You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
When I was 27, my best friend’s father got up one morning and shot his wife, his mother and then himself. He called 911 as he was dying. My friend, Maria, was asleep in bed just a few miles away. Thank God he didn’t have it in his mind that she, too, could not survive without him.
It took days for her to reach me with the news. I fell to the floor and sobbed like a baby. I still feel guilty about it now. I don’t think I said anything to console her – I was crying for my own loss. She seemed to understand. She knew I would take it hard. The violent death of these three people was unfathomable. I’d written about murder-suicides before but never dreamed one would hit so close to home. To me, theirs was the closest thing to a perfect family, a safe haven from my own chaotic world. Joe Robertson was a crime scene tech for the local Police Department. He was gruff but had always been nice to me. Marta, his wife, was something else completely. A beautiful Italian woman with a heart big enough for all her children’s friends, Marta loved me in a way I had never experienced before, nor have I since. I guess it’s that unconditional kind, though of course I didn’t know that word back then. I just knew that she hugged me the minute I walked in the door, fed me cookies or whatever else she had baked – she was always baking – and called me her strawberry, short for Strawberry Shortcake. I was her strawberry. I adored her.
We found out later that Joe had been depressed. His doctors tried a few medications. Everyone thought it was a stage that had passed. Obviously it hadn’t. In my anger and grief, I hated him. He had robbed Maria and her brother John of a family but, in my mind, he had taken one from me as well. I refused to accept it. I put up their photographs and lit candles in their memory. I wrote him angry letters daring him to justify what he had done. Maria was so strong. I felt shame for taking her tragedy so damn personally. Our group had expected to come together that summer for our 10-year high school reunion. We did go but our first reunion was the Robertson family funeral. Afterward, we all met at a restaurant and shared, not our grief, but our stories, cherished, often hilarious, memories of Bob and Ollie. It was a classic Robertson event – friends, family, food and laughter.
I had no idea how deeply the deaths would affect me. I wanted desperately to share my feelings with Lynn – and eventually I did - but, at the time, it seemed unfair to speak of my grief so soon after she had lost a mother, a father and a grandmother. I thought I would only bring her down. Instead, I drank and stayed up late watching reruns of NYPD Blue or whatever else would numb my mind. I dated occasionally – one man actually wanted to marry me – but mostly I isolated, threw myself into work and drifted into a depression so deep I thought I’d never escape. Six months later, the depression lifted but the mental anguish that followed was far worse than anything I’d ever endured. I didn’t know it then but the Robertson deaths had unearthed a horror so deep within me I’d forgotten it was ever there.