Leonard Pitts—No Closure With Execution of McVeigh

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Now that it’s over, I find myself wondering if it really is. Or might it not be said in some sense that Timothy McVeigh cheated the death penalty after all?

Oh, he died, all right. Died lying on a gurney with his eyes open and poisons leaking into his body through an IV tube. But he died silently, died calmly, died with composure, died without giving what some of us wanted so desperately: the satisfaction of his suffering. To the contrary, so stoic was the Oklahoma City bomber according to witnesses that he seemed almost to mock our ability to hurt him. He turned his execution into an outtake from an old war movie the principled prisoner holding to his beliefs, refusing to give in to his captors. Alec Guinness in “Bridge on the River Kwai.”

And those who had hoped for some scent of fear, some pause of reconsideration, some death’s door conversion or just some response vaguely recognizable as human, wound up with disappointment instead. Timothy McVeigh did not give us the prize of his pain. On that score, he robbed us once again.

You felt the effect of that robbery in sifting the responses from some of the survivors and victims’ relatives who witnessed the execution. They had come to this day seeking something they didn’t get. And when it was done, they faced reporters with words of puzzlement and soft bitterness.

“It was too easy for him,” said a woman who lost her mother in the explosion, after McVeigh dozed his way into death.

“For him just to go to sleep is unfair,” her husband said.

It wasn’t right, they kept saying. It wasn’t enough.

You had to feel for them, because it was obvious where they had made their mistake. They had gone to an execution in expectation of “closure” that coming-to-terms moment the afternoon talk shows once promised mourners they will eventually find. How to tell them that they were looking in exactly the wrong place for a thing that is elusive even under the best of circumstances?

Because for most of us, closure is not retribution, nor even justice. For most of us, closure is that moment we finally accept that this is what is and nothing’s ever going to change it. It’s that moment we remember again that fairness is not promised in life, but hurt is. The moment we allow the joy of what we once had to overtake the pain of its loss. And we finally stop shaking our fists at God.

One hundred sixty-eight people died in the Oklahoma City bombing. Countless families and circles of friends and acquaintances were torn by it. And the nation itself was grievously wounded, the innocence we didn’t know we had left bloodied and maimed.

Six years later, the author of that agony is put to death and some of those who suffered the most feel cheated. Not fair, they say. Not enough.

And you wonder: What ever could be?

One of my readers once wrote of wanting McVeigh to be locked in an inescapable building for precisely 168 minutes before it and he were blown to hell.

Would that be enough? Would that be fair?

How about if we slowly cut him to pieces alive and awake with chain saws? Or if we could beat him with clubs until he was just a lump of bloody tissue and broken bones? What about if we could somehow kill him 168 times, make him die again and again and again and again?

Would that be enough? Would it change a thing? Or wouldn’t we, in all likelihood, still be exactly as we are today? Those who knew and loved the 168 dead still missing the blue of certain eyes, the goofiness of a particular smile, the music of a special laugh, the pressure of lips on lips. The rest of us still grieving with them, our innocence injured by its encounter with evil.

And all of us still wondering why. Still shaking our fists and demanding answers from the clouds.

So you see, it was a mistake to seek closure from Timothy McVeigh. He never had it to give.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

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