According to Tibetan religion, Bardo is the intermediate zone where a soul resides after death while waiting to go to its final destination. To a Christian, it might be purgatory although that word for me has a sinister overtone of punishment for past sins. I’ve often wondered in the six years since my son Will’s death how quickly his soul was admitted to paradise. Did his soul have to spend time in Bardo first?
We don’t have rituals for deaths that have occurred in the past; we often don’t even know how to talk about them. In this society, we are urged to move on, get over it—forget. I don’t believe that is a solution to our grief; but does it help to grieve forever?
A few days ago, I was giving some of my unwanted books to a Little Free Library here, one of the fruits of a quiet attempt to build and set up wooden boxes for giving and receiving books. In the tumble of donated books, I saw one with a title that spoke to me: From Murder to Forgiveness: A Father’s Journey by Azim Khamisa with Carl Goldman published in 1992 by a small California press. Someone had given the book to a friend who might have been grieving, inscribing the first page: “With special wishes for love, happiness and world peace.”
I felt the book was especially intended for me. There are many signs along the way even in our secular lives that point to sources of wisdom and inspiration we may never consciously seek.
Azim Kharmisa writes in simple, profoundly felt words about the murder of his twenty-year-old son when he was delivering pizzas, by a fourteen-year-old gang member in California who had just run away from home.
After months of grief that seemed to have no end, Azim began to think about his son’s killer, soon to be sentenced, at fourteen, to twenty-five years in prison. He realized that he needed to reach out to the boy’s grandfather, Ples Felix, who had raised him with a simple set of rules Tony had run away from home to escape: work hard in school, exercise, do chores, keep your bedroom clean. Azim is Ismaili; Ples Felix is an African American. As they began to work together to establish a foundation dedicated to ending youth violence, Tony became involved. Photographs show the visual contrast on which some of us base our belief in progress: Tony, the large dark-skinned man, the slender lighter-skinned Ismaili.
They began to speak in schools, insisting to the children that they always have a choice. Even in the most difficult situations—as when Tony was handed a gun by an older boy and ordered to shoot Tariq Khamisa in order to steal the pizzas—choice was present. The two men work to empower children to make right choices in difficult situations when they may be heavily influenced by so-called friends.
This book helped me to take up the memoir I’ve been working on for years called Will’s Things. As so often, I was too heavily influenced by a publisher’s unwillingness to publish the whole memoir, offering instead to reduce it to a chapbook. I turned down the offer; Will’s complicated story can’t be told in seventy pages, but then I became discouraged and stopped working on my draft. I know it will be difficult to find a publisher even with my resume; we humans can’t deal with too much truth.
Will’s Things is my way of doing what Azim Khamisa and Felix Pes are doing through the Tariq Khamisa Foundation—making presentations at schools to teach children that they always have a choice. I am writing about another form of violence: the destruction of lives through the use of drugs. Drug companies and some doctors continue to make fortunes through selling and prescribing these death-dealers. Our failure to control this highly profitable commerce is an example of our moral turpitude.
There is a wider context to this story. In Azim’s memoir, I was distressed to see a photo of a California group of young ROTC members in uniform, helping to plant a tree in Azim’s memory in a school courtyard. One choice we as citizens are not able to make: ending the wars we are promoting and sponsoring in the Middle East—and soon all over the world.
Killing is never justified, even when we have turned whole populations into monsters. Violence is violence wherever it occurs.
Trish Williams-Mello says
Thank you Sallie for this wonderful story of family and forgiveness. Good luck on your memoir of Will. Looking forward to reading it!