Grief, Closure, and Forgiveness

Jeanne Bishop

My sister Nancy Bishop Langert was murdered when she was 25 years old. She and her husband Richard were returning home from a restaurant the night before Palm Sunday, 1990. The killer, a local teenager with a criminal history, was waiting for them, gun pointed. He handcuffed Richard. Nancy, who was three months pregnant with what would have been her first child, begged for the life of her baby.

The killer forced Nancy and Richard into the basement. He shot Richard once through the back of the head, execution style. He turned the gun on Nancy. She protectively folded her arms across her pregnant belly, but he fired there anyway, twice. Then he left her to bleed to death. Blood and marks on her body revealed what Nancy did in her last moments: she tried unsuccessfully to crawl upstairs to the telephone. She banged on a metal shelf in a futile attempt to summon help. Finally, when she must have known she was dying, she dragged herself over to her husband’s body and wrote in her own blood a heart symbol and the letter “u.” Love you.

The killer was arrested six months later. Police found in his room the gun (which ballistics tests showed was the murder weapon), the burglary tools he used to break in, handcuffs, a trophy book of press clippings about the murders, his own poems about killing. Police learned he had even gone to Nancy and Richard’s funeral.

A jury convicted him of the first degree murders of Nancy and Richard and of the intentional homicide of an unborn child. The court sentenced him to life without parole on all three charges. Because he was 16 at the time of the murders, he was ineligible for the death penalty in Illinois. After the judge sentenced him and the sheriffs took him away, my mother turned to me and said, “We’ll never see him again.” When we left the courtroom that day, a reporter asked us if we were disappointed that the killer didn’t get the death penalty. That was the first time I had an opportunity to say what I’ve been saying ever since: No.

I thought a lot about this answer when I watched interviews with family members of the Oklahoma City victims after Timothy McVeigh was executed. Family members said they were dissatisfied. McVeigh hadn’t suffered enough. He hadn’t said he was sorry. And they hadn’t gotten what they were promised by federal officials who had sought and carried out the execution: closure. Those family members were looking in the wrong place. First, there’s no such thing as closure. Second, the death penalty is the most anti-victim response to murder imaginable.

“Closure”, a neatly wrapped-up end to the horror and grief of murder, simply doesn’t exist—nor perhaps should it. The most blatant perpetrators of this lie are death penalty proponents who promise executions that bring psychological resolution, even peace, to family members on a specific date. It doesn’t happen this way. Grief, the culmination of sweet memories and the bitter loss of possibilities, lives on—and it should. The grief I felt after my sister’s murder is not closed. It lives in me today, but differently. At first it was a grief that numbed, that paralyzed. Now it is a grief that energizes me to love more passionately, to share more generously, to live more fearlessly, to work to prevent the violence which could inflict on another family the suffering mine has endured.

You don’t hold back love when you understand that people can be snatched from you at any moment. You don’t waste time being afraid when you realize how short life is. Every day I’ve lived since Nancy’s murder is one day she never got to have; now I try to live in a way that honors her and the God who gave the gift of life in the first place. Grief taught me this.

In the play “Shadowlands,” C. S. Lewis, whose wife, Joy Gresham, is dying of terminal cancer, exclaims that the prospect of life without her is too painful to discuss. She answers, “The pain then is part of the happiness now. That’s the deal.” So it is with Nancy and me. The pain now is part of the happiness then, when she lived. The memories of Nancy’s life and death, painful as they are, also bring tremendous joy. Why would I “close” that, even if I could? The notion that killing another human being, no matter how despicable his act, could somehow honor this grief, even heal it, is a lie.

It’s a lie because the death penalty is, frankly, anti-victim. First, death inadequately punishes the killer. The most common proposition—a life for a life—is obscene. If all my sister’s killer could give me in return for my loved ones was his own life, I would wholly reject it. His life is not enough for theirs; his death could not begin to pay for theirs. To suggest that the killer’s death is equivalent to those of the victims insults their memory.

The death penalty is also anti-victim because it squanders the money and attention that should go to victims and wastes those resources on the killer. Millions upon millions of dollars were spent to execute Timothy McVeigh; countless more millions were spent publicizing the execution—and McVeigh. We are no safer now that he is dead rather than incarcerated for the rest of his life. But we are poorer. Money which could have paid for police officers, crime prevention, hospitals, damage restitution, counseling for victims and their families, and scholarships for victims’ dependents went instead to death row personnel and security, lethal injection drugs and apparatus, court costs, media platforms, cameras, reporters, news trucks, ad nauseum.

The death penalty is anti-victim because it promises what it cannot deliver. It does not deter crime; it does not make us safer; it does not even punish (how does one punish a person who no longer exists?). Finally, the death penalty is anti-victim because it perpetuates the evil idea behind my sister’s death: that one human being has the right to snuff out the life of another. Executing Nancy’s killer would erase him from the earth. But the reality is that the death penalty does not limit blood shed but always fosters even more killing.

That grief can somehow be good and that killing to even the score is wrong are radical notions, particularly in light of September 11 and its aftermath. But Hannah Arendt , writing after the Holocaust , pointed out that forgiveness—not forgetting but refusing to be diminished to the level of murder-- is one of two human capacities which make it possible to alter the political future. The poet W. H. Auden wrote in the wake of the blitzkrieg of Poland that “We must love one another or die.”

Forgiveness, love: these abilities are not fuzzy-headed idealism; they are pragmatic practices of extraordinary courage. Vengeance didn’t work in South Africa or Northern Ireland. Forgiveness has. Vengeance has not worked in our criminal justice system. Beside the bloodshed of execution and leniency for murderers, there is a third way: punishment without violence. Life without the possibility of parole.

“We’ll never see him again,” my mother said that day. And it’s proven to be true. We’ve been allowed to process our grief, day by day, year by year. We’ve been blessed to do this without another death on our hearts. My sister’s killer will spend the rest of his life in prison. His life will be his punishment. And because he lives I can work to extend to him the forgiveness he has neither asked for nor deserves. Not for him, but for God, for Nancy and for myself.

Jeanne Bishop is a public defender in Cook County IL, and is a member of the national board of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, an organization composed of murder victims' family members who oppose the death penalty.