WE DID NOT GROW up religious. Being born into an Irish-Italian family, growing up in East Hartford, Connecticut, I was expected to attend catechism, follow through with First Communion and Confirmation. Yet, I have little memory of attending Mass on Sundays as a family. In grammar school, after class, we walked from McCartin School on Handel Road to Blessed Sacrament Church on Millbrook, where I studied the sacraments and, when the sisters weren’t looking, carved my initials, same as my catechetical classmates, into the wooden pews. Unlike most Catholic youths, however, I severed my involvement with the Church before I was confirmed (when I realized drinking beer from a keg in the woods did far more for my soul than Jesus could). It wasn’t until my midthirties that I was able to sort everything out and understand the grace within the Catholic Church did not have to be muddled by those larger, divisive social issues driving scores of cradle Catholics away. It was the church’s archaic roots in Judaism and its dedication to custom—love that incense—I felt most at home with. Sure, I was repulsed by the disregard for human life that any pedophile priest displayed, but I was able to set aside those feelings for the sake of my faith—for which, not long after my conversations with Jesperson began, took a serious hit as questions began to surface.
Going to Mass was a Band-Aid holding me together. I leaned on it when I felt the need to bring some light into the darkness, and my dialogue with Jesperson had manifested into physical ailments. Confession, simple meditation and prayer, fasting (we have such an obsession with food in this country, the burn of hunger once in a while, for me, keeps it real), Penance (because, of course, I hate myself), Holy Days of Obligation, and the sheer silence, relaxation, and peaceful solemnity I experienced while sitting before, during, and after Mass, became a balm, keeping my anxiety levels, diverticulitis episodes, and panic attacks to a minimum.
As Jesperson and I discussed his demons, feeling I was getting closer to my Jane Doe goals, my semidaily Mass routine, which I’d been accustomed to for years before I met him, seemed to work in tandem with something else. In order to help me quit smoking in 2007, my doctor put me on .5 mils of Lexapro, an antidepressant. “It’ll keep you calm and help to alleviate the stress of breaking the habit.” And it did the job: I quit and never picked up a cigarette again. Yet, after the whirlwind my health got swept up into not long after Dark Minds started shooting in 2010, after prescribing yet another round of antibiotics for an “episode,” my doctor wondered if upping the dosage to .10 mils a day might help me achieve stability. “But I don’t want to take your edge or intensity away,” he warned. “I want you to stay who you are.”
The .10 mils seemed to be the magic number. Along with Mass, prayer, and a renewed dedication to lifting weights, the balance I sought arrived in small chunks. I also accepted that along the path of a journey, such as the one I’d embarked upon, especially when seeking specific answers, you have to prepare yourself for the reality that they might not be there in the end. No matter how hard it is we want to make sense of what happens in life, the violence and evil perpetrated by one human being against another, sometimes you have to be content that moving forward is the only response, and the answers lie in the fact that you were willing to take the journey to begin with and, in the end, saw it through.
Still, as I continued believing that I was halfway to heaven, making it all somehow work, it soon became apparent I was, in fact, only a few steps from hell.
30
NOSTALGIA AS CAMOUFLAGE
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the
remembrance of things as they were.”
—Marcel Proust
MY BROTHER CRUMBLED AFTER DIANE’S MURDER. HER FUNERAL was one of the more somber moments of my life. It was pouring rain. Buckets. A hard, slanted rain that makes a lot of noise. Everything drenched. It was gloomy and overcast, like Seattle. Crawling all over the funeral home and later, at the cemetery, were plainclothes cops. Looking for what, I do not know. Not once was Mark questioned or asked to produce an alibi, as far as I was told. His and Diane’s daughter, Meranda, was a month shy of her seventeenth birthday. At thirteen, Meranda had walked out of her parents’ lives, fed up with babysitting them, and went to live with an aunt.
The two boys, my nephews Mark and Tyler, seemed resolute; being so young (Mark Jr., thirteen, and Tyler, eight), they responded to what happened by putting up an emotional barrier. My brother Tommy, whom the boys were living with at the time of Diane’s murder, called them down from their room. My mother and stepfather had come over to break the news.
“Your mother has been in an accident,” my stepfather told them, leaning on the old cliché we gravitate to in times of distress because we are so scared to face death in any form.
“Can we visit her?” Mark Jr. asked.
“I’m sorry, we can’t—she’s gone. She died.”
“Can I go play now?” Tyler asked.
At the funeral home, before heading to the cemetery, Meranda read a eulogy she’d prepared. Afterward, she stood at peace behind the lectern while a song she and Diane used to sing to each other played: Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”
“My mom always sends me signs that she’s near,” Meranda said later. “That same song played in the dressing room as I tried on my wedding dress.”
Most everyone sat motionless and stunned, many crying. I thought: Here is a young girl, headstrong and unwavering, much like her mother, honoring the woman who’d given birth to her at nearly the same age she was now eulogizing her.
There is so much of Diane in Meranda. Not only do they look alike, but they share the same hard-nosed will and temperamental drive, only Meranda harnessed hers into a path of devout Christianity, teaching, marriage, and motherhood to three children. On that day, as she read her eulogy and stood strong in front of everyone, Whitney belting out that familiar, sad song, I could feel the final arc of that “vicious cycle” we all hear about, one of which Meranda had been locked in, dissolve. Meranda was a survivor. Some bumps and bruises along the way, but she would come through this.
As we headed to Silver Lane Cemetery in East Hartford, less than a mile down the road from a restaurant/bar, The Family Affair, that my parents once owned, and the cape-style home Diane grew up in with a brother, Terry, and sister, Kelly, the rain came down sideways, in piercing strands. As I look back now, it feels as though I’d stepped into a scene from The Killing. Dark. Damp. Cold. Raw. Everyone suspiciously gazing at each other: What the hell happened? I see the memory in slow motion.
My brother wore sunglasses, an empty shell of a man. He had to be held up by a friend on each arm, as if his body had given up. I’d been mourning a marriage of seven years, on top of all else that had happened. I was sober a year by then, so I had a different outlook on life. But losing my oldest brother because he was no longer emotionally available, and now this, a murder in the family, most everyone thunderstruck and crushed, no answers in sight, felt final, the pain so crippling my legs heavy as stone. This was not an end to a chapter, but the closing of a book.
Still, as I stood there afterward, thinking about our lives, an intense feeling of closure came up. This could be a new beginning. In the months and years ahead, our family could step back, mourn in whatever way he or she chose, and hit restart.
Hope. I was beginning to see it had always been available.
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