just thoughts. . .
So that guy that’s been all over the news lives in the same town that I live in. He went in and gunned down his four kids and then turned the gun on himself. While discussing this with my parents I made the comment that he (the gunman) got off lucky. Meaning that if he hadn’t turned the gun on himself he would have had to endure 1) the guilt of killing all of his kids for the rest of his life and 2) he would never get the “opportunity” to find out what prisoners do to men that kill kids. My mom sounds off with ‘it depends on what you believe’. Although now that I think about it he probably would have gotten of with some kind of temporary insanity plea, fuckin’ bastard. The more I thought about it the more that I wondered if this man was sitting in some lonely cell in the pits of hell having to listen to the theme song to ‘I dream of Jeanie’ or maybe Neil Diamonds ‘Coming to America’ for eternity. Or, was this man really being tortured physically. Probably not. If I could really wish anything on a person I think I would wish for a man like him to roam the halls of purgatory with no conclusion and no release, ever. Only a feeling of complete and utter loss with no hope of ever being at peace. Yeah, with the way things really go he’ll get what would be the equivalent in this world. I read in the paper that he was not to have any service and that his body was ready for pick-up by his next of kin. I thought about that and I thought about the funeral that his immediate family would have to endure. This man that for all tense and purposes was good and descent who snapped one day and decided that he would hurt his wife in the worst way. In a guttural way, in a way that would make her stomach seize and her head become over-whelmed with pain and disbelief. His fucked up mental image of whatever he thought he was accomplishing is now the burden of his family who will have to stand around his barren coffin with the top closed. Only the people that were close to him when he was a small boy will be at his side, Mom, Dad, maybe a brother or sister. I would think that no one else would want to shame their name by acknowledging his presence in a time of such darkness. If you weren’t his family and just a friend, would you go? Could you stand by his coffin and try to come to grips with the harshness that this one man spewed onto one woman. The fact that he took his family, the children that he raised, the diapers that he changed, the birthdays, the Christmas’, the family dinners, the laughter, the tears. The tears of a woman that had been given on a birthing table not once but four times and with the simple act of squeezing a trigger the hopes and dreams of these little ones were lost immediately. Not to be taken back and not to be apologized for. But simply gone. The pain would be to much, and the funeral for such a man would be the desolate type that they show in movies where the parents come by stare longingly into the hole that their son now rests in and think back to the days when HE was just a boy. When he would play with his father and all of the things that he got to try just once and got to make the decision himself of whether to try again or not. All the things that his young just maturing daughter will never know, simply because he decided for them that they could not live anymore. No, I don’t know what I believe. I hope that somewhere in someplace that he is getting what he has earned and with any luck maybe he will get to know no such peace in his soul for all of eternity.