STABBED TO DEATH BY HER GRANDSON

Today the local news reported that an 80 year old woman was stabbed to death Sunday after church. in her home. Asked if I had heard about it, I said I had not had an opportunity to tune into local news. Shortly afterward my daughter, who attends the Unitarian Church with her husband and family, phoned me, sobbing. The murdered woman was her good friend who sang in the church choir beside her for the past five years. The woman's daughter and her son (the 6'5" 22 year old who was hearing voices and was the one who killed his beloved grandmother) had also attended the church for many years.

Suddenly 6 degrees seems a short distance. How many lives are ruined because of a delusional act by a promising young man, who had been loved by his teachers, relatives and friends. As with most schizophrenics, if that is his correct diagnosis, he had begun to hear voices and, while he did well on medication, when he began to feel better he would go off of them, as he did recently. He had been in England with his mother when he began to slide backwards. She sent him back to the states, when she felt she could no longer handle him. Her mother was the widow of a psychiatrist, I was informed. However, being a psychiatrist's widow is no match for a paranoid, delusional 22 year old hearing voices, the world soon learned.

The church which had been attended by him for many years, as did his mother and grandmother, invited the congregation to meet to deal with the loss and feelings of the parishioners who knew the three of them well and loved them all. Such meetings are helpful to let people who know one another share their collective grief but they all know that nothing will bring the lady back or make that young man's life ever see the potential that was once so visible.

Death is so final for the human who has died, but it is equally final for all the people who lose that friend, neighbor, relative, parent, mentor, or whoever the deceased may be to them. The daily factual and unemotional stories in the papers and TV drone on with the facts. Media stakes out house waiting to get someone to emote, the more tears they can stir up, the more successful they seem to feel the interview was for them. Twenty two years of enjoying this little boy growing up to manhood is lost to memory. A loving grandmother has had life taken from her and the many lives she was touching. A mother must live with her own desolation while residing In England. How she will be able to make herself come to her mother's home (where she may have lived for many years) and deal not only with her death but with what the law will exact from her son.

Is it possible not to bleed emotionally for all concerned under the circumstances?