joewatts

At left, Aunt Gladys Watts Waddell, center is a photo labeled Joe (Uncle Joe Watts) operating the radio, and at right Clark Watts, photo labeled “How do you like this of me and my girlfriend.”

More to come…

I haven’t been much for updating my blog lately. Thanks for checking. I’m planning to get back into it this weekend. I’ve been really busy working, but that’s not the real reason. As many people who have read my blog regularly know, I lost my Mama on March 3, 2007. (I wrote about what Mama meant/means to me here.) It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through–hopefully ever will go through. Losing a parent is always difficult, I’m sure, but to have Mama stolen from us by an evil man who wanted nothing more than money for something is just more than any of us could handle.

The justice system moves slow in America, but we seem to have finally arrived at an end. The trial was in September (I’ve posted about it here). The sentencing was this Monday. What is below pales in comparison to what my siblings, my niece and my nephew so courageously said, but this was all I could muster. The D.A., who really strikes me as a good and decent human being, had tears in his eyes. They sentenced the man that murdered my Mama to 45 years. The end result should be life in prison.

I woke up yesterday morning with the realization that this was the first morning since this evil man murdered my Mama that he woke up with no hope. I’m sure that before this he had hope that he could get away with it, hope that a jury would believe his lies and finally hope that a judge would fall prey to an easy sentence. Thankfully, none of that happened and he will wake up in a prison cell until he dies.

Well, anyway, this was my impact statement

To know me was to know my Mama.

Her favorite color was purple. Her favorite season was spring.

She loved the land and watching the purple irises poke their blooms skyward. She loved the jonquils and the daffodils springing out of the ground first to chase off the winter. She even brought me the blooms of some of the first of them the Saturday before she was murdered.

We talked on the phone every day for the last 4 years of Mama’s life and she would always tell me about something growing or changing in the yard.  She loved Marengo County and she LOVED Octagon.

More importantly, Mama believed in the people here. She probably taught more than half of them in school. She taught for something around 30 years, taking enough time out to raise the 6 of us–and to teach us all to be good, decent people and to care about those around us. She taught us to believe that people are at their core decent. She grew up in the Great Depression and learned that we must all look out for each other in order to survive.

She taught by example as much as anything else. She always treated everyone with respect and love. She had high hopes for all her students and worked hard to make sure that when they left her classroom, they were better for it. She’d do all she could to help them find jobs after graduation and she even helped them with work clothes if they couldn’t afford them on their own.

There are so many things I still have to learn from her. I didn’t know until I was thumbing through a book on WWII that she had volunteered with the Red Cross weekly while in college to wrap bandages for the soldiers. She loved to write in the margins of books.

She could have told me all about this and the thousands of other things that I don’t even know to wonder about, but she was stolen from me.

And that’s only part of the pain I feel. When I first started talking, I said to know me was to know my Mama. The important part of that statement is the “was.” I’m a very different person today than I was on March 3, 2007. Like Mama, I trusted people. I was pleased to see the first blooms of spring popping up in my front yard from the bulbs I had dug the year before at Mama’s house. I was happy. I was laughing, smiling, living life. I was talking to Mama on the phone and telling her about those first flowers popping up. I was excited to know that I could pick them soon and take them home to her in the way that she always brought flowers to me.

And then, because someone wanted something and is an evil, evil man, Mama was stolen from all of us. I immediately knew that something was wrong–before we got to the house, before we talked to anyone. On the drive from Birmingham to Octagon that night, I cried and I cried. But I started to get angry, too. I still cry regularly. But the thing that has impacted me the most is the anger.

I’m not afraid of people anymore, perhaps even when I should be. Instead, I’m angry. I’ve lost much of that kindness that Mama instilled in all of us. I’ve lost the trust that she always had–willing to stop even in her 80’s to offer help to someone broken down on the side of the road. Mostly, I feel anger.

I hope some day to feel the same love and joy for the world again. I don’t know if seeing the maximum sentence for this horror will give me back my hope, but it is all I can ask for. I’m honestly still shocked that the maximum sentence isn’t death. I’m still amazed that the most we can hope for in a sentence is actually the least that could possibly be acceptable considering how cruel and violent this attack so clearly was.

Anything less will certainly be a cruel blow from a system that claims justice as the goal. The loss of my Mama is the largest, cruelest and most incomprehensible thing I’ve ever been through. Please don’t let the violent, cruel person who committed such a horrible murder ever find his way back on the street–EVER. The thought of seeing him walking any neighborhood is just too much to bear. The thought of all those wonderful people who live in Octagon trying to go to sleep at night with the knowledge that this violent thug could one day walk their streets again is too painful, too unacceptable to imagine.