Ultimately, who knows the details that led to this end. Even the family will be asking questions that they can never know. But in trying to make some sense of the senseless, each of us has to come to our own sense of it all, so here's what I have decided happened, for my own understanding, and I share it in case something in here might help someone else.
HER LEADUP TO THIS - I recognize that untreated bi-polar issues, drugs for the trip, clinical depression, psychotic episode, are all possible as lethal explanations, but the thing that speaks
to me the most is the timing of the event.
I do think one factor was the natural emotional roller-coaster, the low lows that we get in our life after experiencing the high highs. We miss the high, and then we can't get it back.
And I also think she had been feeling lost as happens when we undergo MAJOR change in our life. The "live life on the road" life had ended, and she was in essence starting a new life, and I am guessing she felt trapped as she was being herded in that direction. Not comfortable, not at "home" with her life, a sense she was losing control and the road ahead was impossibly long.
In those contexts, in a tragic way, I see that afternoon as having been a crossroads for her, in her mind. That's because her in-laws were coming home in a few hours, having been gone a week, and then JB and LB were headed to Denver to restart life as they had left it. I don't think those looming "life deadlines" were coincidental to all of this, and in fact I think they were a huge part of the perhaps impulsive and very tragic choice.
THE DAY OF THE TRAGEDY - I think she left her front door with her mind troubled, but I don't believe she set out to do herself in. JMO That's because I believe that all the people, and the dogs, that said she went out to 3009 were
not wrong.
I think she took that walk before deciding to go another direction in her life.
Here's the route I think she took: goes down Teakwood and to 3009, as TT observes, and turns south. Gets down to the Trophy Oaks entrance, the area where the man reading the newspaper saw her. The dogs track her that far as well, before they were told to stop. She continues down 3009, then turns right (W) on Gloxinia (which would explain why she was not spotted at the busy intersection with light at 2252 and 3009), and gradually makes her way N on Sorrell to the W end of Sumac,
in essence a big loop. [click for map] Arriving at Sumac and Sorrell, on far end of street from TT if that TT crew was still working, she went unseen.
There are other loops she could have taken after going that far down 3009, or side streets she could have walked down and back in the neighborhood, but this is the basic route that makes sense to me and fits the best.
I think as she walked, she pondered things and her frustration was building. The shortest version of that loop is about 2 miles long, so she could have gotten to Sumac and Sorrell after perhaps 35-45 minutes, returning home just like she had said when she left. Perhaps the walk was brisk, or perhaps she dawdled, looking and pondering.
And I think when she got to that corner, for whatever reason, she decided that she wasn't going back. At least not yet. Maybe she still had 20 or more minutes left, of her hour, and decided to walk and think some more. Or maybe she decided then and there she wasn't going back, I dunno. So for whatever reason at that moment, she didn't turn down Sumac, kept going straight, eventually walking around Fairview Circle until she spied a quiet hidden place where she could slip in and be unseen and undisturbed to think further, or whatever.
Did she keep going farther and farther back from the house (with a lot that big, she might have been able to be as far as perhaps 1000 feet back) through the thickness and then climb up in a big leafy oak or evergreen to think? Did she perhaps sit there, up in a tree with no one likely to come by, and write a note? Or ponder? Or did she select that spot to immediately end things? We'll never know, I suspect.
POSTSCRIPT - This tragedy is disturbing on so many levels, such a needless loss of life. Life is not always easy, but I am reminded that peace in troubling times "that surpasses all understanding" comes from the Prince of Peace, and I have to look to God to make sense of it all, to walk past this "shadow of death" that He promises He can lead us through. Even if I don't understand, I trust Him.
