A Little Bit Strange

Just as no one can really knows what happens behind closed doors, no one can know what thoughts flicker behind a locked mind. People in extreme distress may not always divulge the extent of their emotional chaos. They may not, in fact, be completely aware of the depth of their inability to cope with their emotions. The mind can become a seething dark cauldron of rage, a desolate, inconsolable desert of dire emotional turmoil, confused and unforgiving.

Can we quantify what it would take to turn an attentive, loving and supportive mother into the murderer of those children whom she has dedicated years of her life to ensuring they become stable, loving, and competent human beings? The human mind of the observer balks at the very suggestion that a mother might conceivably become a raging monster, knife in hand, prepared to take her children's lives in their formative years.

So much has been invested. So soon taken away. A move that is irremediable, final and utterly pitiless. And the mystery remains. The mother, having taken the living breath from her children, consigning their souls to oblivion, takes her own life. For indeed, what has she left to live for? Her devastated husband who has suddenly come abreast with his future become darkly withered and without hope?

The mind is a strange instrument of survival - capable of coping with stress - alternatively of surrender to the final bewilderment of life unlivable. Where love once trod with grace and humility, a failure of human emotions tramples the past, sullies the present and forfeits the future. A father, arriving home, calling out to the mother of his children, to each of the children by name, and there is no response.

He wanders through the house, finding no one there to greet him. No note to inform him that they have all gone out briefly, soon to return. They have gone, and they will never return.

Six year-old Katie; (Katheryn Elizabeth Corchis) - Alex; (Jon Alexander Corchis), ten years of age, and their mother - gone. Jon Corchis found his wife, Alison Easton, and with her their two children, in the basement of their home, lifeless.

 

Left behind, a ravaged father and husband for whom the worst conceivable nightmare has become his personal reality. Left to mourn the absence of their grandchildren and to grieve the death of a daughter and daughter-in-law, two sets of grandparents whose world has abruptly twisted on its axis, leaving them utterly bereft.

The ideal family; father and mother, son and daughter, both attending elementary school located directly across the street from their comfortable home in Stittsville, and where the mother of the two children volunteered her time while her children were safely at school. There, at home, to greet them daily, on their return.