It was August when I learned of her death and October when I met her family for the first time to join them on a walk to benefit the domestic violence shelter she had sought aid from in the past. It is now January and I am only now telling you the rest of the story of that weekend.
Old news, right?
Unfortunately, no. Sue Weiland has yet to be buried. Her body is still being held as evidence, not yet released by the attorneys in the case. Peter Whyte pled not guilty at his arraignment on October 23rd of last year. The trial is slated to begin on May 7, 2007.
For those interested in the felony procedure, a flow chart of the process from the Wisconsin Department of Justice guide is provided for you at the Justice for Sue site (scroll down to the Sept 9th entry).
As for myself, I have been held in a different way, unable to write. Volumes of words have spilled out in this blog in the three months since I met the Weilands, but none of them have been the post I really wanted to write.
I was locked, not blocked. Locked. Locked in a moment. Specifically this one:
This is Ron Weiland, Sue’s father. I took this photo and I hated myself for doing it even as I pressed the shutter release.
Sue's brother, Patrick, will understand this. Patrick Weiland is a multiple award winning journalist and was the senior producer for NBC's Dateline for many years. During our first evening together, after his mother went to bed and we sat up talking, he shared a perspective with me that I never had a full appreciation of before.
When you see all those heinous images of one tragedy or another on the evening news, remember there are human beings behind those cameras. We get images. They get sights, sounds and smells, the heat, the chill, the damp. They get the energy of the place, the fear, the pain. Patrick recounted his visit to a Romanian orphanage being the first to bring the plight of these children to our national attention.
“They would put children with similar problems all together. I walked into one place that was for children with cleft palate. There were something like 200 of these little children that had never been treated. Beautiful little children with these disfigured faces all looking at me. I didn’t realize at the time how traumatic that was for me but it was.”
Then there was the plane crash off the California coast and the dead bodies strewn across the water. In the ocean, it doesn’t take long for flesh to become food. As I said, there are sights we don’t get to see. There are sounds they won’t let us hear, but they did hear them. A human is there, or a team of them, taking it all in, as much as their psyches will allow anyway, sifting through it all to determine what we could see, should see, and why.
Article comments