I Am Not Handling This World Very Well

...and for the first time in a long time, it's got nothing to do with my darling roommates. (My darling roommates are themselves a topic, but we have been down that road so thoroughly and so often that even I am weary of the discussion. I did, however, reiterate to Tim this afternoon that there was simply no way that a newborn was coming here, so he and Squeaky--separately or together--needed to have other arrangements made by that time. I don't know if he was listening, but that's not my problem.)

No, what is currently playing havoc with my already-compromised emotion-regulation mechanism is this story. The local news here in Chicago is talking of almost nothing else, but for those of you who live elsewhere: Out on the southern edge of Chicago, near where my mom lives, there are many cemeteries. One of them is Burr Oak, which is historic because for a very long time, it was the only place where African-Americans were allowed to be buried. Dinah Washington is buried there, and quite a few African-American sports legends of the 50's and 60's; most well-known, however, Emmett Till is buried there. For years there have been occasional remarks about the grounds looking shabby, but nothing concrete, nothing serious...

...until this week. Apparently, during the investigation of possible embezzlement, the Cook County Sheriff's Office discovered something far worse: empty graves, bodies stacked two in a grave, bodies in graves other than where they were supposed to be...and in the far back of the cemetery, in an area full of scrubby plants and tall grasses, they found a pile of broken concrete grave-liners, smashed caskets...and bones. Human remains, dug from their graves using heavy machinery, shoveled up with their casket, their grave-liner, and with no regard for names, or for the fact that they were once someone's mother, someone's father, someone's husband or wife, brother or sister, son or daughter. Thrown together in anonymous dumpsters, or left on the ground for the rain and the sun and anything else to act upon.

There are, at last count, at least 300 graves involved. A thousand people, family members of people once buried there, came to the gates today, searching for answers. Some brought notes, funeral programs, family Bibles full of dates and names and anything that might provide a clue, if one were needed, as to where their family member had been buried. Most of them came away with nothing. There were people who were looking for five, seven, ten, fifteen relatives, all of whom had been laid to rest in Burr Oak. Some family members admitted that they'd thought the place was shabby, but they had kept burying their family members there so that they could all be together in death.

Tonight, Tom Dart, the Cook County Sheriff, closed the cemetery and declared the entire grounds a crime scene. As family members had walked the lanes and plots, some of them had stumbled across more bones; and later in the day a second dumping ground was discovered, bigger than the first. In an interview, Dart said that the cemetery's "Baby Land" area, once devoted to the graves of infants, was completely gone. Mothers had searched without success for the gravesites of their babies.

In a final indignity, on Friday morning, investigators entered a dilapidated shed on the cemetery premises and discovered the original coffin of Emmett Till. It had been stowed there and allowed to deteriorate after Till's 2005 disinterment and re-burial; one of the perpetrators of this crime had allegedly been collecting money for a proposed Emmett Till Memorial--money which she then pocketed. The casket, according to surviving members of the Till family, was to have been a part of the memorial; when the sheriff's staff opened it Friday morning, they found a family of possums living inside.

Four people have been arrested: Carolyn Towns, the former manager (fired in March for suspected financial irregularities); Keith Nicks, a foreman; Terrence Nicks, who operated a dump truck; and Maurice Dailey, who drove a back-hoe. Each was charged with dismembering a human body, a Class X felony; if convicted, they could receive as much as 30 years in prison. They are all being held in Cook County Jail in protective custody, for fear that other inmates would harm them. Towns, who was apparently the ring-leader, is being held in the psych unit of the jail after an evaluation showed "cause for concern" regarding her psychological well-being.

I know why this story just horrifies me so completely; the whole issue of what happens after death is a common turning-point for my thoughts. My realistic side understands that the body is just a shell, that after death there is nothing there but material matter; my hopeless-romantic magical thinking side, when I ponder the thought of the afterlife, always visualizes the afterlife as an eventual reunion with the people who went before us, as we remember them--including their physical selves. And my skeptical side refuses to invest that kind of hope in any daydream outcome, because the real me, down at my core, can't stand the thought that even after death I will never see JP again. (Of course it all comes back to him; you were expecting differently?)

But there's more to it, as well. One of my colleagues realized today, after talking with some family members, that he's got about seven or eight relatives interred in that cemetery--and that most of them are in exactly the sort of situation that was targeted: older graves, graves which weren't visited as often, where no one would be as likely to find out what had happened. Between that story and the tearful women on the news, clutching sepia-toned pictures of mothers, husbands, grandmothers...

There are just some things my brain cannot accept, cannot process. There is an enormity to the story that is unfolding: first it was 30 graves, then 100, then on Friday it was 300. Tonight, as they announced the closing, the sheriff admitted that there are 5000 graves which need to be examined. Five thousand restless dead, five thousand heart-sore families...And it could be any one of us--that's the other thing. Every family has its dead; every family has buried at least one or two members; even if the rest of the family believes in cremation, there will always be one or two dissenters. Every one of us will lose a loved one; most of us will see that loved one's casket lowered into the earth. Any one of us could be one of those weeping, picture-clutching family members.

In fact, any of us could be a victim here as well. After all, we all will die; who's to say that any of us would be lucky enough to escape a fate like this? Who's to guarantee that no matter what any of us do--no matter what kind of plans we make for our eventual resting place--who's to guarantee that we might not be found one day in a wooded back-lot, in a pile of cement, and shattered metal, and the mixed remains of our fellow travellers? It makes me reconsider what my last wishes might be, I'll tell you that.

My wishes for the people who did this, on the other hand, require no further consideration; I would like them consigned to a separate section of Hell all their own, away from the decent damned, so that even if I end up in Hades when I die, I won't in any way be forced to associate with their kind. Their Hell will need "protective custody", just as much as their earthly prison does.