Divine Madness

In 1980,  Mount St. Helens killed 57 people, the Kwangju uprising for democracy in South Korea took over 2200 lives,  the Soviet rocket, Vostek, exploded on the launch pad killing 50 people, and hurricane Allen killed 272 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless in the Caribbean and on the Texas coast. And, I'm barely scratching the surface here of the human tragedies that happened that year.

1980 was a mad, mad year.

In other 1980 news, the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Olympics, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, Norman Mailer won a Pulitzer, the Letterman Show debuted, and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein declared war on Iran. That was also the year Radio Caroline's Mi Amigo ship sank and the New York City Transit Workers Union went on strike.

Oh, the records and broken records, the entertainment and sports news, the politics, space exploration, the scandals, the disasters. It was a year of the weird, the sad, the miraculous and I'm forgetting something. . .

No. I am not.

That year, 1980, that mad, awful year, is the year John Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan.

Life is life. Each matters. Each person's value is precious beyond a price tag. But when John Lennon died, something changed within me. Sure, the sorrow was unspeakable but his death woke me up to something I had been asleep against. I suddenly saw something with adult eyes that my child eyes had missed.

I mentioned that John Lennon was killed by a deranged fan. Deranged. A deranged person caused irreparable harm to the person he supposedly loved most. How is that possible? To cause harm or even destroy somebody that means that much to you? But the person of John Lennon was destroyed and that wound was felt around the world, evidenced by the pain of people who never met the music icon, but grieved his loss like the dagger in the heart of humanity that it was.

Anyone who takes a life must be a monster, right? Or, is it possible that sick people -- mad people, insane people, people not right in the head, lunatics, call them what you want -- are capable of destroying people they care about?

Wow. This was profound. This was frightening and comforting at the same time because if it is true that mentally sick people are capable of intentionally hurting the ones they love the most, then maybe the verbal abuse and neglect my siblings and I were experiencing was not at the hands of a parent who hated us but was at the hands of a parent who was not well. Maybe, the mother who was supposed to provide for and protect us but, instead, harmed us and left us to our own devices . . . was sick?

Somehow the death of John Lennon, devastating as it was to us kids who had grown up Beatles fans, helped me come to terms with an environment that I might otherwise have succumbed to. For the first time, at age seventeen, I began to think my mother was not just rude to my friends, lacking in empathy, mean to us, angry at the world, and antisocial.

Something was wrong with her.