Disclaimer: I don't own them, I didn't create them, and I don't profit from them, but I'd love to buy them all coffee.
Author's Note: This idea just wouldn't leave me alone after watching "Still Life" last night.
Grissom:
The words were out of my mouth before I realized that by confessing a bit of my childhood to Catherine that I'd never really shared before I actually felt better; relieved somehow that someone I'd known for nearly twenty years finally knew a piece of the real me.
I was nine years old when my father died. He had been a brilliant scientist teaching at UCLA. He was my idol. His love of plant life paralleled my love of insects. I could remember many times that he and I would often spend Saturday afternoons together and while he told me about various plants we'd find while hiking through the foothills outside of Los Angeles I'd find another insect that I'd never seen before and my curiosity would be piqued to find out as much about it as possible. It became a game between he and I that I looked forward to each week. How many plants could my father find that he'd not had a chance to show me before? How many times would he show me a plant that he'd shown me before in an effort to test my knowledge? I really couldn't remember the number of times he did that.
One thing that I do know was that the day he died he promised me we'd go for another walk, just as soon as it cooled down a little outside and he'd had a chance for a short nap. The temperatures that day were record breaking; another record broken in a long line that summer. I had been bothering my mother all day; or at least that's what she'd told me, even as her eyes held a smile; I think that she looked forward to me getting out with my father as much as I did because I didn't really fit in with the other children in the neighborhood. While I loved baseball, I didn't play it very well. I found it much easier to make friends with Sherlock Holmes and the Hardy Boys, later on to be joined by Shakespeare and Walden. I spent my time looking for new and interesting insects rather than joining the Cub Scouts and making new and interesting friends-. That particular Saturday I was anxious to get outside and see what sort of insects would be out in this kind of heat and my father seemed unusually still; too still as my mother brought him a cold beer.
I'd never wanted to burden my mother when my father died; I needed to be the man of the house, but I also needed to know why he died. That was something that no one seemed to be able to tell me; the why. I think that's what drove me to become a criminalist; what's still driving me. His mysterious death, which I now have a hundred theories for, was the inspiration for that bulletin board in my office shaped like a big fish. I know I'll never really know why he died; only that I can't bring him back.
I've been told by more than one member of my team that I don't have a heart; that I'm not human. It's not true. I feel things so deeply that I just can't bear to share them with anyone. I saw how much my mother was affected by my father's death; how her going deaf just two years later brought challenges into my world that I didn't understand.
How can I answer the whys of families left behind when I can't answer my own why? I follow the only thing that I can understand; the only thing that doesn't lie: the evidence.