The blackness of Hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into a pit. Hope had forsaken me. I was that mother whose child had been slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own heart every abomination.
Dorothy Day, on her time spent in prison
The word "monster" derives from the Latin monstrum, an aberrant occurrence, usually biological, that was taken as a sign that something was wrong within the natural order. Wikipedia
Last night I had a conversation with 2 of my older
children and my husband. If Adam Lanza had not killed himself, what would we do
with him? They said he should die. One said he should be shot, as he shot
others. None of them felt it was fair for him to live. I argued that he had to
be mentally ill, and therefore we needed to know what moved him to his acts of
inconceivable violence. We cannot help others with these issues until we know
more about them. Adam was after all, someone's baby. He himself had been an
innocent kindergartner at one time. Even so, they said, he was not a baby anymore. Maybe lethal injection was more appropriate. But he should not live in
prison. We shouldn't have to pay for him to eat and have a bed.
I kept thinking, right now there are other little boys
out there, little boys who need help. They are victims too. Victims of a brain
that does not function appropriately. Victims of emotions that flood and
control them. Our world casts them aside and leaves them with few people who
understand them. And fewer who genuinely love them. Things will not change
until more of us work to ease their agonies and those of their families. Prison
is not the place for them, but sometimes neither is the home they share with
their families. I sat last night and cried. But I cried for the little boy who
grew to be called a monster. I cried for him as much as for those children he
killed. In saving him, all would have been saved.
I once had a conversation with a friend about Ted Bundy. I
said I wondered what had made him the way he was. Thinking to myself something must have damaged his psyche, perhaps he'd suffered trauma or his brain lacked development in a critical area. She looked at me seriously
and said, "He was demon possessed. That is the only thing that makes
sense." It was incomprehensible to her that he should be sick for any scientific reason. As long as we have the attitude that these people are evil and there is no
hope, we will never do the work it takes to truly understand them and make
changes to cure them or at least make life the best it can be. But every mother
who has had to deal with a mentally disturbed child needs us to help her. Right
now there are little baby boys everywhere in this world with mothers who love
them. Mothers who wrap them warmly and cradle them to their breast. Not one of those mothers thinks her son could ever grow up and be a
monster like the one they are hearing about on the news. But some of them are
going to be wrong.
We work to change things for all kinds of handicaps and
challenges people face. Is not the malfunctioning psyche as important to
research and treat as any other illness of childhood? We must try to see
ourselves as Adam Lanza's mother, as Michael Long's mother. Or father for that
matter. We say so easily "No one in their right mind could do such a
thing." But then we judge them as if they were in their right mind. I
think that must be how they are treated their whole lives and I cannot imagine
how outcast and alone they feel. Surely that leads to anger, sadness, misery. The never ending torture of the soul, by definition, is Hell. We hope
the monsters burn in Hell, never realizing they are already intimately acquainted with its
hospitality.
Please read Michael Long's (not his real name) mother's story here.
