Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The trial judge had denied our request for a stay of execution by the time I got back to Montgomery. He ruled our evidence was “untimely,” meaning that he could not consider it. With less than a week before the execution, the next few days involved one frantic filing after the next. Finally, on the day before the execution, I filed a petition for review and a motion for a stay of execution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Even in death penalty cases, the Court grants review only in a small percentage of the cases filed. A petition for certiorari, a request to review a lower court’s ruling, is very rarely granted, but I’d known all along that the Supreme Court was our best chance for a stay of execution. Even when lower courts granted a stay, the State would appeal, so the Supreme Court would almost always make the final decision to permit an execution to proceed or not. The execution was scheduled for 12:01 A.M . on August 18. I had finally finished the petition and faxed it to the Court late on the night of August 16 and had spent the next morning in my Montgomery office, waiting anxiously for the Court’s decision. I tried to busy myself by reading files in other cases, including Walter McMillian’s. I didn’t expect we’d hear from the Court until the afternoon, but that didn’t keep me from staring at the phone all morning. Whenever the phone rang, my pulse quickened. Eva and Doris, our receptionist, knew that I was anxiously awaiting the call. We had submitted an extensive clemency petition to the governor with affidavits from family members and color photographs, but I didn’t expect anything in response. The petition detailed Herbert’s military service and explained why military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are worthy of compassion. I wasn’t very hopeful. Michael Lindsey had received a life verdict from the jury and was executed instead; Horace Dunkins was intellectually disabled, and the governor had not spared him, either. Herbert would likely be seen as even less sympathetic. I spoke with Herbert regularly during the day by phone to let him know there was no news. I couldn’t rely on the prison to get a message to him if the Court ruled, so I asked him to call me every two hours. Whatever the news, I wanted him to hear it from someone who cared about him. Herbert had met a woman from Mobile with whom he had corresponded over the years. They had decided to get married a week before the execution.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He’d turn the corner on Hamilton Avenue, roaring off down Broadway to the high school, leaving the rest of us still jumping up and down at the bus stop trying to stay warm. Peter Weber and Castiglia also drove to school every morning or got rides with their new friends. I remember for a long time Mike and Bobby Zimmer were a lot taller than me and Castiglia. Then all of a sudden I was taller than all three of them. We’d stand back to back over at Kenny’s house as his mother checked to see who was the tallest and it was so good for little guys like me and Castiglia to be taller than the other guys. And when we weren’t trying to see who was the tallest, we’d be out on the lawns still playing tag and wrestling on the grass. Steve Jacket was still throwing screwdrivers into his front lawn across from Pete’s house on Hamilton Avenue, telling us all he was going to become a TV sports announcer just like Mel Allen, and Pete was still coming over to my house every once in a while after school to steal beer out of my father’s locker in the garage. Little Tommy Law was hanging out with Billy Meyers, trying to stay out of trouble and graduate from high school like the rest of us. High school was just about over for me and the rest of the guys. We had been on the block together for almost twelve years, running and moving from Toronto Avenue to Lee Place to Hamilton Avenue. No one could remember how we all first got together back then, but we had become friends, “as close as real brothers,” Peter told me one afternoon, and we wanted to believe it would always be that way. * * * President Kennedy got killed that last year and we played football in the huge snowdrifts that had settled on the Long Island streets that afternoon. We played in silence, I guess because you’re supposed to be silent when someone dies. I truly felt I had lost a dear friend. I was deeply hurt for a long time afterward. We went to the movies that Sunday. I can’t remember what was playing, but how ashamed I was that I was even there, that people could sit through a movie or have the nerve to want to go to football games when our president had been killed in Dallas. The pain stuck with me for a long time after he died. I still remember Oswald being shot and screaming to my mother to come into the living room. It all seemed wild and crazy like some Texas shootout, but it was real for all of us back then, it was very real. I remember Johnson being sworn in on the plane and the fear in the eyes of the woman judge from Texas. And then the funeral and the casket.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The bear was beautiful: massive and shaggy and radiant. The squid, heartbroken, knew she could not even begin to compare. When the queen and the bear departed for a picnic, the squid asked a chambermaid to take her into town. When the queen discovered that her squid was gone, she was enraged. But once her anger receded, she knew what she needed to do. So the queen sat down and wrote the squid a letter. “My dearest creature,” she wrote. “Before I begin, I must ask you to keep an open mind and an open heart about the following missive. “I love you, and I will always love you . The fact that you refuse to come to my chambers, even just as a companion and not as a lover, stills my heart. You seem to believe that the fact that our love has ended means we can never be in proximity to each other, and I beg you to reconsider. I have loved many creatures in my lifetime—a goat, a honeybee, an owl—and despite the fact that our love did not endure, I still see them regularly. We are still friends. Just because I have found happiness in the companionship of a bear does not mean that our time together meant nothing. “I am sorry that things did not