10ofRods
Verified Anthropologist
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- Jun 27, 2019
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Thanks for the reply and I agree.
It's 100% true that we have almost no facts about the Laundries and certainly none about their family dynamics. Perhaps, with no real info to go on, we view the situation through the lens of our own experiences. In my case, the kids in my family never, ever, ever told our parents anything. So the fact that Brian might have successfully hidden what had happened to Gabby seems 100% plausible to me. "Um, yeah, we broke up. She left the van with me. I'm fine. I don't want to talk about it. Let's get the kids and go camping." IMO, people who have a normally open relationship with their parents believe Brian talked to them or at least had trouble hiding things from them. Maybe. No one knows what's actually true. Although, we saw how smoothly he could manipulate a situation at the Moab stop.
What really stumps me and makes me think the Laundries were kind of clueless about their son is the fact they let him go to Carlton Reserve alone, didn't follow him there, didn't check on him sooner. Half of WS believed he had killed himself. He was an obvious suicide risk, but his own parents didn't realize it? That makes no sense whatsoever unless they did not know the depth of his troubles. JMO
I think there are other possibilities. As you say, families are different (very different). It's hard to know what one would do in that situation, as the parents. People have different views on the morality of terminating our lives, and certainly, the alternative for BL was one that, perhaps, his parents knew he would find intolerable. It's very hard to stop a grown up from doing what they are bent on doing, when it comes to such serious events. BL's life was over, from his point of view (and from mine, too).
I think that had BL been flagrantly suicidal right in the family home (holding a gun to his head; in possession of sufficient medication of a type to be a successful suicide and threatening to take them, etc), the family most likely would have called 911 and tried to Baker Act him (which is not easy, as many suicidal people perk right up when talking to the ER personnel or the ER psychiatrist).