Closure part one
What is closure? And how do we achieve it?
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The mood was light on execution day. This was despite the early start the relatives of the victims of Timothy McVeigh had had. The previous night, they’d attended a lighthearted dinner. According to Peggy Broxterman, whose son Paul died in the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing that McVeigh had carried out six years earlier, “everyone was up… a lot of laughter and talk and everything like that. I mean, it wasn’t somber.” And now, at around five AM, ten bereaved relatives were climbing into a prison van with blacked-out windows at Indiana’s Terre Haute Federal Correctional Complex. On arrival, they socialised and ate breakfast. Around the room, counsellors were on hand to help the distressed. “Not one person that went to that execution needed any kind of counselling,” said Broxterman. “We were there because we wanted to be there.”
Breakfast over, the relatives were driven to the death house. Inside the viewing room, a curtain pulled back to reveal a one-way window, on the other side of which McVeigh was waiting in place, strapped down onto perfectly ironed white sheets on an execution table. “You son of a bitch!” called Broxterman. “Right on,” came a voice from the back. Fresh from his own breakfast of two pints of mint choc chip ice cream, McVeigh raised his head, turned towards the window and glared in its direction for four or five seconds. Resting his head back down, he was asked if he had any last words. Twenty seconds of silence confirmed that he did not. Warden Harry Lappin read out McVeigh’s charges, then asked Marshal Frank Anderson if they could go ahead with the execution. Picking up a red phone, Anderson received final confirmation from the Justice Department.
It was ten minutes after curtain-up that the sodium thiopental began flowing into McVeigh’s veins. With “two hard swallows and a blink” he fell unconscious. Next came the pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant, and then potassium chloride, which stopped McVeigh’s heart. His eyes emptied, he turned white and then a pale jaundice-yellow. When he was pronounced dead at 07:14am, on the 11th June 2001, one witness, Sue Ashford, clapped and said “Oh yeah!” As the door opened to let the relatives out, Broxterman “all but skipped out of the viewing room”, writes Professor of Law Jody Madeira. ”It was a happy, elated occasion. I was thrilled,” Broxterman said. With another witness, she left the death house singing “Ding, dong, McVeigh is dead, da, da, da.” Ashford said the killing, “was very exciting.”
As far as much of the general public were concerned, what the bereaved relatives achieved that morning was ‘closure’. One poll, run by ABC News and the Washington Post, found 60 percent of respondents agreeing that “the death penalty was fair because it gave closure to murder victims’ family members.” This is an increasingly common view. In her book, on which the above account is based, Madeira notes that between 1993 and 2001 the frequency with which the word ‘closure’ was associated with the death penalty grew 500 times. For Diane Leonard, whose husband Donald was killed in the bombing, the execution was, “the closing of a chapter… if you’re in the midst of that chapter, you’re dealing with it day in and day out and that went on for several years… I knew that once that execution was behind us, that chapter on Tim McVeigh was closed.”
Closure is something we all seek after painful experiences. The trauma doesn’t have to be as extreme as the death of a loved one in a terrorist bombing. We can desire closure following a heartbreak, a betrayal, a humiliation, some important failure in a status game. Like Leonard, we want to close the chapter and move on to a part of our story that’s new and somehow cleansed of the dark episode we’ve endured. But what does closure mean, precisely? Is it actually possible? If so, what can the science of storytelling teach us about how to actually achieve it?