Hi, so now some part of this blog will be discussing what it’s like when someone in your family kills another person in your family. Since we last spoke, that’s happened in my family.

I will try to tag every post containing this talk with ‘Homicide Adjacent’ so you know it’s coming, and can nope on out of here if you’d rather not. Believe me, I’d rather not.

For the rest, I’ll be talking exclusively about my personal experience, and staying far, far away from the details of what is now an open criminal case.

GROUND RULES

Talking about this is risky because homicides tend to make the paper, and there’s a timeframe here that would narrow a search. Given those parameters, I think it’s possible someone might be able to identify the incident, and from there, correctly identify me. I can also see how solving that little puzzle might feel like a fun logic/mystery game… if the end result didn’t totally fuck this blog and my ability to post here.

Because being identified seems like a legitimate concern, I am hereby invoking the Law of Vague-Blogging and laying down some ground rules:

I can’t tell you who these people were in specific relationship to me, their genders, ages, or manner of death. I also can’t indulge in any speculation on the nature of what is now an open legal matter.

Please don’t ask — or if you forget and ask, please understand — there will never be a time in which I can divulge more details as I really do not want to lose this blog, which would be the end result of getting doxxed. Even as time passes, the two identifying point of my connection to these people and the window of time between my last post and this post will always be a vulnerability.

I also cannot risk identifying these people by process of elimination. So please don’t ask if so-n-so is OK. My sisters are alive. My mother is alive. My kids are alive. My husband is alive. For all you know, I never mentioned these people on the blog anyway, so maybe you didn’t even know they existed.

OK, there might be more rules later. I’m kind of making this up as I go along.

If anyone has experience in this arena and has helpful suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. If you suggest a book, I will lovingly make a note, but I’m in no place to concentrate right now.

The only other thing is that I’m identifying the person who did the killing as Aggressor, and the person who died as Victim. Choosing these names for ease of comprehension for readers, but for my own conscience need to say that these titles only identify each person’s behavior in one moment of time. People are wild and complicated shades of grey, and I don’t mean to encapsulate who they were in their entirety. I probably don’t need to tell any of you we are all so much more than one word.

OK, on to what I can talk about. Here’s what it’s like to find out someone in your family killed someone, and that someone in your family has been killed.

WHAT HAPPENED

You get the call.

You know it’s bad right away, but the information is this weird shape that does not fit anywhere in your brain, so it just sits outside your body, unacceptable. It is very strange to see/feel a fact outside your body, because usually they get incorporated so fast, they are in your brain before you really consider them. Not this one. Someone you know well is dead by violence. By the actions of someone else you know well.

It does not make sense. You don’t know what the hell shape it is, but there’s some fucked up jags and pointy spikes and you don’t want to touch it, much less try and cram it into one of your available thought slots.

The phone rings again. You talk. You hang up. You pass this ugly thought that doesn’t fit between you and your spouse. Holy shit, what the fuck is this even?

Trying to comfort you, he says, “This is bad, but you’re OK. I’m OK. The kids are OK.”

You have to tell the kids. I mean, something anyway. Eventually.

You are in the middle of a pandemic, so all your children are all right here, in the same house, hearing the same phone ring over and over and over, watching you take the phone into another room and close the door.

Maybe you will only tell them Victim died. They don’t need to know everything.

Maybe you can tell them the worst part later. Much later.

Like thirty years from now. And when they hear this final horrible piece of Victim’s death, your unrecognizably adult and mature children will write in to My Favorite Murder’s Hometown requests. It’ll all be a freaky story your kids are so far removed from and unhurt by, it will become nothing more than a twisted tale from the family vault to be enjoyed on a podcast.

You realize that’s probably not going to work.

Kids don’t live in a bubble. Do you want them to hear it from someone else? Even if there’s never a funeral because of Covid, do you really think the children will have zero follow up questions when it turns out none of us ever see Aggressor again?

Still, you wait and wait and think on all the ways you can make this not horrible somehow. But they know something’s up.

You tell the kids. Both parts. They look like you physically punched them each in their small and vulnerable stomachs. The way kids do when they love you so much they don’t even defend themselves, just like, “Why? Why did you do that?”

You hate Aggressor in that moment. When Aggressor made their terrible and life-altering decision, they probably weren’t thinking of the fallout for three kids on a couch, now trying to make sense of how their lives have just been profoundly changed.

In a very strange way, you almost come full circle to understanding Aggressor, at least in the sense you want to fucking kill Aggressor yourself. You are glad then, that they are in jail.

The phone rings, and you talk. And the moment you hang the phone up, it rings again. And again.

#

You can’t conjure Victim at all. You’ve known this person for years, but now they are a placeholder. You really can’t remember even their face.

Aggressor is walking around in your head in Technicolor with the hues turned up until it hurts your eyes. You can already think of a dozen ways the death happened, given the scant information you have.

You google Aggressor’s name. Nothing comes up.

You get a little more crafty in your search string. Three articles pop up. No name, but there’s a familiar house with police caution tape strung across the front. You’ve been through that door. Long before you knew, the local news was reporting.

You obsessively check for breaking news. Those three articles get amended, adding details. Then there’s a name. A photo of Aggressor looking shockingly harmless. I mean, at least in comparison to what they are allegedly capable.

#

You start to wonder if you could’ve done anything to stop this. Did you miss something? What about that time which, in retrospect, seems ominous, even though it passed as nothing more than a daily hassle back then?

Do you choose to believe there were signs, and therefore (+) benefit from imagining you can protect yourself and others from this ever happening again? Because if you go that way, you must also accept some level of (-) guilt you could’ve prevented this.

Or do you choose to believe this came out of the clear blue and therefore (+) no guilt that there was anything you could’ve done, any small move that might’ve saved two lives. You are not a God! Fool, you are not even a minor player in this incident, get the fuck over yourself. But if you go that way, you must also accept some level of (-) anyone you know might kill you or someone you love at any time.

#

You snap back to reality. You’ve been thinking about Aggressor so much: What is going to happen to Aggressor? What happened to Aggressor?

Whine-bullshit-whine about this fucking asshole.

The only time you ever think about Victim is wondering how they might assist in this Aggressor situation, because you are in way over your head trying to deal with all these phone calls, and Victim would probably be a really valuable resource right about now. And then you are all WHHHHhhhHHhhHhaaaAAAT The fuck, Anne. Victim has completed all the assists they are ever going to help out on.

#

In the dark, in bed, when you thought you could escape this whole thing for a few blessed moments, you are instead still talking about what happened with your spouse.

The moment he stops talking, your brain starts conjuring the first fuzzy clips of Victim: something funny they said once. The way they did their hair.

You start feeling really sick. Like, you’ve never felt this sick to your stomach. But what are the chances you come down with Diverticulitis or The Horrible Stomach Flu on the same day as all this other bullshit happens, right? This is straight up stress. You know it. But Jesus, you’ve never felt this sick before.

Your spouse starts talking again. This is nice, because it stops your brain from conjuring more Victim memories. It stops you from pondering the details of how they died. I mean, you know the First News Report version, but that doesn’t cover the multitude of variants. You can also smell the stress on your spouse, the change in his very body chemistry. That’s not so great for your about-to-upchuck sensibilities.

You go throw up.

You go to sleep.

This is the first day.