I am feeling pretty damn shitty today, but I have a good reason. I'm not sure exactly what the point of my writing about this will be. Maybe it will help me work through the way that I'm feeling. I need to work through it, because I'm having trouble enjoying anything right now.

Yesterday, my mom's house was broken into. Whoever did it took a small fortune from her. A few weeks ago, my mom won a large sum in Las Vegas, which she split with her sister. My mom had $3500 in cash, in an envelope in the drawer of her dresser. She said she kept part of it in cash because she was planning on doing Christmas shopping with it. That money is gone now.

The thief took all of her jewelry. Her wedding ring. My deceased father's wedding ring. My mom's class ring. The ring of her uncle's which was more than 100 years old. And pretty much all of the rest of the jewelry.

That's not even the worst part, though. We think it was someone we knew. The thief tried to make it look as if they had entered through various windows in the house, but the unmarked snow underneath the open windows tell another story. This person obviously had a key.

In my thanksgiving entry, I mentioned my jobless brother. He's literally always home. I don't live there anymore, and neither does my youngest brother; we both have our own places. But, this middle brother of mine, the jobless one, he's been in South Carolina for the past week. Otherwise, he would have been home. My mom works during the day. This thief either knew for a 100% certainty that no one would be there, or was just an extremely lucky person.

How lucky for him.

My two brothers have not made the best choices with their lives over the past couple of years. My youngest brother is OK now. He's in college and lives on his own. But my other brother...He knows and is friends with some pretty shady characters. Other jobless kids, kids who were decent for a while when they were younger, but then discovered weed. I mean, they're not people who get high occasionally or recreationally, maybe like you. These are the idiots for whom weed has become their religion, their ethnicity. Their only focus. You know the type of person I'm talking about.

We're thinking it's one of those people that knew my jobless brother was gone, knew my other brother and I didn't live there, and knew my mom was at work.

The hardest part of this whole thing is knowing that my mom's personal items are gone. Gone forever, most likely. Her fucking wedding rings, for God's sake. All her keepsakes. Her physical symbols of her life's history and her love for my dad is right now in the possession of some fucking heartless scum who couldn't be satisfied with taking several thousand dollars from her. They couldn't just scare her, take the cash, make her feel violated: They had to steal her history.

What's weird is that it's actually harder for me to let this go than it was to get over my father's death in 1997. When a person dies, it's final. There's nothing you can do but grieve. I cried, accpeted the fact that he was dead, and moved on. But, in this case, it doesn't feel final. I know that her treasures still physically exist somewhere on this planet. We just don't know where. Can you imagine the frustration, disgust and grief I must be feeling, knowing that someone is out there right now, probably going from pawn shop to pawn shop, trying to sell my mom's most treasured possessions? I can't imagine how she feels if I feel like this.

I've never believed in capital punishment, not even for rape or murder. And I still don't. But, I can say that if I encountered the person that I think it is, it would be difficult for me to not literally kill them. I don't want the state to do it. I want to do it, for how they have made my mom feel. That horrifies me. It horrifies me that I couldn't fall asleep until 3 am last night, and until I slept my thoughts were fantasies of the various ways I would extract revenge on the thief. I'm not a violent person. The thougt of taking a life or being in a fight disgusts me. I hate this person for their callousness and for stirring up those feelings in me.

My mom has called the police, her insurance company, a locksmith, her sisters, her friends. An evidence technician took prints from an item that my mom was certain was moved. Our only hope is that the thief was stupid enough to move it bare handed. Or stupid enough to make a phone call.

I don't care if the person has already spent the money on the biggest brick of weed they ever planned to sell or smoke. I just want my mom to have her rings back. She must be so hurt. I prayed to God last night that he take away her pain and give it to me. Considering the way I feel, maybe he did.

As I was writing this, I was hoping that it would feel cathartic. I was hoping that I would help me to work this out by writing down. I think it has, a bit. But, I was also hoping that at the end of this, I'd be able to write about forgiveness, or God's grand plan, or be able to gain some other sense of perspective. Or maybe balance it against the magic and power of Christmas. But, writing about that simply wouldn't feel very honest right now.

I want to see justice. I want this guy to be caught. Even if he isn't caught, I truly hope that some kind of karmic recrimination ensnares this heartless, disgusting person, and he pays for his actions in pain equal to the pain he has caused my family.

We're still going to have Christmas. My family and my extended family will be together Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We still have that. We will eat and laugh and joke and smile, even.

Me, Sally, my youngest brother and, hopefully, her sisters and friends are going to buy my mother jewelry for Christmas, which is also her birthday. It won't come close by a longshot to replacing what she lost, neither in value nor sentiment. But, we love her and we hope that, somehow, giving her our own material symbols of our love makes her feel that much better.

There is some small beauty in that.