Two weeks ago, I fired all of my lawyers. I will not replace them. Nor will I press ahead. Instead, I will cease. I am dropping all attempts to enforce a court order issued a year-and-a-half-ago, threatening my ex-wife with contempt for refusing to relinquish the pittance I was “awarded” in an “equitable distribution” decision. It was not equitable, it will never be distributed, certainly not to me, nor will the legal system will do anything about it.
I am abandoning my struggles to see my son. I will not file more motions. Nor will I seek justice pro se. There is no such thing as justice. As far as pro se is concerned, that is legal pig-Latin for, “I’m bankrupt, and so I guess I’ll have to go it alone.” I have been alone from the very beginning. The only difference now is that I will not spend $200,000 for the privilege. I will not lodge any complaints with disciplinary boards or ethics committees. Lawyers have no ethics, and they never sanction one of their own. This is sometimes referred to as “honor among thieves.” I do not intend to take my case to “the media.” I will not attempt to get the truth that Fox Mulder believes in “out there.” There is truth, and it is “out there.” But no one will dare to say it. No one tells the truth, and certainly not the news. Everyone knows that. And I will not befoul my child’s memory so that Johnson’s Ford can advertise used trucks with turned back odometers.
The cliché, “out there,” refers I think to my fellow citizens. As I recall, I saw a movie about them once in which an innocent man was saved from the gallows by “angry citizens.” I was six. Today, I am fifty-six. In America, in 2002, there are no angry citizens, determined to right a wrong. There are hollow people, hiding behind curtains, repeating chants and shoving their fingers into their ears. What they are saying is: “He must be guilty. I’m sure I’m not. He’s nothing like me. So I’m safe. It won’t happen to me. He must be guilty. I’m sure I’m not. He’s nothing like me. So I’m safe. It won’t happen to me. He must be guilty. I’m sure I’m not. He’s nothing like me. So I’m safe. It won’t happen to me. He must be guilty. I’m sure I’m not. He’s nothing like me. So I’m safe. It won’t happen to me.”
Have you ever walked the deserted streets of an affluent suburban community at three AM, in winter, in America, in 2002? I have.
It is immaculate, with mile after mile of new sidewalks, gigantic houses, and fastidiously polished cars, dozing in driveways. At intervals, sodium lamps arc out over the silent streets and cast white hot pyramids of light. Nothing alive can be seen. Not even a bird on a wire. There are no wires any more. The gargantuan houses may have a lamp or two on, glowing dimly. But there is never a silhouette. The rest of the windows are black. As you walk, you begin to feel a sense of something sinister. The houses are ogres, jutting their heads up out of the ground. Their windows are dark obsidian eyes, watching you. It occurs to you that there are no trees. You haven’t seen a tree in the last hour, only small saplings, with canvas sacks on them, reminiscent of the hood that the executioner slipped over the head of the innocent man when I was six, the one who was saved by his fellow citizens just in the nick of time, people determined to stop a terrible injustice.
I don’t know if there ever were such people. But I do know that you will not find them here. You hear the moan of the wind at first, then syllables, finally words. It isn’t the wind. Wraiths are chanting in unison. They are muttering, “He must be guilty. I’m sure I’m not. He’s nothing like me. So I’m safe. It won’t happen to me. He must be guilty. I’m sure I’m not. He’s nothing like me. So I’m safe. It won’t happen to me. He must be guilty. I’m sure I’m not. He’s nothing like me. So I’m safe. It won’t happen to me. He must be guilty. I’m sure I’m not. He’s nothing like me. So I’m safe. It won’t happen to me.”
I once had a son. I loved him more than anyone in the world. I loved him with an intensity I had never before even sensed in myself. Tragically, I did not fully comprehend the power of my love until he had been taken from me. I will always love my son. But the stark reality is that I will never see him again. I will never get to hold him, just once more, or look into his eyes and whisper goodbye, or trace his features gently with my fingertips in a silent gesture of farewell. Never. No, not ever. My ex-wife has dedicated her life to ensuring this, and—as time has gone on—her fury has grown and consumed her like a raging fire. She is psychotic, she is a millionaire, and she has the legal system on her side. For a period, I feared that she planned to have me murdered. But I no longer fear that. Death would end my suffering. You can be certain—she wants me alive. There is another reason, as well. She needs me. She cannot live without me. She has dedicated her entire life to hating me. In a curious way, she is vastly more committed to me than she ever was when once, long ago, she loved me. Her hatred, I think, is what keeps her alive. I am her God. She grows ever more devout.
