Forgiving My Daughter's Killer

by Kate Grosmaire

  “We just have to be here,” she said.

  This seemed to be the predominant sentiment for several people. When I walked out into the hall, I was overcome with love. Seeing so many people from my community—probably forty or fifty—felt like being wrapped up in a warm blanket.

  They all wanted to help.

  I used to teach parenting and breast-feeding classes, and when I counseled young moms-to-be, I’d say: “Keep a list. People are going to ask you what they can do to help, so write everything down that could possibly help you. When someone calls and asks what they can do, you can look at your list and say, ‘Thanks—we need toothpaste.’ ”

  I would also tell them that it’s as much about friends wanting to help as it is about the moms needing help. People want to do for people in need, and it’s kind to let them. After all, in this terrible place Andy and I found ourselves, a tube of toothpaste was not going to salve our wounds.

  But the love of a community could.

  That advice came back to me as I was surrounded by people who wanted to show me love.

  What can I do to help?

  Is there anything I can do?

  “I don’t think the cats have any cat litter,” I said, ever practical . . . and still in shock. Amid all the drama, the first thing I remembered was that I hadn’t been able to buy cat litter that afternoon for our three cats.

  I’m sure people were flummoxed by the request, but everyone received it as if it made all the sense in the world.

  Cat litter? Okay.

  Several priests were at the hospital to tend to us. Father Chris had stayed the whole evening. Father Will, not even ordained a year, Father Michael, and Father Kevin all came to the hospital to be with us.

  As I looked at these men of God, with their clerical collars and kind expressions, it made me thankful to be a part of the Catholic Church.

  I had a soft spot for Father Mike, an Irish gentleman with snow-white hair, kind blue eyes, and a compassionate, loving manner.

  “Do you want to see Ann?” I asked him. As we walked back to the intensive care unit, he took about five or six steps then stopped.

  I followed suit by stopping and waiting with him.

  He took five or six more steps before stopping again.

  I stopped with him and silently waited. That’s when I noticed that his eyes were full of tears.

  “Father Mike,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “Kate, it’s not okay.”

  When I looked into his eyes, it felt as though God was speaking to me.

  This is not okay with me. This is not what I want. I’m grieving this too. I feel this loss just as greatly as you do.

  It wasn’t a long moment. It only lasted a second or two. But that’s when I strongly felt God sharing in my grief—that he cried with his children, that this was definitely not okay. People sometimes ask if we ever blamed God for this tragedy. We haven’t. Perhaps any brewing anger dissipated when I saw the tear-filled eyes of Father Mike, who shared in our sorrow just as he’d rejoiced in our past triumphs.

  Hours passed, filled with beeping machines, nurses coming in and out of Ann’s room, visitors, and whispered conversations about what exactly happened that had made Conor do this. By 11:00 p.m., I was absolutely exhausted.

  I felt a little like I did after I brought Ann into the world so many years ago.

  After a successful labor and delivery, the nurses had let her stay with me in my room. She nursed and suckled until I needed a break. Finally, I said, “Is there any way you could take her? I’m so tired.”

  “Oh,” one said. “We thought you would want to keep her in the room.” The nurses knew me because I taught breast-feeding classes at the hospital.

  “Yes,” I said, handing the tightly wrapped bundle to the nurse. “But I just need some rest!”

  Nineteen years later, I was in another hospital, during a less joyous time, realizing once again the limitations of my body.

  “I want to go home,” I said to Andy. We’d been sitting by Ann’s side for hours.

  I knew there were mothers who would not have left their child’s hospital bed under any circumstance. They’d vow to stay right beside their injured child’s side, hoping against hope for a miracle. They’d sit stoically in the stiff chair. They’d go without rest on the off chance that their child would wake up and see they’d been there all along.

  I needed sleep—real, deep, restorative sleep, not the constantly interrupted hospital sleep. I’d just received the most shocking and horrible news, and I knew the disruption to our lives had only begun.

  “That’s fine, I understand you want to go home. But first, you stay here while I go home and take a shower, and then I’ll come back and spend the night. I want to be here when Ann wakes up,” Andy said, kissing my forehead. I looked in his eyes and saw something I didn’t possess. Hope.

  I nodded, knowing God could perform a miracle. It wasn’t as though I was overcome with hopelessness, but I couldn’t shake the belief that she’d die of her injuries. Part of me loved how Andy still had hope, and part of me was deeply saddened by it.

  Andy reached into his pocket for his keys, when his fingers landed on some change. He pulled out the coins and saw that one of them was a gold piece about the size of a quarter. He picked it out from the others on his palm to look at it more closely. On one side was an image of an angel rising out of the clouds.

  “Look at that,” he said, marveling at the coin.

  “How’d that get in there?” I asked.

  “Maybe that’s what Father Will was talking about when he said, ‘Be open to seeing glimpses of God,’ ” he said.

  That little coin convinced us that—somehow—God was very close in that moment.

