My 65 yr old mother was murdered. She was discovered in a pool of blood in the kitchen of the home she had lived in for 39 yrs.
It goes without saying that my life was changed forever.
I grew up in a small Alabama town. My father died of a massive coronary when I was four. My mother and my maternal grandmother raised my 13 yr old brother and I from that day forward. My mother was clueless. My dad had been a civil service employee. We had a maid twice a week. They were to close on a new house the next week. In an instant it was all gone.
My mother only had a high school education. She raised us as a mill worker and later as a nurses assistant at a nursing home. Her meager salary, along with SS survivors benefits and VA benefits provided for us. My brother and I never did without anything we needed. I'm sure at times she did. We were raised to be independent, to value education, and with the belief that if we worked hard we could be anything we wanted to be.
Thirty years later she was dead. She had worked for the same nursing home for 20 yrs. When she didn't show up for work her head nurse went to her home and found her. Dressed for her day at work, she had been stabbed seven times. For years I felt like I was in a nightmare from which I couldn't wake up.
An inexperienced and perhaps incompetent small town police force never made an arrest. There was little physical evidence and what there was was deemed by the state crime lab to be "tainted". In my heart I know who is responsible and he is long dead. I trust his punishment is "out of this world".
I spent the first five years spiraling down into an abyss of alcohol and psychotropic drug abuse. I just couldn't deal with the pain of her loss. Doctors were more than willing to prescribe mind numbing medication. I spent the next three years in intensive therapy to get off the drugs and to deal with the feelings I had been medicating. It was the final nail in the coffin of an already troubled marriage. It adversely affected the lives of my two children.
Fifteen years later, it's a part of the fabric of my life. It has helped mold me into the person I am. It helps me today to relate to people in my profession of social work. It has made me stronger and more understanding of crime victims and those who suffer from mental illness and addiction.
Some of the pain is still there. Maybe it will always be. But it in no way compares to the memories or love I have for her and the pride I have for who she was and what she accomplished as a woman and a single parent.
So join today with me in the memory of my mother, Naomi, and all those victims of crime who never had their day in court, their loved ones who never got their "closure" but yet moved on to make their lives and their world a better place.