1201

 Thursday, December 1, 2022

In bed around 9,  up at 5:45, several pss, no toddy, hard time opening eyes for one ps from CPAP leakage, problematic in light of chronic dry eyes & increasing presbyopia.  18 degrees under mostly clear skies, high of 35 forecast.  IC discomfort overnight, line between discomfort and mild pain pretty fuzzy.  Eyesight also pretty fuzzy.

‘Absolute family tragedy’: 10-year-old Milwaukee boy charged as an adult in the fatal shooting of his mother

This story in this morning's Journal Sentinel kink of knocked me for a loop, not only because of its intrinsic horror (a 10-year-old psychopathic matricide) but because it calls to mind the 15-year-old psychopath who sexually assaulted my 25-year-old mother in 1947, threatening to kill my sister and me to try to get her to stop resisting.  He too was a murderer, having stabbed to death a 32-year-old woman in a local parking lot the week before.  From all the newspaper accounts, and there were many, in the Tribune, the Sun, and the Daily News, he never manifested any remorse, either for the murder or for the assault of my mother and of my sister and me, aged 3 and 6 then.  Though I was 6 years old and present during the savagery, I have no memory of any of it, or rather only a repressed memory that I can't pull up.  I wonder if the memory may return to me sometime before I die, but probably not since it has lain hidden for 75 years now.  Nonetheless, I know it has had bad effects in my life because of the one memory that has never left me from that night, my father yelling at me and frightening me as I sat on the floor in my overcoat, and because of the recurrent nightmare, I had for years, i.e., that someone was in the bedroom threatening to hurt . . . who? me? my mother? and I was powerless to do anything except to moan loudly, trying to . . . what?  scare him away?  warn whoever was with me?  Always the same nightmare, always the same terror, always the same response, loud moaning, trying to do what?  So the story of the 10-year-old who seemingly pretty casually shot and killed his mother for refusing to buy him VR goggles and felt no regret, no remorse, no emotion over what he had done reminded me of the 15-year-old neighbor boy who also killed, and raped, and threatened to stab children with the knife he used to force himself on my mother.  Reading the news item was a chastening way to start this day.