Petals in a Breeze

Memory is a devastating element of tragedy. Not just hard images of the event itself, but lingering recollections of softer moments that drift through the mind like petals in a breeze. Memory reminds us, in its darkest moments, that what once existed is now gone forever.

I thought about this as I sat with three women in Santa Monica. All remembered with stoic clarity the moment they were told of the murder of their children. But tears were shed when they recalled the warmth and laughter that murder had taken from them.

This is the flip side of a column I wrote three weeks ago about the mothers of condemned murderers on San Quentin’s death row. The impact of the crimes on those mothers was the object of the essay, not the crimes themselves.

Response to the column was varied, but a message that punched through was a demand that the men be put to death immediately and the women suffer a mountain of blame for having raised their sons to be what they had become.

Oddly, there was no cry for blood and no blame applied by the victims’ mothers I met with three days ago. A communion of grief links the women on two sides of murder and teaches a lesson in humanity that ought not to go unnoticed.

*

What an English dramatist called “the crime that shrieks” knows no color. Murder is an equal-opportunity abomination.

Willie Brooks, a 17-year-old African American boy with a promising future, was killed in a random shooting six years ago in South-Central L.A. The killers, possibly gang members, were never caught.

Peter Verge, 18, who was white, was preparing for a life in Hawaii when he was shot to death in an oceanfront Santa Monica apartment in 1978 by a lawyer friend strung out on dope. His killer was convicted, sent to prison and disbarred.

Wendy Wagner, 41, also white, the first woman paramedic in Santa Fe, N.M., a person who cared deeply about people and animals alike, was shot to death in 1997 during a carjacking. Her killer is serving a life sentence.

“Willie was my only child,” Carolann Taylor said, tears filling her eyes. “When they took him, they took my future.”

After her son’s death, Taylor, 44, worked with juveniles sentenced to a California Youth Authority facility, trying to understand what prompts someone to kill. “I didn’t want other mothers,” she said, “to feel the pain I felt.”

Margaret Verge, 69, Peter’s mother, approached the mother of her son’s killer in court and said she bore her no ill will. “It would be worse,” she said softly, “if it were my son who had murdered someone. I would rather be the mother of a victim than the mother of a murderer.”

Bobbie Peyser, 68, Wendy’s mother, exploded in hysteria when her daughter was murdered, but felt nothing toward her killer when he came to trial. “I was hollow,” she said, expressing an emptiness in her soul. “I felt no anger toward the man who murdered her. He wasn’t worth my rage. I just felt a terrible sadness that will never go away.”

*

None of the women who sat in a semicircle around me on a sunny afternoon sought vengeance. It was a gentle moment of recollection and reflection, the best of human emotion in the midst of terrible memories. They showed me photographs and clippings. They spoke of yesterday as though it were this morning, so close to the heart is grief.

“I don’t believe in the death penalty,” Carolann Taylor said. “I would like the killers of my son to touch as many lives as possible in a positive way. I talked to a gang member at the CYA. He had murdered someone. I asked why. He said, ‘It was my assignment.’ I thought, ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”

“You never get over it,” Peyser said. She handed me newspaper clippings she’d saved. Wendy’s face smiled out at me. Peyser’s hands trembled, her eyes filled with tears. “Without therapy, I couldn’t have gone on. This bracelet”--she showed me a silver bracelet on her wrist--”was Wendy’s. I’ve never taken it off. I never will.”

The small, quiet gathering was held at the Verge family home. Peter’s sister, Suzanne, 37, was there. “In an odd way,” she said, “Peter’s death has brought us all together. We’re closer now than we were before. We’re always aware that Peter isn’t here, but something good has come from tragedy.”

If there is an elegance to humanity, some of it must lie in the way we bear grief. To bear it without rancor ennobles us in ways too fragile to define. But I know it existed among those women in a room filled with words, tears and petals in a breeze on a sun-softened afternoon in Santa Monica.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.