TRAVELLING THE ROCKY ROAD TOWARD RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
Author outlines contact with her father’s killer that both captivates and provokes
Dead Reckoning: How I Came to Meet the Man Who Murdered My Father By Carys Cragg | Arsenal Pulp 327 pages, $19.95
In spring 2011, Carys Cragg began writing a series of letters to Sheldon Klatt. Drug-crazed and desperate, he’d stabbed her father to death in 1992 during a home break-in when Cragg was 11 years old and happily residing with her family in Calgary.
Despite being an adult now who was “safe and well, with a circle of family and friends” around her, Cragg felt curious and angry. Possessing a “scar on (her) soul,” haunted by “old memories, old pain” and wanting to “move forward,” the Vancouver-area youth outreach counsellor began an arduous process that would eventually take her to a meeting room in the Drumheller, Alta., medium security prison and to parole hearings for years afterward.
In Dead Reckoning, Cragg reproduces many of those letters. In the first, she introduces herself to Klatt (“My name is Carys and I am the eldest daughter of Geoffrey Cragg, the person whose death you are responsible for. I was 11 years old when you came into my house and shattered my world into pieces.”) and closes with a question, “Have you ever wondered how I’m doing after all these years?” In his replies, Klatt displays a regretful man with a habit of speaking in half-truths.
For readers, the revelatory nature of some memoirs can have a discomfiting intimacy. From a complete stranger we’re shown, for instance, page after page of the blackest of depressions, the degradations of addiction or the bottomless despair of grief.
In reprinting her letters to Klatt and sharing the ongoing tumult of her innermost feelings, Cragg exposes stormy states of mind. In just one letter, for example, she writes, “More awful than your taking him from me was your taking me away from him,” “I don’t know how to even begin to describe the depths of pains you’ve caused me, my family, and the thousands of family, friends, colleagues, patients and other community members who experienced such a profound loss,” and, “Your actions devastated our souls, destroyed our confidence, sent us in a spiralling mission to control everything
… ’’ The cumulative effect is to convey a seemingly limitless well of pain and anger while, in terms of narrative pacing, risking repetitiveness. At a literary level as well, the impact of Cragg’s choice to end most of her book’s chapters with a third-person, fiction-like vignette about her adolescent moments before and after her dad’s death is lessened by prose that suggests a writer still finding a voice.
Though written by someone who expresses skepticism about the notion of emotional healing, Dead Reckoning nevertheless follows the hopeful arc of an individual “moving toward further peace.”
Within that framework, Cragg productively explores the challenging idea of “restorative justice.” As outlined by a helpful mediator Cragg met before making contact with Klatt, restorative justice offers a “different world view” from retributive justice — with its law-breaking, blame, guilt and administered pain. Viewing crime as “a violation of people and relationships (that) creates obligations to make things right,” this holistic justice aims to “promote repair, reconciliation and reassurance.” Cragg’s experiences of and thoughts about it captivate even as they provoke.