In the Bleak Midwinter

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

An odd thing happens to me sometimes when it snows. I remember standing at the tiny grave of my friend’s six-month-old baby who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I can’t recall if she wore black, but I vividly remember looking down and seeing sandals on her feet–no nylons. Her toes were turning blue as she walked across the frozen ice from the hearse to the grave. It was so cold.

And then I remember coming out of Oxbow County Jail with a skiff of snow covering the ground. The tall fluorescent lights shining impersonally down on me and a small Hispanic woman, both of us alone after the ½ hour we had been allowed to visit with our sons. The snowflakes swirled around us, but neither of us noticed.

“Not what you expected when you had that beautiful baby boy years ago was it?” I said to the woman as I passed her on our way to the parking lot in the icy wind.

She looked up at me, the tears on her cheeks reflecting the flood lights around us. “No, Señora,” she said. “No.”

Oxbow was a lonely place. Visitors were required to arrive at least 30 minutes early, secure all possessions in small lockers and then sit on concrete benches jutting out from the sides of a waiting room with walls almost as high as the room was long. There were narrow windows about 8 feet above the floor to let in natural light. No books, no magazines, nothing but time to worry until a deputy called us down the long hall to the room where our children or spouses or friends were waiting behind a wide, thick sheet of glass. We each sat on small round stools and picked up the wall-mounted phones. Across from us, inmates in orange jumpsuits shuffled in and sat down, identical phones lining the glass on their side.

Conversations were slow to start. Along the row next to me, there were always weeping wives or mothers and occasionally a small wide-eyed child or two. I would tell my son the events of the week; what his siblings were doing; whether or not I’d heard from his court-assigned attorney; and how much money I’d put on his jail account so he could buy a toothbrush or stamps.

I was always relieved when he was in jail. At least then I knew he wasn’t lying behind some bar using trash cans as shelter from the cold, or unconscious from an overdose in an empty parking lot where a deputy sheriff had found him and administered CPR to save his life. Jail was warm. And there was food. But when you visit every week for months on end, jail is also cold, bleak, and lonely–no matter what the season of the year.

Once my son called at two o’clock in the morning; he was being released. (Another reason to keep money on his account. Inmates had to pay to use the phone. Some had no one to provide cash, so they did without phone, paper, pencils, envelopes, stamps–or any other way to connect with home.)  The county needed his jail cell for someone who’s crime was more serious than the credit card fraud he committed to get drug money. The county literally threw him out. He was waiting for us on a street corner in the middle of the night.

My son died of pneumonia on a gray day at the end of January thirteen years ago. He was 33. His third child was only 21 days old. His veins had been so compromised by years of drug use, his body simply gave up. There was nothing left with which to fight. It was cold the night we got the call and arrived amid the flashing emergency lights of half a dozen vehicles. We buried him a few days later in a cemetery covered with snow. When we visit on the anniversary of his death, we have to shovel ice off the marker where he lays.

In this country today there is a layer of rage igniting many of our social interactions—from politics to sports to health and back again. But every story begins at home with a mother and a child. There is not a single story without its tender places. That’s what makes us human. If only we could remember that before we judge or vilify someone else’s child and send him or her out into the cold.