Closure

Years ago, when I was researching The Empty Room and collecting books, movies, and memoirs that dealt with my subject as a way to immerse myself in it, I stumbled across a documentary called “A Kill for A Kill: Witness To An Execution.”

It’s the story of the Kelley family, of Houston, Texas. Jim and Linda Kelley had three children, and they all worked in the family business, The Golden Nugget Pawn Shop. On August 29, 1988, a man named Leo Jenkins walked in to rob the place and killed the two elder of the kids, Mark, 25, and Kara, 20, in the process.

The documentary tells the story of the family and legal system’s attempt to bring Jenkins to the electric chair.

At the time, I was watching to see the experience of the surviving daughter, Robin, who was the youngest sibling in the family, I believe. Part of the exercise of witnessing sibling loss in these scenarios is to see if their loss is seen, in the way the story is told, in the way other people treat it, in the way the subjects see themselves.

I didn’t get a lot of that in this documentary. Her story was not really explored, as I recall.

But what I remember more than anything about that particular documentary, was that, near the end, the family is filmed walking in to watch the execution (which is not filmed) and ends with the family filing out. I mean, possibly there’s a little bit more after that. It’s been years since I watched it. But not much.

I felt…outrage.

Not because of the death penalty…which is something that sincerely baffles me as to the right or wrongness of it. I know I’m supposed to have a strong opinion about it. But, honestly, I feel like, not being in the position of a murder victim’s family, I am not in a position to judge.

What outraged me was that it seemed like the movie ended on a note of…mission accomplished…for this family. As if, with this death, there would be closure. That it would stop the pain of their horrible loss. Or at least ameliorate it somehow.

I’ll be honest, this idea of closure, the false-promise of it, is one of my pet-peeves.

I’m not really sure when I started to notice that word creep into just about any story about something difficult someone faced. Someone needed closure. Someone got closure. Someone sought closure. Once I noticed it, I saw it, read it, heard it…everywhere.

What the hell is it, really? To me, it’s a promise, a false promise, that loss finishes. That it can be neatly sealed away.

The false promise that knowing how someone died, or answering some question, or even putting someone who has committed a horrific crime to death, will put an end to the grief of losing someone.

“It’s as if grief is a can of peas you can seal and put on a shelf,” said one surviving sibling I interviewed for The Empty Room, about closure. (He didn’t like the word any more than I did.) He’d lost both his siblings, an older and younger brother.

Closure is fake. The grief after you lose an important person in your life is life-long, and life altering. It will change in nature, in intensity, in what triggers it, in how you integrate it into your life, perhaps. You will go on. But it does not go away. That’s just a fact.

Most people far enough into the journey of life after loss figure this out. We even figure out that it makes no sense that the psychic imprint of someone who deeply shaped us would just disappear, like a handprint in memory foam. And we don’t want it to, really. To lose that imprint altogether, that would be the real loss.

But man, does it sound appealing, at first. “When will it end?” asked one woman I interviewed, who had recently lost her only sibling, her sister, overseas. “When will I get closure?”

Promising closure, or implying it, is to give people, especially those new in their grief, yet another obstacle to grapple with.

I so wish that word didn’t infuse our vocabulary.

When I watched this documentary, I thought this family had been sold a false bill of goods—the promise of closure if the murderer was put to death—if they could just get him to the electric chair. Years of their lives were spent in the pursuit of it. Years in which they could have been healing, integrating the loss. Instead, I thought, they were encouraged to pursue the false hope of closure, of the end of their grief, through the electric chair.

The real story, I thought, as I watched that movie, begins now, as they leave that execution chamber. I wondered what they felt on the other side of that…the other side of that false promise. I’ve wondered for years.

It’s only now, in looking up reviews of the documentary, that I see that Linda Kelley was actually an activist on behalf of the families of murder victims. That she actively sought out this execution and the right of families to witness them. So she actively pursued this form of “closure,” it wasn’t foisted upon her.

I still wonder how the story of her loss unfolded, after it. She died in 2017, per Google. She was an activist and not a reserved woman. The story is probably out there. I want someone to do that documentary. Her surviving daughter I think, also per Google, is a psychic in Arizona. I want someone to tell that story, too.

Maybe I will.