Mercy Killing
Coming to terms with my grandfather killing my grandmother
Warning: discussions of gun violence, homicide, suicide
On January 19, 2014, my grandfather Bill walked into my grandmother Frances’s hospital room with a loaded gun he’d purchased that morning. He set their Neptune Society cards side-by-side on a nearby table and kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years. Then he shot her once in the chest. He tried to shoot himself, too, but a spring popped from the pawnshop gun and the weapon broke apart in his hands. Correctional officers who were at the Carson City, NV hospital that day arrested him. According to subsequent news stories, he wept as he was apprehended. “I failed in my mission,” he said.
Sun dotted my Long Beach apartment floor as my sister relayed this news over the phone. I’d been grading student essays on a weirdly warm winter morning, and now my brain flickered, and it felt like a hand had my throat. I interrupted her to tell my husband, Ryan, what happened — “my grandpa shot my grandma and now he’s in jail and she might die” — and then shock propelled us: we slipped on our shoes and walked quick miles down Ocean Avenue with the sea shimmering below us. I thought of the people in the hospital who heard the gunshot, how horrified and panicked they must’ve felt, and then the word “ruined” echoed in my brain, a…
