“I don’t. It’s done. I mailed the beneficiary-change form today.”
I stared across the table at her, my thoughts and emotions swirling. As they swirled, three questions kept rearing their unsettling heads: What would the FBI think, if they learned of my wife’s big gift in memory of an accused drug smuggler? What if the money ended up, directly or indirectly, in the pockets of narco traffickers and killers? Last but not least—in fact, worst of all—was it possible that I was resisting the idea because I was actually jealous of a dead man?
Suddenly Kathleen clutched my hand, and for a moment I wondered if she had somehow read my ungenerous thoughts. Then I heard her gasp—a ragged, wrenching effort to draw a breath—and saw the expression of terror on her face.
“Kathleen? Honey, what’s wrong?” She jerked her hand from mine and gripped the table, pushing upward with both arms, as if to keep herself from being pulled underwater. “Oh God,” I said. “No. Please, no.”
Her eyes opened wide, and then wider and wider still—impossibly wide—and she reached across the table, her hands scrabbling, searching for mine. Her gaze remained locked on me, and as I stared, frozen with horror, the fear in her eyes gave way to something else—dawning awareness, perhaps, followed swiftly by sorrow and then—at the last moment—by something I would have sworn was gratitude.
Knoxville News Sentinel
July 13, 2004
Kathleen Walker Brockton, Ph.D.
Scientist, teacher, humanitarian, wife, and mother
Kathleen Walker Brockton died Tuesday after a brief bout with cancer. She was 50. A native of Huntsville, Alabama, Dr. Brockton earned her B.S. degree from the University of Alabama and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Brockton was a professor in the University of Tennessee’s Nutrition Science Department, where she taught for fourteen years. Before moving to Knoxville in 1980, she taught at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. A respected scholar as well as a popular teacher, Dr. Brockton’s research interests focused on the health effects of nutritional deficiencies in children. Her 1997 journal article “Vitamin A Supplements: Saving Sight, Saving Lives” brought widespread attention within her field to the problem of vitamin A deficiency, a problem that causes blindness in an estimated 500,000 Third World children every year and kills approximately half of those children within a year after losing their sight. Chosen as “Author of the Year” by the journal’s editorial board, Dr. Brockton used the award’s monetary prize to establish a nonprofit foundation, Food for Sight, to provide vitamin A supplements to Third World children. During its first three years, Food for Sight provided vitamin A supplements to more than 100,000 children in Asia and Africa. “It costs fifty cents to keep a child from going blind,” Dr. Brockton was often heard to tell prospective donors. “Fifty cents. Who couldn’t—who wouldn’t—give the gift of sight to a child?”
A woman of exceptional intelligence, vision, and compassion, Dr. Kathleen Brockton is survived, mourned, and missed by her husband, Dr. William Brockton; their son, Jeff; their daughter-in-law, Jenny; and two grandsons, Tyler and Walker.
Arrangements are still pending, and a memorial service will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Food for Sight Foundation.
A DOZEN YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE I’D LAST SAT IN this particular chair, in this particular role: in the role of troubled parishioner, seeking counsel from the senior minister at Second Presbyterian. At the time of that visit, I’d been working a series of sadistic sexual murders—murders committed by my nemesis Satterfield. What had brought me here, back in 1992, was a question that had been raised, crudely but powerfully, by a young woman infuriated by the cruelty Satterfield had inflicted on his victims. “Why,” she had raged, “are men such shits to women?”
The minister on that prior occasion was the same as the minister on this occasion: the Right Reverend Michael Michaelson, D. Div., more often (and more simply) referred to by most of his flock as Rev. Mike. I still remembered Rev. Mike’s answer to the memorably crude question about men, women, and the problem of evil. On that occasion, he had responded with a disquisition that was long, learned, and fascinating, one that viewed the issues through a half-dozen different lenses: theology, of course, but also evolutionary biology, sociology, and abnormal psychology. In the end, though, Rev. Mike’s learned comments had proven to be far less illuminating than Kathleen’s brutally efficient explanation: “Why? Because they can be.”
In the years since that counseling visit, I’d worked a hundred homicides, give or take a dozen—none as brutal as Satterfield’s misogynistic butcherings—and that particular “why?” had drifted into one of the distant, dusty corners of my mind, displaced by other questions that were less rhetorical and more immediate, as well as more answerable: “Doc, what made that checkerboard crosshatching on that punched-in circle of skull?” (Answer: The milled head of a framing hammer.) “Doc, how come them maggots to look burnt?” (Answer: Because the killer left the body in the woods for a week, then came back and torched it.) “Doc, did that dude get blowed up by a bellyful of dynamite?” (Answer: No, the abdomen burst from the buildup of decomposition gases in the gut.)
