A rchive Date
[ 27-12-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[A fatal victim of mental illness
By MICHELE MANDEL -- Toronto Sun
August 20, 2000
May she now rest in peace.
May those who called for her death, those cold armchair moralists, be silenced now and shamed.
Dr. Suzanne Killinger-Johnson, gripped by a mental illness they cannot and, choose not to, understand, arrived at the place she so desperately sought last week when she threw herself and her baby in front of a subway train. She joins her son in a place that she thought, in her profound sickness, was safer for them both.
My heart weeps for that poor baby. And yes, it weeps for his killer as well.
The woman was ill. If we treated her here with some compassion it is because of that fact. This wasn't some selfish feminist whiner who simply couldn't juggle a career and motherhood as some would have you believe. She apparently suffered from a rare mental illness that gripped her with an invisible hand that she allowed no one to see.
But many still can't quite forgive, can they? They cannot make allowances for what seems the betrayal of the most sacred bond we hold dear, that of motherhood.
Why else all the attention and the outrage that has followed her suicide bid? When Jeyabalan Balasingam clutched his three-year-old son Sajanthan to his chest and jumped on the westbound tracks of the Victoria Park station last August, the sad tale lasted but a day in the city's newspapers before fading from our attention.
But the case of the suicidal doctor has spilled endless newspaper inches of armchair analysis and outrage. Some believe it is her status, her wealth and profession that has struck such a venomous chord. Perhaps. But I believe it has much more to do with the nature of her maternal role. She was a mom. No matter her sickness, many cannot forgive a mother doing such a horrific deed.
There is a universal strain of mother worship that exists in all societies. As William Ross Wallace wrote, "For the hand that rocks the cradle, is the hand that rules the world."
And so any negation of that role, anything that defies that natural order, strikes us with horror.
Fairly or unfairly, we expect more from a mother. Which is why we now struggle with the case of little Avery McCarty. On Aug. 8, his mother, Susanne McCarty of Beaver, Wash., travelled to Calgary and abandoned her ill little boy in a Safeway shopping cart. This was not an impulsive act, but as deliberate as the one executed by Killinger-Johnson. She came into the store disguised in sunglasses and a hooded jacket and in the note she left for authorities in his plastic knapsack, she gave him a false name -- Abraham or AyBe for short -- in what was an obvious attempt to throw them off his real identity, and her own.
And then she vanished.
Once more, we are ready to condemn. What kind of mother abandons her own child, leaving him behind in a strange city, with a false name and nothing but the clothes on his back? Did she whisper, "I'm sorry," before she left him? Did she look into his trusting eyes and promise she'd be back?
When a security guard found him in the bakery aisle, he was sitting quietly. "Where's mommy?" he asked.
She was a nurse; she had enough money to be spotted by a Toronto flight attendant with Avery, her daughter and an unidentified man taking a flight between the Netherlands and Canada in June. But her plaintive note said she could no longer care for her boy, his dad was dead and so were all other family members.
Her son, she wrote, suffers from metaphyseal dysplasia, a rare genetic disorder, and a form of dwarfism. That much is true: He stands 30 inches tall and weighs 27 pounds, closer to the size of a toddler than a pre-schooler. The police, though, are skeptical about the rest of her note.
Meanwhile, Avery keeps asking for his mommy.
Perhaps, she was doing what she truly believed was best for him. Whether emotionally or financially, she believed she could not care for him as he deserved. Rather than neglecting him, or hurting him, she left him in a busy place in a kinder country than her own. And hoped for the best.
"I love my son so much and will love and miss him till I pass away but I just can't take care of him anymore," she wrote in the letter she left with him.
"Please find him a good home," she pleaded, underlining the word, "good." "I wish there was a better way to do this, but there isn't."
His foster mom has said it's apparent that McCarty had been doing a good job raising him. "He is so polite. Not only does he say please and thanks, AyBe covers his mouth when he coughs!
"At bedtime AyBe says 'I a good boy.' When he wakes up he says `I awake, I a good boy.'"
How could a mother leave him? Maybe she, too, thought she had no other choice. Maybe she, too, is suffering from depression, and is desperately saving him from the day when she may see no other way out than the one ultimately chosen by Killinger-Johnson.
Read Michele Mandel every Sunday. E-mail her at mmandel@sunpub.com.
Michele can be reached by e-mail at michele.mandel@tor.sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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