From Tragedy to Healing

I just finished "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote. I had read it in college and then after seeing "Capote" recently, I had an interest in re-reading it. It was a lot different than I remembered - mostly because I remember being so deeply horrified by it the first time. I think I was so much more naive to the evil and injustices of the big world back then - and (unfortunately) now a senseless mass murder of an innocent family isn't as shocking to me. Sad commentary on "growing up".

There were a few inconsistencies between the book and the movie (imagine that) so I was looking online for some information about the story and all the players. Interestingly I came upon a story about the two surviving daughters of the slain Clutter family. In the 45 years since the tragedy, they have rarely, if ever, given an interview. But LJWorld.com had this to report:

The scrapbooks and stories tell the family's true history.

Within three thick red binders are children's photos, graduation announcements, tidbits of diaries, correspondence through the years and mementos of Herb and Bonnie Clutter's family. Then there are the stories Beverly English, 65, has written about each of her parents -- stories describing everything from what kind of music they enjoyed to how Bonnie would kill and pluck a chicken for dinner.

The scrapbooks and stories portray the family the way no one else has -- certainly not Truman Capote, whose book, "In Cold Blood," told of the Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kan., in November 1959.

"We want to remember our parents in a positive light," said English, one of the family's two surviving daughters, "not the negative."

The positives come in the form of the scrapbooks, loving memories and a number of memorials throughout Kansas. The negatives are the brutal murders of Herb and Bonnie Clutter, their daughter, Nancy, 16, and son, Kenyon, 15, and, to make it all worse, what the daughters and others say are Capote's inaccuracies in describing the Clutter family.

(the story goes on to talk about how the sisters have moved on in their life, and how they are correcting the inconsistencies in the book within their own family)

...The sisters try to pass their family's legacy on to new generations. Since English completed the bulk of the scrapbooks in the late 1980s -- they are an ongoing project, she said -- the younger Clutter descendants have used them to learn about their grandparents. "I'm so glad we did it," Mosier said. "It was a healing thing for both of us. We had laughter with lots of things, and we had tears. But it was just a healing thing."

The result is a written record for the family of what kind of people Herb and Bonnie Clutter were -- something Capote never accomplished.

"It's their life I want to immortalize," English said. "Not the way they died."

I've written in this blog many times about how scrapbooking is a healing process, I just love stories that obviously make a point!

I had trouble with a picture of the week, but after writing this blog I thought I'd do a generational photo, in honor of these two Clutter sisters making scrapbooks so that future generations would have knowledge of the family members that they never knew. Here are my girls with their great-grandmother, who they adore - but someday will need her stories to know who she really is. Happy 85th birthday Grandma-Great!!!