Savannah Knight is a retired mortician with great plans to become a paranormal author. On her first day of retirement, she heads to the local library to start her new career as an aspiring author. But shortly after her first research session, everyo...
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There is nothing more frightening than a suffering victim who has nothing left lose; therefore, there is no fear of dying for their cause. Most people do it as quietly and as less painful as possible, but some feel they need to take someone out with them, someone who they feel is the source of all their pain. While this is screamingly evident in the case of most school shootings, I'm speaking right now of a different scenario—a murder-suicide.
Frank and Lilly Pickford were the envy of all their friends on the outside. They'd been happily married for over twenty years, had three beautiful adult children, and they even had grandchildren on the way. But when Frank suddenly lost his job, all that happiness flew right out the window. Things disintegrated within the next several days—with his family, his future, his finances, and his relationship with his wife.
Though she tried to do everything to comfort Frank, Lilly couldn't hold things together on his own. Instead of looking for another job, Frank spent most of the day in his garage drinking, waiting for something to happen from nothing. He immediately stopped sleeping in the bed they shared, despite how often Lilly begged him to join her at bedtime. When she wouldn't relent, he threw something at her—anything in the vicinity—to get her to leave the room. The last time he did it, it hit her right in the face, breaking her nose. That's when he knew he was at the point of no return. From there, it became much easier for him to her hurt, both physically and emotionally.
"Why would I want to sleep with someone as fat and ugly as you?" he screamed one night. "I can't stand to look at you anymore, let alone sleep with you." Lilly tried to give him his space, but it didn't get better from there, only worse. He slapped her, punched her, kicked her, and he took every chance he got to put her down. She was nothing without him, according to Frank. By the time of their deaths, they'd both jumped into a large, bottomless pit that consumed both of them with Frank's darkness and insecurities.
On her last day alive, Lilly had just found out the local Wal-Mart wanted to hire her as a cashier, but of course, Frank couldn't have that in his house. No woman would ever take care of him—that was his job. He forbade her to go, but she didn't listen. Truth be told, he probably would have killed her anyway even if she had obeyed him—this incident only sped up the timeline.
When she returned home from her eight-hour shift at Wal-Mart, Frank waited in their dark living room with a shot gun pointed at the front door. The moment Lilly opened the door, he pumped three shots into her—one to her head, one to her heart, and the last one landed right between her eyes. He didn't feel any sense of remorse when her dead body hit the ground.
"I told you not to go, you stupid bitch," he said, then pointed the gun at his head. He wasted no time finishing the job.
Their neighbor, Leslie Gibson, heard the shots immediately and called the police, but she was too frightened to go check on Lilly. She watched from behind her locked front door as the paramedics rolled the body bags from the house to the ambulance. It was too late to save Lilly; it was too late to save the world.
Like Frank and Lilly, there had been many suicide victims throughout my career who didn't leave any sort of a note or any clues as to why they so desperately wanted to die. After spending my entire career trying to understand death and mortality, I figured it could have been one of several things:
1: Maybe they didn't have anyone left in their lives to say goodbye to.
But that couldn't always be right. Stanley Barker didn't have any friends, family, or any romantic partners in his life to write his suicide note to, yet he did. It was quite clear in his note that he thought somebody might be listening to his words. Why else would he have written them? And who was he writing to, anyway?
2: They knew the pain would be gone soon, so they didn't care about anything else.
Many of my colleagues had this theory: if a person really, truly wanted to kill themselves, then they wouldn't have left a suicide note. So, in their eyes, all the millions of suicide victims who had left suicide notes didn't really want to die—they only wanted the attention that suicide would gift them. If that's true, then what the hell is the point? They aren't going to be around to enjoy this so-called attention if they're serious about dying.
Stanley Barker was pretty fucking serious. He loaded his body with enough alcohol, cocaine, and heroin to kill more than one person. How did he think he'd come back from that? The mixture alone might have been enough to kill him, but his blood was more poison than anything by the time he died. That man meant to die, and he meant to die as hard as he could.
3: They could have wanted to spare the feelings of those they left behind as much as possible.
I think in Trent Sterling's case, the exact opposite was true. Perhaps the only reason he wrote a suicide note was because he wanted to do as much damage as he could on his way out. Though Trent wasn't the vindictive type, his heart had been shattered for so long because of his father's constant disapproval and feelings of disappointment. So, I think he tried to make a point on his way out—if you don't change your heart, you're going to lose much more than the only son you're too embarrassed to claim. I think Stanley also had similar reasons for leaving his own note—except his note was written to the world rather than one specific person.
4: They didn't really want to die.
Think about it. You've lived a life of pain for as long as you can remember, and on your way out, you have this golden opportunity to say what you could never say while you were alive. There's a blank page in front of you, but you have nothing to say to anybody—not even a note to the person who will be taking care of your birds after they find your dead body. These people leave as quietly as they lived, but that was simply a reality I didn't want to fathom.
The reason I thought about all these things was because I understood exactly how all these victims felt throughout their lives. Though it was a long time ago, I spent my teenage years drinking and doing drugs to dull the pain, cutting myself to feel something more powerful, and starving myself until I couldn't stand to walk. I spent my younger years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, and each time, the doctors would come up with some new diagnosis nobody understood—schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, learning disabilities, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder. You name it, the doctors swore up and down I had it.
It wasn't until I received a much different diagnosis that things began to make much more sense—polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). And as soon as the doctors helped me balance my hormones, I began to feel much better, much lighter, much freer. However, it hadn't been a miracle cure. If I didn't watch my nutrition, my body could be sent into complete chaos anytime, so it was still something I struggled with regularly.
Frank and Lilly, like many others, didn't leave a note about why their lives had ended. It made sense for Lilly—because she had been murdered—but why didn't Frank want to tell the world how he felt? If you look a little deeper, he did actually leave his Mark by killing the love of his life before he turned the gun on himself.
As soon as he realized he couldn't reverse what he did to Lilly, he felt he had no other option but to commit suicide. The love of his life was gone by his own hands, and there was no miracle for what she had—a violent and painful death. He knew he wouldn't be able to live the rest of his life with that guilt, so that last bullet sent into his skull was his letter to the world. He might as well have said—
I'm the monster who did this, and I can't live in a world where someone like me exists—even if it's to live the rest of my miserable life out behind bars.
