Fathers.

On this father's day, I am primarily thinking about two things:

1) How lucky I got in the father's department.
2) How a man can brutally kill his two children along with his wife and mother in law.

I am in Boston this weekend, having quickly come up after hearing the news that a friend was violently killed by her husband. In his rage, he also killed my friend's mother and their two small children, aged 2 and 4. If you want to know the horrific details, just open up the Boston Globe. It's all over the news. I don't think I can bring myself to write the details of what he did.

Mixed in with my grief is a visceral anger born in the pit of my stomach and coursing through every vein in my body. In the notes of confession he left at the scene, shortly before some lame attempt to flee, he called himself a selfish coward for what he did. Selfish coward? Those would not be my words to describe the act of murdering your own children.

So many articles and comments are floating about now, and I think I have read most of them by this point. Many have commented  that my friend likely ignored warning signs of his hidden rage... and I can honestly say that is not the case. This horror was a lightening bolt in a blue sky. No one would have ever anticipated this mild-mannered man to commit such an atrocity. Articles have also reported there was some kind of marital discord. I can say that the problems they faced were typical of a lot of married couples. And in any event...no level of discord warrants this nature of response. There is simply no justification.

It's hard to keep myself from walking through my imaginary scene of what happened. To fill in the many blanks with some kind of narrative. I keep searching for an answer that will never arrive to a very simple question:  

Why?