work out between us. I have, as I hope you would agree, behaved honorably and beyond reproach . I am filled with grief and sorrow that you do not believe in amicable partings. I would have thought that you—intelligent creature that you are—would know better. “The truth is that you have been with me during a very difficult period of my life, and I am sorry that I have not been on my best behavior. But such is love! What we have will transcend this messy business, and we will be in each other’s lives forever. Does that not please you? None of this jealousy or betrayal; just a friendship based on mutual trust. I hope one day we can meet each other in some neutral space, our pain limned with understanding, with all of this behind us. I faithfully await your reply.” When the squid did not reply, the queen wrote another letter: “Sweet squid! The mistakes that I have made number in the thousands, I think. I have spent many days meditating, fasting, abstaining from alcohol, and am now realizing how profoundly I failed you. The truth is, you are my past and my future. I miss you. I wish I could suckle your tentacles and kiss your cool mantle, and that we could travel like we used to. I’m so sorry about the bear. The bear is beautiful and very special in her own right but she is nothing like you. She is still here in the castle but when I pass by her I have a strong desire to turn and run in the opposite direction. It is only you I want, my little cabbage.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  As I was completing this book in the summer of 2010, my beautiful, hilarious kid sister Lisa went to sleep one night and the next morning never woke up. Time tames the pain, but can never heal the loss. I miss her every day. In peace her sleep, and may her memory be for a blessing. NotesAuthor Note: Throughout this book I frequently use italics to emphasize certain words or passages in the texts quoted; all such emphases are my own. Prologue1. For a recent though very different treatment, spanning the Jewish scriptures in Hebrew to a classic of medieval Christian theology, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, see Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History. In that study, Anderson traces the shift in the Old Testament’s metaphors for sin from “burden” to “debt,” and then follows developments around that particular concept in the New Testament through to later rabbinic and Christian thought.Chapter 1. God, Blood, and the Temple: Jesus and Paul on Sin1. On John’s role as Jesus’ mentor, the most recent full study is John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 2.19–233; see, in short, Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, 184–97. Dale C. Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus, 204–20, reviews à la loupe the similarities and differences between the two prophetic figures.2. Meier, A Marginal Jew, argues that John’s immersions were a one-time event (2:56), and that they “implicitly” challenged the traditional cultic means of atonement and sacrifice at the temple (2:75, n.52). I question both of these conclusions. First, nothing in the gospel material—or in Josephus’ report about John’s activities (Antiquities 18.116–19)—indicates how many times a person could immerse, and common practice at the time was multiple immersions. (Even in the much later Christian context, when single immersions were desirable in principle, people might receive baptism a number of times: when moving between different Christian sects, for example; or if the authority and bona fides of the person administering the immersion were in question, as occurred during the fourth-century Donatist controversy.) Second, immersion was never a substitute for sacrifice; on this point, see Joan Taylor, The Immerser, 31, 95, 111.On apocalyptic Jewish traditions about the Kingdom of God, and how these figure in traditions from and about John and Jesus, see E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 77–119, 222–41. On purity, sacrifice, and atonement, see n. 11 below.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  It was the kind of wordless testimony of struggle and anguish I heard all the time growing up in a small rural black church. “Just about everybody in here was standing next to him, talking to him, laughing with him, eating with him. Then the police come along months later, say he killed somebody miles away at the same time we were standing next to him. Then they take him away when you know it’s a lie.” She was now struggling to speak. Her hands were trembling and the emotion in her voice was making it hard to get her words out. “We were with him all day! What are we supposed to do, Mr. Stevenson? Tell us, what are we supposed to do with that?” Her face twisted in pain. “I feel like I’ve been convicted, too.” The small crowd responded to each statement with shouts of “Yes!” and “That’s right!” “I feel like they done put me on death row, too. What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?” I sat on the crowded sofa in my suit, staring into the face of a lot of pain. I hadn’t expected to have such an intense meeting when I arrived. Folks were desperate for answers and trying to reconcile themselves to a situation that made no sense. I was struggling to think of something appropriate to say when a younger woman spoke up. “Johnny D could have never done this no kind of way, whether we was with him or not,” she said, using the nickname Walter’s family and friends had given him. “He’s just not like that.” The younger woman was Walter’s niece. She continued with her rebuttal to the very idea that Walter would need an alibi, which seemed to generate support among the crowd. I was relieved to have the pressure off me for a moment, as Walter’s large family seemed to be moving toward some sort of debate over whether Walter’s character rendered an alibi unnecessary—or even insulting. It had been a long day. I was no longer sure what time it was, but I knew it was very late, and I was wearing down. I’d spent several intense hours on death row earlier in the day with Walter going over his trial transcript. Before my meeting with Walter, I spent time with other new clients on the row. Their cases weren’t active, and there were no deadlines on the horizon, but I hadn’t seen them since the Richardson execution and they had been anxious to talk. Now that Walter’s case record was complete, appeal pleadings would be due soon, and time was critical.