Ripped

This morning, I finally finished shredding all of Katherine Arthur's law papers, some 30+ boxes of densely-packed legal documentation that she stored at my house prior to her Peace Corps journey to Ukraine in 2002, and the discovery of her breast cancer in 2003, subsequent retirement, illness, and death on March 4th of this year. The project took three months, on and off. I destroyed one shredder, and have worn down another in the process. The hours of paper shredding have been a fine opportunity to bond with my rabbit Cloudy, but otherwise, what a drag!

Katherine had a family-law practice, and she was keen that her papers had to be destroyed in the event of her death. There were plenty of identity theft opportunities there, with photocopies of driver's licenses, Social Security cards, and credit card information for hundreds of clients. The documentation also gave detailed, intrusive information on the private lives of many hundreds of people: paternity tests, drug tests, interviews with hostile and vindictive people. There were also detailed clinical diagrams of bite marks, rope burns and cigarette burns. There was also plenty of information about childhood sexual abuse.

There was a class of confessional letters to family law judges that seemed like a minor literary form after awhile. The letters always seemed to start in the same way, suggesting that tired lawyers and social workers were pushing the same basic letter structure onto their clients, regardless of differences between cases. I never read more than the first line of these heart-breaking letters, but I read dozens of first lines. The letters would always start something like: Your honor, I'm sorry I:

• let my child use drugs;
• abandoned my children on a road side;
• bathed my baby in scalding water;
• spanked my daughters so hard they bled;
• etc., etc., etc.

I suppose if I were a novelist, this information might have been a gold mine of dysfunction ripe for exploitation, but I was never tempted. Instead, after many hours of shredding, I began imagining that by destroying all this potentially-damaging information, I was actually purifying the world. Once everyone's identities were made safe again, people's memories could fog up and blur from the healing effects of time. Life could start again, fresh and new. After all, nothing can bring back an ugly past like a legal document, so .... do away with the document!

I just hope I'm right.....