What do you say?

On what may have been the last night at my regular job, a late-middle-aged woman comes in, looking for a CD with the Metallica song "Am I Evil?" without the lyrics.

We joke about how few kareoke CDs Metallica put out, and I eventually just hand her Garage Inc. and tell her this is the best I can do. Nope, she's looking for the backing track, so someone could play guitar over it.

I make a few recommendations for places to look online, and let her know that getting someone to record the guitar part for her is going to be expensive and time consuming. She tells me her son used to play it, and she wants to hear it again.

A couple of years ago in my fair city, a couple of Hmong kids pitched a white youth off a five story parking garage for the crime of not being Hmong. It wasn't a hate crime, like the recent shooting of a Hmong hunter by a white guy, so it didn't get much press.

That was her son that got tossed off the roof.

She's a wreck now. We talked for half an hour. She moved into her son's empty apartment. She destroyed her family connections in the way she divided up his possessions. She goes to grief counseling. She's on more medications than the local cancer ward.

She simply cannot, and will not move forward with her life. The life that she created was horrifically taken from this earth, and that's why she spends all her time listening to his CDs and looking at boxes of his crayons from when he was eight.

It's not every day you get to speak with someone who's loved one was the victim of homicide. It's not every day you get to see how the mind can destroy a person.

What do you say to them?

What CAN you say to them?