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2004-08-03 - 8:23 p.m. trust me The Lori Hacking story has been fascinating to me in a tragic, black way. Someone on one of the boards I read commented that "you never know who you can trust." I've been thinking about that phrase. No, you never will know who you can trust. That's the whole idea of trust. It's belief; it's hope. It's defined as reliance or confidence. None of those involve absolute knowledge. They each involve faith. Trust is based around the future, and it's an uncertain practice to say the least to attempt to predict the future. I can know how a person behaved in the past, but I can only trust that they will continue to behave that same way. I think of how she trusted her husband with her life, figuratively and literally, the same way I trust my husband with mine. Not that I recognize a lot of life-threatening moments in my average day, but in general, I trust my husband not to turn around one day on a whim and kill me. I don't really know he won't go insane and do it, any more than he knows I won't. But we have a pretty good basis to believe that it won't happen. Figuratively, I trust him not to come home one day and say, "hey, I got a new job on the other side of the country, so quit your job, say goodbye to your family, pack up the entire house, and let's go!" ...with the entire reason for moving being a lie. Do I know he won't do that? No. But I have tons of experience supporting my confidence that he won't. So did Lori Hacking, of course. Fatal mistake. But what else can you do? Have someone sign a contract that says, "I hereby promise not to lose my mind and kill you one day"? From all reports, her husband had all the appearances of sanity right up until the end. I have to wonder how far his plans extended. If they actually got to North Carolina, what was he going to say to her? If she had managed to find a place to live, would they have gone, and would he have found somewhere else to go while pretending to be in classes? How long would the deception have gone on? Was something wrong, in his perception, that would be better if the two of them could just get away? Or did he never plan for her to get there at all - did he plan for her to disappear along the way? And then maybe he himself would just disappear as well? Or was there no plan? Was it as simple and tragic as not being able to cope with some particular piece of reality, and making up a piece of great news, an accomplishment, a new reality, to replace it? Believing that somehow, some way, you can keep the fiction in place and no one will know. Then when the person who trusts you most - whom you have most betrayed - discovers the truth, you simply can't handle it, and you make that piece of your reality go away too? How do you detect that another person has the kind of damage that would enable them to take that path? You don't. You take the best information available to you, and if it seems like the right thing to do, you trust. You trust people with your house key. You trust them to babysit your kids. You trust them to keep a secret. You trust your own instincts. Sometimes you'll be wrong, and you hope when you are, it's a mistake from which you can recover. Scary old world, huh? And the oddest part is that if you don't trust anyone, it's even worse. my mood - |
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