Susan’s Letter to Melanie

January 8, 2007

Dear Melanie:

First of all, let me thank you for the letter I received from you today. My heart breaks for all of us! But for our family, there is finality and closure. Yours must endure. Part of the bitter bargain, I suppose.

When my eldest son, Adam, now 35 (yikes!), was 17 and living with his dad in Redding, California, I received a call from his grandmother.

“Adam is okay, but there’s been an accident, and Justin is dead.”

I didn’t skip a beat. “Who was driving?”

“Justin.”

I knew that my job as a mother was radically different if Adam were driving than if Justin were driving. You, my dear, have the job I dreaded the most (considering my son was still alive.) I knew that if Justin were driving, Adam would have had a traumatic event in his life in which he saw his best friend die. That mother’s job was to help her child through a very long grieving and anger process. I could handle that. Go into damage-control mode. Make immediate change. Crack a whip here and there. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Had Adam been driving, my job would have been very different. The psychological damage and trauma to my child would have been much more complex, sophisticated, difficult, and drawing on an entirely different area of philosophy and faith. I have a great deal of compassion for what both you and Jessica are going through.

There are reasons why I know what I know. My life’s events have brought me to a special place with special equipment, if you will. When I was 16, my two cousins, a girlfriend, my sister and I were in a wreck in my cousin’s ‘65 Mustang. High speed, single car, alcohol involved. My cousin who was driving and my 19-year-old sister died in the wreck. I learned there and then about the finality of death. I learned that there are some things it does no good to get angry about. I learned that being judgmental brings back no one. Heals no one. Helps no one. Now you have learned that lesson. We cannot control events in this life, but we can control how we react to them. It’s very Zen, I think. We need to understand that we really have very little control of the events and to relax into the great God’s will as to how we will respond.

I, too, think that perhaps I made mistakes in Alex’s rearing that brought us to the point where he was in a position of letting alcohol make the decision to get in anyone’s car at 1:30 in the morning after a party instead of spending the night, as he had planned. His toiletries and clean boxers were in his backpack. He had intended to spend the night. Had he made that decision, even if Jessica had still had the accident, no one would have been killed. How different your life would have been had Alex made a better choice. Jessica would have had an irritating DUI and at-fault accident to deal with. You would have the luxury of being both disapproving and supportive. Now there’s no room for disapproval. She is doing that for all of us.

And, as you said in your letter, we have all done at one time or another what Jessica did – thought we were okay to drive and driven. As a society, we play Russian Roulette, and that’s not right. We need to provide more support for one another. I am not against drinking socially. I believe alcohol has a place as a lubricant for the best (and sometimes the worst) kinds of social intercourse. We become relaxed, creative and less judgmental – the other side of the coin of making poor decisions, I suppose. I remember years ago reading in the Psalms “God gave man wine so that his soul may be happy.” It’s okay. But we need to be aware, after tens of thousands of years of drinking, that we are in a new era where we are operating equipment that can kill us. We need to care for one another and be responsible for one another. Alan and I had dinner with friends a few nights ago at their house a couple of miles from our house. After dinner, instead of opening that next bottle of wine, Denise served a pitcher of water with limes sliced in it. How wonderful! We quenched our thirst and still had something to sip. And our evening already had the advantages of having had wine earlier (with the fresh crab. Mmmmmm.) I have adopted this tactic at my own home. There are lots of ideas welling up on how to change our behaviors around drinking, but I’ll leave that for another time. I think your idea of changing the world one person at a time is an excellent one; one we might choose to do together.

I cannot tell you I’m mellow about Alex’s death. As I emailed you a few days ago, I am still in damage-control mode. More punishment for Jessica feels like more damage to me. As more focus comes our way over our less judgmental stance, the attention inside my mind and body over Alex’s death is mounting. I have more of what my mom used to call “blue” days than earlier. I am thinking about it more these days. I do expect a train to come barreling down the emotional track and do me in any day. But I do not hold Jessica to blame. Don’t even ask me why. I am sorry for her. I am sad for her. But I know that any sane young person is going to beat herself up enough for what has come to pass. There’s nothing more we can add to the coals heaped on her head by her own feelings of fault.

Meanwhile, I told my husband, Alex’s death has been as if a huge explosion went off and killed Alex, but the fireworks have been beautiful. We have received love and support from people from whom I never expected support. Our entire family and all our friends completely agree on our stance concerning Jessica and her sentence. The reporter from the Santa Barbara paper asked me “why” we are taking the stance we are. When I told my husband she had asked that, he immediately said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

I have learned what a much loved man Alex was. Alan and I always called him “Lonesome Luke.” We didn’t have a clue that he had so many friends. When his long-time girlfriend, Deanna, graduated and left Santa Barbara for law school in Davis a couple of years ago, we really worried about Alex not having any friends. We said, “We need to make a point to call Alex more often now that Deanna’s gone.” Phffttt. What a joke. There were 60 friends at his memorial in Santa Barbara. I don’t have 60 friends! Good night! Everyone loved Alex. The kids are planning a concert in April in Santa Barbara to bring awareness of drinking and driving to the younger community in Alex’s name. Jessica wants to give talks. We’re coming up with all kinds of creative ideas to keep other young people alive. And Jessica needs to be part of that solution.

To that end, our family will do everything in our power to keep her out of prison. We are granting an interview to the Los Angeles Times later this week. They find our point of view intriguing, and want to delve into it. I spoke with the reporter the week before last, and he sounds like a person we can trust to do a thoughtful, mature article. Alan and I will travel to Santa Barbara on the 25th of this month to testify for Jessica on the 26th. I am so proud of Alex’s friends, especially his girlfriend Paige, who misses him so terribly and who suffers so every day. She has also adopted our point of view and articulates it unwaveringly to the press.

Please do not be terrified. You are not alone. Jessica is not alone. It is, indeed, a different planet now. One on which you and we are tied together forever by this tragedy. Let’s continue to support one another and paint no one, not even the district attorney, who is just trying to prevent more death, as villain.

Thank you, again, for your letter.

Much love to you,

Susan Barich