Life with Murder

My Uncle left for WWI thinking he was off to a great adventure. Like every other member of our family since the Revolution, he wanted to serve his country and his people. However, when he came home, he brought a chest full of the highest military medals and a bad case of PTSD. He was still repeating the aphorism that war was months of boredom interrupted by moments of terror decades later, and he said that, eventually, he only remembered the terror.

In this heart wrenching documentary, the parents of a teenaged boy and girl come home to find their daughter shot to death in their basement. They slowly piece together that their son is responsible, and the rest of the film is how they learn to deal with the new normal.

Never have I seen a documentary that focused on the tedium of despair, but anyone who has ever lost someone to a sudden death knows exactly what that means. The terror of loss is immediate and overwhelming, but then comes the numbing dullness of cleaning up the death site, arranging the funeral, etc. The trouble comes afterward, when there is nothing concrete to do but to mentally break down what happened again and again.

As in war, it can take months or years to break down and understand what happened. When the sudden death is caused by a family member, the denial is so much stronger than reality. It has its own kind of PTSD.

The film maker here spares nothing in showing the audience how a family problem ignored becomes a family tragedy. Parents love their kids, even when their kids are sociopaths. A family will seek some kind of normalcy, even in the agony of loss, and it will do so because the terror is just beneath the surface.

Also, Mason needs to stay in prison.

Witnessing a family's pain as entertainment is a pretty ruthless appeal and possibly an insult to an audience, me included, that may have been just as riveted had the tv reporters invited some brilliant therapists, some mental health professionals to accompany and guide these sessions. Without that aspect of compassion that may have artfully demanded logic from the son instead of these ridiculous stories that ignore the room entirely, forget the elephant....where's the road through to healing? Where's the chance of resolution, solace or any comfort at all. Except that's none of our business except it's been made our business by airing and sharing lovely parents in an impossible situation doing the best they can. I just hope they're getting that support from those who might have advised them to skip the entertaining us but just as said near the end, how can we possibly judge what few could likely survive at all-the loss of both children under circumstances that are close to the worst. God bless them. Well done documentary for what it provokes ... a lot of questions.

I don't understand how these parents can stand by this idiot of a son... he's a horrible, pathetic, lying monster. So very sad..

This was an interesting doc.

I gave it 8 stars for the parents and for the daughter they lost.

Nothing to say about Mason.

I googled the father and see he passed away in 2016.

Hope his wife is coping ok.

This was an excellent documentary about a twisted and horrific situation these poor parents found them selves in. You can see the devastation and toll it has taken on them. He seems like a sociopath, more or less. The way he reminisced about his sister on the anniversary to his Dad. You can understand their reasons for doing what they are doing. The Dad's sister says they are a mother and father, they are 'mothering and fathering'. But it also feels like a toxic situation, surely, especially given what was revealed throughout the documentary.