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The Dunkins family called frequently, trying to figure out what could be done with only days to go before his execution, but there were very few options. When it became clear there was no way to stop the execution, the family turned their attention to what would happen to Mr. Dunkins’s body after his death. They seemed particularly concerned, for religious reasons, with preventing the state from performing an autopsy on their son’s body. The date of the execution arrived, and Horace Dunkins was killed in a botched execution that made national news. Correctional officials had plugged the electrodes into the chair incorrectly, so only a partial electrical charge was delivered to Mr. Dunkins’s body when the electric chair was activated. After several agonizing minutes, the chair was turned off but Mr. Dunkins was still alive, unconscious but breathing. Officials waited several more minutes “for the body to cool” before realizing that the electrodes had not been connected properly. They made alterations and electrocuted Mr. Dunkins again, and this time it worked. They killed him. Following this cruelly mishandled execution, the state performed an autopsy—against the family’s repeated requests. I received a call from Mr. Dunkins’s distraught father after the execution. He said, “They could take his life, even though he didn’t get a fair trial and he didn’t deserve that, but they had no right to mess with his body and soul, too. We want to sue them.” We provided some aid to the volunteer lawyer on the case and a suit was filed, although there wasn’t much hope. There were a few depositions but no judgment of relief. The civil suit failed to slow down the State of Alabama, which moved ahead aggressively with more execution dates. — We relocated to our new office in Montgomery in the shadow of these two executions. The men on death row were more agitated and unnerved than ever. When Herbert Richardson received word in July that his execution was scheduled for August 18, he called me collect from death row: “Mr. Stevenson, this is Herbert Richardson, and I’ve just received notice that the state plans to execute me on August 18. I need your help. You can’t say no. I know you’re helping some of the guys and y’all are opening an office, so please help me.” I replied, “I’m really sorry to hear about your execution date. It’s been a very tough summer. What does your volunteer lawyer say?” I was still working on the best way to talk to condemned people about how to respond to news of an execution date. I wanted to say something reassuring like, “Don’t worry,” but of course that would be a remarkable request to make of anyone—news of a scheduled execution was nothing if not unimaginably worrisome. “Sorry” didn’t seem quite right either, but it tended to be the best I could think of.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Herbert, watching the house from across the street, was devastated. He had planned to run to his girlfriend’s aid when the bomb exploded to reinforce his readiness to protect her and to keep her safe. When the child picked up the bomb and it detonated, Herbert ran across the street and found himself in a circle of grieving neighbors. It didn’t take long for police to make an arrest. They found pipes and other bomb-making materials in Herbert’s car and front yard. Because the victims were black and poor, this wasn’t the kind of case that would usually be prosecuted as a capital crime, but Herbert wasn’t local. His identity as an outsider, a Northerner, and the nature of the crime seemed to generate heightened contempt from law enforcement officials. Placing a bomb anywhere in Dothan, even in a poor section of town, posed a different kind of threat than “typical” domestic violence. The prosecutor argued that Herbert was not just tragically misguided and reckless; he was evil. The State sought the death penalty. After striking all of the black prospective jurors in a county that is 28 percent black, the prosecutor told the all-white jury in his closing argument that a conviction was appropriate because Herbert was “associated with Black Muslims from New York City” and deserved no mercy. Alabama’s capital statute requires that any murder eligible for the death penalty be intentional, but it was clear that Herbert had no intent to kill the child. The State decided to invoke an unprecedented theory of “transferred intent” to make the crime eligible for the death penalty. But Herbert had no intention to kill anyone. Herbert was advised to deny any culpability but ultimately argued that this was reckless murder, not capital murder, which could be punished with life imprisonment but not the death penalty. During the trial, the appointed defense lawyer presented no evidence about Herbert’s background, his military service, his trauma from the war, his relationship with the victim, his obsession with the girlfriend—nothing. Alabama’s statute at the time limited what court-appointed lawyers could be paid for their out-of-court preparation time to $1,000, so the lawyer spent almost no time on the case. The trial lasted just over a day, and the judge quickly condemned Herbert to death. Following the imposition of the death sentence, Herbert’s appointed lawyer, who was later disbarred for poor performance in other cases, told Herbert that he didn’t see any reason to appeal the conviction or sentence because the trial had been as fair as he could expect. Herbert reminded him that he’d been sentenced to death. He wanted to appeal no matter how unlikely the prospects, but his lawyer filed no brief. Herbert was confined on death row for eleven years, until it was his time to face “Yellow Mama.” A volunteer lawyer had challenged the intent questions in a desperate appeal but was unsuccessful. Herbert’s execution was now set for August 18, just three weeks away.