What We Do To Fathers Who Kill Their Children
There are crimes so horrific, they transcend the death penalty debate.
On Thursday afternoon, last week, millions of phones buzzed across the province of Quebec. An Amber Alert.
We were then looking for two young girls, two sisters, aged 11 and 6. They were last seen with their father the night before. This would be the longest active Amber Alert in Quebec’s history. It lasted three days.
The girls were eventually found dead.
And I won’t get too much into the details, because as I am writing those lines, a chase is still going on to find their father, still running away or hiding somewhere in the woods. So many elements of this story are very mysterious, and the investigation has yet to tell us more about the circumstances of the girls’ disappearance and ultimate death.
But for everyone who received that Amber Alert, this outcome is truly heartbreaking. There are no words to describe the pain that the girls’ mother, friends and loved ones must be feeling right now. And the rest of the population can only send out their support and their prayers, and maybe hold their children a little tighter.
And we are just as devastated as we are angry. We look out the window, look out into the distance, and we imagine the forest where men and women in uniform are searching for him, day in and day out.
This story feels familiar, as awful as it is. We have witnessed this kind of tragedy before. Those are the stories we tell ourselves when we’re wondering how the world went so wrong. All places have them. Unfortunately, we are not unique in this regard.
Yet, there’s so much about those stories we don’t know and never will. But one thing is for sure: no one has sympathy for fathers who kill their own children.
So it should be. No but’s.
In fact, people have so little sympathy for fathers who kill their children, they often do not wish death upon them, even though that might be what they would deserve in the end.
They want them to be alive.
They want them to live as long as possible with the lives they took on their mind.
There are crimes so horrific, they transcend the death penalty debate. No way those monsters should just get away with it and die. Nope. Sir, you’re going to live a long and healthy life in prison, haunted by the suffering you have caused.
And in the meantime, we might just get to know what went through their minds when they decided it was over, that what they put on this Earth they just had to take back. We might get to know, but I’m not sure we would be able to understand.
And even then, I’m not sure we would know what to do.
Because what they took back, they can’t bring back again.
For Norah and Romy Carpentier.