Having Your Day in Court

 Having Your Day in Court



Wednesday evening, I made my dinner and settled in to watch the latest episode of Handmaid's Tale. I will be thinking about that episode for some time. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but Elisabeth Moss just nailed her performance as June in this one. There was testimony involved, and even though I've watched more dramatized trial scenes than I could possibly recall - and have litigated a number of bench trials myself - something about her statement really drove home the idea of "having one's day in court." Justice is the end goal, of course, but in that moment it's about something different but equally powerful. It's about standing in a room with the person who hurt you, and he has to stay there and listen to you speak your truth. He may deny it when you're done, but for those moments you know and he knows that what you're saying absolutely happened.

I never got my day in court, and I never will. But I did get my moment in another way. The man who subjected me to inhuman treatment was my uncle, married to one of my dad's sisters. After I had finally told my parents what he did to me and we had cut off contact with him and his family, my dad and I happened to spot his vehicle in the parking lot of a local restaurant. It infuriated me that he was moving freely about my hometown. So while it wasn't exactly the confrontation/revenge scenario of my dreams, I went in to the restaurant, stood right in his line of sight, and Stared Him Down. He looked away as soon as our eyes met, and he never looked back at me. He couldn't. Because he knew. He knew what he did, and he knew it didn't end me. 

I won't ever get my day in court because on this date in 2013, he died. My family had been estranged from him and his wife for almost 20 years by then. But even though he was essentially dead to me already, some part of me needed to know, for sure, that he was not just merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. 

So the night of his visitation, I drove back to my hometown, sat in my car in the parking lot next to the funeral home, and waited for everyone to leave. I went inside while the staff was vacuuming and managed to see him lying there in his casket. This may not say much for who I am as a human being, but it was one of the top 5 best moments of my life.

2 days later I watched both him and his wife lowered into the ground. (She died a couple of days before him. Her funeral had to be postponed because he was found dead that morning.) I've never been back. Some day I'll visit. Just once. He worked for Pepsi, and his house was filled with all kinds of stuff emblazoned with their logo. So one day I plan to pour a big ol' bottle of Coke on his grave.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

That Bitch Wants to Kill Me. She Does.

Image
On the surface, it may seem like I have next to nothing in common with this character from TheWire. We look nothing alike. She's describing life experiences that are a world away from anything I've lived through. Our ages are significantly different. But in many ways, I identify very strongly with what she's saying.  I don't think most food addicts turn to such desperate measures to get money to feed our addiction. This doesn't make me any better than this character. It just so happens that heroin is illegal and therefore expensive, and in America, junk food is cheap and available pretty much everywhere, any time of the day or night. But I 100% get what she's saying about her inner addict and how that bitch wants to kill her. Because I have one of those, too, and she definitely wants to kill me. It's recently come to my attention that certain people in my life are surprised she hasn't already finished the job. (This isn't helpful, by the way. Nor are...
Read more

La vida es ahora

Image
A dear friend said this to me over the weekend. La vida es ahora . Life is now.  I had one of those wonderful afternoons where you are talking with people who just get you, who accept you, who've been through it  with you, and everyone loses all track of time. We talked for seven hours straight about all kinds of different things. At one point, I was expressing misgivings about a life change I've been considering, listing various things that could change in the future which would make this change impractical. My one friend, who is fluent in Spanish, finally said, "You keep talking about 'if this' and 'what about that?' but la vida es ahora. " We happen to be only a week apart in age, and we've been talking quite a bit lately about this stage of life we're in, which involves considering what we want the rest of our lives to look like. I think a lot of people my age are thinking about this in terms of their children being almost-adults and the ac...
Read more

Fat is a Feminist F*cked Up Issue

Image
Many years ago, I read an article which I am pretty sure was titled, "Et tu, Camryn?" My memory tells me it was in Bitch  magazine, although I can find no evidence of this online. But I have an almost-eidetic memory, and even though it's declining a bit with age (I'm 47), I still trust it on this point. The article was a condemnation of Ms. Mannheim for losing weight. Granted, she had written an early fat acceptance memoir ( Wake Up, I'm Fat! ). But the article was written as if she had betrayed all the other fat girls and women in the world, and perhaps even feminism itself, by losing weight. Isn't it funny how, apparently, a woman's reproductive choices should be kept private between her and her doctor*, but not her weight? The ad featuring this young woman dancing around in her underwear  while eating ice cream was all over my Hulu for a while.   During previous attempts to get my eating under control (and, OK, lose weight), I've had nightmares wher...
Read more