  When we emerged from Ann’s room, to our surprise the four priests and our deacon were still there. These men are early risers, so their remaining there touched Andy deeply. We came out and hugged each person. With every hug, Andy thought, This is why I go to church. This is why I belong to a community.

  Deacon Tom took one look at Andy’s weary eyes. “Need a ride?” he asked when he heard of Andy’s plan to go home and return.

  A hug. A ride. A comforting word.

  We never felt more loved and taken care of by our community.

  That is, until I got home.

  Just a few hours earlier, a deputy sheriff and a victim’s advocate had shown up on my porch and shattered our world. That night—at one thirty in the morning—I arrived to that same house, to the place that would never quite be what it had once been.

  And on the porch I found cat litter—one hundred pounds of it.

  CHAPTER 5

  When I got back home, the house seemed like the shell of something that had previously held our happy lives. My muddy gardening clothes lay in a clump on the floor. How different the world looked when I’d slipped those on earlier that day, when my head was filled with plans for my tomato plants.

  What I didn’t know—what I wasn’t told until many weeks later—was what happened at the hospital just as I was falling asleep at home.

  Around two o’clock that morning, Andy was still awake in Ann’s room. It was dark and quiet, except for the whoosh of the ventilator. The machine almost sounded like it was explaining how it was doing the heavy work of living for Ann. Innnnn. Ouuuut. Innnnn. Ouuuuut. Andy stood over Ann’s bed, just looking at her.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said. “I’m here.”

  He paused and listened to the ventilator, a poor and inadequate substitute for Ann’s voice. He didn’t really expect her to respond, but he was surprised at how desperate he felt when she didn’t.

  “If you can move or say anything, go ahead,” he encouraged softly.

  Innnnn. Ouuuut. The machine whirred.

  “It’s okay,” he added. “I know it probably hurts a lot.”

  He stood there without saying a word, feeling the desperation of the situation settling on him.

  Then, amazingly, h
e heard something beyond the ambient nighttime sounds of the hospital.

  Forgive him.

  He didn’t stop to wonder where this was coming from. He knew. He’d heard the voice for nineteen years. It belonged to the same girl who had only mastered five words—none of which was Mama—when she was two years old. It was the same voice that belonged to the girl who called trees “ghees” and cats “gats” when she was three. It belonged to the girl who required speech therapy until she finally conquered the “f” sound. The little girl who one day triumphantly announced, “Daddy, listen: ‘The farmer chased the fox over the fence!” It belonged to the same girl who would later ask to borrow the car and a few dollars for a soda at the bookstore.

  Her lips weren’t moving, but he heard that voice just as clearly as he’d heard it when she asked him to make her and Conor dinner for their picnic.

  Forgive him.

  “No,” he said aloud. “I’m not going to do that.” How could she ask such a thing? How could she expect him to even consider forgiving the person who changed our lives forever?

  Dad, this is what you need to do. You need to forgive.

  “He did something terrible, Ann,” he said. “I won’t forgive him.”

  Dad, you need to forgive Conor.

  “No way.”

  You need to.

  “I won’t.”

  Had someone walked by the room, they would’ve wondered why Andy was arguing with a comatose person. It was a real discussion—one that any father and daughter would have over more trivial topics and in happier circumstances.

  After about twenty minutes, he realized it was a back and forth he couldn’t win. Ann would never relent.

  “Okay,” he said in exasperation. The girls always got what they wanted in the end, and this exchange would be no different.

  After all, what father can refuse his daughter?

  “I’ll try.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Miriam?” I said the next morning, after walking over to my neighbors’ home across the street and knocking tentatively on their door. Even though we were friendly, I didn’t make it a habit of stopping by unannounced.

  “Would you mind keeping an eye on the house for me?” Ann’s shooting was headline news in the papers and on television. There weren’t many Grosmaires in the country, and we were certainly the only ones in Tallahassee. “Of course,” she said. “Do you want Randy to mow the lawn?”

  “You know, I just planted all my tomatoes in the garden,” I said, shocked at how long ago that peaceful afternoon seemed. “If he could just go over a couple of times this week and turn some water on them, that would be great.”

  “He’ll make sure things are okay, Kate,” she said, her voice catching.

  Like a powerful magnet, this tragedy drew all our family from across the southeastern United States to Tallahassee Memorial Regional Medical Center. Specifically, to a tiny waiting room with plastic chairs and a coffeepot in the corner.

  One by one, they showed up, disheveled and concerned after making their unexpected trips. My mom had traveled nine hours straight from Memphis with my brothers; Andy’s brother came up from St. Petersburg, Florida; his sister drove from Robertsdale, Alabama; and my sister Patti drove up from Davie, Florida. They all had the same shocked look of disbelief and concern on their faces when they saw me for the first time. While we waited for information on Ann, a dozen family members crowded into the small room until one of the deacons at our church—Deacon Melvin, who was also the chaplain at the hospital—offered to let us use a classroom down the hall.

  “As long as no one’s using this room for a class,” he said, “you guys can hang out here.”