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  This time there was only her funeral urn, placed in the chamber below Trajan's Column. I attended in person the ceremonies for her apotheosis, and contrary to imperial custom wore mourning for the full nine days. But death made little change in an intimacy which for years had dispensed with mere presence; the empress remained for me what she always had been, a mind and a spirit with which mine had united. Some of the great works of construction were nearing completion: the Colosseum, restored and cleansed of reminders of Nero which still haunted its site, was no longer adorned with the image of that emperor, but with a colossal statue of the Sun, Helios the King, in allusion to my family name of Aelius. They were putting the last touches to the Temple of Venus and Rome, erected likewise on the site of the scandalous House of Gold, where Nero had grossly displayed a luxury ill acquired. Roma, Amor: the divinity of the Eternal City was now for the first time identified with the Mother of Love, inspirer of every joy. It was a basic concept in my life. The Roman power was thus taking on that cosmic and sacred character, that pacific, protective form which I aspired to give it. At times it occurred to me to identify the late empress with that wise Venus, my heavenly counselor. More and more the different gods seemed to me merged mysteriously in one Whole, emanations infinitely varied, but all equally manifesting the same force; their contradictions were only expressions of an underlying accord. The construction of a temple of All Gods, a Pantheon, seemed increasingly desirable to me. I had chosen a site on the ruins of the old public baths given by Agrippa, Augustus' son-in-law, to the people of Rome. Nothing remained of the former structure except a porch and a marble plaque bearing his dedication to the Roman citizens; this inscription was carefully replaced, just as before, on the front of the new temple. It mattered little to me to have my name recorded on this monument, which was the product of my very thought. On the contrary, it pleased me that a text of more than a century ago should link this new edifice to the beginning of our empire, to that reign which Augustus had brought to peaceful conclusion. Even in my innovations I liked to feel that I was, above all, a continuator.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  When I left the empty body it was no more than an embalmer's preparation, the first stage of a frightful masterpiece, a precious substance treated with salt and gum of myrrh, and never again to be touched by sun or air. On the return I visited the temple near which the sacrifice had been consummated; I spoke with the priests. Their sanctuary would be renovated to become a place of pilgrimage for all Egypt; their college, enriched and augmented, would be consecrated hereafter to the service of my god. Even in my most obtuse moments I had never doubted that that young presence was divine. Greece and Asia would worship him in our manner, with games and dances, and with ritual offerings placed at the feet of a nude, white statue. Egypt, who had witnessed the death agony, would have also her part in the apotheosis: it would be the most secret and somber part, and the harshest, for this country would play the eternal role of embalmer to his body. For centuries to come priests with shaven heads would recite litanies repeating that name which for them had no value, but for me held all. Each year the sacred barge would bear that effigy along the river; the first of the month of Athyr mourners would walk on that shore where I had walked. Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others: the problem of the moment was to defend from death the little that was left to me. Phlegon had assembled on the shore the architects and engineers of my suite, as I had ordered; sustained by a kind of clearsighted frenzy I made them follow me along the stony hills; I explained my plan, the development of forty-five stadia of encircling wall, and I marked in the sand the position of the triumphal arch and that of the tomb. Antino�polis was to be born; it would already be some check to death to impose upon that sinister land a city wholly Greek, a bastion which would hold off the nomads of Erythrea, a new market on the route to India. Alexander had celebrated the funeral of Hephaestion with devastation and mass slaughter of prisoners.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I preferred to offer to the chosen one a city where his cult would be forever mingled with the coming and going on the public square, where his name would be repeated in the casual talk of evening, where youths would toss crowns to each other at the banqueting hour. But on one point my thought fluctuated: it seemed impossible to abandon this body to foreign soil. Like a man uncertain of his next stop who reserves lodgings in several hostelries at a time, I ordered a monument for him at Rome, on the banks of the Tiber near my own tomb, but thought also of the Egyptian chapels which I had had built at the Villa by caprice, and which were suddenly proving tragically useful. A date was set for the funeral at the end of the two months demanded by the embalmers. I entrusted Mesomedes with the composition of funeral choruses. Late into the night I went back aboard; Hermogenes prepared me a sleeping potion. The journey up the river continued, but my course lay on the Styx. In prisoners' camps on the banks of the Danube I had once seen wretches continually beating their heads against a wall with a wild motion, both mad and tender, endlessly repeating the same name. In the underground chambers of the Colosseum I had been shown lions pining away because the dog with which their keepers had accustomed them to live had been taken away. I tried to collect my thoughts: Antinous was dead. As a child I had wept and wailed over the corpse of Marullinus torn to shreds by crows, but had cried as does a mere animal, in the night. My father had died, but a boy orphaned at the age of twelve noticed no more than disorder in the house, his mother's tears, and his own terror; he knew nothing of the anguish which the dying man had experienced. My mother had died much later, about the time of my mission in Pannonia; I do not recall the exact date. Trajan had been only a sick man who must be made to make a will. I had not seen Plotina die. Attianus had died; he was old. During the Dacian wars I had lost comrades whom I had believed that I loved ardently; but we were young, and life and death were equally intoxicating and easy. Antinous was dead. I remembered platitudes frequently heard: "One can die at any age," or "They who die young are beloved by the gods." I myself had shared in that execrable abuse of words; I had talked of dying of sleep, and dying of boredom.