This time, sitting in the pastor’s study, I asked a question not on behalf of countless suffering women, but on behalf of just one woman. How could an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God, I asked—the kind of God we heard about again and again in the stained-glass sanctuary of this majestic church—allow health-conscious, humanity-helping Kathleen Brockton to be stricken down, in the prime of life, with an aggressive, untreatable cancer?
The right reverend sat silent, his eyes on me—not looking at me so much as looking toward me, somehow, his gaze seeming to send compassion in my direction. Kathleen and I had known him, and had liked him, ever since he’d arrived at Second Presbyterian fresh from seminary, as an energetic young assistant pastor. After a long while, he gave a sorrowful shake of his head. “I won’t pretend I have a good answer for you,” he said. “This is one of the toughest questions of all. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow suffering—undeserved suffering, in particular? Why do some people—even terrible people—lead charmed lives, while others—including wonderful people like Kathleen—get dealt brutally bad cards? That’s the central question, as you probably know, of the Book of Job.”
I made a face. “I don’t buy it. Job.”
“How do you mean?”
I told him how I’d sought solace in the story of Job, and how unsatisfying and infuriating I had found it. I also confessed my two sacrilegious dreams about Job: Good-Boy Job and Game-Show-Winner Job.
Instead of looking shocked, he actually smiled slightly. “That’s an interesting spin on it,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve come across that in any of my Old Testament textbooks. I might just use that in a sermon someday, if I really want to rile people up.”
“Be my guest,” I said. “While you’re at it, tell folks how offensive it is to say things like ‘Everything happens for a reason’ or ‘His will be done.’ Kathleen’s secretary actually said that to me when I went in to clean out her office. I had to walk away to keep from hitting her.”
He winced. “My secret name for that is the ‘God’s Perverse Plan’ doctrine. If you take it to its logical extreme, you end up arguing that God planned the pain of every battered woman, every molested child, every black man strung up by a lynch mob, every Jew sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.” He clasped his hands, his fingers interlaced and his index fingers extended, and I couldn’t help thinking of the nursery rhyme Here is the church, and here is the steeple . . . “A poet I like a lot once put it this way: ‘If God is God, he is not good; if God is good, he is not God.’ Strong words, but they do get at the heart of the problem.”
“I’m not sure I follow. I never was good with poetry.”
“He’s saying that if God’s omnipotent, he must be a jerk, to allow so mu
ch innocent suffering. And if God’s not a jerk, then he must not be all-powerful, because if he were, he’d protect people.”
Amen, brother, I caught myself thinking.
DOES SUICIDE RUN IN FAMILIES? THAT WAS THE question I found myself pondering after I had left Rev. Mike’s study and returned to my empty, echoing house.
The answer, I well knew, was of course it does. Over the years, I’d read scores of books and articles about suicide; its dark causes, and the long shadow it could cast on the lives of the loved ones left to clean up the mess, literally and figuratively. I also, though, knew the answer in a deeper, darker way: I had felt its tug on occasion, during my adolescence; had heard its sinister siren song, calling me toward the rocks of doom. But adulthood—the twin rudders of a career and a family—had steered me into safer waters.
Until now.
In the blink of an eye—the catch in a throat—my mind traveled back almost half a century. I was four years old. I was trundling up the stairs to my father’s law office, a few steps ahead of my mother, who climbed slowly so that I could be the one to burst through the door crowing, “Daddy, Daddy, we came to s’prise you!” Only we were the ones, she and I, who were surprised: surprised by the figure slumped sideways in his swivel chair, the eyes vacant and clouding; surprised by the dark splotches and smears fanning across the wall behind him; surprised by the odors of brimstone and blood and bleakness in the air.
We never spoke of it, my mother and I—not once in the next forty years; not once before her own death. And so, because it was never spoken of, it was never really laid to rest.
And now, here it was again—suicide, my unseen, lifelong shadow—sitting beside me on my bed. On our bed: the bed I’d shared for thirty years with Kathleen. Young, willowy Kathleen. Pregnant, rotund Kathleen. Dough-bellied, big-breasted, nursing-mom Kathleen. Weary working-mother Kathleen. Midlife, tennis-toned Kathleen. Swiftly cancer-stricken Kathleen.
I reached for the drawer of the nightstand and slid it open, then wormed my hand once more beneath the phone directory. Closing my fingers around the pebble-textured grip, I pulled upward and outward, removing the pistol Decker had loaned me a lifetime ago, back when I had mistakenly believed that what I needed to fear was a malevolent man, not a microscopic murderer called cancer.