It was still dark when they arrived at her home.  The damp summer humidity left an eerie heaviness in the air as if foretelling of the grief to come.  Slowly they tracked through the slight blades of damp grass like dark shadows of despair.

Walking up the slightly lopsided wooden steps, preparing themselves for the situation that was about to unfold as it had countless times before.  They readied for the gut-wrenching cry, the weep of dread and sadness, recalling the sound from previous families and loved ones as they prepared to hear them yet again this day.

I would like to think that Detective Pols of the Wyoming Police Department held my Aunt Paula’s hand firmly in his grasp, gazing into her troubled eyes. I imagine he could already see the dread, the horror of the unknown, echoing through her as a distant memory from her past rumbled through her like a torrential storm.

For those same passionate words, the cry of sympathy was spoken years earlier by other officers when she was told of her husband committing suicide, leaving her with their twin boys and unborn daughter.  Now there was the sadness and sorrow, the tear stricken grief of a mother lost in misery after being told her 28-year-old son was dead, murdered in cold blood.  He was the victim of a domestic homicide.

To think of the pain she felt at that moment disturbs me, even a year later. I am sure that the sanity of it all crashed down upon her like an unbearable wave of hopelessness, becoming worse with trepidation and confusion as Detective Pols spoke those ill words of grief and sorrow to her.  His voice soft, yet firm, caring, yet stern, as he told her that Jeff, her first-born, her baby, had been stabbed in the neck and that her son was forever gone.  Only to follow those words of grief with even more distraught and horrendous news.  Informing her, they also believed the monster that killed him, the abuser that took her baby from her, was his very own girlfriend.

I can only imagine the heaviness she felt in her heart as her mind raced with images of her fallen son. Her legs weakened with each passing thought, buckling to the strain, succumbing to the devastating heartache and fury as her mind continued to race through all the recollections, all the past happy memories, shattering through her like shards of broken glass.   Falling to the floor, lost in an inferno of sadness mixed with hate, confusion mixed with loss, of outright horror and shock.  It pains me to think of it now, that moment, those seconds, those breaths, after hearing those words of loss and death.

My mother Roxanne told me that they came to her in this way.  Leaving her in complete shock, leaving her to reach out to those she could count on the most; reaching out to her family, her sisters, who came ever so willingly, ever so lovingly to her aid.