Do not go where the path may lead, go instead
where there is no path and leave a trail.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sara spoke to me last night. Or I should say, nudged me. It may sound crazy to some but since her death in 1997, I have, at times, had the distinct feeling that the spirit of a 9-year-old girl who was brutally raped and killed was trying to tell me something. Perhaps it’s just the hallucinations or mind games that come with immersion in a life other than your own. If you do your job well, covering a murder can consume you. Another reporter might not have had the same odd feeling of connection to the case that I did but for some reason it was unmistakably there. I returned to the field where she was found many times in the months after her death. I saw her face in quiet times alone, forever smiling and holding that baseball bat. In death, she seemed supremely content and happy to me, not at all suffering the kind of tortured existence some may imagine for the victim of a violent end. I saw her rising above and beyond her short life and tragic death to a place of understanding, compassion even. It sounds nuts even as I type the words, then oddly reassuring as I re-read them.
So there she was again last night. Funny how it didn’t even occur to me as I turned down her street that she might be there. I was returning home after dropping off a friend and rather than go back to the main road, I followed the winding Shady Vale Road deeper into the lush, tree-lined valley that gives it its name. Except at night, it felt dark and foreboding. I wanted to turn back but felt supremely silly so I kept going, right past the dirt path that led to the field where she was left to die. I could only glance, a knot in my stomach, and keep going. The feelings of Sara’s presence had never frightened me but tonight they were oddly unwelcome. I knew without any doubt why. Her memory was somehow challenging me to go to the dark places of my own reality and do whatever I needed to do to find my own place of understanding and compassion.
So I return to the computer after another two-week hiatus. I know I do not have far to go in completing this narrative, at least for now. There is an end in sight so why is it so hard to approach it? Perhaps putting an issue to rest is even more difficult than clinging to it as if to a life preserver. Our stories become so much a part of who we are maybe we are afraid of what we will find if we choose to relinquish them, even a little. In Alcoholics Anonymous, this is referred to as the “hole in the donut.” What will be left of me if I give everything up? Will I simply be like the hole in the donut? What will I be if I give up the pain and fear and insecurity that have plagued me since I was a child? Hmm. Perhaps then I can be what I’m meant to be, whatever that is. Perhaps these feelings, rather than protecting me from any harm, have instead held me back from true experience, kept me empty rather than safe. I’ll never know until I see what it’s like to live without them. My!
next steps are clear. When – and whether - I choose to take them is up to me.