Grief's Second Mile: Beyond the First Year by Doug Manning

Author:Doug Manning [Doug Manning]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2015-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

Death by Someone’s Hand

When I speak of grief being delayed, I do not mean the sadness and tears are not there. They are not only there, they are overwhelming and devastating. There is no way to describe the pain or how helpless s person feels as they are unable to stop or control the tears. But the work of grief, the long journey towards a way to cope with the grief, is crushed under the load of the emotions and all of the walk toward healing is put on hold for a much later date.

This is especially true when a loved one is murdered. All these families can do is hurt and try to survive until the perpatrator is caught and the case is solved. They are grieving, of course, and need someone to walk with them and listen to them. But, chances are, any lessening of the pain or tears will be quite limited. The mind is dominated and fixated on finding the one who did this and seeing that they are properly punished. These grief journeys are extremely long and improvement is very slow.

Having the person charged does not free the family to think about anything else. The next hurdle is the trial, which adds to their frustration instead of bringing relief.

For the last fifteen years I have walked with a mother whose daughter was murdered. Recently she told me that when we first talked together I began explaining the concept of significance; that we needed to establish the significance of her daughter’s life. She said she did not understand that until she had to sit through the trial. I remember sitting there as well. The attorney for the man who murdered her daughter went to great lengths trying to play on the sympathy of the jurors because of the very bad home life the young man had experienced. My friend said she was screaming inside, wanting to rise and tell the court who the guy had killed. She wanted them to know how wonderful her daughter was and how valuable she was, not only to her family, but to society itself. It was horrible to just sit there, knowing no one would tell her side of the story.

Victims’ families become victims in our courtrooms. They have no rights. They cannot speak until the trial is over and then the speeches are limited or edited. I watched the state bring in a small busload of folks to stand as support for the murderer and take them to lunch each day at the state’s expense, while the family of the victim sat on their own with no one to tell their story. Grief and justice sometimes do not live in the same room.

In my friend’s case, it was a long time after the trial before we could do much more with her grief journey than cry and mourn the loss; too much anger to work through, too many questions that could not be answered, too much blame to be analyzed.

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