Judy Shepard, on the Night She Learned Her Son Matthew Was Killed

by Michael Jones · 2009-09-03 09:17:00 UTC
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Matthew Shepard

Judy Shepard, the mother of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard who was murdered more than ten years ago in a hate crime, has a new memoir coming out.  In it, she talks about the tragedy of losing a son simply because he was gay, and the tireless work she's done over the past decade to get the U.S. Congress and the White House to pass hate crimes legislation that includes protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The book is called The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed.  Judy has an excerpt of it in Newsweek's current issue, and when we say it's powerful, we mean it's powerful.  Check out these few sentences:

As Dennis and I rushed around in a daze—packing our bags and preparing paperwork rather than staring at the slow-moving clock—I did everything I could to stay hopeful. Dennis and I had only limited information about the extent of Matt's injuries, and absolutely no information about the circumstances surrounding his attack. We knew he was critically injured and that his hold on life was tenuous, at best. Still, our highest hope at that point was for Matt's complete recovery. Our most basic, and perhaps most realistic, hope was that he would hold on to life until we could be with him, by his side.

Shepard died on October 12, 1998.  But Judy's memoir is done in part to share with readers the life that Matthew lived before he was killed.  As she told Newsweek, "There are still some things that as a family that we’ve chosen to keep to ourselves. We’ve loosened up a little bit, but there just doesn’t seem to be a need for the world to know everything about us or Matt. The reason I wrote the book was because I wanted to reconcile the public Matthew with our Matt. As I said in the book, he had a life before he was killed."

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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