Never a fait accompli

Our son Alex, as you might know from previous posts, is mired in his own world of self created drama.  It is a very serious drama that makes the day-to-day nonsense all of us endure pale by comparison.  Alex has pled guilty to state felony drug charges, two to be exact, and is set for sentencing on July 2nd, a mere two weeks from today.

He is, as you might expect, terrified and well he should be.  At twenty-three he is no longer a child that can be protected from harm by his parents.  He made reckless choices as an adult, granted a young adult, but still an adult.  The consequences of his choices have caught up with him as ultimately do all of our decisions.

His terror is shared by his mother, my wife.  She fears the incarceration of her son as any mother would.  She understands well that we are all responsible for our actions and should be held accountable but still, when you remove all the rational logic from the equation you are left with the distilled essence that is the love of a mother for her child.  Nothing, be it word or deed, can cleave its way through the bond established between a mother and her offspring.  Equally true too is that nobody can understand or define this bond other than through use of broad generalizations.  Even the mother herself is not omniscient when it comes to her the bond that ties her to her child.

His joy is her joy.  His pain is hers.  His fear is hers and the punishment meted out to him for his actions will be meted out to her as well.  There is no escaping it.  He may be incarcerated and if he is so too will be a part of her and there is not a lot I can do about it.  I’m already seeing the reflection of his present state in her eyes.  At best I can temporarily present a distraction to her but I cannot help her escape the unfolding of his future.

I can, however, moderate it.  I cannot facilitate his future, but I can to a point direct the conversation away from an apparent fait accompli to one of possibilities.  To that end there is one ever present reality that both Alex and his mother need recognize.  That being that whatever happens, be it incarceration or probation, it is but a mere blink of time in his life.  It will pass.  Just as certainly as he will face up to his actions and suffer the consequences of same, his and her life will move past this.

July 2nd is not the end but the beginning.  Every new day is the precursor of an always uncertain tomorrow.  The gift we have as human beings is that we get to choose between optimism and pessimism when we contemplate what kind of tomorrow we will live.  There are times when I personally have been pessimistic about tomorrow, particularly with respect to my health and my relationship with my wife.  But those are my stories and not part of this post yet it is important to point out that I too have been optimistic about the uncertainty of tomorrow with respect to those two very important aspects of my life.  It is a matter of choice.

I can’t help but draw some parallels between Alex’s story and my own.  One particular thread that glaringly stands out is the thread of anecdotal “help” we receive from others.  In my case people have came up to me, after learning of my cancer, and told me of a relative or friend who had the same cancer and who had died from it.  Not very encouraging or contributory to my overall morale, I have learned to filter out their chaff and continue moving forward.

Alex too is confronted by those sorts of helpful gems.  Apparently he has had a recent conversation with someone who had presumably served twelve years in prison for a like offense.  This person told Alex all about it the result of which is that Alex, and by extension his mother, are even more terrified of July 2nd.  The circumstances of this individuals personal accountability for his or her actions is unknown to me.  I suspect though that if placed under bright light and looked at through the clarity of a magnifying glass one might discover that this person’s story is just that, a story, but a story whose details are mysteriously blurred by overt intent or by the individual’s need to mitigate any judgment of this person’s past but the overall interpretation of this sharing of information is that the facts are simply not applicable to Alex.  Such is the our legal system and the justice it renders.

On my own I’ve tried to fathom how justice is brought about by the courts of the state I live in.  To that end I explored whether or not there were any recommended or established sentencing guidelines or rules with respect to specific offenses.  There are states who have enacted rigid sentencing rules tying the hands of presiding judges.  Simply put, some states have made sentencing a process of no greater challenge than stamping out cookies with the same cookie cutter.  They have, in effect, removed justice from the justice system.

Our state, thankfully, is not one of those.  There are indeed sentencing guidelines at play here and it is important to note that a judge is not bound by them.  They are recommendations only yet recommendations designed to better tailor sentencing to the crime committed and specifically attempting to make a distinction between violent and non-violent crime, the former always destined for incarceration, the latter open to a greater range of possibilities.

Under these guidelines Alex would be, as I have interpreted the recommendations, a Level I offender.  It is his first offense.  He has never been convicted of a crime.  The recommendations separate each offense into one of three levels of severity, each with three possible outcomes, nine possibilities in all.  Of the nine eight call for immediate probation.  The ninth, reserved for the most severe infraction, calls for a shock treatment of one hundred eighty days in prison followed immediately by probation.  Which sentence a judge chooses is, as you might have guessed, based on the aggravating and mitigating circumstances of the crime.  My interpretation of these seems to me to lean the recommendation towards some kind of probation.  But as I said, these are recommendations only and the court’s judgment is not bound by them.

So Alex and his mother are left dangling in a world of fear uncertain as to whether they are suspended above an abyss or solid ground.  We won’t know which it is until his sentencing.  But what I know and I wish so very much for them to know is that no matter what, July 2nd is but one day of one year and they should not fear it but instead embrace it for the possibilities it presents.

Marvina, his mother and my wife, likes the “Life is Good” brand name and products.  She recently purchased a hat with a simple flower on the front and the word “Grow” embroidered above it.  Honey, keep the simplicity of that sentiment in the forefront of your mind as we move towards and encounter the coming July 2nd and try as best you can to share its meaning with Alex.

Grow.