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A friend from the area emailed me today to tell me that I had wrongly reported the details about the woman in Irving who killed her two young autistic children. Her husband is alive; she is not a widow.
I didn’t bookmark the other sources of information I’d found, so now (of course) I can’t find them, to see where they got theirs. My friend thought I’d confused two different tragedies–another killing of a child by a mother occurred not that far away, with different circumstances. Whether I conflated stories about two different killings, or the sources I read had already done that, it’s still a mistake, and I failed to check deeply enough.
So death of a spouse was not part of the problem.
I apologize for sloppy fact-checking.
Comment by Kip Colegrove — July 26, 2010 @ 10:49 am
Thanks for the clarification. It does not invalidate the overall point of your previous post, of course; women are typically expected to be more patient with heavy burdens than men, and that plays out in all sorts of ways.
I think about parishes I’ve served, including one of the two I now serve, and recall how a child with special needs–and the adult such a child grows into–can form a core of caring and nurture in a group. Not simply forbearance, but actual nurturing and creative interaction that enrich the moral and relational life of each and every parishioner.
The autistic gentleman in one of my present parishes is so deeply integrated–along with his mother–into the fiber of that little community that I’m convinced he is one of the reasons that small congregation survives. My theology rejects the notion that painful and difficult situations exist in order that that grace may abound (that would make God a proximate cause of any suffering), but such situations do exists, and I’ve seen grace abound through them.
Our role seems to be the steady work of accepting the challenge with creativity and joy. The results, as I’ve seen, are well worth it.