It was six years ago today that Cassie, after spending the afternoon planning Molly’s baby shower, returned home to find someone in her house.
The intruder’s reaction to this was to beat her to death. When her will to keep herself and our daughter alive proved to be too strong, he went and found a knife.
Along with some gas, he used the clothes that Cassie had been collecting for Molly to fuel a fire intended to destroy the evidence of his crimes.
Nearly two months passed before he was arrested. Until that day, I was the square peg that police tried to hammer through a round hole. Apparently, that’s just how it works.
I have a great deal of difficulty talking about any of this. And I wouldn’t be if I thought it was an option. It deeply disturbs me that some things so obvious are not immediately apparent to other people. These nightmares are layered in a way that aren’t easy for me to navigate.
And those nightmares led to another. The one where I had to approached the government and ask them to consider these legal circumstances and do something to change them. They would not.
The murder of our daughter had been ignored in the charges. The absence of law gave the killer impunity for his crime against her. And rather than see this as any kind of problem, they seemed to instead celebrate doing nothing as an ideological victory for themselves.
For them, it could only be a woman’s choice to have a child if they could survive such a crime. If not, it was perfectly acceptable that such killers had free legal domain over that aspect of her anatomy, and her history, and her choice.
They were in fact protecting his choice. Hers didn’t matter to them.
But even if they had decided to observe a woman’s right to dignity and consideration without discrimination by creating a law to fill this void that left Cassie and Molly unprotected, it wouldn’t have changed anything for Mathew Brush. Only the ones found guilty of slaughtering pregnant women after him.
But that doesn’t matter now because they didn’t do anything anyways.
Not only do I have to find a way to live with these layers of nightmare, but I have to imagine the ones to come – the ones that are inescapable – the ones that this absence of law and accountability allow a father to experience.
On this night, six years later, I think of them just as I do every other day, and I try to find ways to understand how things so obvious can go so easily unobserved by others.
I watch as the cheerleaders for unfairness seem to be taking over the world.
I brace myself for the future.
