Makowski: An elegy for AJ Freund, now Crystal Lake's son

Andrew “AJ” Freund was not a ghost. He walked the earth in a body, a real body, one that bore bruises and hunger, the coldness of water and dirt, and pain. He walked the earth in a body, a body we could see. This is a body we saw in grocery stores, through car windows, through house windows, over fences, over suburban streets and sidewalks, in emergency rooms, in our restaurants and stores. This is a body his parents should not have possessed. This is a body that should never have been returned to them and their cruelties.

Of course, he was more than a body. He was Andrew, AJ Freund, a young boy who smiled and dreamed about the world. We gather in the mounds of reportage about the crime scraps of details, little brief moments of life he left behind, like how he spoke to his younger brother, clamoring to first open the front door. How few, so few, these details of life. He must have sat in chairs in a particular way and picked up French fries in a particular way and looked up at the trees and the sky in a particular way and spoke in a particular voice and laughed, and this is lost, all lost, to death, soon memory, then time.

Now the ancient horror confronts our community: one’s parents, the only people we can trust to defend the weak and young, murder their own image and blood. We cannot depend on them to mourn, or resuscitate details of that shortened life, or to nurture the lingering memory of the dead, which is all we often leave behind. Our community, in ones and twos, in dozens and great crowds, accepts the boy. Although too late, but in mourning and long-wanted respect. Many people on this earth endure suffering and die silent deaths. Thanks to the police, thanks to the voices of the collective, we have broached the silence around AJ’s maligned life and death. We have recovered his body from an anonymous patch of withered land. But what words can make up for silence?

What words can make up for the fault of actions, the fault of turned-away eyes, and all that life AJ contained, all that life? Now he is a ghost, a shadow of the living, and to conjure a ghost we must speak and we must remember, we must will, will, will that person back into existence, before the murder and the obit’s line, back into time.

Elegy for AJ Freund

For nine nights you laid in plastic

and shallow grave, off the dirt road

in the cold, alone.

Star-bright dreams watched over you –

star-bright dreams and dry grass,

and the cold sun, and dirt.

No. Not watched over. Coincided.

No, not star-bright. Dim.

No, not dreams, not fairy tales,

not imaginary friends, not youth.

Only dirt. Dirt and plastic shroud.

I’m sorry, AJ, all I have are words.

I have words and you have nothing,

only the silent speech of bruises,

details in police reports, in news reports,

only a village of questions,

not memory, not laughter, not life.

When the police arrived you became

ours now. We searched for you

in meadow and marsh, but you were already

gone. We arrived late, like prayer and thought.

You are ours now. We gathered by the curb

with candles and stuffed hearts.

But we only have words and tears.

We only have the lateness of speech.

AJ, you are ours now.

You were ours then, and we returned you

to those fetid rooms of sorrow.

You are ours now, and we return you

to the ground, to the earth-deep

hope of an end to all pain,

to a loss we can never speak or know.

• Marek Makowski is a Huntley District 158 graduate, a former Northwest Herald intern, a University of Missouri-Columbia graduate and currently is a graduate student in literary studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.