I prayed for (sent compassion, fully attended to) the boy, who would be a man in his early sixties now. I don’t think he had any religion back then, but who knew now? I wondered if somewhere, this morning, he too had felt the firm touch of a thumb on his forehead, the dust on his lashes. I assumed at first that he’d still be in prison, but that terrible night was more than forty years ago now, and life never really meant life. Perhaps he had been released. What did he think, now, about what he had done? What does it take, to atone, inside yourself? To never be forgiven?
