Justice will only be achieved when those who are not injured by crime are as indignant as those who are.

08-14-01 about midnight

Hey Bekah-La, I started working this evening. Played pool and if you are helping me how's about you do it from the other side (wink)? My record is 0-6 but I did concentrate a bit better. Probably getting out of town? I still dread the office. Very much in fact. I love you, Bekah...my dream: to speak on your 22nd birthday, of your justice achieved in so many ways - to make a book, to have all the time and means to attend to a project that will save us both, Bekah - and maybe even save others.

I will meet the man in charge of your defense tomorrow. That's how I think of him. Not HER prosecutor, but BEKAH'S defender. Memo: brochures. My MADDwoman will be there and we'll meet. Your stepmother will be there with a pen and an X or two for me. Second memo: Invoice from Green Hills. I had wanted to actually be able to handle that. But as John said the day after you died, "Don't worry, Mom - everyone knows you don't have any money."

Bekah there is hardly anything I would not do to hear you laugh right now. You slip away, over time. I believe I understand why some mothers settle down in Despair. Recovery means deciding to be more important than your baby. It is foreign, engenders guilt in the heart even though the mind can see that no demand issues from the grave. When I chose to have and keep you Bekah I accepted a sacred trust. My esteem has been limitless my devotion true as well as germane to all of my best beliefs about myself.

My many redemptions have always come via you, John, Andy, and Rory, my self-respect rising and falling on the weather within these relationships. "My babies are ribbons...." Sure I've always been a woman, a writer, a feminist and humanist...primarily though at least as far as what I thought was the most descriptive of any worthiness I might claim...your brothers and Bekah, you. If I cooked for you score one for me - bathed you nightly that bought me a drink - if while driving I juggled conversations among us all successfully enough that we felt that warm connection by the time I parked the car - I was okay. Now I feel as though I must refer to the past - which if I carry on too long will mean I'm wallowing, and if I leave it at your grave will diminish me to the skin-deep "mad chic" lump of nothing I used to be before I was a mother.

I am bone-tired and not explaining this very well. But you get it right? To recover will be to lose you; if I never "get over" your death I can visit your grave every other day for life, nurture this raw grief that has supplanted your human presence and RAISE it like a child...now that would be devotion, right? If I do recover from losing my only, much loved and already missed, beautiful both out and in, little girl, will it mean I really don't love you as much as I claim?

If I eventually catch up to a future without you and discover my lust and my joy and my hopes for happiness were not permanently destroyed when you died, will it mean that I did not hold you as dear as I thought I did?

And I know I did. Plus have learned since July 19 the eternity of the love I bear toward you. My girl, my only girl. Bekah. Surely it was as infinite on July 18 as it is today - always was, from the first acknowledgement of your conception. But it has been necessary only since you died to access that eternity/infinity, just to feel like me.

I am the mother of four children - one girl three boys. My girl is Bekah. How old? My kids are 25, 21, 17, and 9, all girls except for three.

All alive except for she.

This hypothesis among others is not healthy I think. And yet the scenario is certain to occur time and again for as long as I keep living...because you are not alive. You are dead, murdered, mowed down at the threshold of your LIFE, tragically, suddenly, unexpectedly. WRONGLY. You were elsewhere as I thought perhaps...amen

I'm falling out again Bek! and I swear I keep losing it just as I am just about to NAIL it.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Okay I read over it. It is close. When we gather at your grave to memorialize you it will be your 22nd birthday. But you won't be 22. Or 23, 24, 25, 50, 75, dead naturally. All of your children will never even get born. No issue. Oh, Bekah, this reality is so painful.

So in the future while chatting with strangers what will I say? The subject of family certain to come up - In 2005 I will be 50, and your 25th birthday will come and go and you won't be 25 - you'll be dead. How baby girl can you be dead?

Will I ever be okay to say, my daughter would be 25 today, but we lost her four years ago...? without launching into the story of you and how you were killed by an ANIMAL as you innocently crossed the street? without going into indignant passionate details, or singing your praises, cataloguing your phenomena, crying in spite of myself?

You will always be murdered, and that is worse than dead. For a long time, maybe even years, your justice will be my purpose in life. And it may elude us - us meaning Detective P, the DA, my MADDwoman, me, Paul, Andy, you.

No, not you...your justice will afford you the peace you eminently deserve - I know it will be. Somehow I feel that even if her skank lawyer and many bucks allow her to escape the earthly consequences of her crime, you will rest easy, satisfied that every human effort possible was pursued to that end. Whether or not the trial's outcome is fair, your justice will be exacted on the other side. She really is too old to sacrifice all the years she robbed you of. Not to mention your marriage, your children, your career. All the love and laughter that would have and should have defined those years and kept you as happily and vitally engaged in your life as you were. Until she took you out of it as offhandedly as squishing an ant.

Whether any justice will be achieved in this dimension I do not know, and that doubt torments me along with the mental flashbacks of the horror she committed when she murdered you. My desire that she be punished here on earth is intense and not only for your justice. I need to know she is punished for what she did to my only girl, and for what she did to me. For robbing me of my girl, for robbing my sons of their sister, for robbing my grandchildren of their Auntie Bek. For your grandparents, your friends, your family-to-be that you can never have. She took it all and nobody had a choice but her.

I have seen her. She doesn't have a clue or appear to give a rat's ass about the profound scope of her crime as far as I could see. The time she goes away for represents justice for all of her victims alive and dead. Even so, if she dies in prison ten or twenty years from now, your loved ones will still be missing you. I want to know that whatever is left of her useless life will be spent miserably in a cramped cell being treated as contemptuously as she treated you. That will be paying for what she did...I might be able to forgive her after that.

08-15-01 wee hours

A big sound came from the kitchen and I forgot to say AMEN. So AMEN. I gotta get in the shower and to San Pedro. I love you Bekah...on the radio KROQ just now a song: I will be OK, OK, I will be all right...amen Love eternal Bekah-Marie Bales Zask! Mom

Later...

Hi sweetie. It is somewhere close. And I must work or we fall off the earth's edge and what good will that do you? I love you - I called your grandparents today. They are utterly bereft and keep counting the money for some reason. Miriam asked why didn't she just go home? and I said Miriam, look. We are not guilty - not me, you, Paul, Jesse, Bekah - one person is.

Are you giving her real, real bad dreams? Good. Amen

Paul thinks you went into her windshield face first. I dunno. But the story slowly comes out...I told the detectives I just don't want to be surprised when it comes to trial. This especially applies to what happened to you Sweetie. Now I know your heart still beat until you were at the hospital. I don't agonize too too much because I know that your brains were left in the street...ohhhhhhh

horror ----------- ------------ horror ----------- ------------

Paul told me his story. He made me laugh out loud too Bekah! "What's the dell?" he went into shock and when they told him you had been "pronounced," he said, "So - is she okay?"

Duh. Christ do I remember that - when my dad died:

Me: What is it? Is it Daddy? Is Daddy hurt?
Carolyn: He's DEAD!
Me: Who's dead?

Swear to god bekah. So much to learn from you. My longing for you will never be satisfied though. I guess that's just one of those things I will carry with me until I die. When you die do you still have to think and think? I sometimes wish I did not think so much....

Amen. Bekah I love you with all my heart and soul and my glands and follicles too

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