A man whose last name was Parente, of all things, has been in the news.
As a mental health professional, any suicide saddens me. And as more reports emerge, is seems as if Mr. Parente may have had a collapsing Ponzi scheme for which he was responsible.
But the part I cannot wrap my mind around is that he took his wife and 11 year old daughter to visit his 19 year old daughter at Loyola College in Baltimore. In the hotel where they stayed, he bludgeoned and asphyxiated his wife and 11 year old, did the same to the 19 year old when she arrived, and then cut himself so that he bled to death.
I don't think of Lawyers, dads, or those with Italian surnames as crazed. More stereotypes shattered.
It made me so sad. So very very sad. And mad. One person's inability to live a live he was proud of, or to cope with circumstances and consequences facing him, meant the end of lives that should never have been cut short. How could he be so selfish? So devoid of parental or spousal love? Humility? I have no explanation or theory.
No wonder these college students were devastated. Anyone who has been 19, or knows 19 year olds faced a nasty, brutish dose of disillusionment. Would that reality was they way we would like it. Safe. Kind. Fair. Loving. I believe that it is best to live "in reality." But this hurt me.
Please, when nothing helps, do NOTHING. No violence. No threats. No abndonment.
When help would help, GET IT. For you, your children, and anyone who might think of you as an example, and for the rest of us who are witnesses.
1 comment:
Agreed on all counts. Suicide itself is a devastating act--I think of that Arthur Miller, I think from A View From the Bridge, where a character says, "Suicide kills two people, that's what it's for." We had a suicide in our neighborhood right before Christmas--a teenage girl whose mother died two years earlier of cancer. So heartbreaking--if she'd just told someone.
But to kill everyone else too? That's beyond comprehension.
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