I wasn’t looking for the Lindsay Clancy trial. It showed up in my daily email from The New York Times, and something about it caught my attention.
The case involved mental health, depression, psychosis, psychiatric treatment, medication, and the almost impossible question of what happens when someone commits a horrific act while severely mentally ill.
Given my own interest in depression, after all I wrote a thesis titled Lived Experiences of Depression and Overcoming Depression in Midlife, I was curious. Curious enough to fall down the rabbit hole and binge on the trial.
I watched hours of courtroom testimony. Then more testimony. Family members. Therapists. Psychiatrists. Experts. Medical records. Medications. Different diagnoses. Different interpretations of the same behavior.
Not exactly how I had planned to spend my free time.
The more I watched, the more obvious it became that this was not a black-and-white case. It existed in multiple shades of gray. I started watching with one idea. Before long, I had no clear idea at all. Just doubt, contradictions, unanswered questions, and more and more possible scenarios developing in my head.
And lots of red flags. For instance, when Lindsay woke up, she had no memory. She was only told what had happened. But what caught my attention and blew my mind was one sentence from Patrick Clancy.
Four days after the killings, he publicly asked people to forgive his wife. “Forgive Lindsay, as I have,” he said. He made this statement on January 28. Their youngest child, Callan, had died only the day before. And Patrick had already arrived at forgiveness.
That’s what I found impossible to understand.
First, there is the injury itself and the shock of absorbing what happened. Then comes the attempt to make sense of it: Why did this happen? How could this person have done this? What does it mean for everything I thought I knew?
Hurt, anger, blame, resentment, and rumination are often part of that psychological reckoning. The mind goes back to the injury again and again because it’s trying to understand something that does not yet fit into reality.
Forgiveness, in the fuller emotional sense, comes later. It involves a change in our relationship to the injury and, importantly, a loosening of resentment toward the person who caused it. That can take a very long time. Psychology describes forgiveness as a transformation of resentment.
Grief adds another process on top of that: shock, disbelief, anger, despair, and gradual adaptation. Reality has to be absorbed. The loss has to become real. The mind has to begin reorganizing itself around a world that is suddenly and violently different.
Four days after the deaths of his children, Patrick should have been at the very beginning of an event requiring enormous psychological processing. Yet he was already speaking from the other end of it.
What his words revealed to me was simple: Patrick Clancy had checked out of his marriage long before.