  Everyone fit nicely into the huge boardroom, which had a long table down the middle with plenty of chairs on either side. Notably, the room had large windows that made it roomy and bright. Andy’s office staff brought lunch up for us—platters of chicken fingers and little sandwiches—which they did every day we were in the hospital.

  It gave us a much more comfortable place to visit with people who’d traveled a long way to see us. Every act of kindness, every visit gave us a taste of God’s love. It felt as if God were hugging us over and over and over again, through the arms of our family, our fellow parishioners, our neighbors. I was very aware of their collective anguish, perhaps the result of God spreading out our grief so we wouldn’t be crushed under its weight. As our church, family, and community mourned with us, it lightened our burden and saved us from despair’s depths.

  “I’ve never experienced a Holy Week like this one,” said Father Mike as he stood in the waiting room over the people gathered at the long table. Ann was shot on Palm Sunday, the day on which Christ began his Passion, and it felt as though our friends might’ve been walking with us toward her eventual death. A small group in the corner held hands, bowing their heads and praying. Another group was gathered around a table, setting out snacks. Cindy was encouraging people to sign up for the online meal volunteer system, which ended up providing two months of amazing casseroles, hams, and pies.

  As we fellowshipped with our visitors, we were interrupted by consultations with various specialists. A reconstructive specialist asked to speak to us about Ann’s hand, which was injured by the blast of the shotgun. After looking at Ann and consulting his charts, he looked at us earnestly and explained what could be done.

  “She needs to be stabilized before we can do any sort of surgery. Because of her brain swelling, her skull is left open,” he explained. “Once that is stabilized, here’s what I’ll do to salvage her hand.”

  After his presentation, he left and I watched the nurse tinker around Ann’s body, tending to her as she appeared to sleep. Caring for Ann used to be my job, but her injuries had far exceeded anything I could solve with Neosporin, a kiss, or some strategically placed Band-Aids. I knew I’d never be able to reach over and grab that hand of my daughter’s again, but the visit with the specialist was unnerving. I feared my daughter would not survive the week, so her hand was way down on my list of topics that needed to be addressed. In the hospital everyone had their own area for which they were responsible, which made it hard to get a good overall picture of what was really going on.

  But, deep down, I felt I knew.

  I went out of the room to get some air and visited with friends near the waiting room, outside the Neuro ICU. That’s when our friend Rick Palmer turned the corner and dashed up to me with the confidence of a man used to navigating hospitals.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” he said. Rick and his wife, Barbara, have two very well-manicured acres in a neighborhood a few miles from our home, with neatly trimmed driveways and well-mulched flowerbeds due to Rick’s gardening hobby. In addition to ornamentals, Rick grows the most awesome tomatoes, eggplants, and beans in his backyard. He and I always “dished the dirt,” so to speak.

  Of course, he wasn’t there to talk about eggplants. Rick is also an ophthalmologist, a corneal specialist, and the staff ophthalmologist for three hospitals—including Tallahassee Memorial.

  “I can help with her eye,” he said. Like everyone else, he simply wanted to do something to make things better. His offer to help with her eye was like a mom’s offer to bring over a casserole. But as I listened to him explain his possible services, it seemed so futile.

  “I’m not sure, Rick. No one has said anything about removing her eye,” I said. “I don’t know if or when they might do it.”

  But Rick was so insistent. He wanted so badly to help us.

  “Andy said I could see Ann,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  “Certainly,” I said. I was convinced that tending to her non-functioning eye was not the best use of our time at this point, but I figured a nurse could explain it to him better than I could.

  “I’m Dr. Palmer, and I’m an ophthalmologist,” he said to a nurse. “What can I do to help?”

  “Thank you, but . . .” She looked at me and paused. “I’m not sure there’s much to do right now.�
�

  “I can enucleate the eye, for example, to try to salvage it,” he suggested. Enucleating simply means removing the eye from the socket, a practice done after orbital trauma. “If you need me to,” he insisted, “I can do that. I’ve been in medical practice for years, and I could easily help.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Please,” he said. “I want to do something.”

  Very calmly, and in a measured fashion, she said, “That’s not necessary.”

  “If the eye isn’t functional,” he said, “it will need to be taken out.”

  “No,” she explained again. “It’s not necessary in this case.”

  “It’s a common procedure,” he insisted. “I can do it today.”

  “There’s nothing to remove.”

  He was shocked by her answer.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  The realization gradually settled on him. He couldn’t enucleate the eye because there was no eye. Part of her—a very significant part of her—was simply gone. Stolen.

  “You’re sure?” He just stood there for a moment, trying to wrap his head around just what nothing meant, not wanting to process it.

  “Thanks for trying, Rick.”

  Rick tilted his head as if there were some answer written in the ceiling tiles, and his eyes suddenly filled with tears. He quickly dropped his head, turned to me, and shuffled out of the room, where Andy intercepted him with a big hug in the corridor.

  “I’m sorry,” Rick said to us, sniffling. He was shaking his head in disbelief. “I just got overwhelmed in there.” Rick has three daughters of his own, and a young son.