Story by Rachel Lord Elizondo | Illustrations by Courtney Garvin
All quotes are from Natasha Trethewey’s book Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
Rachel Lord Elizondo shares something terrible in common with celebrated poet, professor, and author Natasha Trethewey — both of their mothers were murdered in Georgia by their former partners. Elizondo talks with Trethewey about her new book Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir — and the journey toward healing, education, and advocacy to end partner violence in Georgia and in every home.
Trigger warning:
The following article describes family violence, murder, & suicide.
y life changed forever on my mother’s 52nd birthday when a sheriff’s deputy told me that she and my father were both dead. I doubled over and cried out from the pain. When I close my eyes, I can still see the blue lights flashing on the gray of the pines on that cold February night.
As I try to drift off to sleep, I picture my mother’s last moments. My father breaking in, my mother running toward the door. The moment the shot rang out — did she turn back, call out for help, try to call 911 or one of us?
These pieced-together, painful memories and imagined last moments are part of a gaping wound inside me that still festers — still refuses to heal.
Natasha Trethewey, author of Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, has a wound like this, too. She gives me a name to describe the feeling I have of not being able to fully move forward, of still having one foot stuck back on that cold February night and all the warning signs leading up to it.
In the prologue of her memoir, Trethewey describes a dream she had of her mother and former stepfather, her mother’s murderer, just three weeks after her mother’s murder. When Trethewey wakes up, she is left with a question her mother asked her ringing in her head: “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”
While there are differences in our story — mine a murder-suicide by a biologial father, hers a homicide by a former stepfather — both of our mothers were shot and killed in acts of domestic violence in Georgia. And I can’t help but feel that not enough has changed since Trethewey lost her mother in 1985.
On a late September day that felt blissfully cool for rural south Georgia, I call Trethewey for an interview. We've exchanged a few emails back and forth, but this will be the first time we have ever spoken. Although separated by geographic distance — she lives in Illinois now, I still live in the same rural area where I grew up and where my parents died — and the decades between our personal tragedies, we make a connection almost instantly.
I start by asking about the factors that she feels contributed to her mother’s murder.
“Perhaps one thing that’s embedded in all of the things that you said … has to do with language,” she says. Trethewey is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, so it’s not surprising that she begins with language. “There are all kinds of cliches or the little statements that people make that are rooted in the role of women, and it goes back a long way … Embedded in so much of our language is this idea of the role of women and whether it is appropriate or not for the husband to discipline a wife.
“My mother was told things like ‘stand by your man,’ regardless of what he may be doing to you. There’s also, ‘She made her bed, now she should lie in it.’ All of these kinds of sayings and the language then gives way to other notions about whether women choose their victimhood. I used to have to talk to my father about this, and I’ve written a poem about this. … My father would constantly say, ‘But she hated violence. Why would she marry a guy like that?’ Because my father, when he was a graduate student in New Orleans, he was also a boxer. My mother couldn’t stand that violence, so it made no sense to him that she would end up with this violent man, and I had to say again and again, it’s not like he just started beating her on the first date. That’s not how it happens, and people don’t understand that a woman, even someone who is educated, is employed and not dependent on her husband for her livelihood or her children’s care, could still find herself in a situation that was very hard to extricate herself from.
“ … Something that still troubles me even now, when I was going back through, reading the court documents and the police reports, they continued to refer to my mother as his wife, even when she was his ex-wife. She was his ex-wife for two years before he actually killed her. She was his ex-wife, the first time he tried to kill her, and yet, as long as the documents kept saying that, to me — a poet who is so focused on language — it still added into the record some ownership of her. They can’t even get the language right. Somehow she’s still his, meaning to do with what he will.”
Trethewey’s reflections on language remind me of the night of the murder when a relative said he “wished my parents could have gotten along.” I wish they could have gotten along too — but more than anything, I wish my father did not beat her, did not give her black eyes in front of us, did not choke her and his children, did not stalk and harass her, did not constantly manipulate language and lie, did not use manipulated Christianity to make it seem as if he was in the right, and, finally, that he did not violate a temporary protective order and kill her. It was not so much a matter of them “getting along.”
I am also reminded of how many times I have had to list my parents as “married” on life insurance policy forms. They had been separated and in the process of a divorce when he murdered her.
Trethewey and I compare our stories. We were both young women when our mothers were murdered. Both of our mothers were employed and well-educated. Trethewey's former stepfather killed her mother in a suburb outside of Atlanta, while my father committed the murder-suicide in my mother’s house in Ben Hill County in south-central Georgia. Trethewey was the child of an interracial marriage in Mississippi — her mother was Black and her father was white — when such marriages were still illegal; I am white, and I was born in Georgia. Trethewey’s mother had sought help from a shelter; my mother didn’t. Her mother lived in an apartment complex with dozens of neighbors around; mine could have screamed at the top of her lungs and not been heard.
Trethewey’s mother, as a Black woman, faced increased risk. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an estimated 51.3% of Black adult female homicides are related to intimate partner violence. Additionally, in 2017, for female victim/male offender homicides, Black females had the highest rate at 2.55 per 100,000, meaning a rate higher than their white, rural counterparts.
