By CLYDE HABERMAN
NEW YORK — It is one of the more overworked words in America today: closure, the suggestion that a single moment or event will somehow end the abiding pain of having lost a loved one. If Osama bin Laden is ever captured, we are sure to hear talk of closure. Are we to believe that every 9/11 family will then find peace?
No, it isn’t the greatest word, Carolyn Goodman agreed.
But she was hard-pressed to come up with a better one to describe her feelings now that someone has finally been found guilty of killing her son long ago in the dark of Mississippi. Not violating his civil rights, that tepid charge often used by prosecutors as a last resort. But taking his life.
“After all these years, I don’t know that people want to see this drag on and on and on,” said Goodman, a retired psychologist who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “I mean, there has to be an end.”
“I always like to speak to young people,” she said. “I say to them, ‘Your job is to make this world a better place.’ If that’s not closure, well, that’s the way I’d like it to be.”
It has been a twisting and rugged road for Goodman. She has spent nearly half of her 89 years living with sweet memories of her son, Andrew, and with wistful thoughts of what might have been had he not been killed in 1964 — he and two other young civil rights workers, in Mississippi to affirm the right of all Americans to vote freely.
A new chapter in this long tale, perhaps the final one, was written in a Mississippi courtroom this week when a jury found a former Ku Klux Klan leader, Edgar Ray Killen, guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of Andrew Goodman and the men who will be linked with him through eternity, James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner.
On Thursday, a judge sentenced Killen to 60 years in prison, 20 for each life that he obliterated. At 80 and in fading health, he may have seen his last of freedom.
That is justice enough for her, Goodman said, sitting in the book-lined living room where she last hugged her son, saying goodbye to him with some foreboding but not realizing it was really farewell.
Not every relative of the dead men has been satisfied with the manslaughter conviction in this notorious case that scarred a nation’s soul. Some wanted Killen to be held guilty of a more severe murder charge. But Goodman is not disappointed.
“First of all, I’m against capital punishment,” she said. “This case is really complicated. I don’t know if we’ll ever truly have all the facts. This man, I get the impression he’s a pretty smart person. I don’t know exactly what his role was. But he certainly was an important part of this whole process that took place.”
As for the prison sentence given Killen, “it’s good that he will be off the streets,” she said. “This may sound a little weird, but he should spend the rest of his life in jail thinking about what he did and maybe even influencing other people who are in jail.”
Influencing them how?
“Influencing by saying: Listen, think before you act. If you disagree with somebody, you don’t have to kill them. Maybe you can convince them that there are other options, other ways to go.”
Goodman testified last week at Killen’s trial in Philadelphia, Miss. Her court appearance was brief. She did little more than read a postcard that Andrew, who was 20, had mailed home hours before he was killed.
It was not her first trip to Mississippi. But the ride into Philadelphia was emotionally rough. She decided not to stick around for the rest of the trial.
“I’d driven on all that red Mississippi dirt, and somehow or other I envisioned Andy and those kids driving up there,” she said.
“You know, I have a pretty good imagination, and it just flooded me with feelings. This setting, seeing it as he had seen it, and driving up that same route that he drove, that just sort of got to me.
“I just truly don’t want to go back. I’ve had it. I’ve had enough of it.”
Then Goodman recalled something once said by her husband, Robert Goodman, a civil engineer who died relatively young himself, at 54 in 1969.
“Bob Goodman said: Look, you don’t know when it’s going to happen. You don’t know how long it’s going to take. But whenever it is, we are a country of laws. We don’t know who’s going to be in power, and it doesn’t really matter, but let’s have justice.”
And now she has it.
Perhaps that qualifies as closure, after all.
Clyde Haberman is of The New York Times.
