My paper- "The Death of Pure Love"

The death of a child is the most heart-wrenching, pain-invoking element of tragedy ever known. The loss of a child is the loss of an innocent soul who has had no time to fully develop his or her own identity. Until recently, I never realized the most basic reason of why this statement is so true, but now I understand. The death of a child is the death of the pure love only a child can possess.

Children are incredibly important to the world. Though it may seem obvious to consider the need for children to be purely to keep the human race going, there is a much deeper need for children in life. People need to be able to recognize the true and unmarred form of love that only children can possess. When children hit puberty, this pure love they possessed when they were younger begins to fade. The discovery of sex turns this love into lust. Teenagers will learn that they cannot trust everyone, but must be careful about who they become close to. As they age, people learn more and more about the vagaries of human nature and how it can harm them. One will become hardened from bad experiences and mistakes made. Many people are incapable of trusting someone who has hurt them. Children are capable of not only trusting someone who has hurt them, but they are also able to love such a person.

In my last blog post, I wrote about a woman from my hometown who murdered her two young children. I have always realized how horrible this occurrence was, but, until know, I have never quite understood the gravity of what this woman did. These two children loved their mother unconditionally. Too young to know any better, they thought that their mother’s unstable behavior and extreme distrust for absolutely everyone was normal. The only person they trusted was their mother, as she had taught them to invest faith in no one but her. The thought I cannot get out of my head is about when they realized what was going to happen to them. She shot one child first. Did the first child to die realize what was happening and immediately lose the love and trust for this woman or did he or she see the mother as a protector until the final moment? Did the second child, seeing his or her sibling die, lose the love for his or her mother in those last painful moments of realization and try to escape? The pure love of a child is nearly untouchable, but how long can a child possess such feelings for someone who is about to commit such an unspeakable crime? No one will ever know what thoughts were flying through those children’s heads in their last moments. Their mother may have known, but she shot herself immediately after murdering her children. I pray that the two children never realized what was coming and felt the pure and unadulterated love they had always felt for their mother until the very end. The little boy was about seven when it happened and the little girl was five. These two children were old enough to realize that they wanted to live, but too young to have done so. Their pure souls had not yet been marred by lust and corruption. When Patty Walling killed her children, she killed one of the only truly pure things that are present in this world.

Maybe Patty saw and recognized the unconditional love her children held for her. Maybe she never wanted to see that love turn into anything less. Patty was schizophrenic so it is not easy for one to understand what she was thinking when she shot her children. Patty probably considered herself unfit to protect her children from the evil of the outside world and thought the best way to protect them was to take that world away from them. The one thing I do know for sure about Patty Walling is that she believed in God. In her eyes, the love that she saw emanating from her children could only be reciprocated by a pure and infallible being like God. It is possible that she wanted to send them to a better place where they could never feel pain or sorrow. One could not possibly commend a woman’s act of killing her children, but those who were around Patty the most could only see her intense adoration for those two kids so it is hard to believe that this crime stemmed from malice.

The killing of the two Walling kids is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to the small town of Winifred, MT. In such a tight-knit community, someone would have taken care of the children if Patty felt unfit to do so. It is impossible to justify Patty’s motives and forgive her completely for what she did. No one could have seen it coming and saved them, and that may be the most tragic element of the whole incident. These children were killed by their mother, the person who was supposed to protect them and preserve that pure and clean love they possessed for as long as possible. I guess she preserved that love for eternity.

There is absolutely nothing more heartbreaking than the death of a child. It may be painful to watch children grow up to lose the pure love they hold, but there is nothing worse than that experience being taken away from them. At such a young age, children have yet to make their imprint on the world. They have not yet felt true pain so they have yet to find out about true joy. They have not yet been able to experience loss so they cannot wholly appreciate what they have. We have not yet seen them grow and acquire an identity that will be theirs for adulthood. These children have only been able to show us what we wish we still were capable of as adults: pure and untainted love.