there is so much i've been meaning to tell you.
i've wanted to say it so long, but it has to stay a secret, because it isn't my place to talk about it.
i've dreamt about it. i used to obsess over news articles. and then not long ago, someone who knew the real facts gave me a small window of truth and i pushed too far in curiosity. i asked too much.
i once met a family, in passing, because they lived with my friend in his parent's house. they had all lived together for just over a year. a young, handsome father, (he would soon be an engineering graduate), a beautiful, kind wife, and their baby, who i really barely remember at all, but know from many photos that he was very sweet. he was just learning to crawl, then, so they had baby gates up everywhere. my friend introduced us as the dad cut up vegetables for supper at the counter and the mom chased after the crawling, laughing baby. it was so brief.
roughly two years after this, not long after the family had left from a visit back home, the dad shot his wife and child on the side of the road, and then proceeded to kill himself.
they said he was depressed.
my question, the one i asked when i shouldn't have, was to my friend, their friend, when we were in a bar one night. we were on the topic, and my friend had brought it up. i asked, "is her family mad at him?"
my friend started crying, and i'd never seen him cry. he just said, "how could they be?"
i know a lot of people that could give a lot of reasons as to why her family could be mad. people who say they should be mad, even if clarity were present in times of tragedy. people who say he didn't love them, that he was fucked, that he deserved to die.
and i think they are so wrong. he was sick. the man who shot his wife and child on the side of the road that afternoon was not the man that i met that day, so briefly. but why can't people believe that?
people always compare this to the man who cut that kid's head off on the greyhound bus. a popular incident of disgust with the justice system, all because the man who did it is now free. he didn't take his medication properly that day. but the truth is, that man wasn't himself either. he was sick. he may still be sick. i'm not saying he should be free. but i am saying that he was not himself.
mental illness is something that everyone thinks would never happen to them. we're all too damn normal for that to happen. we could never, ever, turn a gun on the people we love. but this makes me furious. we all could. we are all suceptible to illness. there was nothing wrong with that man who killed his wife and child. he was a good man. and he became a different man when he became ill. i can't pretend like i have even the slightest understanding of what happened that afternoon. but i know, and i know this so desperately, that he was not the man he had been every day leading up to his illness. there is this thing that can take hold of people, and we shouldn't let it erase every good moment we had before. even though i didn't know them, i wish that someone could have helped him sooner. and i hope to god that my friend was being honest when he answered that invasive, horrible question that i asked.
but ask yourself this: if tomorrow your father, or mother, or husband, or brother, or someone else you have loved and cared for unconditionally did something so terrible as this-- would that mean that person was evil? that they had never loved you?
i genuinely hope you know that wouldn't be true.
may the memory of that family be of every moment of goodness they had.
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