A Cold, Cold Wind

I wrote this a few years ago in memory of Matthew Shepard. I post it every year at this time and will continue to. May Matthew’s precious soul rest in peace.

Dear Matthew,

Twenty-four years ago this month, I opened the newspaper and saw your picture. It captivated me. You were about my age—21. But you looked much younger and so fragile—you were just 5’2” and weighed only 120 pounds. I read the article that accompanied your picture and learned your story. You’d met two men at a bar in Laramie, Wyoming two nights before. The men found out you were gay and pretended that they were, too, to convince you to leave with them. When they got you in their car, they hit you with the butt of a gun and stole your wallet, coat, and shoes. They drove you to a remote area and dragged you from the car. They brutally pistol-whipped you, tied you to a fence, and left you to die—barefoot and without a coat, on a night when the temperature dropped to near freezing. But you didn’t die that night. You lived, tied to that fence for eighteen more hours before you were found by a cyclist who, at first glance, mistook you for a scarecrow.

By the time the police arrived, your face was unrecognizable and completely caked with blood, except for two trails that had been made from your tears. You were taken to a hospital in Laramie, then transferred to Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft. Collins, Colorado, which had a more advanced trauma unit.

I was born in that hospital, Matthew. And at the time of your beating, I lived just two miles from it. For the six days that you were there, in a coma, I passed the hospital multiple times at night and looked up at the windows that had lights on. I wondered which windows were the ones in your room. And I prayed for you, asking God for a miracle. But you never regained consciousness and died.

I saw the footage of the crowd outside your funeral. As your friends and family walked into the church, they had to walk past anti-gay protestors holding up signs bearing the most vile, hate-filled slogans I’d ever seen. Your parents had to wear bulletproof vests to your funeral out of police concerns for their safety. Your mother later said she could hear the protestors yelling throughout the funeral. Your parents weren’t even able to lay you to rest—they believed that if they interred your ashes, the site would be discovered and defaced, victimizing you and them all over again. It took twenty years for your parents to finally have your ashes interred, in the crypt of the Washington National Cathedral.

I followed the trials of the two men who killed you. Both of them said they’d robbed and beaten you because you were gay. At one of the trials, the DA asked the coroner, “When Matthew Shepard was tied to the fence, could he feel pain? Could he be thirsty? Could he feel the cold?” And the coroner said, “Yes, he may have felt pain because he may never have completely lost consciousness.”

Oh, Matthew. How I hope he was wrong. I hope you lost consciousness and never felt the cold and the pain. I hope you never had the chance to wonder how two people could hate you so viciously and intensely just because you were gay.

I didn’t understand that kind of murderous hate. And I didn’t understand the hate from the protestors at your funeral. How could they hate you so much that they would take the time to travel to your state just to stand outside your funeral and yell horrible, ugly words about someone they had never met and didn’t know? They claimed to be Christians, doing God’s work. I heard and read their vile comments in which they used the Bible to condemn you. They used passages from Romans and I Corinthians to say that homosexuality was a sin punishable by an eternity in hell—and many of them said it with a sick, smug shrug, as if to say, “That’s not my opinion. It’s God’s.”

Homosexuality is denounced as a sin in those passages of the Bible. But so are envy, gossip, arrogance, drunkenness, and deceit, among others. I doubt the Christians who condemned you were free from all of those sins. I know I’m not. I also wonder how many of them knew that in that passage from Romans, there are two more sins listed with the others: having “no love, no mercy.”

Not long after your death, Elton John wrote a song for you called “American Triangle.” In it, he describes what was done to you, saying, “See two coyotes run down a deer; Hate what we don’t understand.” That was true the night you were murdered, and it’s just as true today. We see people we don’t understand—their religions. Their race. Their sexuality. Even their political party. And rather than getting to know them, we label them as “other”—as different from us. We stay ignorant because understanding the “other” requires effort. An effort we don’t choose to make.

I think you knew better than most, Matthew, that it’s Christians who are the most guilty of this. Of sitting on the sidelines and judging people as we smugly shake our heads at their sins. We comment on social media, and our comments reek of self-righteous anger and hypocrisy. We’re one more group of haters, but we feel justified in our hate because we use our beliefs to do it. We look for sin and find it, then back up our judgment with the Bible. I’m guilty of it, too. And I don’t want to be. I want to remember what was done to you because of hate and, in remembering that, choose to love in the name of Jesus Christ—to love the “other” every bit as much as I love the ones like me.

The protestors at your funeral said you got what you deserved. You didn’t. You deserved love as much as any person on this earth. You deserved a life and a future. Your parents deserved to have you in their arms, not your ashes. If you’d lived, you would be forty-five years old today. I wonder what you would have done with your life. I wonder if you’d be a father, a partner, a friend to many. I know you’d still be a beloved son. That life was what you deserved, Matthew. And I’m so deeply sorry that you didn’t get to have it.

In the song Elton John wrote about you, one of the refrains is “It’s a cold, cold wind.” I’ve been in the same part of Wyoming where you were tied to a fence and left to die. And I’ve felt that wind—it’s an uncommonly cold, biting wind that you can feel down to your bones. You felt that cold wind in a way I pray no one else ever does. Twenty-four years later, that cold wind is still blowing. And it’s still spreading hate. But I believe love is spreading, too. When you were dying, candlelight vigils were held for you all over the world, showing the light of love in the face of hate. That light still shines for you, Matthew, and for all the others who’ve been hated and hurt because of their race, religion, or sexuality. Every time we choose love over hate, the light gets stronger. The cold wind gets weaker. And love wins.

You are remembered, Matthew, and you are still so loved.

Renee