DEAD RECKONING : To attempt to figure out where you are and where you are going based on where you have been.
When Carys Cragg was eleven, her father was murdered by an intruder in their family home. As a Social Worker nearly twenty years later, Cragg became aware of a restorative justice initiative – in which facilitators would carry letters between her and the incarcerated murderer of her father, with a view to eventually meeting him if that's what she desired – and realising that this was finally her chance to take control of the experience (to no longer be a passive victim of violent crime; to finally confront the facts as an adult and not a shielded child), Cragg eased herself into a correspondence with Sheldon Klatt; the man serving a life sentence for stabbing her father to death when he was a twenty-one-year-old drug addict/petty thief. Maybe it's because she is a life-long diarist, or maybe it's tied to the personality traits that led Cragg to become interested in social work and justice, but I found this memoir to be unusually self-aware and self-reflective; the narrative in Dead Reckoning is highly crafted. Some of this craftedness worked for me – Clagg's father was a sailing enthusiast and she uses nautical terms (as with the definition provided above) to plot out the stages of her journey – and some of it didn't: Clagg inserts brief vignettes from her childhood/adolescence in which she refers to herself in the third person; I get the emotional before and after she's trying to convey, but I found it jarring and distancing every time. Overall, however, this is a compelling record of Clagg's quest for truth and an interesting meditation on the meaning of “justice”.
I paused, a little confused by some of his wording and disappointed with some of his conclusions, yet surprised by his ability to reflect. Then sadness took over. I could have told myself that I was feeling sad for him, for the world created for him, for the world he then created for himself. But I found myself sad that this man's life, the darkness of which I could only imagine, was so incredibly unfair, and because no one was capable of caring for him, my dad had crossed his destructive path and died.Right from the beginning you realise that the murder revealed a philosophical rift in the victim's family: the dead man's brothers show up to Klatt's parole hearings to curse and threaten him as the ruination of their lives, whereas Carys Clagg's own mother (who had the nearly impossible task of raising four broken children on her own) gives statements asking for clemency at these same hearings. Raised in this liberal environment and privy to the failures of the social services system through her own work, Clagg assures Klatt in her first letter that she feels no anger or hatred towards him, only curiosity. When he responds to her questions with a tale of a broken home and childhood abuse, Clagg answers with understanding and empathy, but insists that he take responsibility as well. It's a tough line for someone with self-described “socialist values” to walk: Clagg states she isn't vengeful, but does want Klatt to make a reckoning; she agrees that the conservative government/judiciary of Alberta probably gave Klatt a life sentence because her father was a respected doctor and not a drug dealer, but she states that only means that the deaths of drug dealers aren't taken seriously enough; she doesn't like the psychobabbly word “closure”; she finds the word “forgiveness” to have too many religious overtones; and other than taking control of her own story, it's hard to know what Clagg wants from the experience.
Writing those words confirmed everything I had done up to that point. Why I had chosen my career. Why I believed what I did. I'd known it when I was younger, after my father died, but I hadn't really known it until the offender wrote it in his letter to me. People stopped caring for him, and he fell down. He stopped caring, and my family fell down. The world stops caring, and we all fall down.In an Author's Note at the beginning, Clagg explains the nature of memoir (Memories, inherently flawed, are subjective experiences and are thus authentically truthful), and in addition to stating that she won't tell her siblings' stories, she explains that she never asked Klatt's permission to publish long excerpts from his letters in her book (Permission was not sought from the offender as this was not his story to give permission for me to tell.) And I don't know how I feel about that: Klatt was sharing his personal history and memories, and on the face of it, attempting a personal connection with and trying to offer what was healing for Clagg. As a not angry/hateful/vengeful participant in the correspondence, as someone who recognises the many opportunities lost to intervene with Klatt when he was still a young offender, after reassuring him that she was not collecting information for “a novel or thesis”, what duty did Clagg owe to her father's murderer in return? When the two do eventually meet, it is in the presence of two facilitators from the restorative justice project – and it is clear that they are neutral to the process, there for the perpetrator's needs as much as for the victim's. When one of them asks if Clagg and Klatt wanted to discuss confidentiality expectations, Clagg thought:
Surely I had no guarantee of confidentiality or privacy. That seemed to be their problem, not mine. I wanted the power to reclaim my story. Murder had so often silenced the least powerful in this room. I wanted to know my story, have access to my story, share my story, and I didn't want anyone in my way.In the end, although I can't really define what she got from the process, and even though it would turn out that Klatt wasn't as open and honest as he presented himself to be, Clagg did feel a burden lifted from herself through this experience. It makes for a very interesting read, and if it leads other victims of crime to seek out restorative justice initiatives that might ease their burdens too, then it's a very important read as well. I'm taking off a couple of stars for the third-person bits and the use of Klatt's letters without permission (in the context of the person Clagg presents herself as). If nothing else, this process helped Clagg make a dead reckoning of her own life:
I'd become a child and youth worker to have more flexibility to support vulnerable people. Then I'd become a practice analyst to observe how the Ministry of Children and Family Development was and was not providing ethical and effective care. Now I was a teacher in a classroom, asking a new generation of learners to do the same. What if I could offer what I instinctively knew how to do when I was young; to make sure no unjust act went unnoticed, that no voice went unheard.
