The Washington Post put out a Breaking News banner that the verdict had been reached and would be announced within the hour.

I pulled out my knitting and was glued to my seat for that hour. Please please let it be what it just has to be. Please let justice be achieved. We all saw what he did.

The various reporters talked and interviewed and switched back and forth, trying to use the time well but everybody knowing it was filler while we waited.

Six afghan rows later, the judge appeared, acknowledged those present, and began.

The first count. Guilty. The second count. Guilty. The third count. Guilty. The judge asked the jurors, not by name but by their number, whether they were in full agreement with this verdict. Eleven times the answer was a decisive yes; one time, a man was barely able to express it for the emotion in the word. Yes.

Behind his pandemic mask, Derek Chauvin’s eyebrows had a you can’t do this to me expression.

Eighteen times there had been complaints filed against him with the police department, never had he been held accountable.

Guilty. Bond revoked, sent to jail on the spot, and he was taken away with his hands in cuffs behind his back. Standing upright now, being escorted out, not face down on the pavement with someone’s knee grinding hard into his neck while he pleads for mercy and breath and at the last, as he was dying, for his mama–but alive.

My cousin-in-law the cardiologist once told me he’d learned over the years that he was going to lose his elderly patients when they started telling him about seeing their loved ones who’d gone on before. George’s mother had died a few years previous. Mama.

It hit me then like a wave in a storm: all the grief for George Floyd’s family, for his little girl who needed her daddy, for all the black lives taken too soon who should still be with us, for all the accomplishments and achievements that the world never got to see and that never came to be because of how too many in our society and our police all too often see people whose skin is darker than theirs.

Back when I was a kid, the epithet for a bad cop of course (and too often all cops) was ‘pig.’

It was deeply gratifying in all the sorrow to see that male Chauvin-ist pig handcuffed and walking towards the jail time he’d so defiantly, brutally, hatefully earned. Away with him.