ABSTRACT
The night I began this chapter on the life of Pam Thomas-former addict, convicted felon, and mother of three-I received a call from my sister telling me she’d have to pick me up early from the retreat center where I was writing because, as regional director of a Wisconsin child welfare agency, she had an emergency. She had to tell a depressed and isolated mother that her only son had been found by his foster parents hanging in a closet. I was confronted with the mystery of human suffering. I was as confounded by a thirteen-year-old boy’s despair at the world as I was surprised by six-year-old Pam Thomas’s childish choice to live in spite of rape and abandonment. By all logic, Pam Thomas could have been a suicide too, but the body that was marked for disposability survived. Pam refused to embrace the death of hope.
