I miss himI miss him
By Brandon Astor Jones
"The exploration and innocence of one's childhood ought to be a beautiful thing — a thing done best by having had a childhood. How sad that so many adults can only know and painfully realize what was, at best, not a childhood in the agonizing retrospection that we so charitably call adulthood. It is both ironic and sadder still that when the sweet beauty of childhood innocence is denied a child, most often, that deprivation consciously or unconsciously is at the hands of adults." — Irving Elmer Bell
Children want and need the truth. Retrospection, in a delayed manner, can crystallise truth. The words above are from the introduction to my autobiographical first volume, a work in progress that will cover my life from ages four to 21.
Writing about my childhood has been at once the most frightening, revealing and emotionally painful endeavour I have ever undertaken. Reading it will not be an activity for the faint of heart.
I have, in the writing of this book, uncovered thoroughly traumatic experiences that were buried as quickly as they happened in the cracks and crevices of my childhood consciousness. The continual dredging up of my newly remembered childhood muck has been an excruciatingly painful journey that often left me physically and emotionally too weak to write letters to my friends and loved ones. Were it not for their love and support, I would not be half way through the first volume.
Fifty years later, some of those memories still hurt. I will share an excerpt about death from chapter one, in the hope that it will encourage you not to lie about death to a child. The mind of a child, though innocent, is more often than not quick, strong and resilient:
Death is hard on a child. My great-great-grandfather died. I do not know who, if anyone, was with him when he died. I know only that I did not see him for two or three days (which was common because he would go from one family member's home to the next, frequently) and then we were all going to his wake and funeral.
I remember the sight of his body, from the waist up, in that coffin, being so still when someone picked me up to view it. His body did not look dead. The facial expression was as if he was still asleep in his day bed. Yet I knew that he was dead.
I was not prepared for life without him in it. After I cried, as did many others at Burr Oak Cemetery, in my sadness I became angry because it was then that I realised that they had kept his death from me. He was my best friend, and in my irrational child mind, I felt that if someone had told me that he was dying, and had taken me to him, I might have been able to make him laugh so much that he would have been too tickled to die ...
Something happened to me that day as I watched that casket go into the ground ... the power of my great-great-grandfather's spirit ... that day took what was left of my childhood (for eternal companionship) and in exchange gave me the cynicism of age to take me through life. I suspect that it about the time that my trust in adults died and went into the ground with my great-great-grandfather. I cannot begin to describe how much I missed/miss him.
[The writer is a prisoner in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, Georgia State Prison, HCO1, Reidsville, GA 30453, USA. For the first time in 17 years, Brandon has the real hope of his sentence of death being mitigated. If you can help by contributing to his defence fund or in other ways, please contact Australians Against Executions, PO Box 640, Milson's Point NSW 2061. Phone (02) 9955 1731, fax 9427 9489. Cheques can be made payable to "Brandon Astor Jones Defence Fund".]