Upon Killing Your Child
June 7, 2010 | 2 Comments
A few days ago, I was walking home past a row of cars. It was the beginning of the long weekend, and, in true Victoria Day weekend fashion, the sun was trumpeting the start of summer. It was a beautiful afternoon, and those cars shone in the glorious light. In an urban setting, the sheen of a car in the sunlight is hallmark of summer. As I walked on, I thought about this story from the Washington Post, and I thought about the fact that at some point this summer a small child will perish in a car just like those. It’s horrible to think about. It’s a tortuous way die, and it’s a tragedy for all involved.
“Death by hyperthermia” is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just… forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.
Society often cries out for blood after such a horror. It’s understandable. We want to protect the innocent. We want to do whatever we can to make sure that the world is safe for children, and when a child is taken from us long before they’ve had the opportunity to fully live, we want vengeance. We want to find the monster involved and extract as many pounds of flesh as we possibly can. I can’t blame anyone for this reaction. It’s basic and elemental, however, it doesn’t always equate to justice.
As much as we might try to find a villain, there isn’t always one to be found. All we’ll tend to find are humans and fallibility. We’ll find people who are suffering far greater torment than we could ever inflict upon them… more than we’d ever want to inflict upon them.
Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.
Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.
The facts in each case differ a little, but always there is the terrible moment when the parent realizes what he or she has done, often through a phone call from a spouse or caregiver. This is followed by a frantic sprint to the car. What awaits there is the worst thing in the world.
Each instance has its own macabre signature. One father had parked his car next to the grounds of a county fair; as he discovered his son’s body, a calliope tootled merrily beside him. Another man, wanting to end things quickly, tried to wrestle a gun from a police officer at the scene. Several people — including Mary Parks of Blacksburg — have driven from their workplace to the day-care center to pick up the child they’d thought they’d dropped off, never noticing the corpse in the back seat.
Then there is the Chattanooga, Tenn., business executive who must live with this: His motion-detector car alarm went off, three separate times, out there in the broiling sun. But when he looked out, he couldn’t see anyone tampering with the car. So he remotely deactivated the alarm and went calmly back to work.
I don’t know what would constitute justice in these circumstances. I really don’t think any of us can know. I don’t know if, or to what extent, we should prosecute these people. In a tragedy, we might look for easy answers. Sadly, here, there are none.
Nor do I know what to suggest to fight this. Are there safety features to implement? Probably, but as evidenced, these measures cannot save all children; this phenomenon is a sympton of something greater than one simple mistake. One simple answer isn’t going to solve it.
I could suggest that we all slow down a little, that we take more care in our daily lives. But this is unrealistic. We all have more and more demands upon our time. We are all trying to balance these demands. Slowing down is just not an option for us. Even if we made such a decision, it’s unlikely we’d actually adhere to it.
Maybe all we can do, as parents, is make a point of always checking the car seat. Maybe, everytime we get out of our cars – no matter where we are or what we’re doing – we have to walk to the back door and peek in. Maybe this is the only safety measure we can really enact.
Maybe there’s nothing we can do. Maybe the only demand we can make of ourselves is to offer a little compassion to those who have made this terrible, terrible mistake.
(H/T: Conor Friedersdorf)
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2 Responses to “Upon Killing Your Child”
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June 7th, 2010 @ 12:45 pm
Our legal justice system has no place in this issue except a considerate, thorough and careful review to make certain that the incident was indeed accidental. Once the suspicion of criminal intent has been allayed the legal system should do what all people would do in that case; quietly withdraw to allow the poor wretch to work their way through the personal hell they find themselves in.
As for automation; I don’t know. Any idea I can think of promptly founders on the rocks of the nature of human beings. Safety systems would be deactivated because they were annoying or inconvenient. Cooling systems would be immensely inefficient or expensive or unworkable in an inert automobile.
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Jonathan McLeod Reply:
June 7th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Agreed. Generally, this can’t be treated as a criminal act. Not if we’re to be a civilized society.
And we’ll always find ways around safety measures. Our ingenuity can be our saviour or our demise.
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