I worked with a man many years ago and I saw him utterly broken by tragedy.
He came home from work and found his wife in the kitchen of his house with his daughter who had just returned from her honeymoon. He insisted that they should all head out for dinner – his treat. His daughter said she would drive home to her new husband and get ready. My friend said he would follow in a half hour and pick them up. He didn’t drink, so would be the designated driver. They bid adieu and his daughter left.
A half hour later and my friend and his wife were headed down country roads to their daughter’s home. As they approached a bridge they saw blue flashing lights and a car across the road. There were two ambulance men in a ditch by the side of the road. My friend described the dread moment when he realised it was his daughter’s car.
Later, accident investigators pieced together what had happened. She had been driving when her car hit a pothole, in a million-to-one shot, the steering wheels had wrenched to the side and the car spun, causing her head to hit the bracket for the seatbelt on the door frame. The driver of the car behind had described how she had gotten out of the car, walked to the side of the road and then fallen over. She was lying dead at the scene when my friend drove up to the scene.
My friend was obviously devastated for years afterwards, and his grief assaulted him in waves. Even in those circumstances, where nobody had done anything wrong, where the risk was so obscure as to be invisible, even then he tormented himself – “If only I had driven. If only I hadn’t suggested dinner. If only we had eaten in my house.”
I worked with him for about two years after that crash and saw him diminished, eroded by the pain. When he seemed to be in a good place all it would take was a song on the radio to bring all of that pain back to the surface. He would be knocked back to square one when his wife would hear about one of her friends becoming a grandmother. The loss of their child was not diminished in anyway by the freakish and unpredictable nature of her death. They still felt responsible, they claimed the blame.
When I consider how my friend suffered in a tragedy where nobody is to blame, I am deeply ashamed thinking about the devastation that I have caused. When I murdered my partner, not only did I take the life of an innocent woman, but I inflicted the worst pain imaginable on her family. Yet while both my victim’s family and my friend couldn’t have foreseen or prevented events, my partner’s family must torture themselves thinking about the times that they believe they could or should have intervened.
Perhaps the deepest shame I feel stems from knowing that it would only have taken the smallest of interventions on my part to in order to change my behaviour and produce a profoundly different outcome. There were myriad warning signs yet I refused to see them. These are the biases and thinking errors that have led to the murder of an innocent woman and the devastation of her family and friends.
But while I can’t undo my crime, it doesn’t mean that I can never again do anything good. It is my belief that by scrutinising, exploring and exposing the flawed and twisted belief structures that I used to justify my abusive behaviours, I might help others to identify those traits – whether that is in themselves or in somebody that they know. It is my hope that by sharing the lessons I have learned that somebody else reading them might notice some pattern or warning signs and realise that they are actually far closer to lethal violence than they might have thought – whether that is as the perpetrator or victim of domestic abuse. I will only focus on my beliefs, my thoughts and my actions – those things that were within my locus of control.
