Afterword

The scream came unexpectedly. It was a sound of great anguish, as if the pain of the child had found a woman's voice. It was a sound of grief, of the letting go that follows the formal acceptance of great suffering.

With a patient in a psychiatric ward, I heard the woman's scream as Megan Kanka disappeared in the dead of summer. The patient had just heard that the child had been raped and murdered. For the next twelve hours, there was profound mourning among the women on the ward. Many were victims of sexual abuse, and the news of the rape and murder of a small girl was more than they could bear. I did not think so many tears could fall for so long. That was in 1994. It is now 1999.

In the essay you have read, I wanted to establish a narrative of the murder and its aftermath, and I wanted to offer an interpretation of what this tragedy tells us about the universal tragedy of sexual child abuse and the particular tragedy of Megan Kanka’s death. I wanted to write an true elegy, a poem, but instead there is this essay. I am only an academic writer, a father of five whose sadness for the death of a child I did not know continues to haunt me. I have tried to mark this tragedy in the only way that I know.

Yet how easily the child is lost among the agendas. Sometimes I think that I have put Megan Kanka behind me and then I round a corner and see a pink ribbon on a mother's blouse and the politics and sociology of it all fades.

An elegy is supposed to end with the contemplation of something eternal. As much as I would like it to be otherwise, I'm afraid that I have seen very little in life that is constant except the telling of truthful stories and the making of sincere wishes.

I wish for you, then, Megan, a house in the afterlife where

. . . peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

W. B. Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (5-8)

I wish for you a place to live where you can experience corsages and kisses and promises kept. I wish for you your own children with whom you garden in the spring, and I wish that your grandchildren may surround you in your old age to return the love that you surely earned in your seven short years. I wish you happiness and rest in that place, Megan, where you will be always with each of us in our deep heart's core.

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