I sit with my mom a year and a half after Sarah’s death. She is telling me about her printmaking class. It is chilly outside the café, but the sun is bright and the air smells of rain.
“One of the guys in my class, his girlfriend had an abortion, and he is a wreck about it. He does all these really graphic prints with unborn babies and images of umbilical cords coming out of his body.”
I listen but am distracted by a couple arguing next to us. I wish I could hear what they are saying, but I can’t make out the words behind their furtive, tense whispers.
“Did you know I drew a portrait of Sarah when she was younger? I have a photocopy of it on my studio door,” my mom continues, as if it makes perfect sense in conjunction with the story of her distraught printmaking friend.
“Oh yeah?” I say, more focused now that she is talking about Sarah.
“I realized that I don’t have to draw her death in order to move on. I don’t have to draw her murderer or create some terrible death scene to process all of this.”
I stare at my mother’s face as she says this. I wonder if Sarah’s death is as evident in my body as it is in hers.
“That’s good, Mom,” I say, offering her a small smile.
“What I am trying to say”—she pauses, reaching out to grab my hand for a second—“is that you don’t have to write the story of her death. Her story isn’t your story. You don’t have to make it yours. You can live your life. Her death doesn’t have to take over everything.”
I have a memory from when Sarah and I were kids, the two of us at the river. I must have been about eleven and Sarah five. We swam in the gentle water and lay in the sun until we turned pink. I buried her in the sand, and she laughed and I laughed until we were simply laughing about how long we had been laughing.
I can no longer think about this moment without thinking about the moment she died. That is what this death has done. It has taken my best moments and paired them with my worst thoughts. It changes the way I remember.
I look at my mom, part of me still pushing the sand over my little sister’s sunburned legs, part of me wondering what Sarah’s last thought was before she stopped breathing.
I try to focus on this moment: the smell of the rain to come; the chilly sun; the couple next to us, kissing now; my mom’s coffee, still hot and steamy.
“Thanks, Mom,” I say, looking down at the trembling poached eggs I haven’t taken a bite of yet. I wish that she was right. That my grief didn’t need this obsessive replaying of the past. I have become a scavenger, picking through scraps of memory. If I can reassemble Sarah’s life, see every piece of her death, perhaps she will come back to me. She believed in magic once. Isn’t this a kind of terrible magic?
My mother has given me a new memory. She has made this moment our perfect moment, which I will replay when I need to calm the hurricane of grief that follows me.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Small Town, USA—The last defendant involved in a string of murders in 2013 began standing trial on Monday.
Raymond Douglas, 31, is accused of killing Leland Miller. He faces 50 years in prison if convicted. His former co-defendant, Dale Brady, is expected to testify against him.
The multiple twists and turns in the case were outlined in opening statements Monday. Douglas is accused of killing Miller, 29, and cutting his body into parts before disposing of them in Dry Hills and other areas.
That investigation also linked Brady and Miller to the deaths of a couple who were killed in Little Tree Trailer Park only a few days before Miller was killed and dismembered.
Brady was sentenced in June 2014 to three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole after taking a plea bargain to avoid a potential death penalty sentence.
In his opening statements, District Attorney Phil Boyd said that Brady is cooperating fully and providing testimony on behalf of the prosecution. He says Brady will testify to Douglas’s involvement in Miller’s murder and the tense days leading up to that fatal night.
Shawn Cook, the defense attorney for Raymond Douglas, says his client is innocent.