If I Could...
With Christmas now about two weeks behind us, a feeling of exhaustion hung in the air in our house that January. Despite being Jews, we always extravagantly decorate our house for Christmas. When we began embracing Kathryne’s Jewish roots, we agreed to keep some of our Christian traditions to allow our boys to decide how to, or if to, define what a relationship with God means to them. Nearly every flat surface in our home was covered with decorations. Thousands of ornaments adorned nearly a mile of lighted garland. A now brown tree loomed over the living room. The task seemed daunting; reset our Disneyland style Christmas decorated house back to its normal state where only age-appropriate toys, books, and cereal decked the halls. Back in November, I requested the first few days of January off in order to clean the house and was relieved to finally have time to decompress and breathe after the stressful holiday season. Christmas is stressful enough for most people, but the burden seems far greater for households which celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas like ours. The clash of red and green with blue and silver cannot be overstated. The first thing to go was the fire hazard in the living room. I dragged the green plastic tote boxes from the shed through the snow and into the garage where I could easily arrange my takedown efforts. I searched for the one which read, “Ornaments” and pulled it inside the house and began carefully placing the ornaments in the box. After about an hour and a half, the tree was naked and ready to be dragged out to the edge of our property where last year’s tree still sat, nearly 3 months of snow before now doing nothing to breathe life back into it. “Bye bye, kiss-miss tee!” My oldest son, Lincoln, shouted from the front porch. The snow was almost halfway up my legs as I hauled the tree off. “Bye bye, indeed.” I scoffed. When I got back inside, I continued taking ornaments off the garland hanging over every doorway in the house. I was cold from being out in the snow and standing above the floor vent pumping out warm air when it occurred to me that I would need the ladder to remove the garland from the catwalk above our living room. I figured I would wait for the snow to stop and melt off before going back out the shed to get it. “It should be warm next week.” I thought. As the day carried on, so did I. I was hoping not to waste all of my days off fighting with two toddlers to stay out of the decoration boxes, a fight which I was losing, thus far.
The next day, I picked up where I left off.
Just before Christmas, Kathryne finished her Master’s degree and took a job as a, “Therapist for children and adolescents who specializes in childhood trauma.” In November, she began seeing a girl, who we will call Emma in order to preserve her privacy. A survivor of the worst conditions you can force upon a child herself, Kathryne bonded immediately with Emma, sympathizing with her about her father’s reported physical and emotional abuse. Kathryne would sit quietly and listen while carefully constructing a safe place for Emma, knowing it may be her only safe place. Kathryne felt deeply that therapy was a sacred space to share any and everything that troubled her clients, her heather gray couch acting as the sacrificial altar where one could come and bleed their emotions before an impartial audience. She immediately recognized the similarities between her own life story and Emma’s and took special care to maintain a sense of decorum during her sessions with Emma despite being immediately reduced to tears once Emma left. Kathryne had incredibly high hopes for Emma and saw herself as a great example of how a young girl with an abusive father could overcome these obstacles as a child and help others with their struggles as an adult. She had no doubt that this was the most important work she had ever done or would ever do.
Meanwhile, at home, I continued shoving Christmas and Hanukkah decorations into their appropriate totes. I was midway through the kitchen when Kathryne texted me and told me she was going to be late. I asked her if everything was OK and she responded with one word, “No.” I immediately went into a panic. I called her several times and when she did not answer, I texted her again and asked her if she was safe and if I needed to come to her job and get her out of whatever situation she was in. After a few minutes, she responded with the worst news a therapist who specializes in childhood trauma can give. After months of working up the courage, Emma’s mother filed for divorce in what was meant to be the beginning of the end of Emma’s father’s cycle of abuse toward her and her siblings. In their last session, Emma reported feeling deeply happy about her mom’s decision and told Kathryne she finally felt safe at home now that he was gone. Emma’s father was not as happy as Emma was about the news and decided that morning that he was going to commit suicide, an event which would have been tragic on its own but may have provided more stability in Emma’s life and possibly even an opportunity for meaningful healing down the road. However, in the fashion of an incredibly emotionally immature man who could even bring himself to continually abuse his wife and children, he decided to take Emma, her siblings, her mom, and her grandma with him.
Kathryne called me from the car sobbing and gasping for air. I asked her if she wanted to pull over and allow us to come get her. The line was silent for almost a minute with the exception of the sound of Kathryne’s breathing and the unmistakable sounds of ‘being in the car.’ My heart was broken for her. I began tearing up as the reality of the tragedy my family and community were now facing set in. A prominent member of my community and a seemingly upstanding Mormon man had just murdered his entire family, and my wife was his daughter’s therapist. I wiped tears out of my eyes as I considered the possibility that he may have considered also coming to Kathryne’s office and shooting her for whatever involvement she may have had in Emma’s mom’s decision to file for divorce.
Questions filled my head. How would I have explained that to the boys? How could a man bring himself to shoot his own children? I wished deeply that he had just killed himself at that point. I felt absolutely zero sympathy for him or his extended family for the pain he caused not only his family, church, or community, but for the pain he was causing my wife. Good people like Kathryne who strive daily to make the world a better place and to help people navigate the strife of daily life do not deserve to be thrust into the situation she now found herself in; nobody does. Several almost silent minutes passed on the phone when I heard Kathryne’s car pull up the gravel driveway. She hung up the phone. I walked to the garage door and opened it, waiting for her to put her car in park and come inside. When she did, I wrapped her in my arms and she fell to the floor in the kitchen and continued to sob while the Christmas lights I hadn’t gotten around to taking down that day illuminated the room with an ironic, cheery glow.
“I don’t know what to say to you in this moment other than I am so sorry.” I whispered in her ear while our sons came to sit in her lap. Children always seem to know when someone is sad and almost always know how to make it better, but this time, a gentle hug from our boys just made Kathryne ask how anyone could do what that man had done. I sat in silence. Later that night after the boys were asleep, Kathryne sat on the floor in the shower and cried. I sat on the floor on the other side of the glass door in silence while her phone vibrated and dinged every few minutes for the rest of the night.
“How am I expected to go back to work tomorrow and pretend that this didn’t happen?” She asked. “Nobody expects you to pretend this didn’t happen. Nobody.” I replied. We sat in silence again for several minutes after that. Through the falling water, I could hear Kathryne crying again. I slid the glass door back and looked at her. “I am so sorry.” I said.
“I would take your pain away in a heartbeat if I could...”
-Brendon
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