Authors: Deborah Spungen
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (2 page)
As I was walking from city hall back to my office, I remembered an essay sent to me by a stranger in the aftermath of Nancy's murder. It's called “Reflections on Time and Change.” The note that accompanied the essay said the sender hoped it would provide me with some answers as well as some challenges. It was only now that the true significance of the words became meaningful to me and I understood why and how I would be able to apply them to my own life.
I often wonder what people are thinking when they say, “You'll get over it.” Sometimes it sounds to me as if they are talking about a case of mumps or my despair at income tax time. But what can they mean when they say it about my grief? Maybe they mean that grief is just an interruption in life. Their theory seems to be that life is basically happyâbuying stuff, working, watching TVâbut that a time of death and grief is an unnatural, sad time in that happy life.
I cannot agree with that view.
Time can lessen the hurt; the empty place we have can seem smaller as other things and experiences fill our life; we can forget for periods and feel as if our loved one didn't die; we can find sense in the death and understand that perhaps this death does fit into a bigger design in the world; we can learn to remember the good and hold on to that.
But we cannot “get over it,” because to get over it would mean we were not changed by the experience. It would mean we did not grow by the experience. It would mean that our loved one's death made no difference in our life.
There is an interesting discussion in the Talmud, an ancient Jewish writing. Those Jews had the custom of rending their garmentsâliterally tearing their clothesâto symbolize the ripping apart that death brings. But the question was raisedâafter the period of mourning, could you sew the garment up and use it again? The teachers answered yes, but when you mended it, you should not tuck the edges under so it would look as if it had never been torn. This symbolized the fact that life after grief is not the same as before. The rent will show. The next question was, can you sell that garment? The teachers answered no. The rending and mending of our life is ours and others cannot wear it.
No, we don't get over it. We change and grow. Our life has a difference
which is ours alone. Perhaps we can help each other make that difference the kind of difference that increases the world's supply of compassion, love, and healing. (adapted from “Reflections About Time and Change” by Dennis Klass)
Nancy's murder was the catalyst for my original involvement with Families of Murder Victims. But at some point, I don't remember the exact hour or day, or year, it all began to stand on its own. I was drafted into the victims' rights movement, but I have chosen to stay and make it my vocation.
My experiences since Nancy's murder have provided me with a life far different than I could ever have imagined or planned; I have written
And I Don't Want To Live This Life
, I have returned to school and earned two graduate degrees, I have seen the development of a unique victim advocate agency grow out of the gathering of a few tearful families in our living room, I have had the opportunity to meet and speak to thousands of people who I might otherwise have never known.
I would like to see FMV go out of business, but that remains a dream until we can begin to stem the tide of violence that surrounds us. I have helped to establish a new agency, the Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia, which includes FMV and a new program, the Student Anti-Violence Education Program (SAVE). SAVE is designed to offer young children, in their classroom, the skills necessary to choose nonviolent means of resolving conflicts. I have come full circle and can once more look to the future with increased optimism, because my tomorrow is dedicated to everyone's children.
In May 1993, I stood at the front of a church in Philadelphia, aptly named Bright Hope, and watched as more than five hundred families of murder victims came together to share the pain of a common experience. For thirteen years I had served as a voice for many of these families, and now this was their opportunity to speak out, to be heard, and to be acknowledged. One by one they called out the names of their loved ones, brightened only by the candles they held and their common purpose, commemorating the lives of those lost to violence. It was a day to celebrate the strength of the human spirit that gave all of us, in that church, the courage to go on, to live, and to love again.
D
EBORAH
S
PUNGEN
January 24, 1994
THE REPORTERS were back.
They crammed our front porch and spilled out onto the lawn, jabbering with each other, jockeying for position close to the front door. There were photographers and television cameramen. There were microphones and tape recorders and lights. One of the reporters rang the doorbell. He kept his thumb down on it so it rang over and over and over again, demanding my attention and cooperation. My husband, Frank, had already left for work but some of our neighbors hadn't yet. As they wormed their cars past the double-parked vans and cars, they craned their necks to watch.
The freak show was on again.
I hadn't opened my door to the press since the nightmare began three and a half months before, when my oldest child, Nancy, was found under the bathroom sink in room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. She had been stabbed in the stomach with a seven-inch hunting knife and had been left to bleed to death. She wore only black lace underwear. The man accused of murdering her was the man she shared the room with, her loverâBritish punk rock star Sid Vicious of the defunct Sex Pistols. He was out on $50,000 bail.
She was twenty years old when she died.
The reporters kept ringing the bell, shouting my name. The neighbors honked. None of them would go away, ever, it seemed, until I opened the door. So I opened it.
“He's dead!” one of them yelled.
“Sid's dead, Mrs. Spungen!”
“Overdoseâ!”
“Middle of the nightâ”
“In Greenwich Villageâ”
“Celebrating being out on bailâ”
“Some celebration, huh?”
“Care to comment, Mrs. Spungen?”
“How does it make you feel, Mrs. Spungen?”
“Get what he deserved?”
“Happy?”
“Sad?”
“End of ordeal?”
The shutters clicked, the TV cameras rolled. Pens were anxiously poised. I said nothing. I felt nothing. Just my own pain.
“Don't you want to comment, Mrs. Spungen?”
“How about the criminal justice system?”
“What do you think of it now?”
I closed the door in their faces.
