In Memory of Two Common People

 by Lucy S. 

Eight years ago today, my cousin Elizabeth’s son and husband were murdered in their home. A few years before, her son had been driving his grandma’s car and was carjacked.  The police caught the carjacker, and he was sent to prison for a few years. For this, he wanted revenge. The two knew of each other distantly, having gone to the same high school, and it was not hard for the one seeking revenge to discover where the other one lived. Two others were also actively involved in the killing. 

My cousin’s son’s girlfriend had just given birth to their son days before, and the new father had fallen asleep in the living room with his baby sleeping on his chest. The young men intent on murder shot my cousin’s husband and her son several times, and nicked the baby’s foot. The baby was fine, except that he lost a father and grandfather he will never know, and his mother and grandmother and many in his family were devastated. There is no way to know the ways in which this devastation will continue to ricochet through so many lives.

The original one out for revenge was soon caught, and then the others were caught as well. They have been sentenced to  life without parole in prison.

I am trying to know if there is anything to be said about these deaths beyond what is so commonly said about death. It is strange how death defamiliarizes us with life by reminding us that in its particularity, there is not actually any such thing as “just life.” But the at times shocking event that defamiliarizes us with life – reminding us that a person’s life is not like the sun that reliably rises every morning – this event is talked about in what we think of as stock phrases. I don’t believe that this is because we can only speak platitudes, but because in the face of specific losses, the platitudes also are defamiliarized. When my cousin Elizabeth says to treasure the time you have with those you love because you never know when you may lose them, the words may or may not hit some listeners as clichés which slide away without seeping in, but they leave my cousin’s mouth as an all too personally realized truth. The shock felt may be that the cliché really can (and ultimately will) come true.

I think that we need to speak our common words without embarrassment when we in turn want to comfort those who have lost their loved ones. They aren’t looking for a new way to speak about death, because death and its vocabulary have been made all too new for them already. We don’t need wisdom and answers so much when loved ones die as we need to know that people cared for the lost ones and care for us. We need to hold on to each other for as long as we can in the ways that we can figure out.

It’s hard to understand why people purposely kill other people when we have too little time with each other as it is. I know that the man who killed Elizabeth’s son and husband had a daughter and had told others that he was trying to be a better father. Some of the newspaper articles reported this about him. It seems that all atrocities depend in various ways on compartmentalizations.

But our losses, like our love, resist compartmentalizing. As I have done many times since I first read it, I read again today what Judith Butler has to say about mourning these losses. Here is some of it:

When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related (22).

This lack of any ready vocabulary to express a loss which knows no definable borders is, I think, the very reason that most of us have to work with the words we have. Otherwise, we can only retreat into alienated silence from other particular lives – and we ‘never know when we will lose them.’ This is one of the ways that I have learned that we’re always more than language, that there are wounds and also love far beyond words.

I have been trying to understand for some time now how to talk about the losses of these two family members or other losses. For some time, I felt that I should somehow speak some kind of testimony, a plea for something I could not even fully articulate – maybe a plea to let people remain common in the ways in which these two men and those who killed them might have remained common people had the latter three not killed the former two. It would be nice if Elizabeth or any of us could just complain about one of them in an ordinary way right now, or think of any event connected to them as we used to think of it before.

I have realized that people’s common habits and tastes can endear them to me as much as their greater deeds. I know what it is to savor the cool, dry night air outside in California as Elizabeth’s husband enjoyed while he worked on his car. (He loved working on his car at night.) I know what it is to fall asleep with my baby sleeping on me as Elizabeth’s son did. I know what it is to go to bed sure that those in my home are safe on an ordinary domestic evening as Elizabeth did. They should have all woken up to an ordinary morning. 

Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004 (this ed. 2006).