Should auld acquaintance be forgot.
JonBenét Ramsay, Part IV
Should auld acquaintance be forgot.
I learned about JonBenét Ramsey when the story broke nationally. She was a child, I was a child. It was compelling like a loose tooth. I worried it. I read the National Enquirer in checkout lines at the grocery store. I wondered about what her life was like and what her death could have to do with the world as I understood it. I thought a child could solve another child’s death. I had just started reading Sherlock Holmes stories. But in this case, eliminating the impossible isn’t something you can do. There is always another impossibility ready to stand guard in front of whatever truth is left.
It’s been twenty-four years, almost to the day. Dotted all over the country are the men and the men and the women who worked on that case, on all sides, a life-haunting job. I wonder what their trauma is like, and how they manage. If they’re still angry, or sad, at themselves or others. What their narratives of the case are now. If we’ll hear from any of them next year. The national news media does love an anniversary. This year, she would have turned thirty. Next year, it’ll be twenty-five years since her murder. I will greet the touched-up pageant pictures of her as old friends—or maybe tastes have changed, and they’ll publish some of the candid family photos this time.
It is still sad—tremendously, wretchedly sad—that a child died afraid of the last person she saw. Whoever that person is. What, ultimately, does it matter who killed that girl? Is her dying as the result of some grand psychotic scheme more tragic than if she’d run into the street at a bad moment and been hit by a car, which was statistically far more likely to happen to her, and would have rendered her no less dead?
I don’t know. I don’t know if the progressively bigger and more flame-ringed hoops that people with theories about her death jump through are impressive or just crass. How many different explanations do you need for this? It’s a horror movie come to life, or maybe come to death is more appropriate, but there isn’t any catharsis when it happens in real life. The death just goes on and on.
Something happened in that house that night. Something happened in that house that night. And whatever it was, it was the culmination of many other things that had also happened, in that house and in other houses. You cannot say that nothing happened, because a girl is dead who should still not be dead. Maybe that’s the burden hoisted onto JonBenét’s small shoulders in death.
In so many houses across this country, things happen. Bad things of all kinds. We live in their shadows, they follow us ceaselessly, large acts and small, and sometimes we’re not sure if we’ve imagined them or blown them out of proportion, because—well, what did happen, really? What can we point to? An accumulation of injustice? A slow drip of fear? How do we justify our own experiences? We tell each other, and sometimes in each other’s shocked expressions or furrowed brows we find the validation we didn’t know we’d been searching for all our lives.
But whatever was going on in that house, we know something happened. Something happened. Because a girl is dead, and continues to be dead. A dead body is evidence even if all the evidence that surrounds it has been tampered with beyond recognition.
We say we want answers because the dead deserve them, when we mean that the living want them desperately, fear not having them. We want answers, notionally, so that we can stop these things from happening again. But no matter how often we get the same answers—statistically, anecdotally, morally—American society seems particularly incapable of enacting them.
What could we possibly learn from any of the theories, from an accidental slip in the bathroom and subsequent panic, to the international cabal masterminding some vague revenge? We already know children should not be at risk of violent death, or abuse, or the normalization of bone-deep fear. We already understand that, but this culture applies that understanding inconsistently when it is applied at all, across the systems that uphold racism and poverty and privilege and class. The excuses are legion, because there is no framework for coping as a family or a society with what we learn.
We never know what goes on inside other people’s houses. We’re lucky if we know what goes on inside our own.
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This is the last piece in this series of writing about JonBenét Ramsey. Thank you for making it this far. Next up I’m going to do something lighter, a reading journey through 2020, and then some books I liked in January. If you want to talk about books or true crime or anything at all, I’m around as @writingmiranda on Twitter Dot Com.