What was it like to be a child of Gus Voorhees?
And for your mother—what do you think it was like for Jenna Matheson to be Gus Voorhees’s wife?
Were you aware as children of the many threats against your father’s life?
Were you aware of acts of vandalism, death threats, bomb threats directed against the women’s centers with which your father was associated? And how did your mother react to these, so far as you know?
In the Free Choice movement Gus Voorhees has been called a “great man”—“a brave martyr for the cause”; but in the Pro-Life movement Gus Voorhees has been called, for example, by the conservative Catholic philosopher Willard Wolhman, a “thoroughly evil, amoral man”—a “mass murderer as evil as a Nazi war criminal.” How do you and your family feel about such extreme reactions to Dr. Voorhees?
How was the news broken to you and your siblings, that your father had been killed on November 2, 1999, at the Broome County, Ohio, Women’s Center in Muskegee Falls, Ohio?
Were you informed, at the time, that Dr. Voorhees had been assassinated by a lone gunman associated with the right-wing Christian organizations Army of God and Operation Rescue?—or did you learn these details at a later date, when you were older?
Were you allowed—in time—to read about your father’s death, or to watch TV news or documentaries? Did you attend any of the several memorials for Dr. Voorhees in Ann Arbor, Lansing, Detroit?
Was your father’s death a terrible shock to you, your brother Darren, and your sister Melissa? Did your loss draw you closer together—or did your loss have the opposite effect?
Your mother Jenna Matheson has refused all requests for interviews following your father’s death—is this for reasons of privacy, for reasons of (mental) health, or is your mother preparing a memoir of her life with Gus Voorhees and is not inclined to share personal memories with the media?
Where does your mother live at the present time? (Are you aware that mail sent to Jenna Matheson at any former address is returned to the sender as “undeliverable”?)
Are you “close” to your mother at the present time?
Do you (and your family) feel that a sentence of death is appropriate for the assassin of your father? Will such a sentence bring “closure” to you (and your family)?
Dr. Voorhees was an adamant and outspoken opponent of the death penalty—are you?
REVENGE
God help me to be strong.
Help me to be cruel like the world.
WE WERE CHILDREN made mean by grief. We were children with wizened little crabapple hearts and death’s-head grins. You would do well, if you were a nice child, to stay out of our way.
I SAID, WHY should they have a father and a mother? I hate them.
Sometimes I said, Why should they be happy? I hate them.
WE CONSPIRED TO kidnap their little wiry-haired dog who barked too much. We fantasized hiding their Airedale they called Mutt, in someplace where they wouldn’t think to look, and we would feed Mutt, and Mutt would come to love us. And Darren said if Mutt doesn’t cooperate we kill him.
Cooperate how?—(I had to ask.)
By obeying us.
Obeying us—how? (I had to ask. I needed to hear my brother articulate what we would do, to feel the thrill of knowing we might do it.) By doing what we command him, stupid. By wagging his tail and loving us.
It was exciting and alarming, to think (seriously?) of kidnapping our neighbors’ dog. For these were neighbors who’d befriended us—who’d taken pity on us, and admired our mother. At times my heart would stop, and beat hard and start again, when Darren stooped over me saying in his whisper-voice—What’ll we do? We kill him.
Kill him—how? (Had to ask.)
Same way I’m gonna kill you, asshole!
And Darren would pummel me, and slap my face once, twice, three times, not really hard slaps (of which my brother was more than capable) but swift stinging slaps of humiliation, that left my cheeks burning and made tears spring from my eyes but I did not cry.
It was crucial, I did not cry.
Of course, nothing came of our plot to kidnap Mutt. Nothing came of our wish for revenge. We were too old to be children, in fact. You would need special eyes to see how grief was rotting us from the inside-out, stunted children, ugly troll-children it would have been a mercy to shoot with a sniper’s rifle—one, two.
“EVIL”—“HEAVEN”
Good news, kids! There is no evil.”
This was the way he talked. Sometimes.
Went on to assure us there’s no Devil, no Satan, no Hell.
There is—(maybe)—Heaven but it isn’t anywhere far away or anything special.
And we demanded to know, why isn’t Heaven anything special?
(You always hear of Heaven being so special.)
And Daddy said, because Heaven is just two things: human love, and human patience.