The time will come a time when her obsession with me will cease. Within the next few years, my son is going to go mad and start to hear voices. No treatment will be able to cure him. This will be the climax of her drama. He will die in one of two ways. Either he will adjust to being institutionalized, or he will commit suicide. The best guess statistically is that the suicide rate runs somewhere between 30 and 50%. Certain features in my son’s disorder drive the risk higher. But I know my son. He won’t kill himself. He will shuffle around the drafty corridors of hospitals, and the dingy halls of publicly funded halfway houses. He will be passive and dependent, but not demanding. When the nurse rolls the medication window up, he will be the first in line. He’ll stick out his tongue and swallow down his pills. Then he’ll let his jaw flap open again as she probes his mouth with a tongue depressor and a concentrates the beam of her flashlight, to ensure that he has really swallowed them. He will swallow these pills because, though they never have been effective, they allow him to gain access to the window. It is his hunger for connectedness that drives him. It drives all human beings. Mental illness appears to blunt it. It doesn't. If anything, his yearning is deeper. The flatness in his expression does not reveal it. But it is there. That's why he loiters at that window and has gradually persuaded his doctor to give him different medicines and numerous times in which he should take them. All human beings yearn for love. The first person who loved us when we came into the world to greet was our mother.
Usually, since then, it’s been straight down hill.
My son will engage the nurse in 30 more precious seconds of human contact. 30 seconds with a woman who symbolizes his mother. His mother lives back East now, and visits only at Christmas and on his birthday. He has accepted this. This year, he’s going to make a purse for her. He’s been hard at work on it in OT since mid-summer, and doubtless he’ll tell the nurse all about his progress for some time now during his 30 seconds of bootlegged love. The image has definite poignancy until one remembers that the lost child at the window is not five years old. He is forty-five, edentulous, and grizzled. He speaks in a monotone. He does not look into other’s eyes with his own. They are as vacant as burnt out sockets.
In a way, the Christmas present that he labors on with such determination, now suggests his final epitaph:
After I am gone,
No one will remember Me.
And yet, I wonder,
If my father had stayed,
Might I have known more?
Might I have tasted any of love’s power?
I wouldn’t know.
I wouldn’t know.
My memories fade now.
My heart has turned to powder.
Long ago,
I wept and hid, and
Prayed that God would put a cease
To the crashes and cries and bashing.
I do not know.
I do not know.
All I can recall
Is the lurching shadow of my father on the wall,
Mumbling threats, and
Staggering away.
So pray not for him,
Or for me.
We are dust again In the cold unending galaxy.
No need for crying.
No point in trying
To remember me.
MLR 1978-2023*
I am arranging a private memorial for my son. After the New Year, a handful of my true friends and I will gather around a small hole that I will dig with a spade in my back yard. Each will say what he deems appropriate. Each, if he wishes, he may place some object or memento into the hole I have dug. I will conclude with a poem that I have written to him. There will be no paper that I read it from. I will know it by heart and this is where, until my death, the words that I say that morning will remain. I will make it the best poem I have ever composed. When I am finished, I will shovel the earth back into place and tamp down the sod. The poem will never be spoken aloud again.
I will place nothing in the earth. I have nothing to put there. When the cops ejected me out into the street two years ago, I was given three minutes to gather some toiletries and a toothbrush. All that I have of my son is what I carry in my heart. That is where it will stay.
I never wanted this. But it happened. “’Tis so,” as Stephen king once reflected. “Wishing cannot make it otherwise.” His mother induced him to turn his back on me. It is I who clung to hope, not my son. Emily Dickenson once said that hope is a thing with feathers. Perhaps. But all I have ever seen is a shadow of approaching talons, darkness, and then more of that horrible ripping is it rummages through the remaining tatters of my heart. Hope is no comfort; it is simply love’s determined dedication to withstanding unbearable agony.
Conceivably, in spite of all my good intentions, I will not have the strength to give up hope completely. What I will never do again is grovel before the tyrants who did this to my child. I have stooped to my conqueror for the last time. I refuse to stand when some conscienceless sadist enters the room. I will not enter my “plea.” I do not plead with Nazis. I really would rather die. Anyone foolish enough to believe that these are just words will die trying to kill me. This is the line I have drawn. Below it I refuse to descend. They will have to kill me first.
*I believe my ex-, the obsessed alienator, is also very sick and just as much a victim, of the pox that destroys is all. Of course I hate her at points. And I hate this most of all--that she has successfully sullied who I am, and everything i stand for, and debased it into this, my son's fabricated "reality." Still I hasten to add, fixating on my fury on the tragic fact that, like Medea, she is destroying her own child, ultimately diverts us and certainly does not enlighten anyone else. Every time I publish a piece, I get letters from men who are sick and close to death. They all describe their ex's and they are all monotonously identical. It is understandably tempting to lash out at what we can at least see. Ok, then take a closer look. Shes an automaton. We are all being destroyed--the entire family--so our lawyer can buy his sixteen year old that cute little Mercedes 450 SL. The carnage must cease.
In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."