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  And I pass also in silence over the experiences of illness, and over other, more profound experiences which they bring in their train; and over the perpetual search for, or presence of, love. Never mind. That disjunction, that break in continuity, that "night of the soul" which so many of us experienced at the time, each in his own way (and so often in far more tragic and final form than did I), was essential, perhaps, in order to force me into trying to bridge not only the distance which separated me from Hadrian, but, above all, the distance which separated me from my true self. Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit. During those years in an unfamiliar land I had kept on with the reading of authors from classical antiquity: the red or green cloth-bound volumes of Loeb-Heinemann editions had become a country of my own. Thus, since one of the best ways to reconstruct a man's thinking is to rebuild his library, I had actually been working for years, without knowing it, to refurnish the bookshelves at Tibur in advance. Now I had only to imagine the swollen hands of a sick man holding the half-rolled manuscripts. Do, from within, the same work of reconstruction which the nineteenth-century archaeologists have done from without. In December of 1948 I received from Switzerland a trunk which I had stored there during the war, with its contents of family papers and letters some ten years old. I sat down by the fire to work my way through the debris, as if to take some gloomy inventory after a death. I passed several evenings alone at the task, undoing the separate packets and running through them before destroying that accumulation of correspondence with people whom I had forgotten, and who had forgotten me, some of them still alive, others dead. A few of the pages bore dates of a generation ago, and even the names had quite gone from my mind. As I unfolded and threw mechanically into the fire that exchange of dead thoughts between a Marie and a Francois or a Paul, long since disappeared, I came upon four or five typewritten sheets, the paper of which had turned yellow. The salutation told me nothing: "My dear Mark . . ." Mark. . . . What friend or love, what distant relative was this? I could not recall the name at all. It was several minutes before I remembered that Mark stood here for Marcus A urelius, and that I had in hand a fragment of the lost manuscript. From that moment there was no question but that this book must be taken up again, whatever the cost. That same night I re-opened two of the volumes which had also just been returned to me, remnants of a library in large part lost.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  “And then he shot her in the head.” When he said that, my body just let go. I remember the exact traffic light I was at. For a moment there was a complete vacuum of sound, and then I cried tears like I had never cried before. I collapsed in heaving sobs and moans. I cried as if every other thing I’d cried for in my life had been a waste of crying. I cried so hard that if my present crying self could go back in time and see my other crying selves, it would slap them and say, “That shit’s not worth crying for.” My cry was not a cry of sadness. It was not catharsis. It wasn’t me feeling sorry for myself. It was an expression of raw pain that came from an inability of my body to express that pain in any other way, shape, or form. She was my mom. She was my teammate. It had always been me and her together, me and her against the world. When Andrew said, “shot her in the head,” I broke in two. The light changed. I couldn’t even see the road, but I drove through the tears, thinking, Just get there, just get there, just get there. We pulled up to the hospital, and I jumped out of the car. There was an outdoor sitting area by the entrance to the emergency room. Andrew was standing there waiting for me, alone, his clothes smeared with blood. He still looked perfectly calm, completely stoic. Then the moment he looked up and saw me he broke down and started bawling. It was like he’d been holding it together the whole morning and then everything broke loose at once and he lost it. I ran to him and hugged him and he cried and cried. His cry was different from mine, though. My cry was one of pain and anger. His cry was one of helplessness. I turned and ran into the emergency room. My mom was there in triage on a gurney. The doctors were stabilizing her. Her whole body was soaked in blood. There was a hole in her face, a gaping wound above her lip, part of her nose gone. She was as calm and serene as I’d ever seen her. She could still open one eye, and she turned and looked up at me and saw the look of horror on my face. “It’s okay, baby,” she whispered, barely able to speak with the blood in her throat. “It’s not okay.” “No, no, I’m okay, I’m okay. Where’s Andrew? Where’s your brother?” “He’s outside.” “Go to Andrew.” “But Mom—” “Shh. It’s okay, baby. I’m fine.” “You’re not fine, you’re—” “Shhhhhh. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. Go to your brother. Your brother needs you.