Home
Contents
Now available in hardcover:
Search This Site
Email
|
Closure, For Lack Of A Better Word
May, 2001
Whether it's a school shooting,
the Oklahoma bombing, a suicide or a Volkswagen hitting and killing
my teenaged son, there is no closure beyond what happens at the
very moment our loved one dies. That's it.
The
door slams shut at the last breath and there's no reaching through
the ether to say, "Oh, by the way, one more thing, I love you,"
or words of apology or regrets, or just to announce something
insignificant if they were living but monumentally important now.
Slam! It's over, the life of this vibrant person is gone from
your world -- a world with the audacity to keep on turning.
"Hey,
wait a minute, I didn't finish... Come back." It just doesn't
work that way and if the grieving families of Tim McVeigh's victims
think closure is still to come, they're living in a fool's paradise.
Right now they, and everyone who endures the sudden death of a
loved one, are trekking through the stages of grief that will
take them to acceptance. On the surface, the ones I've seen interviewed
this week look fairly normal.
Underneath their socially acceptable calm they're experiencing
chaotic emotions ranging from the initial rage, through numbness,
followed by disbelief, then anger, betrayal, more debilitating
rage, regret, sorrowful remorse and even guilt. Guilt? Yes, because
they meant to drive that day, they should have done this they
should have done that, until the internal "shoulds" almost outweigh
McVeigh's "should not have."
They function in spite of these crippling emotions because they're
looking for "closure," and there is none. There is only accepting
the unacceptable. Survivors will come to grips with that in their
own time, in their own way.
Maurice Warner, a mental health counselor at the University of
Washington, said he doubted watching McVeigh die would bring many
viewers relief from the pain the bombing caused them. He suggested
further that some families might feel violated. "People very often
feel trashed in their personal issues of loss, when you have all
these strangers tromping on what has affected their lives," Warner
said, adding, "their experience is so unique, and they would be
very aware of the intrusion by people who presume to know what
it's like."
Some of the families look at the execution as the end of it all.
The pain started with the first blast and continued through the
funerals, the escalating wall of flowers and teddy bears, through
the trial, onto the conviction and sentencing, to the date of
execution days away. They were getting close. Whether they or
the nation believes in capital punishment or not, the story that
had a beginning and a middle would now have an ending. A closure.
That was not to be. A one-month stay of execution brought more
of the same emotions that were beginning to soften around the
edges: disbelief, rage, betrayal. Just when they thought they
couldn't go one more day, they faced 30 more. They've had a reprieve
from having to hide their grappling emotions, gaining the right
to be openly angry again. "I need closure," more than one survivor
has said to interviewers.
What they really want is catharsis. They want to be purged of
the one debilitating emotion continuing to feed their insomnia,
fear. Until McVeigh's execution is carried out, there is the fear
the man who called their children "collateral damage" in his horrific
bombing could someday walk the earth again -- where their loved
ones never can. Inside that fear lives the gut-wrenching rage
that keeps them going. These feelings are intense and confusing.
British author C. S. Lewis wrote these words shortly after his
wife died: "In grief, nothing stays put. One keeps emerging from
a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats.
Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if
a spiral, am I going up or down it?"
Executions should not be seen as therapeutic for the surviving
families. So, then, how do they stop spiraling? Each in their
own way, I suppose. At a certain point -- and there's no hard
and fast rule about when that point is reached -- they might do
as I did: Take a deep breath and begin to live one day at a time,
concentrating not on how they died, but on how they lived. It
always makes me smile when I remember how he lived.
Oh, and yes, it really helped to realize nothing could ever hurt
him again, nor can anything ever hurt me as much.
|