The rural landscape where my mother was killed presented its own unique challenges, such as neighbors not being able to hear or being within running distance, gun ownership being more prevalent, and limited resources in terms of victims services and access to medical care.
I ask Trethewey for her opinion, wondering if these differences and similarities can reveal how the system failed our mothers in their own unique way. We went from being the interviewer and the interviewee, the virtually unknown freelance writer and the well-known poet and memoirist, to just two people whose lives were marred by the ugliness of domestic violence. Two women angry with the state of Georgia, their lawmakers, and all the systems that seemed to fail their mothers and so many people before and after them. Trethewey, 35 years out from her experience, sees the opportunity for connection.
“I’m interested, too, about what is similar about our experiences, even as there are other divergences,” she says. “I mean, as we’ve been sitting here talking, I’ve been wanting to ask you things. I’m curious about how someone else lives through it and deals with it … I guess what I wanted to know from you, I mean, do you carry the kind of grief that I carry about losing your mother? … Did you love your father? How do you feel carrying that burden?”
Answering her questions — thinking about how much I miss my mother, how I am carrying this burden daily, my constantly evolving feelings toward my father — is painful. I was my mama’s baby. I found a treasure trove of artwork I drew for my mother on holidays and special occasions and other notes and drawings I gave her just because. Pictures from school with sentences in sloppy block letters explaining how much I loved her. We found gifts from her students, handwritten notes from my sister, family photos we forgot existed, memorabilia from my brother’s time in the Boy Scouts. She had saved it all.
I weep while writing about her, even as I write this now. When something good happens, for just a millisecond I think of telling her before I am reminded of that horrible night. I dream of her nearly every night.
I have since dedicated myself to the cause of domestic violence awareness because it is the biggest way I know that I can still channel my love for her. I tell her story, my story, over and over again until I am numb to the details in hopes that it will save another woman’s life.
As for my father, I spent my life trying to make excuses for him, constantly trying to reason with myself on why I loved the man who could be so awful. I wanted to believe he was the person who bought me candy at the store as a child and helped me convince my mother to take stray dogs in and whose face lit up when he played with my nephew. I wanted to believe he was the person who cut my mother fresh flowers because he wanted to, because he loved her, not because he was trying to convince her to stay with him because he had continued to abuse her.
I wanted to try and believe he was more of the good parts than the yelling at night, the hole punched in the wall on my mother’s side of the bed when I was a child, the “You can run, but you can’t hide.” In the end, he shot and killed my mother and then himself and selfishly left my siblings and me to pick up the pieces of such a terrible tragedy, the ripples of which we will see for decades, probably even generations.
When I speak with Nancy Bryan, the executive director of Ruth’s Cottage & The Patticake House, a women’s shelter that covers the region where my mother lived and worked, she brings up the issue of gun violence early on. (The shelter has a murder-suicide in its history, when one of the founding members of the shelter, Joy Hill, was murdered by her partner in 2002.)
“It’s particularly challenging because gun ownership is really encouraged and prevalent [here], and the data show that the presence of guns escalates the homicide rate,” Bryan says. "Most of these women die from gunshot wounds. That’s the number one indicator.”
An “indicator” refers to the lethality indicator assessments shelter staff fill out with clients when working on requesting a temporary protective order. While an order can technically be put in place for the perceived threat of physical violence, as Bryan tells me, in her experience, it is nearly impossible for victims to get one unless there is a history of physical violence in the county my parents lived in. These matters, the act of deciding whether to issue a temporary protective order or not, a matter that is literally life or death in some cases, are left up to county judges.
Georgia was recently ranked 10th in the nation for its rate of men killing women, according to the Georgia Commission on Family Violence. Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (which, going back to Trethewey’s point about language, is problematic in itself as it takes the abusers out of the equation), has been stalled in the Senate due to the influence of the gun lobby. According to the Georgia Commission on Family Violence, firearms were the cause of death in 73% of recorded domestic violence fatalities in 2019 in Georgia. My parents will be included in the data for 2020.
Bryan tells me there is additional cause for concern with the state of Georgia. Although there is a federal law (18 U.S.C. 922 (g) (9)) that allows for abusers convicted of certain misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence to not legally be allowed to have guns, Georgia does not have this law on the books.
“Georgia is the only state that won’t [pass this law],” Bryan explains, the frustration palpable in her voice..
All the states surrounding Georgia — Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Florida — have passed a state law that mirrors the federal law, Bryan says. Local Georgia judges say that they aren’t authorized to enforce federal law, and local law enforcement officials say they can’t enforce federal law without a judge’s order.
Then Bryan tells me something I did not know about my mother’s own temporary protective order, which she obtained just weeks before her murder. “That order, technically could have forced your father to turn over all his guns,” she explains. “Does it mean he absolutely could never get his hands on [a gun]? No, but it is a good step in bringing it home, and it may have made him think. And that is something that you can do with those orders. They are very powerful."
While I was worried about my mother and frustrated with the constant harassment he was inflicting upon her, I did not really consider the issue of the guns in his possession. It seemed normal. He always had a gun with him. Most people I knew did. Mama kept her revolver in her purse, and I told her on the phone the day she was murdered to keep it close by. I hoped it would protect her.