“Waitâ!”
“We need a statementâ”
The reporter nearest the door began to ring the bell again. I leaned against the inside of the door, the ache in my chest making it hard to breathe. The pain had started right after I had learned of Nancy's death. It would not go away. I'd seen a doctor but he said I was in perfect health. I thought about running from the press. I had my coat on and my keys in my hand. I always did now, so I'd be ready to run. But I knew I'd never get away from them. They'd follow me. They'd find me, wherever I went.
The repeated ringing brought my seventeen-year-old son, David, downstairs. He hadn't yet left for school. Not that leaving was anything more than a token gesture. He rarely made it to school. Mostly, he sat in the public library. He had stopped seeing his friends. He had stopped living. We had all stopped living. I had quit my job; Frank went off to work like a zombie and came back that way; Suzy, who was two years older than David, had isolated herself in her apartment in the city. She seldom went to her classes at the Philadelphia College of Art and we saw little of her.
But the reporters didn't care about any of us, just as they hadn't cared about Nancy. All they wanted was another installment in their ongoing freak show, to sell papers, to boost ratings.
“What's going on?” asked David.
“Sid OD'ed. He's dead.”
David nodded grimly. He wasn't surprised. He had no more capacity to be surprised. He had grown up with too much anger and pain and tragedy. He had grown up with Nancy.
“I'll call the police,” he declared, and went off to use the phone. I just stood there in the hallway.
A patrol car came immediately. The Nancy SpungenâSid Vicious case was the biggest story Huntingdon Valley, our little Philadelphia suburb, had ever known. Any call from the Spungen residence brought a quick response.
The officers moved the reporters off our property and sent them on their way. David and I watched from the living room window.
As soon as the policemen left, two English tabloid-newspaper men returned and began to ring the bell again. When I didn't answer, they backed up onto the front lawn and began to yell.
“How dare you call the police!”
“We're not bothering you, Mrs. Spungen!”
“We just want to talk!”
One of the reporters was particularly abrasive. Three days after Nancy's funeral he'd shown up with a copy from a page of an English newspaper carrying the banner headline
NANCY WAS A WITCH
. He told me if I didn't deny it people would assume it was true. I said “No comment” and closed the door. Somehow he managed to shove the page inside the door before it shut, then told the police I'd stolen it.
“We have a right!”
“How dare you call the police!”
David went out the door after the two reporters, fists clenched, face red. Six feet tall and powerfully built, he ran toward them. They turned and took off. He chased them across the lawn and down the block to their car. They jumped in, surprised and frightened, and sped away.
When David came back, I asked him to please go to school, to at least make the effort.
“You sure you'll be okay here all by yourself?” he asked.
“I'll be fine.”
“Why are you wearing your coat?”
“I'm cold.”
He walked to his car and drove off. The phone rang. I thought about not answering it, but it might be Frank. Possibly he'd heard the news. I picked up the phone. It wasn't Frank.
“Mrs. Spungen, it's Anne Beverley,” said Sid's mother, her voice strained.
We had spoken once before. She had phoned two days after Nancy's murder to offer her condolences and to say she was certain Sid couldn't have done it. It had been a bizarre call, but not as bizarre as when Sid himself had phoned me the following day.
“I'm â¦Â I'm sorry your son is dead,” I now managed to say. “I'm sorry for you.”
“Thank you. Our children were very special children. I suppose this is the way it was meant to be. You know, no one else understood them except you and I.”
“I know.”
“Mrs. Spungen, may I bury him next to Nancy?”
I covered the phone, gasping from the pain in my chest. And from horror. How could she ask me to let her bury her sonâmy baby's accused murdererânext to her?
“May I, Mrs. Spungen? They meant so much to each other.”
“You â¦Â
can't
.”
“Why?”
“It's â¦Â it's a family plot.”
“Then what will I do? Where will I bury him? Perhaps somewhere else in the same cemetery?”
“I can't help you. I'm sorry.”
I hung up. The doorbell rang again. More reporters. I let it ring.
I went through the kitchen to the garage and found a piece of heavy, rubber-encased wire with which to hang myself. I'd been thinking about it each and every day for several weeks. In fact, suicide was all I thought about. I kept putting it off. Every day I told myself to wait until tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow the pain would go away. Maybe tomorrow I'd want to live again, have a reason to live again.
But I couldn't take the pain anymore. It was unbearable and there was no end to it. Death was the only way out. I had no other alternative. Today was the day. This was it.
I went back inside the house with the wire, tied a noose around my neck, and looked at myself in the dining room mirror.
Nothing had worked out the way I'd planned.
Once I had looked forward to life. Twenty years before it had been full of promise. I was twenty then, a nice, reasonably attractive middle-class Jewish girl from Philadelphia. I was a college student, a good student. I had plans and ambitions. I had a kind, young husband who loved me as much as I loved him. I had dreams. Twenty solid years of anguish was not one of them. What had I done to deserve this?
Once I had been happy. I had known how to laugh. I had known how to cry. I hadn't cried in twenty years. There had never been any time to cry since the day Nancy was born. No time for the luxury of tears. I had made a promise to Nancy the first time I saw her there in the maternity ward nursery. I had promised her a life of quality and dignity. It took every bit of my strength and my love to keep that promise over the twenty years of my daughter's frightening, misunderstood, tragic life. It took every minute of every day.