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‘I Want This to Get Over’: After Congressional Shooting, Complex Grief for a Gunman’s Widow - The New York Times

posted onJuly 2, 2017
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Article snippet: BELLEVILLE, Ill. — He flung dishes at his wife, roared at the television, erupted during an outing at a local brewery. Suzanne Hodgkinson became so concerned with her husband’s growing anger that she wrote to his doctor asking for help. Now, the wife of the man who opened fire on a congressional baseball team in June wonders what more she could have done. “I get up every morning feeling guilty because I didn’t stop it,” Ms. Hodgkinson said Wednesday at her home in Belleville, where the blinds are drawn tight and photographs of her husband adorn a living room wall. It was her first sit-down interview with a reporter since her husband, James Thomas Hodgkinson, attacked a Republican congressional baseball team practice in Alexandria, Va., wounding Representative Steve Scalise and three other people before the authorities killed him. (Mr. Scalise remains hospitalized in fair condition.) Ms. Hodgkinson continued, “I wake up with hot sweats, thinking: ‘You should have known. You should have known.’” To be the spouse, or the parent, or the child of someone who commits a mass shooting is to enter a strange club whose members are envied by no one and reviled by many. Rites of passage include hate mail, death threats and the vicious thoughts that haunt them at night. That they should have seen it coming. That they could have done something. That they are alone. And then there is the question of how to mourn. How to dispose of a body that everyone else wants to forget. On T... Link to the full article to read more

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