Once a year, I google the name of a man who will always be a stranger to me. In 2008, my former spouse discovered this man lying behind the fast-food restaurant where they both worked, bleeding to death from what was later determined to be a gunshot wound. I can’t imagine the helplessness of finding a person suffering that way. The man died before the ambulance arrived. And with his passing, I became strangely tied to a family I’d never met. Their loss radiated outward like ripples in water after a stone is dropped.Article continues after advertisement
Throughout our marriage, my former spouse lied to me many times. Often, he lied for no reason I could discern. He used to say, “I won’t lie if you ask the right questions,” which is how he absolved himself from creating the story that he wanted to hear. I never learned what made a question right. Years after our divorce, it occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t asked the right questions about what had happened that day. When he arrived home so late after his shift that afternoon, I had asked, “Where were you?” instead of “Where are we going?” I had asked, “What happened?” instead of “What does this mean?”
For a long time, I knew no details except what he told me, and I didn’t know whether I could believe him. In my experience, he had so often cast himself as a hero or a martyr when he was neither. Part of me even wondered whether he had exaggerated his own importance at the scene. I felt ungenerous for this, so I tried to push it out of my mind. The truth was, it didn’t matter whether he had embellished his experience or not. He was clearly suffering because of what he had seen in that parking lot. Adding to my confusion, the details the police released changed dramatically several times as forensics were undertaken and the murder investigation continued. Eventually, the police stopped releasing updates. My picture of that day remained blurred by inconsistencies.
