Belonging by Jill Fordyce

Author:Jill Fordyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2023-11-03T17:08:08+00:00

Back at work the next morning, Jenny found a pile of messages and some new files covering the neat desk she’d left before the wedding. She was scheduled to be on the dependency court calendar, where typical cases involved children living in trailers full of garbage with drug-addled parents. The cases were difficult and emotional, but they presented Jenny with the opportunity to do precisely the type of work she believed she was called to do.

Her decision to practice law, and more specifically, to become a public defender, was rooted in her faith, the seeds planted while she sat in a church pew with Nonna and Uncle Gino. Every Sunday, she was told about a covenant of love and justice that called for the faithful to act as Jesus did, to bring glad tidings to the poor and liberty to captives. She was taught that Jesus identified with the hungry, the poor, the strangers, and the least of these. There was an obligation to reach out to others with love, to pursue justice, to treat all life with dignity. When she was around twelve, she saw the nuns on the news, singing outside the prison walls the night before an execution. That linked the concepts of justice and faith for her in a tangible way, and she decided that the best way for her to live out her faith was to be a defender of people who could not defend themselves. She not only felt called to do this work, but believed that it suited her. She understood the pain of being silenced and powerless, of being defenseless.

There were times in law school when she doubted her decision to pursue a career in social justice. She was tens of thousands of dollars in debt from student loans; she lived in a small studio apartment in a dilapidated building; and also, few of her classmates were on this same path. Most were competing for internships with high-powered law firms, and while they spent the summers going to Giants games and fancy lunches and working in tall buildings, she toiled away in the back room of a makeshift poverty law office in a strip mall in San Jose.

Every summer, she interned for a nonprofit organization that provided home visits to poor and elderly clients who wanted their wills done. They had no assets to speak of, but it gave them peace of mind to be able to name someone to close up their house after they were gone, to give away a wedding band, or arrange for the care of a beloved pet. Jenny saw the inside of homes where people lived all day in front of a TV, where they asked her more questions than necessary just to have someone around a little longer. She was patient with her clients’ need for human contact, always allotting extra time for simple tasks. She knew what it was like being alone all day. During her months at home with valley fever, she was sustained by the visits from Nonna, Heather, Henry, and Uncle Gino.

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