#brian walch

[cowbagclover]

Update on Brian’s story: The folks at Hogar de la Madre (Home of the Mother) just took down the false story and apologized to our family. I’m so grateful for all the good-hearted and understanding people who have helped us find peace. Just when I begin to fall back into fearing the world, God sends another bright light. Hooray! 

[cowbagclover]

Peace and Healing

When grace arrives at my door in a particularly big package, I’m invited to stop and take in the vast web of causation that has led to each moment. This time, I received peace and healing around my brother’s death in Cambodia (see earlier posts, #Brian Walch or #Khmer Rouge).

Brian’s false story is posted on hogardelamadre—worse version ever.

I find the courage to post about Brian on Tumblr and to send letters to the originators of the story, asking them to stop distributing it.

Two weeks later, I receive Tumblr “fan mail” from the secretary for the Brothers of Charity, describing how he had been looking for Brian’s family in order to get information to the Cambodian Catholic Church so he can be put on a list of martyrs. However, he’s seen on Tumblr that I don’t consider Brian a martyr, so he wonders what we want him to do.

I contact my other brother and my sister, and we all agree that Brian shouldn’t be considered as a martyr or saint. I realize that I’ve been feeling all alone in this quest, but now I don’t.

When we tell the secretary, he thanks us for our candid and detailed account of Brian. He agrees that Brian should not be considered a martyr. His kind letter affirms our perspective and helps to provide us healing and peace. I realize that I could not have written the account of Brian without the decades of recovery work and research I’ve done.

Online, I search for a book that the Brother has told me about, in which Brian is mentioned. It’s out of print, but I find it on Abe Books and order it.

I send a second letter to the distributor, via email this time. Within a day, I receive a phone call from them. They need corroboration from another person.

My family asks the Brothers for help, and they say they will be happy to corroborate.

The book on the Brothers arrives. It presents a clear and decisive account of Brian’s final days. The account is consistent with the one my family has known, based on the letters at the time. I feel affirmed and relieved.

I email the distributor with the contact information as well as excerpts from the book.

The distributor agrees to remove the false account and thanks us for our help.

I go the Novato Festival of Art, Wine, and Music. I sit for a while at a table under an umbrella, enjoying the lovely day and thanking God for such good people and so much joy.

After forty years, these few weeks have brought me a new perspective that is clearer and more insightful than I ever thought possible. Such an amazing gift. And so fast! I’m still taking it in.

[cowbagclover]

Banana Peels Were Everywhere and Nobody Seemed to Mind

Her brother writes, Cambodia is summer camp—palm house on stilts, garden plot. Peanut butter for breakfast. The moon seems larger than the one back home, the kids remind him of his sisters. He calls the huts in Kampong Thom suburban sprawl. The same, it all says, but better. Stay, it all says. Père Noël has brought sixty-five orphans cake, bananas, and chocolate milk.

Between her first-place ribbon and the paper chain she made in second grade, she tacks a photograph: the freshly woven house, four men, her brother the tallest by far. Mother says he looks like a sore thumb. Father says, a saint. Everything in place, the corkboard takes on the shadows of shapes until nothing can be removed without showing what has been lost.

—Molly Roth ©1997

[cowbagclover]

Lamb of God

He used to steer the mower with thin arms that dangled from the short, open sleeves of an old white t-shirt, like a ghost, around the trees and back, through swarms of chaff above the steel-cut rows.

His sister wanted to be just like him, with the power to straighten pathways, fill valleys, lay the mountains low, until he embraced his faith with such force he saw only peaks and troughs.

Whenever he said, “A grain of wheat must die to live again,” she would argue that the nib was still alive, that the seed never really died.

After he left to join the missionaries, the family filled him with pride and dirt—his mother would always say he’d turned strange from the time he told her that she would go to hell if she didn’t change: the Lamb of God had to be the black sheep.

When the family received his final word: he didn’t think he would die, even though the Khmer Rouge had captured the city,

his sister cried for him only once, when a cast of light evoked a summer afternoon, a motor’s drone, the glare of a t-shirt drifting across the well-kept rows and onto the driveway, where stones flung by whirling blades stung her legs as her brother steered the mower away.

—Molly Roth ©1994

[cowbagclover]

Speaking Up for My Brother

Well, it’s happened again. I found yet another retelling of my brother’s life online. They also include a transcript of the source material. The new format lends an extra air of credibility to this essentially false story. So, I’ve finally taken the next step—asking the distributor to withdraw the CD and MP3 about my brother. I’ve also emailed the organization with the online article. (For background, see earlier post, “Tabloid Thinking.)

The ball is in their court. I’m not sure how they will react to someone telling them that their inspirational story about martyrdom in Cambodia is essentially false. I wish I could help them with the real story, but it wouldn’t serve their purposes. Brian was no big sinner, no martyr, just a typical young person who was trying to sort things out but ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That doesn’t mitigate the tragedy of his death. I still miss my brother. I just don’t want to support false witness against him. I’ll be posting some poems I’ve written about Brian. I hope that anyone who has lost a loved one, especially if the death was not fully resolved, can find some consolation in them.

(BTW, thanks for everyone who is reading these posts about the “heavier” side of my life. “Cowbag clover” means the downside and the upside of life over fifty—so much to work through and resolve, and yet so much to be grateful for. I prefer to write about joyful and goofy things, but that’s just part of the story. My brother was pretty goofy, though, so I promise more goofy posts soon, including “evil oatmeal,” bwa-ha-ha.)