Hearty Helping of Rationality in That Crazy
We should all show such courtesy in executing murder-suicides.
A family of three was found dead in their snowy backyard last week in Pennsylvania. The 26-year-old daughter had shot her mom and dad and then herself.
They left documents taped to the glass door explaining their full consent—signed by all three—and detailed financial papers, and they’d even drugged the dog so it wouldn’t bite first responders, and they’d left detailed instructions about it, too.
The daughter apparently suffered from persistent auditory hallucinations and she told her mother they were getting worse. The mother didn’t want the daughter to go and commit suicide all by herself, and the father didn’t want to live without them.
Awful tragedy, right? This isn’t an encomium for bloody solutions to challenging problems, but—I just don’t know about that.
They were apparently a quite religious Christian family, and they seemed to be approaching this without fear and with calm logical preparations on the earthly plane.
An adult child with worsening schizophrenia? That’s a hard condition to manage. There’s no cure, and the drug treatment regimen can cause all sorts of miserable problems in the course of trying to provide some sort of normal-approximating life. Schizophrenics sometimes improve to the point of believing they don’t need their meds anymore, and bad things often happen afterwards. They need lifelong supervision and oversight and adult patients are often extremely difficult to compel into treatment before the happening of the bad things.
Aging parents would find that a terrible grief to contemplate, the future of their aging kid without them to provide as stable-as-possible loving safe home.
And the woman herself was still sane enough to know things weren’t going in a good direction.
I thought it notable, that they’d done this outside, not wanting to leave a hideous mess inside to be cleaned up by others.
Would it have been better to put their child in the hands of our genius psychiatric professionals and public healthcare system for the necessary lifelong management?
This is why life is hard. Sometimes there’s no good answer, no good solution, no solution at all, actually, and just anguish as you see the likely road ahead and you’re helpless in the course it takes.
I guess they had the dignity and courage to think that if God wasn’t to be fixing this in the here and now and ongoing, they’d just go ahead and face the version they expected to encounter in the afterwards and state their case humbly for the choice they’d made, and take the consequences, and leave as little as possible behind them to be the consequences dealt with by someone else.
And I see that as hard to argue with.
I don't blame them one bit. There are many illnesses that are horrendous to behold. As I was an RN I saw people who had prion diseases like CJD and they couldn't stop moving and I felt tortured for watching and trying to take care of them. Sometimes death is better than staying alive.
They were not murdered by medicine and $cience. They did it their way.