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  She looked tired and wore what my sister and I used to call a “church meeting hat.” She had smooth dark skin, and I recognized her as someone who had been in the courtroom when Mr. Carter was resentenced. In fact, I thought I’d seen her each time I’d come to the courthouse in New Orleans. I assumed that she was related or connected to one of the clients, although I didn’t remember the other family members ever mentioning her. I must have been staring because she saw me looking and waved at me, gesturing for me to come to her. When I walked over to her she smiled at me. “I’m tired and I’m not going to get up, so you’re going to have to lean over for me to give you a hug.” She had a sweet voice that crackled. I smiled back at her. “Well, yes, ma’am. I love hugs, thank you.” She wrapped her arms around my neck. “Sit, sit. I want to talk to you,” she said. I sat down beside her on the steps. “I’ve seen you here several times, are you related to Mr. Caston or Mr. Carter?” I asked. “No, no, no, I’m not related to nobody here. Not that I know of, anyway.” She had a kind smile, and she looked at me intensely. “I just come here to help people. This is a place full of pain, so people need plenty of help around here.” “Well, that’s really kind of you.” “No, it’s what I’m supposed to do, so I do it.” She looked away before locking eyes with me again. “My sixteen-year-old grandson was murdered fifteen years ago,” she said, “and I loved that boy more than life itself.” I wasn’t expecting that response and was instantly sobered. The woman grabbed my hand. “I grieved and grieved and grieved. I asked the Lord why he let someone take my child like that. He was killed by some other boys. I came to this courtroom for the first time for their trials and sat in there and cried every day for nearly two weeks. None of it made any sense. Those boys were found guilty for killing my grandson, and the judge sent them away to prison forever. I thought it would make me feel better but it actually made me feel worse.” She continued, “I sat in the courtroom after they were sentenced and just cried and cried. A lady came over to me and gave me a hug and let me lean on her. She asked me if the boys who got sentenced were my children, and I told her no. I told her the boy they killed was my child.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Lorna started to sob uncontrollably. She felt she had failed as a parent. Something must have been lacking in Nancy’s life that would allow her to join a cult. Lorna began to mentally review every significant incident in Nancy’s life that might have made her so susceptible. She decided to ask her son Neil to drop whatever he was doing and come over. When Neil walked into the living room an hour later, his father was pacing back and forth, his mother was still in tears, Leslie was sitting near her on the sofa with her hands clasped on her lap, and the minister was standing next to the TV, with a bewildered expression on his face. “What’s going on here?” Neil asked as he sat down and put his arm around his mother. Lorna said, “We think Nancy has gotten into some type of religious cult.” “Nancy? Never. No way! She would never fall for something like that.” Then his parents told him everything they knew. He was astonished. Fortunately, the minister was able to persuade the Johnsons to do nothing for the moment. He assured them that he would do his best to try to find more information about the Twelve Tribes, and find advice about the best approach to take. Through the minister’s research and connections, he found my name and telephone number and gave them to the family. They called me the following day. I had them fill out my questionnaire, and we had several more phone discussions. As soon as we were able to get enough concrete information, the Johnsons asked their friends and relatives to come over the next Saturday, to be part of a two-day counseling and training program. I advised them to try to get as much help and support as they could find. I was able to arrange for a former Tribes member in another city to make a video describing as much as he could remember about the group, its leaders, its beliefs and its practices. With this as the foundation, we were able to make a plan. Since Nancy and her fellow Twelve Tribes members were unaware that her family knew about her involvement, it was relatively easy to surprise her. The family agreed that we would all fly to Milwaukee the following week, where a former member would join us. We staked out the cult house the morning after we arrived, and waited for Nancy to leave. We figured that it would be much easier to talk with her if she was off the group’s property and away from other members.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  If I could just kiss him, he said, his voice stripped now and small, if I could kiss him just once, that would be enough, I wouldn’t want anything more. I looked at him then, wondering if he meant what he said, if he was really so new to desire that he could believe it. I don’t think so, I said, speaking for the first time since he had started his story, my voice raw, I don’t think that’s how it works; it was a ridiculous thing to say, I knew it even as I spoke. Whatever, G. said, still not looking up, it doesn’t matter, he didn’t give me a chance. I told him that I loved him but he didn’t understand me, or he pretended not to understand, I had to explain it, and once I started speaking I couldn’t stop, after being silent for so long I spoke too much. But it didn’t matter what I said, I only made things worse by talking. He didn’t welcome it at all, and he hadn’t had any idea; I guess I thought he had known it somehow, that he was all I thought about, the only thing, the only thing I cared about. But he was surprised, really surprised, and he didn’t welcome it, he turned away when I kept talking. He wasn’t cruel to me, he was gentle, he was even kind, but he didn’t pretend we could go on as we had. We would stop being friends, he said, he said he was sorry; he didn’t want me to suffer, and it was the quickest way to end suffering, and anyway he couldn’t be comfortable with me now. I was crying then, G. said, I don’t think he had ever seen me cry before, I couldn’t stop. Why did you tell me, he said, I’ve lost something too, you’ve taken something from me too. And I had, I realized, I had ruined so much, for him and for me. I was wrong to tell him, G. said, I shouldn’t have said anything, along with everything else now I’m so sorry for what I said. But there’s nothing I can do, I have to live with it, like I have to live with everything else I feel. He paused, and then, But what if I can’t bear it, he said, looking up at me, finally catching my eye, and though at first I thought the question was rhetorical I realized it was genuine, I needed to have something to say.