Fading Fast

12 February 2020

Far quicker that I would have anticipated, the faces of my clientele are fading. Seemingly soon their personal stories of agony and asserted redemption will be gone.  Amazing how the stories quickly slip away.  No matter how strange the tales I heard, it is clear that I simply won’t be able to hold on to individual stories without some triggering event to make me return to a face or an odd set of circumstances.  

Without a case packet before me, I am not daily reminded of all the screwed-up things alcoholics and dope fiends do. My morning case review was a refresher in their many attempts at denial of personable responsibility. Invariably the mannerisms, the twitching, the inadvertent cursing and the sweating, would take me back to someone else I had seen before. Lacking that daily display of tics and involuntary muscle movements, I have no reason to even think about all those 30,000 cases.

Over twenty years I have heard people tell me on at least one hundred occasions they killed someone while drunk, high or both. Invariably the person who was killed was a friend or a family member. For such people their worlds had exploded and not matter how much time has passed they were always going to be shunned by family and friends.  Most had done at least a year incarcerated and some had served as much as ten years inside.

Most of the time I was told the decedent was also intoxicated.  Rarely was the person who died a stranger. In cases where strangers died, the person telling the story often would break down completely losing it. Sobbing, and with their head on the table, they would stop their practiced narrative and ask for a tissue and pant for breath.  

The vast majority of the people telling me their tales of drunkenness and death would be clearly and truly remorseful.  You could see the tremors as they talked about running into the dead person’s wife at the local IGA.  Often, they would have had community service imposed upon them as a term of parole, and now many years after the death, they still volunteered at the animal shelter or the literacy coalition.

In ten percent of the cases the person telling me their story would not provide me details of the death.  Some would tell me they had no memory due to a traumatic injury or intense intoxication.  If it was a TBI they usually had some proofs of long-term therapy or hospitalization.  Some of these could recite details of the accident they had learned after the fact.  

A handful of the overall total number of people I saw, completely missed the point. They would try and deflect every question about what happened and would simply talk about their hardship. These people seemed not to think at all about the hardship of the wives or husbands or children of the people they killed.  A few would claim it was not their fault but the jury got it wrong, or they took the plea because their useless lawyer told them the jail time would be longer if they didn’t save the family from a gruesome trial. This tiny subset would be the loudest almost screaming about their needs.

Only one person that I remember said he simply did not do the driving and cause the death. The facts were odd.  It was in the Upper Peninsula and neither the deceased or the man convicted of manslaughter had their cell phones with them. This person claims he was passed out and a passenger when the what would ultimately be a fatal accident happened.  He asserted he pushed the dying driver over to try, and tried to head to a store to make a phone call for help. This person had taken a plea, serving 9 months of a year sentence in county jail versus prison. I don’t know what I did with the case.  You see I tell you this stuff is fading. But just 9 months of county time implies the judge believed him, at least partially.

I guess I should try and write down at least one of the stories I do remember each week.