the daddy issue but now it was done. I put an ending to all of it.

I was able to share this experience with my mother and bring closure to the end stages of her life. The real test for me was discovering if, after the meeting, I had let go of the questions about my past. On my mother’s deathbed I considered asking her questions to determine if she had kept secrets from me or if I believed that she didn’t actually know about the whereabouts of my real father. Specifically I planned to ask if, in fact, my real father might have found my mother and if she knew he lived down the street from me. I decided to believe her and did not ask. I believe now that I actually was the one being tested in terms of my trust and I passed it. I really did let it go.

I feel I found my father, how he lived his life, his frame of mind when he joined the motorcycle gang, and I stood up for him. I’m so proud of completing this journey, being my father’s voice, and putting it all behind me. It gave me an enormous amount of closure. I had no idea how heavy that burden was when I walked into the prison but when I walked out, it was just, wow! It was a breath of fresh air and it was just over. It was very freeing. The pain was truly gone. That hardness in me, that darkness and what I carried around for so many decades has opened up. I’m filling my life now with healthy things and a lot of goodness. To take all the tragedies, trauma, abuse, and failed relationships and see them turned into something so beautiful and something that can be used to help others is amazing. All of those events now are just events.

Analysis: Crime and its aftermath

Keisha lost a biological father that she never knew in a drunk driving accident. Moreover, his death happened years before she unexpectedly found out about it. It was her discovery of his death, paradoxically, that gave her the knowledge that the man, in fact, was her biological father. She, therefore, started her journey with a dissonance-generating reality based on lies that she didn’t have a father while he was alive but got a father because he had been killed. As such, her reaction to the crime and its impact was negligible. Rather, her personal loss centered on the finality of the opportunity to have had any relationship with her father.

Much of her reaction to the knowledge about the existence and concomitant loss of her biological father focused on making sense out of her past. Indeed, it had to be rewritten because the reality now of having had a father exposed all the lies she had been told by her mother and stepfather about who her father was and how he died. Additionally, she had to deal with her mother who had told her a false story about her father’s death that her mother thought was true. She further discovered that her father, instead of being killed in Vietnam, actually lived close by throughout her childhood. She teetered, therefore, between feeling shocked, angry with her abusive stepfather for his deception, abandoned by her real father, and a compelling drive to get information about him.

As a private investigator, she started researching his life—“Why did he go from being a military police officer into a biker? I pounded a lot of biker stores.” She learned that he had a son, that her biological father too had lied to her mother about his past, that he had joined a motorcycle gang, and about the numerous similarities between them. She corrected her childhood conclusion that her stepfather might have sent her real father to Vietnam to be killed. She also gained understanding about her stepfather’s abusive reactions to her as a child and the emotional currents connected to the numerous unspoken but pivotal truths that had directed much of her prior life. Indeed, she released much of the stored energy inside her as she proceeded in her personal investigation. She also quit drinking after discovering how her father died and the link between her alcoholism and distorted past.

Having determined who her father was, she turned to dealing with the fact that no one spoke for him as the victim of a horrific crash that killed three people—“No one said his life mattered, his death matters, that any of it matters.” It was as if her father’s existence came and went without anyone noticing. Because Keisha was a private investigator for the defense, she knew the court system well, including the fact that, as her father’s daughter, she would, at least, have given a victim impact statement. She also felt robbed due to the fact that “I was never given the chance to speak in trial.”

Keisha’s digging into the injustices dealt her and her father during the trial generated lots of anger. Whatever might have been possible for her with her father was taken from her with his death. Her reactions were compounded, however, by the fact that she had been an alcoholic and defense investigator, which gave her understanding and empathy for Adam’s predicament. The dissonance between the various realities emerged as she tried to write him a letter. “I was angry, but yet, then I understood… I couldn’t put it into words because I couldn’t draw which emotion I was really feeling.” Motivated by feeling robbed of the opportunity to speak at Adam’s trial and blocked in her ability to express her feelings to him, she discovered the VOD program. She’d known she wanted to meet with Adam even before reading the court transcripts. “I felt internally just [that] this is something I have to do. I have to do this. I have to have this done.”

Preparation

Keisha prepared for six months before meeting with Adam. The chaplains assigned to facilitate the dialogue knew that the meeting was critical to both Keisha and her ailing mother and sped up the process because of the gravity of time. Keisha reports that “I went through every emotion with them…their professionalism created a bond of trust…they were consistent…they were focused.” These relationships helped open her to the process. Moreover, Keisha had already humanized Adam because of her background and knowledge of the court system. She recognized that she had driven drunk herself many times and that he had to posture himself according to his lawyer’s dictates during the trial. Consequently, she started the preparation with some openness to Adam already.

However, she felt stymied about whether or not he was remorseful, which made it difficult for her to determine how open she would be in the meeting. The numerous discoveries she had made naturally opened her to learning more and to expressing her pain and anger to Adam who, in effect, could be a container for sharing what she had learned about her father, the lies she had otherwise carried, and the dashed hope of ever confronting or having a relationship with her father. She couldn’t anticipate, however, what might be possible because she had no direct information with which to assess him. Although the court records had indicated that he had no remorse, it was equally plausible that he could admit nothing, at the time, without incriminating himself. She felt a mix of anger and compassionate thinking, therefore, which was dissonant and confusing. Moreover, in anticipating the dyadic power of the dialogue ahead, Keisha wrestled with a core dilemma. If she shared little or nothing, she’d close down a possible opportunity and walk away with little return. If she confronted Adam and he wasn’t remorseful, he would be yet another father figure who abandoned her. She went through preparation, therefore, with additional dissonance created by needing to put everything she knew and felt in a safe place but feeling unable to assess Adam’s availability to receive it. Her vulnerability was heightened because she was about to lose her other parent as well.

