Secondary Traumatic Stress (or: On the Dispersal of Brain Matter in a Kentucky Trailer)

Photo by Scotty Perry. Used with permission.

When a man’s head has been blown off with a shotgun, you’d expect there to be more of a mess. But a 12-gauge to the temple, at close range, can be surgically precise. I was a third-year law student, still in my 20s, when I learned that. Our clinic director gave us a foot-thick, plain-brown expandable file and told us to “turn over every…