Bad Chemicals Revisited

It happened again. A distraught mother drove her child to a spot in rural Sonoma County, shot her then shot herself. The little girl was five years old. How bad would things have to be to make that kind of choice? I remember being in Seattle a few weeks after Kurt Cobain shot himself and looking out across the lake toward Mount Rainier - the view he would have had every morning from his front porch. That and the face of his baby girl. That must have been some bad crazy hurt to want the lights to go out forever.
Still, Kurt didn't make the choice to take anyone with him. Frances Bean lives on. That option was not left to Jineva Driscoll. We'll probably get to see a lot of pictures of Jineva over the next week or two. Smiling face with teeth askew - probably with a favorite stuffed animal.
If the sign says "Not A Through Street" - why not turn around and go back where you started from? How bad does your day have to get to pick that as a way out?
On a few different occasions, I have sat slack jawed in front of the History Channel as they replay the story of Susan Smith and how she let her Mazda roll into a lake with her young sons strapped into their car seats. Now we're falling off the crazy/evil pie charts. She watched the car sink to the bottom, though it took a good long while. Then she ran home and started lying about it. What sort of bizarre rainbow would her EKG have painted during that week?
Part of me hopes that there will be more revelations about Jineva's mother: drug use, Satan worship, family history of mental illness. But even more I hope that I won't think about her. Let her move into that dark patch of history with the others. I know that I will never be able to fathom the mind of a mother who becomes desperate enough to end her child's life - or a father - or a stranger. For that I can be grateful, and I can wish for relief from the bad chemicals.