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I remember my father, which is to say I am cuffing him with these little words. I am giving him to you with hands behind his back, his head ducking into the patrol car because like the table, this was how it was given to me: from mouths that never articulated the sounds inside a book. To the right of the stage were four people with their backs to everyone else. Heads bowed, they were the only ones not moving—as if enclosed in an invisible room. They stared at something on a long plastic table in front of them, their heads so low they looked decapitated. After a while, one of them, a woman with silver hair, rested her head on the shoulder of a young man to her right—and began to weep. I remember getting a letter from my father while he was in prison, the envelope wrinkled, torn at the edges. I remember holding up a piece of paper covered with lines and lines whited out where the prison guards censored his words. I remember scraping at the chalky film that lay between my father and me. Those words. Nuts and bolts to a table. A table in a room with no people. I stepped closer, and that’s when I saw on the table, impossibly still, the distinct form of a body covered in a white sheet. By now all four mourners were openly weeping while, on stage, the singer’s falsetto cut through their racked sobs. Nauseous, I searched the starless sky. A plane blinked red, then white, then blurred behind a band of clouds. I remember studying my father’s letter and seeing a scatter of tiny black dots: the periods left untouched. A vernacular of silence. I remember thinking everyone I ever loved was a single black dot on a bright page. I remember drawing a line from one dot to another with a name on each one until I ended with a family tree that looked more like a barbed-wire fence. I remember tearing it to shreds. Later, I would learn that this was a common scene on a Saigon night. City coroners, underfunded, don’t always work around the clock. When someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. As a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. Neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called “delaying sadness.” In Saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death—or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  You heard of Clasternack, didn’t you? He got killed. They got a street over in the park named after him.” He paused for a long time. “Yeah . . . he got killed. He was the first of you kids to get it. And there were others too,” said the commander. “That little guy, what was his name? Yeah I got it . . . Johnny Heanon . . . little Johnny Heanon . . . he used to play in the Little League with you guys.” He remembered Johnny Heanon. “He tripped a land mine or something and died on the hospital ship during the operation. I see his folks every once in a while. They live down by the old high school. Fine kid,” said the commander. “He used to deliver my paper,” said the heavy guy. “There was the Peters family too . . . both brothers, . . .” said the commander again, pausing for a long time. “Both of them got killed in the same week. And Alan Grady. . . . Did you know Alan Grady? He used to go to the boy scouts when you kids was growing up.” The boy in the back seat nodded. He knew Alan Grady too. “He drowned,” said the commander. “Funny thing,” said the heavy guy. “I mean, terrible way to go. He was on R and R or something and he drowned one afternoon when he was swimming.” “And Billy Morris,” said the commander, “he used to get in all sorts of trouble down at the high school. He got killed too. There was a land mine or something and he got hit in the head with a tree. Isn’t that crazy?” The commander was laughing almost hysterically now. “He goes all the way over there and gets killed by a fucking tree.” “We’ve lost a lot of good boys,” the heavy guy said. “We’ve been hit pretty bad. The whole town’s changed.” “And it’s been goin’ on a long time.” The commander was very angry now. “If those bastards in Washington would stop fiddlefucking around and drop a couple of big ones in the right places, we could get that whole thing over with next week. We could win that goddamn thing and get all our kids out of there.” * * * When they got to Eddie Dugan’s house, both of the men got out, leaving him in the back seat, and ran up to Eddie’s doorstep. A few minutes passed, then Eddie came out the front door rocking back and forth across the lawn like a clown on his crutches until he had worked himself to the car door. “I can do it,” Eddie said. “Sure,” said the tall commander, smiling. They watched as Eddie stretched leaning on his crutches, then swung into the car seat. “Not bad,” said the commander.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The stories of the Roman emperors, such a garish mélange of rumor and reality, have contributed not a little to the reputation of Roman sexual culture. The proclivities of the Roman emperors have been notorious; in the words of the inimitable Gibbon, “of the first fifteen emperors, Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct.” Their sexual profiles can provide some index of the erotic style of the empire, insofar as we remind ourselves that an emperor’s sexual behavior acted as a cipher for his style of rulership. Nothing summarized the abject depravity of Tiberius as his use of young slave children on Capri. Nero’s reputation for philhellenism and debauchery fused in his three reputed marriages to eastern eunuchs. Eunuchs did in fact come to occupy an ever more important place in pederastic practices of the Roman Empire; Domitian, whose favorite was a eunuch cupbearer named Earinus, banned castration within the empire, but the transfrontier trade was able to pump eunuchs into the empire at a sufficient level that their prominence continued to gain into late antiquity. The outsized villainy of Commodus could be seen in his incest and voyeurism, his three hundred concubines, and his infamous behavior, in which he “polluted every part of his body and his mouth, with both sexes.”14 If reports about typologically “bad” emperors are hopelessly clouded by salacious invective, the biographies of successful imperial rulers may reveal more. Nothing belies the claim that pederastic discourse lost its vitality like the relationship between Hadrian and his Bithynian favorite, Antinous. Possibly a slave, Hadrian’s beloved died on the Nile under clouded circumstances. Hadrian’s sorrow was demonstrative, but what still defies easy comprehension is the paroxysm of empire-wide mourning that ensued. A city was founded at the site of his death; Hadrian believed reports that a new star had appeared in the sky, and Antinous was worshipped as a god or hero; statues of Antinous proliferated until his face was a universal image, known “across the inhabited world.” Indeed, the haunting image of Antinous ranks behind only Augustus and Hadrian in the number of sculptures extant today. Dozens of cities issued coinage in his honor; games were being founded in his memory decades after Hadrian was in the grave. Provincial sycophancy and credulous paganism do not suffice to explain such an uncontrolled efflux of grief. The image and story of Antinous resonated in powerful and unexpected ways.15

