Judge Takes Solace in Her Faith Amid Life’s Ruins

Joan Lefkow thinks back now on a story her mother used to tell about their Kansas farm. She recounts it in the cadence of a Bible parable:

“There hadn’t been rain. Then there was rain and everyone was happy. Then a hailstorm ruined the crops. My father looked out the door and said, ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’ ”

Out the door of the Chicago high-rise where Lefkow lives today, nine months after the murders that changed her life, federal marshals camp around the clock, waiting, waiting, waiting for the next terror or, more likely, for the next time the judge is ready to step outside to Barnes & Noble or the hair salon.

“As a sojourner on this Earth,” she continues, trying to explain how in these months she has kept her sanity and her faith, “I don’t feel terribly entitled. I do believe the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. It’s your responsibility to accept the adversity as well as you accept the abundance.”

“Adversity” is too small a measure of all that has been ripped from U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow since that February evening when she came home from work, walked down to her basement and saw the blood on the floor.

Her husband. Her mother.

Her sense of safety. Her sense of self.

Her home.

All gone, along with her privacy, her autonomy, her vision of her future, certain dreams for her daughters, reliable sleep.

In the remains of this exploded life, Joan Lefkow reaches backward, back to the lessons about fate and fortitude she learned as a girl in a land where the summer sun was as pitiless as the winter wind and the snow along the empty roads could dwarf a man.

When people marvel that she’s strong, as they so often do in admiration and bewilderment and relief, she shakes her head, says no, she’s not strong. She’s just from Kansas.

“It’s something about growing up in the Plains,” she says. “Weather is harsh. The crops may fail. On the farm, you know your destiny is subject to the forces of nature in a way that people who grow up in cities don’t learn.”

*

The first time I met Joan Lefkow she said, “I feel dead inside.”

This was on a sunny April day, six weeks after 2/28.

Two twenty-eight. That’s what she calls it, an icily precise term evocative of a terrorist attack.

On that day, Feb. 28, 2005, Lefkow’s 64-year-old husband and 89-year-old mother were shot to death, in her Chicago home, because of her job, by a man who would have preferred to kill her. She found the bodies.

Even on days that impersonate the ordinary, that staggering array of facts never leaves her mind.

“It’s like a ringing in the ears,” she says.

In Chicago, around the country, “the Lefkow murders,” as they were branded in the news, felt like an alarm and an assault, as if what had happened to this judge had happened to us, to our rules of justice and our faith that the law would keep us safe.

Then the alarm faded, drowned out in the public realm by other cataclysms, heartbreaks, horrors.

At 61, Joan Lefkow was left to salvage from the ruins.

*

The last time Joan Lefkow saw her husband alive, on the morning of Feb. 28, he told her he wanted to drive their 1998 Windstar minivan that day instead of the 1992 Ford Tempo. He was staying home after surgery on an Achilles’ tendon he had injured playing tennis, and he wanted to drive to nearby Cafe Boost.

She’d already loaded her work things into the minivan. Wouldn’t the Tempo suffice to get him to his morning coffee?

She was annoyed and he was annoyed, but they’d kissed goodbye as usual and he watched her from the doorway as she drove off in the van.

After that day, Lefkow would rarely cry in front of other people. Joan, her friends would say, was shouldering through, as if grieving were just another job. Even at her husband’s funeral she comforted weeping mourners more than she wept.

But on a day two months after Michael’s death, Joan Lefkow went to his office, looked around -- at the swamp of papers, the poster of Spain, the family photos, the diplomas -- and wept.

“All this man’s life activities,” she said. “Phone message lists, calls to return. Now they’re just papers in people’s way.”

*

These days she devotes herself to the business, the busyness, of grief. She packs. Unpacks. Untangles the family finances.

On Sundays there’s church and, once a week, therapy.

Religion, she says, “is the floor I stand on.” Therapy coaxes her below ground.

“I have a hard time digging into what I’m feeling,” she says.

She’ll concede to sadness. She can admit, quietly, that she feels betrayed by life.

But anger? The full scream? Not yet, anyway.

Every now and then, as the anesthesia of disbelief wears off, she feels the anger. Not for herself, not that she can recognize, so much as for her daughters.

