Hi.  It’s my birthday.

I woke up this morning snuggled up with my husband and son, which seems like a pretty good way to start a birthday.

Things went rapidly downhill; Denny and I got automated alerts through the Hawk Alert system that a shooter was at large in Iowa City.  Of course what I thought of immediately was the recent campus shootings, like Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois, and the Gang Lu massacre from here at the University of Iowa.  It was very scary at first, because there were no details for what felt like a long time.  Our office got locked down, as did the schools in the area.  Soon the story became public; it wasn’t a lunatic opening fire on campus.  Rather, it was a recently-disgraced local businessman who killed his wife and four kids in their home about a mile from my house.  He then (it seems—none of this is confirmed yet) crashed his van on the interstate and died.

It’s all just horrifying.  A couple of my friends and friend-of-friends knew the family.

Eventually I felt okay enough to send Denny off to work, but it took a while.

It’s hard to imagine how a person could become desperate enough to do something that awful.  Normally I avoid the phrase “there are no words to describe…” because, you know, that’s the purpose of words.  But words like horrifying and awful just seem too weak under the circumstances.  I don’t know what kind of mental illness would lead someone to destroy his family, but in some ways that’s even worse than a random killing spree.  If you can’t trust your daddy, what do you have in life?

Denny reassured me that he would never do such a thing.  I already knew that, but it was good to hear.

Hug your families, and if you ever feel the need to commit a murder/suicide, do the suicide part first.