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Instead of being intimidated or frightened, many of us became more outraged and more determined than ever to stop these ignorant, arrogant men and women who never saw the things we saw, never had to grieve over the loss of their bodies or the bodies of their sons and daughters, never had to watch as so many friends and fellow veterans were destroyed by alcoholism and drugs, homelessness, imprisonment, neglect and rejection, torture, abandonment and betrayal, in the painful aftermath of the war. These leaders have never experienced the tears, the dread and rage, the feeling that there is no God, no country, nothing but the wound, the horrifying memories, the shock, the guilt, the shame, the terrible injustice that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and over two million Vietnamese. We had to act. We had to speak. * * * I am no longer the twenty-eight-year-old man, six years returned from the war in Vietnam, who sat behind that typewriter in Santa Monica in the fall of 1974. I am nearly sixty now. My hair and beard are almost completely white. The nightmares and anxiety attacks have all but disappeared, but I still do not sleep well at night. I toss and turn in increasing physical pain. But I remain very positive and optimistic. I am still determined to rise above all of this. I know my pain and the horrors of my past will always be with me, but perhaps not with the same force and fury of those early years after the war. I have learned to forgive my enemies and forgive myself. It has been very difficult to heal from the war while living in America, and I have often dreamed of moving to neutral ground, another country. Yet I have somehow made a certain peace, even in a nation that so often still seems to believe in war and the use of violence as a solution to its problems. There has been a reckoning, a renewal. The scar will always be there, a living reminder of that war, but it has also become something beautiful now, something of faith and hope and love. I have been given an opportunity to move through that dark night of the soul to a new shore, to gain an understanding, a knowledge, an entirely different vision. I now believe I have suffered for a reason, and in many ways I have found that reason in my commitment to peace and nonviolence. My life has been a blessing in disguise, even with the pain and great difficulty that my physical disability continues to bring. It is a blessing to be able to speak on behalf of peace, to be able to reach such a great number of people. I saw firsthand what our government’s terrible policy had wrought. I endured; I survived and understood. The one gift I was given in that war was an awakening.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  * * * I am extremely grateful to Akashic Books and its publisher, Johnny Temple, for bringing out this new edition of Born on the Fourth of July at such a crucial moment in our nation’s history. For the past two years we have been involved in a tragic and senseless war in Iraq. As of this writing, over 1,500 Americans have died and more than 11,000 have been wounded, while tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, have been killed. I have watched in horror the mirror image of another Vietnam unfolding. So many similarities, so many things said that remind me of that war thirty years ago which left me paralyzed for the rest of my life. Refusing to learn from our experiences in Vietnam, our government continues to pursue a policy of deception, distortion, manipulation, and denial, doing everything it can to hide from the American people their true intentions and agenda in Iraq. The flag-draped caskets of our dead begin their long and sorrowful journeys home hidden from public view, while the Iraqi casualties are not even considered worth counting—some estimate as many as 100,000 have been killed so far. The paraplegics, amputees, burn victims, the blinded and maimed, shocked and stunned, brain damaged and psychologically stressed, now fill our veterans hospitals. Most of them were not even born when I came home wounded to the Bronx V.A. in 1968. The same lifesaving medical-evacuation procedures that kept me alive in Vietnam are bringing home a whole new generation of severely maimed from Iraq. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.), which afflicted so many of us after Vietnam, is just now beginning to appear among soldiers recently returned from the current war. For some, the agony and suffering, the sleepless nights, anxiety attacks, and awful bouts of insomnia, loneliness, alienation, anger, and rage, will last for decades, if not their whole lives. They will be trapped in a permanent nightmare of that war, of killing another man, a child, watching a friend die . . . fighting against an enemy that can never be seen, while at any moment someone—a child, a woman, an old man, anyone —might kill you. These traumas return home with us and we carry them, sometimes hidden, for agonizing decades. They deeply impact our daily lives, and the lives of those closest to us. To kill another human being, to take another life out of this world with one pull of a trigger, is something that never leaves you. It is as if a part of you dies with them. If you choose to keep on living, there may be a healing, and even hope and happiness again—but that scar and memory and sorrow will be with you forever. Some of these veterans are showing up at homeless shelters around our country, while others have begun to courageously speak out against the senselessness and insanity of this war and the leaders who sent them there.