The Stories That Follow Us Home
I sat with my coffee this morning, looking at the mess around me in the kitchen, but my mind wasn’t there. My mind had been stuck last night on a horrific true story that involved the death of a wife and two young children. I’ve sat with that thought today, finding myself thinking about it like it’s my own personal haunting. Why would such a horrible thing stay with me? Even pursue me to go find more details about it.
When I am driving alone I love listening to true crime podcasts, especially late at night when I need to be extra vigilant. Most of the stories I listen to are from long long ago and I can distance myself away from them, but this one…well with a google search I realized the murderer is a year older than I am.
I think as a society we can all agree that humanity is flawed in major ways. We’re not perfect, we’re all trying to learn from our mistakes, from other’s mistakes, but there is a good amount of these recycling mistakes that happen over and over again. One of the greatest struggles is time and how we all start at day one. We can tell someone till we are blue in the face what we learned, but it’s up to them as an individual if they take that advice or they choose to learn on their own.
That being said, I do believe that we try our hardest to see the good. Humanity might be flawed, but “there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.” as Samwise Gamgee would tell us. I’ve heard it said again and again that if you're watching disasters you need to find the helpers. We hear what Bad Bunny had at the end of his halftime show; “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” So why is it so easy to get transfixed on the bad? I think it has one major upper hand, it’s fast. Bad things come in like a bullet, moving so fast they steal the breath from our lungs. Goodness takes its time. It overanalyzes. It takes feedback. It gives space. And in a world obsessed with speed, I think that’s part of why evil captures our attention so easily.
Cases like the one I heard in the podcast last night hit a very raw nerve for me. Anything where someone has a privilege of some sort, strength, age, more people, and they use that to harm someone else, it boils my blood. Something in stories like this strikes a very raw nerve in me. But hearing and seeing such innocence taken away, such love ruined by one person’s selfishness….to have any part of humanity that we can call good, leave and only the bad, the terrible, the worst be seen. It’s heart wrenching. I try to understand it, though I can’t. And even though that’s probably a good thing, it still frustrates me. How could someone put themselves first so viciously? How could a parent do such horrid things? I don’t know. I know that motherhood affected me in ways I did not imagine. I remember being in the hospital crying, holding my first born, my Amazing, and not wanting to go home because I knew I had changed. I knew that even if my dogs were my furbabies, their position had been demoted. My husband and I love a good night of snacks and horror films, but I still have problems with ones where children are involved. But those are films and what happened was real. Watching this very ordinary family get so brutally murdered was real. That family could’ve lived across the street, and it puts a fear in me, as I’m sure with most of you reading this, that love makes us so vulnerable.
But what is love if not being vulnerable? I feel like it’s one of those lessons our human lives have to learn every and each day of our lives. What happened to that family is unspeakable, but it is unspeakable because of the love that we have and the love that they had. And though I will never see what happened to them as right or as necessary, I suppose I would rather live in a world that condemned such acts than one that condoned them.