I did not know the 500% increased risk of lethality with a gun in the hands of an abuser. I did not know about lethality assessments at all.
With Trethewey’s mother, the murder weapon had not been obtained legally and his final intentions were the same as my father’s. Her stepfather had stolen the gun, she told me in her interview. And this is notable, too, because there is a link between stolen guns and violent crimes. According to Everytown Research, the majority of the 23,000 stolen firearms recovered by police between 2010 and 2016 were recovered in connection with crimes, including more than 1,500 violent acts. In Memorial Drive, Trethewey writes, "When they arrived, Joel still had the gun he'd used to kill her. It lay on the nightstand beside the bed, and as the officers entered the room to arrest him he said he'd planned to use it on himself. Said it as if that fact should elicit their sympathy, that it would somehow lessen the gravity of what he'd done to her."
Trethewey and I share common wounds. We both share the need to write our pain, to attempt to figure out why these horrible events transpired in our lives. Trethewey’s entire memoir is a decades-long attempt at writing through, despite the pain, trying to answer the questions that race through my own mind: “Could she have been saved? Why did this happen?”
I go through the chain of events over and over. Trethewey does the same when she relays scenes of her stepfather coming to a football game she cheered at in high school, where he later told investigators he had planned to kill her. She does the same when she talks about the police officer assigned to watch her mother’s apartment leaving his watch. She wants to know why this happened, why this exact chain of events occurred and led to her mother’s murder.
We found so much of ourselves in each other. I focused on the way, as she writes in the memoir, she held onto a police officer telling her over the phone her mother was shot. Shot, not killed. I did the same thing when I learned my parents were dead. I heard that an ambulance was on the way. I told myself an ambulance did not come for someone who was dead. They came for someone who could be saved, someone who only needed to be taken to a hospital. We were both wrong in the end of course, but that holding onto language, that hope that our mothers were alive, that was the same.
As I told her my story, my mother’s final moments and everything that transpired that day, she told me I reminded her of herself after her own mother’s death.
“You sound just like I remember myself,” Trethewey says. “The detail with which you told that story and that matter-of-factness. That distance that you’re able to maintain when telling it is so familiar to me. I could hear myself.”
Over the course of our interview, Trethewey tells me that she still weeps when talking about her mother and what happened. That the memoir has only brought these wounds back up to the surface. That time has not necessarily made it any easier. I know as she says this that I am catching a glimpse into my future.
“I gave an interview and somebody asked me about that 19-year-old girl that I was and asked me if I could tell her anything, if I could say anything to her, what would it be, and I said, I’d say the same thing to her that I said back then, ‘Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?’”
And after so many years, the wound still remains.
Trethewey urged me to write down everything I can now, while I still remember. She wrote in her book, “If you had told me early on how much of my life I would lose to forgetting — most of those years when my mother was still alive — maybe I’d have begun then trying to save as much as I could.” Trethewey and I connected so deeply over our common tragedies; orphans of this terrible epidemic that our state — our nation — is facing and not adequately addressing.
I asked Trethewey how it felt for her to know that her story was so impactful to me. That reading it helped me not to feel so alone. But also, if it made her angry that another young woman, just three years older than she had been when her mother was murdered, had to be told of such a similar tragedy nearly 35 years later. That another woman had to walk through the door of the home where her mother was murdered and walk out a completely different person.
“I love thinking that, well, what you just said and what you said in the very beginning, knowing that you were not alone. I think that’s why there’s something so … is it uplifting?" she says. "It’s something about the way I feel being able to talk to somebody who has gone through a very similar experience. I don’t get this opportunity at all. I don’t. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever talked to anyone else who grew up in a similar situation and is carrying a similar psychic burden. I don’t think so. And the idea of meeting a young woman, so close in age to how I was back then. That’s astonishing to me.”
“But when it comes to the idea of another young person going through such a similar experience three decades later?” I ask.
“It’s hard to answer because, obviously, I would want for something like that to never happen again, and yet why am I not surprised that it does? Because I’m not surprised that that happens anymore than I’m surprised that the police kill Black people a lot because it is just the world that we live in. I think maybe, as with the police brutality protests that we’re seeing now, bringing so much more awareness about that issue to people, maybe the work that I do in my book, work that you’re doing in writing about this issue and writing about your own experience, testifying about it when you talk to people, certainly this has got to bring more awareness. That’s all I can hope. I can hope for that.”
She and I share that hope.
Rachel Elizondo is an emerging writer for South Georgia who is interested in writing about the overlooked people, places, and issues affecting the rural south. She is currently working on finishing a draft of her memoir “Three Napkin Roses,” which explores her experience as a restaurant worker and the dangerous precipice so many Americans risk falling from. Since the murder-suicide of her parents, she is also working to document her mother’s story, in hopes that it too will become a memoir. When not writing, Rachel serves as a Community Relations Coordinator for a health system in South Central Georgia and works with Ruth’s Cottage & the Patticake House as a Board Member. She also enjoys spending time with her husband and playing with her niece and nephews.