Dialogue

The initial dyadic encounter served to quiet Keisha’s concerns and speculation. She read Adam’s body language immediately and felt reassured from his eyes and demeanor that he was genuinely remorseful and available to do the work with her. She also noted that he was close to her father’s age and resembled a fit biker, which was also reflective of her father. Although Keisha had not yet shared her pain, Adam began the dialogue by reading a letter that he’d painstakingly written to her that conveyed the importance he gave to the meeting and the depth of his repentance. As she listened and saw his conscientiousness, Keisha made her first emotional shift, releasing much of her previous apprehension. Moreover, Keisha reciprocally completed the conduit between them, noting the common bond they already had by virtue of shared religious values and their joint commitment to recovery. She instilled even more safety and the possibility of greater openness by reassuring Adam that she would not harm him. She felt the resonance of her words as he responded with relief.

It was critical for Keisha to give Adam the entirety of her story because everything about her past and present was so interlaced. If she had left something out, the story would have been distorted. The fullness of her account and having it heard allowed her to integrate the disparate parts of her life with the man responsible for her father’s death. She gave him her pain in telling him about the various chapters of her life, including her recent discoveries. She focused first on her father’s mattering and giving voice, as she was not able to do at the trial, to who he was, including how he became a biker and his struggles and accomplishments. Indeed, the actuality of her father’s life was and would remain imaginary since she never knew him. However, she now also had a real emotional reality about him as if she had known him well and she communicated that reality to Adam. Indeed, Adam knew nothing about the man he had killed. Keisha also shared her own history, the abuse from her stepfather, and the sordidness about her real father who abandoned her and her mother and was never in her life. In describing her father to the man who had taken his life, she brought him to life for both of them. This telling allowed his life to matter as well as his death and gave her father’s life meaning.

Keisha was clear that when Adam killed her father, he took away hope specific to any opportunity ever to challenge or get to know her father. She dealt with this second source of pain by using Adam as a surrogate father and doing with him what she might have done with her own father. She listed every question she might have asked him and ritualistically followed each question with the statement, “You took that from me. You robbed me of that opportunity and that chance.” As Keisha held Adam accountable for the answers he took from her, she unburdened herself by giving him her pain and the responsibility for the missed opportunity she would never have. As such, she began an integration process in which she began to make more sense to herself.

Having deposited her pain with Adam, she spontaneously realized that she could live without the answers and moved to forgiving him for taking her opportunity away. As she unexpectedly shared her forgiveness, Adam reciprocated with his tears. His expression caused Keisha to reciprocate further. She ministered to his sense of being unworthy by lifting him up with her words and joining them in their shared humanity as two people who, like everyone else, make mistakes and cause harm. As such, she reinstated him as worthy. Adam’s tears, however, also indicated that he was accepting Keisha’s pain and allowing it to be transferred to him. As she, in response, laid her hands on his and he reciprocated through praying for her, he, in effect, said to her, “I will hold this pain for you.” As such, he transformed the pain into deep caring. Keisha experienced this transfer and the transformation of her pain as healing and magical. Although Adam was not responsible for all of her pain, he was the only one left in her life who could receive it. The plunge they mutually made into greater depth was the result of the dyadic energy between them.

Keisha felt complete. She had come to the end of her journey. In many ways, her whole life had been a disenfranchised burden given to her by her mother and stepfather through lies, secrets, and distortions. She unburdened herself by giving her pain to Adam and was able to let her suspicions go. She tested her shift into a trusting place in the world with her mother and found that it held. The energy she had expended since childhood was at rest. The meeting with Adam had resolved her issues with her father. Indeed, Keisha reconstructed a father–daughter relationship that had new and rich meaning such that it helped move her out of a painful past. The VOD gave her a safe and powerful vehicle to reconstruct this positive narrative. It served as a catalyst to ground out the negative excess charge within her and open her to the positive gifts of the transformative experience. The ongoing relationship between them was evidence of that transformation and the value each placed on the testimony of the other. For Keisha, Adam was both a villain and a savior. She paradoxically received life-giving answers because he killed her father. Although the meeting was clearly beneficial for Adam, the sole focus was on Keisha and what she needed from him to close her wounds. This singularity of purpose was demonstrated by the fact that Keisha, ironically, knew nothing about Adam by the end of the meeting except that he was an alcoholic and had a son.

A number of contradictions and dissonance-generating circumstances stimulated the energy flow within Keisha and between Keisha and Adam. These included her awareness of having a father only because he had been killed; the exposure of lies that generated dissonance which propelled her to seek the truth about her genealogy; the recognition that her father’s life mattered because it did not matter to anyone at the trial; her anger at Adam for killing her father while recognizing the similarity in their behavior as alcoholics; her anger at Adam for his lack of remorse while understanding his position as a defendant; her desire to share with him in the meeting alongside the possibility of more emotional abandonment; the need for safety alongside Keisha’s inability to assess Adam’s receptivity; using the man who killed her father as a catalyst to bring her father to life by sharing with Adam; and Adam’s acceptance of Keisha’s pain and willingness to respond as a surrogate father in response to a history he did not cause. By allowing these dissonance-fueled energies to flow, Keisha was able through the dyadic interaction to unearth the blocked energy from her childhood circumstances, bring her father to life, mourn his death, bury the sorrow and regret of never having him, and emotionally forgive and bond with a man who received her pain and as a result brought release and healing to her.