To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

“Her head was bent and her face was set in that empty half smile behind which the whipped soul is suspended.”

She saw her as a broken person, someone who did not believe anybody loved her; someone who threw everything she loved off the bridge in order to punish herself, to punish her soon-to-be ex-husband, to punish life.

Filicide is divided into three classifications: neonaticide, for children killed within the first twenty-four hours of birth; infanticide, children killed during their first year of life; and filicide, a child from age one to any age. Younger children are killed most often, with 70 percent of filicide victims younger than six years old.

“We still view children as the mother’s property,” wrote Dahlia Lithwick in a 2002 Slate article about filicidal parents. “Since destroying one’s own property is considered crazy while destroying someone else’s property is criminal, women who murder their own children are sent to hospitals, whereas their husbands are criminals who go to jail.”

Mothers who mean to commit suicide after killing their children rarely succeed, scholars argue, because they have already killed what is most important to them. Their suicide, in other words, becomes redundant.

Individual murders could be solved or punished, but murder itself, of course, could never be solved,” he wrote. “That could not be done without solving the human heart, and without solving the history that has rendered the heart so dark and desolate.”

The state can’t seem to keep the roads paved; you think we should trust them with life-and-death decisions?”

“Psychopaths tend to see any social exchange as a ‘feeding opportunity,’ a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner,” wrote Robert D. Hare, PhD, in Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. “Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse.”

“Why are all sociopaths not in positions of great power?” Dr. Martha Stout asks in her bestselling book, The Sociopath Next Door. “Why do they not win all the time? For they do not. Instead, most of them are obscure people, and limited to dominating their young children, or a depressed spouse, or perhaps a few employees or coworkers. Not an insignificant number of them are in jail. . . . They can rob and torment us temporarily, yes, but they are, in effect, failed lives.”

“We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.” —Janet Malcolm, Iphigenia in Forest Hills