What can she say when one of the girls phones at midnight, sobbing? When another wonders how she’ll tell her own children that her father was murdered?

What can she say when they cry for the injustice of what’s been stolen from them, except to say this is not an issue of justice?

“Mostly,” she says, “I just hug them and let them cry.”

Into this interminable darkness shines the light of one clear thing: She must take care of her girls. Duty is comfort.

*

After the murders, she turned down request after request to speak in public. No to Larry King. No to Diane Sawyer.

But yes, she said, when U.S. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) asked her to fly to Washington to testify about judicial security in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Durbin and Barack Obama of Illinois were there and, from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, the lone Republican.

She spoke of the need to make judicial safety a priority. To better fund the U.S. Marshals Service, which protects judges and their courtrooms. To finance home security systems for judges. To limit the Internet posting of judges’ addresses and personal information.

The next day, Lefkow’s picture was on the front pages of newspapers nationwide. AOL featured her on its main screen, with a poll: Do you agree with this judge? Should Congress condemn anti-judge rhetoric? Could recent harsh comments about judges encourage violence?

Her own answer is such a stern yes that a few weeks earlier, after Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas linked violence against judges to their “political” decisions, she shot him a letter.

“Sir,” she wrote, “I challenge you to explain to my fatherless children how any judicial decision that I ever made justified the violence that claimed the lives of my husband and mother. As I will not reveal my daughters’ names or addresses, I will be glad to convey to them any statement you wish to make that might ameliorate the further pain that you have caused my family.”

She never heard back.

*

On a Saturday in September, Helena Lefkow, daughter of Joan and Michael Lefkow, married Jake Edie.

The groom wore the tux Michael Lefkow had planned to wear to his daughter’s wedding.

The fatherless bride wore an ivory gown and, on her right forefinger, her father’s wedding ring.

The flower girls -- twin daughters of the daughter Michael had fathered with another woman -- wore mango-colored sashes Joan had made.

Lefkow wore a strapless periwinkle Nicole Miller gown as she stood to address the gathering:

“The poet Diana Der-Hovanessian wrote, ‘When your father dies, the sun shifts forever, and you walk in his light.’ I shall not attempt to put a good light on what happened to deprive Helena’s father of his great joy of being here tonight to celebrate and amuse you all with a cleverly eccentric blessing of his daughter Helena’s marriage.

“But I do know that the light cast by his life on his daughters and the family and community in which he lived and worked will sustain you, Helena, and all of us as we go forward without him.

“And let us also acknowledge another person we miss, Helena’s grandmother Donna, who always said goodbye with ‘This is my last trip to Chicago,’ but always pulled herself together to be there for every christening and graduation, and many birthdays and Christmases. We miss her warm presence with us.”

*

If you’re Joan Lefkow, when you think about fate, you also think about faith. You think about the universality of suffering and the promise of rebirth. And you still oppose the death penalty.

“The wedding was a resurrection of sorts,” she says in a dark wine bar on a rainy night with autumn rolling in. “A new family being created.”

Resurrection. It’s one of her favorite words. Little resurrections are the signposts she seeks out in the foreign land of this new life.

The plant that didn’t die in the old home and lives on in the new one. Her piano lessons resumed. Work.

She’s still waiting for the resurrection in her refurbished house, the young couple she hopes will buy it and make a new family.

Her loneliness grows starker as the shock wears off. From day to day, she ricochets from disbelief to acceptance and back again, from energetic determination to fatigue no sleep could cure.

And yet, she says, cupping her chin in her hand, she feels her voice growing stronger.

When she gets invitations to speak now, she grows more inclined to accept. She feels an obligation to the issues of justice that roused Michael.

“I’ve found my voice in a way I didn’t have yet,” she says. “I don’t have forever to be an influence on other people. Michael’s not there to speak, so I must speak louder. I’m less afraid.”

*

Michael Lefkow once asked his wife, “Even if there is no God and even if evil prevails, would you live your life differently?”

She told him no. She still thinks no.

“I have some core value that searching for the good and the honorable is the way to live,” she says.

“God is the spirit of good in the world. God is the spirit of love in the world. That belief is so ingrained in me that even if someone proved point by point that it wasn’t true, I’d still believe it.”