Too Much Doubt

When they killed Troy Davis, I didn’t recover. I read the news for one thing. I saw the pictures of people weeping on the ground outside of the prison. I wept in my lover’s bed because too much is happening.

The radio said that Martine Correia fought for ten years, working through breast cancer, to get her brother free. I heard the woman whose husband died expected peace to come from the execution. Expected to find closure and give condolences to the Davis family because now they would know her loss. They would finally know her pain. I wondered how that distance is created and maintained. Why the sister can’t go to the wife and say “I see you and our pain has always been the same. We are in this together, you know? The enemies we have chosen are not even the enemies. The enemies are bigger than you or I or him or us. The enemy is the distance between.”

All year, some friends worked on building a garden across the street. They named it Crashed Cart community garden because these shopping carts kept ending up there. It’s really big and beautiful, and wedged between two houses with enough space for the sun to shine down. There is a pile of squash sitting on the cupboard, waiting for Tuesday’s feast. All the neighbors were invited to share in the harvest of the first year. Beans, corn, carrots, onions, green on top of green on top of green. Some things are below the ground, and some things stand tall in the open. There are beds laid out with bricks, and trees being tended, and sunflowers, and vines crawling up sticks and walls. Can you picture it?

The day that Troy Davis was killed, a surveyor came by the garden lot. He told Crystal that the lot had been bought and they were going to start building a house there in October, which is ten days from now.

I always thought that if we planted seeds, people could respond. Like if some kind of beautiful or real or true thing was laid out, people could respond. But it’s the distance thing. Someone came by while the veggies were ripening and thought, “I will build a house here. The land is cheap. This place is for me to have.” Like I always thought if a million people said there is too much doubt, they could respond. They could pause and question about taking a man’s life. About the bigger meaning. But it’s the distance thing. Someone believed that technicalities and legalities or making some kind of political statement was important.

That’s why I can’t recover. There's not enough of this distance work happening that I know about. I imagined painting boards that say “This lot was bought without care or notice for living things.” But it’s not really enough.

I realized what a high maintenance lifestyle I'm involved in. Always needing to tend and regroup, at any moment having to adjust, quit, start over. No matter how much energy was put in or how we thought our seeds were growing or how we thought maybe, just maybe our voices were loud enough. I reached a point a while ago, though some people (cough cough Stephanie) would say it was happening all along. At some point, I knew too many stories and I had too much information to not understand what was really happening. The total destruction and where it is all coming from. The distance.

I guess it’s funny how in times of overwhelm, my emotional response always comes back to, “well, these people are insane right? To kill these living things? To not be able to see them. They have to be insane right? They are like insane Right?

The Spectrum

Dear Queens,

Now don't get me wrong, pain is relative. The amount of pain we're holding, sure it's on a spectrum. But you can't minimize it to me, and you know I won't let you. You can never minimize yourself to me, because you are all I know and we are everything.

What I am trying to say here, is that each time we find ourselves in crisis, I notice how we get out of it. We are always getting better at getting out of it. Each time we are falling, there's this little window, this little ledge that we can grab and then we are back. But we are not just back. We are better. We have all of our experiences added up and we are growing.

Today I got my first suicide note in the mail. From a stranger. He asked me to do some things for him, and told me not to worry about him, because by the time I got his letter, he would be gone. What could I do? I called Bret. He checked the website. Told me he didn't make it out. Told me the guy had been relocated to Graterford, probably some special needs mental health unit. I tried to take some comfort in that, but the problem is I know that it means nothing. I know that Secure Special Needs Unit means nothing and sometimes it means worse than nothing.

I wrote a letter to his brother cause he asked me to, then I wrote the guy back. And then I went downstairs to the photocopy machine and made a copy of my response. I wrote on the top of my letter "Sample Response to Suicide Note" so the next time someone says the words, "I just got a suicide note, like, I'm not sure how to respond", I will walk over to the file cabinet, and I will pull out my letter, and I will say, "here is what I did. Here is all I could think to do at the time but try to bring yourself to it, okay? Are you going to sign your name? If you don't think you can follow up with this person, try giving the letter to someone else or put it back in the mailbox. What do you think you should do? Do you have any ideas?"

It's hard to know. It's hard to know what to do when a stranger writes you a suicide note, and it feels insane to put my response in a file cabinet. Absolutely insane. As if we have a text book here. As if we have a process for this. But maybe the practice, the practice is what makes it all possible. For us to fall and then come back. We're getting so good at practicing falling and then coming back that it's impossible for me not to believe.

Love,
A