In Memorium

What to make of the horrific deaths of Susan Poff and Robert Kamin at the hands of their own son, Moses? Susan, who spent hours calmly providing wound care to homeless youth at the San Francisco Needle Exchange in Panhandle Park, long before it was a legally-operating site. Bob, whom I never knew but who I hear was incredible in his work at jail psychiatric services in SF.
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My friend's partner D had an epiphany at the Catholic funeral service at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Oakland, in response to this question.

"This is a test," he said. It's like this is proof that people do evil things in the world. Susan lived her life loving and giving unconditionally. She and Bob gave their lives to service to the poor and the homeless and to people with mental illness. They gave a boy love whom no one else wanted, bringing him into their home at age five. And ten years later, when his brokenness, as Susan's father said so poignantly at the funeral, seemed beyond repair, he took their lives in murder.

Yet Susan's father also said quite clearly on behalf of the family, "We want you to know that we hold no malice towards Moses. He is in God's hands now. And he needs all the help he can get."
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Susan's death felt like a test to see whether, when learning that someone who gave of herself unconditionally had her life come to an end in such a shocking and brutally violent way, we, as the people she left behind, could rise to the occasion--could focus on her life as an example of how to move through the world--and not on the manner of her death, which at first contemplation threatened to leach out all hope and inspiration from the world. If we can react to this brutal irony and terrible tragedy with grief instead of anger--and I believe we have--then maybe there is hope for us in this world.
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Neuroscientists, particle physicists, philosophers, mystics ask the same question: Who are we and what are we doing here, together? How do we bridge our interior experiences, which are very private and entirely subjective, with the physiological happenings in our brains? More critically, how do we create a shared language with which to describe our internal experiences in a way that makes clear our need for--and inherent connectedness with--each other?
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In struggling to integrate into my internal universe the information of Susan's and Bob's deaths, I realized in a moment of silence that instead of focusing on the way Susan died, I could focus on the way she lived. If, as it has been said, "the mind imbibes the qualities of the things that it contemplates," then it is crucial to focus on what we are for and not just what we are against.
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This is what Jakada Imani from the Ella Baker Center said to me when he was explaining why they were suspending their Cop Watch campaign. "Because when you win," he said, "what you've got is you looking at cops." When in reality what you should get when you win is a city without police or one in which black and brown communities aren't so heavily policed, which begs the question: What would a healthy Oakland look like? I know this question is dangerously naive but, what if we made the police obsolete not by transforming them but by transforming ourselves? (This is the conversation started in "The Revolution Starts at Home, by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, which questions whether we actually have the tools to hold each other accountable when we can scarcely be accountable to ourselves...)
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It's like what Rubin "Hurricane" Carter said on the radio, incredibly, about spending twenty years in prison on a false conviction and, during his incarceration, reading Victor Frankl's account of being at Auschwitz. Carter decided that 'if he can survive Auschwitz, I can survive wrongful imprisonment' and concluded that 'our biggest maximum security prison is our own minds.'

What I got from what he was saying was that, while our wounds, and the injustices done to us and the people we care about are real, there is no end to our suffering when we internalize these harms. And so, keeping in mind the fact that there is violence and hatred and racism and fascism and fear and delusion in the world, we can choose to cultivate our own individual and collective liberation by holding a place of compassion for each other and for ourselves.
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And so Susan's death reminds me to live and to love and to open my heart unconditionally while also holding true that loving kindness need not come at the expense of ourselves or our safety or well-being. It is okay to walk away from someone who is hurting you. As Rabbi Sofer said in the 19th Century, "No woman is required to build the world by destroying herself." The question is how to be compassionate towards someone who has done such seemingly irreparable harm.
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Moses is 15. Young people kill their parents sometimes. It is horrible, and it happens. What teenager hasn't fantasized about lashing out against themselves or their caregivers? If he had been 10 or 12 years old, he wouldn't have been strong enough to really hurt them. Unfortunately, he was. Still. What happened was a fluke; it was not a consequence or logical outcome of his adoption. And it is not necessarily an indicator of what he will be like for the rest of his life.
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In California, youth are all-too-often tried as adults. I can only hope that he will be tried as a youth. There is tons of literature showing that teenagers are not yet fully able to contemplate the consequences of their actions. I was a runaway at his age. Now I'm supporting my Mom.

Given 10, 15, 20 years, I am sure he will have matured into an adult and will regret deeply what he has done, if he doesn't already. And I can only hope that, in twenty years' time, he will get a second chance at living the life Susan and Bob would have wanted him to live, a life of fullness and hope and learning and joy. One can only that judge and jury and prosecutor alike will show him the kind of compassion that Susan and her parents showed toward their own wayward son.