Housing the Stories of Life

What is life: so supposedly precious and priceless yet something that so many feel so free to steal. Beyond war, beyond battle beyond the facelessness and anonymity of death, at its most basic and personal is the death of a woman at the hands of a man.

I have not lived long, some would say not even half of my life as of yet. Still in that time I have been bewildered too many times by men who chose to kill a woman, more often than not, someone whom they declared they loved.

The stories are universal. We all have them in our lives. Mine are numerous and each time I have to add another to my collection I ask myself or my mother (the therapist) or my father (a loving man) or my friends or people at random why it happens.

Please explain to me me, why or how a random woman, beautiful in her health and radiant in her impending motherhood could trigger such horror and destruction. Because that’s what it is when a man grabs a woman who is jogging along a road to a marina in Puerto Rico, to meet up with her fiancé and then rapes and kills her and leaves her naked the waist down by side of a road all within the space of an hour.

And when we ask “Why? Why did you do this?” he can’t answer even as he says that he didn’t know she was with child. I understand even less.

No one else, it seems, can answer.

All that is left is her fiance’s broken heart as she called him to say she loved him while in the trunk of the man’s car. All that is left is a family; sisters, a brother, a mother, a father having to live with the knowledge that their loved one died in the worst possible manner and that the child she was carrying is a life unfulfilled. All that is left is friends who crowd around her sister, unknowing how to comfort her and shaken in our own belief in our own safety.

And I look back on my life and think of the other stories. The man who killed his wife and then his mother even as his mother shouted to his children to run and hide. Now his children have to live away from all they know to be familiar, unable to talk for months. Now his children have to live with the knowledge for the rest of their lives that their father killed their mother and their grandmother. What kind of life is that to give to your children?

And I remember the story of one of my charge’s first hairsylist who was stabbed by her husband. He killed that wonderful gentle woman who brought such joy to so many children as she cut their hair for the first time. And after he killed her he fled their home only to return still covered in her blood as police stood in the house, trying to make sense of the death. But, of course, there was no sense in it.

And these stories are of people I knew. My own life collection does not include the random acts that you read about in the paper. No, mine are all too personal.

I grieve now and when it happens again which it will, I will grieve again. The stories and the bewilderment and the grief are my constants.

And I am impotent, unable to do anything else but to pour out this sadness and useless rage in words and unable to stop the future which will surely bring more stories to house.


* The sister of a friend of mine was recently murdered in Puerto Rico. As she was jogging and 6 months pregnant a man grabbed her and stuffed her in his trunk. She still had her cell phone with her and called her friend for help and then called her fiance to tell him she loved him. She was found an hour later by the side of a road and the man who murdered her, who had no such previous history of assault, was found very soon after. He could give no explanation as to why he did such a horrendous thing.