The Victoria Stafford story is well outside of my old comfort zone: I’ve always preferred abstractness… This is real.
After a few weeks of keeping my distance, it was actually not even the story itself but the way The London Free Press has covered it that started to draw me in.
And then there was the secondary drama driven by Tara McDonald’s persistent media presence. The story’s strange cadence of bizarre developments and irrelevant controversies kept tugging on my curiosity.
By last week it was in my thoughts daily, and the coverage of the arrests — homicide?! — hit me pretty hard, like it did a lot of people. It hardly needs to be said, but my thoughts are now with the family and their struggle to come to terms…
The hardest part is the details. You hear or read the seemingly minor facts — like that little Tori was wearing a Hannah Montana jacket when she walked out of the schoolyard with her abductor — and the imagination begins to reel.
Vague pictures of any 8 year-old’s life come to mind, questions follow — Did she pick out the jacket herself? Was it a gift from Grandma? — just long enough to disturb us, before we shove them aside to save our own emotional sanity.
(Or is it just me with a writer’s emotional and intellectual curiosity?)
Tori’s loved ones don’t have that luxury. Again, the imagination reels. The details of their experience: too scary; the trauma: too rare.
But sometimes, in these extreme cases, we can’t help ourselves. We need to know — or more specifically, to satisfy our craving for empathy, we need to know what they know – what really happened.
And it’s enough to drive anybody nuts. It’s certainly affecting me, I know.
Now that we have more information about the accused, the story is becoming more vivid but far from resolved. There are even more questions about what happened and how the personal narratives of Michael Thomas Rafferty and Terri-Lynne McClintic could have possibly come to something like this.
Some of the speculation is stomach-turning. One only hopes it’s exaggerated.
Now it registers that seemingly minor details (as I called them) aren’t so minor at all. It’s always a detail that pulls a solution together — or a number of details added up — just as it’s details (or the prolonged absence of a few) that make a compelling story.
More to the point, life is nothing but details. We’re immersed in them but we hardly notice… “the trees for the forest,” you might say.
It’s by paying attention to the details around us that we can avoid these kinds of scenarios in the first place.
I don’t mean we should all go around looking for clues to nefarious activities in our neighbourhoods. I mean it’s the little gestures, the little acts of both outreach and self-control that make our society healthier — to prevent the vicious cycles that eventually lead to unimaginable evil.
A lot of us need to make more of an effort to get out of our sheltered, cloistered comfort zones, to get more engaged in the lives of others: a small but indefinitely rewarding investment in the integrity and security of our neighbourhoods.
