A Table, Some Chairs, a Bitter Memory

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008


There are no rules to the way we react to trauma. Some people become obsessed by their misfortune and it grips them whole. Some shake the evil off their coats like a drenched dog drying himself.

Years spent sitting in court rooms has shown me that the victims of crime approach their lives differently after the harm that befell them was inflicted. There are no longer any walks after dark. Strangers are greeted with distrust. Children become more clinging, or less approachable. A proud stride is reduced to a painful shuffle. But until last week, I never thought of that trauma having an impact on a room, and a piece of furniture.

Two years ago, a Honey Brook man argued with his girlfriend about the course of their relationship. During the fight, he took their 30-day-old son and held him up, dropped him to the floor and kicked him twice, in the head.

The assault took place in the kitchen of the woman’s home on Horseshoe Pike as the family ate dinner. In a letter she wrote to the judge who was set to sentence her former boyfriend for the assault, the woman remembered that location particularly.

Here is what she wrote:

“He did all of this in the kitchen where my children and I used to share so many laughs, sit down as a family for dinner and have family game night. Now we are unable to sit around the table; it’s become a useless piece of furniture. The chairs are now in the children’s room, where they sit to eat their dinner, while the table grows cobwebs.

“It’s too painful to enter the kitchen where the assault took place. Even after I tried to re-arrange it to make it less painful, we can still see the image of (her ex) holding (her child) in the air by the back of his pajamas, then being thrown to the floor.”

Her description struck me as profound, and poetic. The trauma suffered that night had an impact not only on the physical and mental well being of those involved, but on their relationship to their own environment. And the picture is immediately recognizable: what family doesn’t use the kitchen table, or counter, or island, as a place to gather and laugh and talk and play and perhaps shout a bit. It is the central place for where the business of being a family gets conducted.

And what more poison could there be than to bring violence into that space, and how could you not feel a chill every time you went back to that place?

The idea of the table itself being shunned, being cast aside, growing dust and cobwebs, drew me in. Inanimate objects do have lives, I thought. We give cars names and they grow personalities. We find a rock in the cool shade and it becomes a friend. Violence enters our homes and the furniture itself become witnesses and victims.

At the end of her letter, the women pleaded for a sentence that would bring her family justice. Here’s how she put it.

“Please let us get that phone call, knowing maybe we’ll go to sleep tonight and actually wake up tomorrow and be able to live again, start on the process of moving the chairs back into the kitchen, sitting around the dinner table as a family … and just finally get back some happiness.”