I’ve been re-watching a show called Cold Case on the Roku streaming channel. When I saw it on there a few months ago I remembered feeling safe in the hands of the writers and actors on the show, so when I needed reassurance, with the grief of losing Cricket and watching the recent events unfold in Israel, I started watching the episodes from the beginning, often instead of watching the news.
The premise of Cold Case is that this particular Philadelphia homicide squad focuses on cases that have been left unsolved for years, even decades. More often than not, the storylines hold secrets that couldn’t have been told in their own time, either because of the prejudices of the day or the inability of the traumatized people involved to speak up. Music helps to set each episode at a particular place and time, and we see the scenes play out both in the past and the present to bring the story to life, but the real power of the show is in the way the detectives genuinely care about what happened to these people, even so many years later, as if they really believe that every life matters and every story deserves to be told.
I remember so many times in graduate school, both for writing and for social work, when the lesson was the opposite: that no one life really matters that much. In social work, the focus was on the collective – the family, community, institution, etc. – as opposed to the individual. And in writing workshops it was all about the beauty or cleverness of the writing, or the complexity of the plot or the nuances of the sentence structure or variety of descriptions; there was a lot of active disrespect for people whose telling of their own stories was still raw or full of emotion, and there was even more anger at people who wanted to tell stories that “have all been told before,” which often referred to stories about rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and eating disorders, not coincidentally stories that are often told by women.
But on Cold Case every story matters. It matters what happened to a young woman who dressed as a man during prohibition; and it matters what happened to an autistic boys’ parents, even if he can’t tell his story in words; and it matters who shot a little black girl on the playground, and how a teenage boy who was thought to be a criminal was killed on a rooftop. It matters who loved who, and what went wrong and why. It has been such a relief to sit on the couch with Mom and Ellie and watch this show and feel that our sympathy can be unlimited, and that there are endless stories that can and should be told.
I don’t think I recognized, when I watched this show the first time around, more than fifteen years ago, that it resonated so deeply with my own story; my childhood has often felt like a cold case, moldering in a file box somewhere. So much of the drama of my adult life has resulted from a crime that never received justice, and I’ve had to fight off the insistence (from others but also from within myself) that my story doesn’t deserve the attention I give to it, and that what happens to me, or people like me, is inconsequential. I still speak up because I know that there is healing in being seen and heard, but the fight has been exhausting. Except, when I watch the detectives connecting with each victim, through their own troubled lives, I feel reassured that they would have cared about what happened to me too. And for a few hours at a time, I don’t have to fight, because I know I matter; I know that we all matter.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 