ManicDDaily

On Closure When Children Have Been Lost

It’s only when I see the block letters bruising
the front page: “Etan:
Choked, Bagged, Dumped” that I
realize how I’ve imagined Gestapo
cuddling their dogs; Hitler
as a vegetarian; those barren Argentine
generals who seemingly loved the
children whose actual parents they
disappeared–how my mind has tried, in
secret even from itself,
to imagine a person deranged, evil,
but somehow kindly to kids, stealing Etan and all those other
missing children,
and keeping them
brainwashed perhaps and eating
pasty foods by the crate – there’s such
a crowd–but
alive–

Even as another part of my brain
knows it doesn’t work like that (Elizabeth
Smart), still it strives (those unkindly grey cellar years)
for a saving grace, silver
lining, guardian angel (but at least she’s still
living), God; to find,
like Abraham, that suffering is but
a test in which a
passing grade is possible, complete with gold
stars and one’s child
back.

Not random pain, not unredeemed
evil.
Not pain compounded by the guilt and fear that it
was not me
this time, not
mine, oh please,
not ever.

Please —
For even as guardian angel
turns gargoyle stone, the brain, roiling, holds
to what it can, prays
on–now that the boy is okay wherever he is,
in whatever realm, form, or formlessness.

**************************************************

Sorry to followers of this blog, to be so grim.  It is hard here in New York (especially if, like me, you have lived downtown for many years) to not be thinking of the recent developments in the Etan Patz case, sending prayers to Etan’s parents.