Sunday, September 02, 2007
After thousands of interviews, it is I who have been enriched - Susan Paynter, Seattle P-I
... Myrlie Evers, wife of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, had stayed blindingly busy and had never before talked about that night her husband fell dead in the driveway. "The bullet went through his body, a window, a Venetian blind, a wall, hit the refrigerator and came to rest -- you won't believe this -- under a watermelon on the counter," she told me in 1972, four years after I started here.
I can still hear the lush timbre of her voice saying she had been so full of hatred that she sat in court wanting a "slow, torturous death" by her own hands for the man tried twice but never convicted in the killing. And how she'd severed herself from that hate.
...
Remarkably unexpected stories also found me in a bland building that contained the secrets of the "dead by unnatural causes" on Seattle's Alder Street. Inside, tender-hearted Dr. Richard Harruff ushered me into a walk-in refrigerator where nine bodies lay wrapped in plastic pods. He treated each with the reverence their families might have wished for but surely didn't expect in the clinical, stainless-steel realm of a King County medical examiner.
In 1999 -- before TV's "CSI" -- the man in owlish spectacles had treated the remains of Kurt Cobain and an incinerated baby with equal respect. Almost as incantation, he murmured, measuring tragic waste along with organs. "Ridiculous," he said over gunk-coated black-tar spoons and the still-strapping remains of young men shot for money.
Like food, I have found raw, unprocessed feelings to be the most nourishing.
[Richard is a longtime Kadampa Buddhist. - ed.]
...
... Myrlie Evers, wife of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, had stayed blindingly busy and had never before talked about that night her husband fell dead in the driveway. "The bullet went through his body, a window, a Venetian blind, a wall, hit the refrigerator and came to rest -- you won't believe this -- under a watermelon on the counter," she told me in 1972, four years after I started here.
I can still hear the lush timbre of her voice saying she had been so full of hatred that she sat in court wanting a "slow, torturous death" by her own hands for the man tried twice but never convicted in the killing. And how she'd severed herself from that hate.
...
Remarkably unexpected stories also found me in a bland building that contained the secrets of the "dead by unnatural causes" on Seattle's Alder Street. Inside, tender-hearted Dr. Richard Harruff ushered me into a walk-in refrigerator where nine bodies lay wrapped in plastic pods. He treated each with the reverence their families might have wished for but surely didn't expect in the clinical, stainless-steel realm of a King County medical examiner.
In 1999 -- before TV's "CSI" -- the man in owlish spectacles had treated the remains of Kurt Cobain and an incinerated baby with equal respect. Almost as incantation, he murmured, measuring tragic waste along with organs. "Ridiculous," he said over gunk-coated black-tar spoons and the still-strapping remains of young men shot for money.
Like food, I have found raw, unprocessed feelings to be the most nourishing.
[Richard is a longtime Kadampa Buddhist. - ed.]
...
Labels: compassionate people
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