Oh syllabus, why will you not just write yourself?

I called Dan last night to wish him good birthday cheer and we giggled forever on the phone.

I talked with Blythe and she was a wreck--her little sister's fianc� was killed in a car accident two weeks ago. Blythe's first long-term boyfriend died in early September 1995. It's horrible. I told my mom this news and she started to talk in platitudes and I cut her off and she said, this has nothing to do with God, Molu. Did you forget how I lost Mom so suddenly? Oh meine mutti, I am so sorry and so careless.

Last fall Oliver and I were working on putting a website together for my dad's 50th birthday. We wanted to put up a page of links about the family. I did a search on my mom and found all these press releases about my grandmother's murderer. He was up for parole last year. He killed my grandmother in 1976. She was a real estate agent. She was showing him a house. He murdered her. He'd never seen her before that day. That's the story I've known my whole life. Reading the press releases, I found out more than I'd ever want to know. About the murder. About what this man did to my grandmother before he killed her with an ice pick. About how my uncle drove around town all night long the day his mother died looking for her. About how he finally found her. About how my grandmother's husband drank himself into a grave 6 months after she died. Dan and Joe and Shawn and my dad all accompanied my mother to the parole hearing. They were all mentioned in the press releases. The press releases said that Shawn cried. The press releases said that this man was a suspected serial killer and that police think he killed several other women (all real estate agents) in Colorado before moving down to Florida. He was not granted parole. He will never be released from prison.

It was visceral shock to read these news stories online at work. I felt my face burning, almost like I was embarrassed. It's odd, reading about this from a stranger's perspective--it was almost like finding out the truth for the first time. And I was ashamed for having spent my whole life knowing about my grandmother's murder but never feeling it. I never even knew what my grandmother's last name was when she died until I read it online at work. I never even knew that I didn't know this. My grandmother died when I was 2. My mother was 23. My mother tells me I move like her mother and that I sound like her and that I use the same lotion as her mother. My mother shows me pictures of me and her mother as babies. We are identical.