The most personal part of someone is their handwriting.” You’ll find out, if you ever lose someone. “Then you see his handwriting, and it just melts you. “You try to accept that it is over,” says Kathryn, 60, a small woman with short, close-cropped hair and large glasses. By early this year, it was simply a search for comfort. * During the next eight years, the search for a son became a search for a body. Jack’s parents never heard from him again. It was the latest bloodletting in 25 years of civil strife that Americas Watch estimates have left 100,000 dead and 40,000 missing. Under the military regime of Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia-"the Saddam Hussein of Central America,” in the words of a local missionary-Guatemala was in the midst of another violent purge. Three days later, according to immigration logs, he crossed into Guatemala. “Enough for survival.” He had been in southern Mexico touring Mayan Indian ruins, Jack wrote, and although he was running short of money, he hoped to visit one more ancient site in the Yucatan before returning to the States to look for work.
“I’ve picked up a few scraps of Spanish,” he had printed in his all-capital-letters writing. * Jack, at 28 a seasoned traveler, had been a systematic, faithful correspondent: His final letter, dated July 9, 1981, was one of three he’d written to Kathryn and his father, Curtis, in only two weeks. She’s been calmly and steadily describing her son to me-his love of classical music, his track competitions, the way he didn’t smoke or drink-but when her eyes light on a bundle of letters, she falls silent. Kathryn stands at the desk, rearranging some Cub Scout derby cars. A bookshelf is filled with reminders of his studies-the collected works of Rabelais, the 16th-Century French satirist, a volume entitled “The Wisdom of China and India” and another called “The Wisdom of Israel.” In a closet, his classical guitar sits next to a 3-foot-high stack of National Geographics. She glances around Jack’s bedroom, apparently much as he had left it in the spring of 1981. He hoped that travel would help offset the “degrading” military experience-"You know,” Kathryn says, “the group living and the fact his intelligence wasn’t used to the fullest.” He may have realized quickly after he enlisted that this was his father’s path, not his own, and after three uncomfortable years in the military and a few months in Europe as a tourist, he moved to San Francisco from his parents’ quiet Knoxville, Tenn., neighborhood and began preparing for a trip to Mexico. Jack was brilliant and introspective, a man who’d graduated from college with honors in philosophy only to join the Marines when jobs were hard to come by. The question has consumed her for a decade, the 10 years since she last saw her eldest son, Jack. “WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOUR CHILD disappears in a foreign country?” Kathryn Shelton asks.
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