A Wounded Spirit
I came across this story on StoryCorps and I was moved by the photo attached to it. The two people had a great deal of pain written on their faces. In the story, the parents of Marine Corporal Jeff Lucey open up about his suicide at the age of 23. After returning from Iraq, they noticed changes in his behavior around Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Jeff was reunited with his sister. When she tried to talk to him, Jeff threw his dog tags at her and shouted,” Don’t you know your brother’s nothing but a murderer?”
The most compelling element to me in this story was the way the parent’s voices changed with their emotion. When the father talks about his son sitting in his lap, rocking back and forth, his voice cracks and it is clear he is becoming upset. There are many pauses as the parents try to collect their thoughts, adding to the suspense of the story. Music does not come into play until the very end, with a piano piece by Yann Tiersen tying together the emotions of the piece.
The story begins with the parents saying goodbye to Jeff at his deployment, then skips to his return at Christmastime. The story ends with Jeff’s suicide the following June. The story does a great job of placing the listener in a particular time and place, viewing the events and feeling the emotions through the parent’s perspective. Though the story is more emotional than concrete, each scene is set with particular details that help ground the listener. The only quotes used in this story are things that Jeff said, and they are spoken by the parents. The tone is always serious, never flippant, but there is a great deal of love behind every word. The inflection varies more than the sentence lengths, though sentences become more drawn out when the parents become more upset.
The piece really hit home for me with the final line. The father, on his son’s suicide, said “We never saw that he was mortally wounded…within his spirit.” Any compassionate listener will feel this family’s pain and have an understanding of their immense loss.
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That was a very emotional and touching story. I really like how the voices of Kevin and his wife provided a good contrast to each other. The details of the evening they dropped off Jeff to be deployed, especially how Kevin described the car headlights, really does a good job of bringing you into that moment with them. I agree with you that the piano piece at the end does a very good job of tying the story’s emotions together. I also think the piano helps the piece to not become too dark and depressing, but instead makes it more emotionally moving. You can really feel the emotion in Kevin’s voice toward the end. It shows that even with the time that has passed since his son’s death, it is still very prevalent in his mind.
I think the major advantage this piece has in regards to captivating the audience is the use of details. The details fix you into each memory they talk about. I could place myself into the settings where they dropped him off, saw him again at Christmas, and when Kevin found Jeff’s body.
The pauses and tones of voice help you to feel with them. Throughout listening to the story I imagined what their emotions must have been. Their tones reflect both love and sadness which kept me listening.