The moon rising over San Francisco Bay is luminescent beauty, the water reflecting it back as a million sparkling diamonds and I remember the time that I gave my wife "diamonds" as we watched another moon over tropic waters. Turning slightly to my rig ht my eyes are jarred into an ugly vision of spot-lit prison walls, brown and ugly contrast to the beauty just seen. Behind those walls a man is waiting to die and I know that he will not see the beauty of the moon on the bay this night or any other moon, on any other night. Word has just come that the Supreme Court will not hear his case.
I turn back to the bay and focus on the ever changing pattern of sparkling light as my mind goes over what I had heard of the man this night. He was a cold hearted murderer of three, who had compounded his sin with a rape so ugly that my stomach fumed wit h the details. His victims would know no more beauty and their families lives had been forever broken by his deeds. A few feet from me a man is yelling in a loud and ugly voice that only the blood of the condemned would wash those sins away. I thought, to o, of the quiet and reasoned voice in a conversation of a few days ago that argued that a man could cross a certain line that removed him forever from the Family of Man and that there was then no reason to keep such a man alive.
My thoughts turn to the killer and of what his life had been. The first shock had been a few days ago when I had read that he was a forty-eight year old, grand fatherly man who passed his time reading books on English and Irish history. I thought of my be dside stand and the volume of English History there, and of the picture of my grandson in my den, I am forty-seven. We had both been raised in a sick, brutal environment, both been moved constantly as children, both rebelled into crime at an early age and had both become mentally ill. I could see a lot of myself in this man. And yet; did not kill, I did not rape, I was not going to die.
I can hear the blood cries of those who cheer the executioner, they are few here tonight but represent many in our society. They cry out for "justice", a nebulous concept, but I think that what they really want is revenge. They cry "justice" for the victi ms and the victims families but I think that what they really want is revenge for the fear that has crept into their souls, the fear that they cannot make go away. One of them even says it; "I will sleep better tonight with that killer dead." But sleep wi ll not come. Revenge is empty bread, that lies like dust in the mouth and cannot nourish. Some lessons can only be reamed in the living of them.
The man who would soon be dead had turned to drugs and alcohol to self-medicate his madness. I had too, in the seventies, and I had escaped that trap just eight years ago by the grace of I know not whatŠ some call it God. He had signed himself into a mental ward as had I, and I was nearly dead in the streets before I surrendered to that VA hospital psych ward. We had both walked so many of the same lonely, ugly roadsŠ But I had not murdered, I did not rape. I think then of his illness, different than mine. His were the wild swings into manic madness and black moodiness that often led to violence in those so afflicted and mine had been the deadening grip of hopelessness that drags the sufferer down into a slow spiral toward death. Was that the di fference then, a slight difference in brain chemistry? We will never know, for in a few moments he will be dead.
I hear the cheers behind me as I pray silently beside the water and I know that it is over. The water that had laid still all night now broke in several waves that seemed to come from nowhere, as if the earth herself had heaved a sigh at the passing of on e of her children. I turn and walk into the night, toward my home, my wife, my children, my life.