Remembering Michael

It’s the 32nd anniversary of my uncle’s murder. Details here: http://www.amw.com/fugitives/brief.cfm?id=44215.

Sad, numb.

I was in a mood when I wrote this – hard not to be, I suppose. However, I don’t want it to come across as maudlin, so I thought I’d add some context.

I chose this year to make a statement about it, on social media especially (Facebook, Twitter). Why? Because, outside of the initial blog posts I published around the time of the America’s Most Wanted episode, it’s been a source of untapped grief. In making it public, I was unabashedly putting it out there – to friends and acquaintances, and strangers alike – instead of it being this twisted little secret which swims around my head.

The fact is, my uncle’s death has nothing to do with me. I never had the chance to meet him. I am involved in the sense you would be involved if you were researching a stranger from another age, another country, who just happened to be related. And yet his story is woven into mine, distant though our two lives were. I am older than he was when he was shot. I wasn’t even 9 years old back then, and I didn’t learn about it until I was 17. The tragedy was delayed for me: time-released.

In any case, this is my sorrow, shared briefly with you. It is, I should add (in all fairness), a necessary exploitation of a crime, in the faint hope someone will happen across an old Guild D40 guitar, or know what happened to a burglar with a Leica fetish. Faint hope, for sure, but it’s part of the process of grief.