Apparently everyone has a hot take on the Lindsay Clancy case, so here’s mine.

One thing I keep coming back to is how badly we, as people, want someone to blame when something horrible happens. We want there to be a reason. We want to be able to say, This person caused it. This is where everyone went wrong. If only they had done X, this never would have happened.

I remember this even during early COVID. Someone would get sick and people immediately wanted to know, Well, did they go to the grocery store? Did they go somewhere they shouldn’t have? Someone gets cancer and people ask, Did they smoke?

I think finding someone to blame can make horrible things feel less random and less scary.

From everything I have heard in this case, I believe Lindsay was profoundly mentally ill. I also personally believe the insanity defense is appropriate.

That does not make what happened any less horrific. Three little children are dead. Their father lost all three of his children. Lindsay lost her children, her family, her physical health, and essentially the entire life she once had. She is paralyzed. There is absolutely no winning here.

When people call her a cold-blooded killer, I struggle with that. I keep coming back to: what was the motive? To murder the children she loved, destroy her family, destroy herself and leave herself with nothing? This was a woman suffering from severe mental illness.

One thing that really concerns me is that she tried to access a specialized perinatal mental health program and was not admitted. I still do not fully understand what happened there. A postpartum woman actively seeking specialized psychiatric care and being unable to access it deserves serious examination.

But this is also where I keep saying: we are all Monday morning quarterbacks now.

We know the ending.

We get to sit here afterward and look at every appointment, every medication, every hospitalization, every provider, every statement and every decision all laid out in one timeline. Of course things look different when you already know what eventually happened.

One provider saw her at one moment in time. Someone else saw her another day. Another person had another piece of the story.

I’ve worked in these systems. There are absolutely major problems with the way mental healthcare is delivered: fragmentation, communication between providers, access to appropriate care, limited time and limited resources. Those are system-wide problems. I think we can acknowledge that the system failed in important ways without deciding that an individual psychiatrist, therapist or other provider is somehow the villain. Doctors are not God. Therapists are not God.

And then there is her husband.

Honestly, some of the things people are saying about this grieving father make me sick.

I keep seeing, “He took the kids skiing while she was in the hospital!”

And as a mother, I genuinely do not understand why people think that was some horrible thing to do.

Their mother was suddenly gone and in a psychiatric hospital. That is scary and confusing for little kids. Their healthy parent trying to keep life somewhat normal, get them out of the house, distract them and keep things afloat while their mother was receiving treatment actually sounds incredibly normal to me.

What exactly was he supposed to do? Have three little children sit at home frightened and focused on the fact that their mother was hospitalized?

Sometimes keeping things normal for your children is parenting during a crisis.

And again, this is Monday morning quarterbacking. We know what happened afterward, so now people go back and attach meaning to completely ordinary decisions that nobody would have thought twice about at the time.

There’s also something else people seem to forget: he is not a mental health professional.

When I was struggling postpartum after Ellie was born, I told Steve some of what I was experiencing. There were also things I didn’t tell him.

He listened, but he didn’t really know what to do with a lot of it. That’s just not his strength. He’s a lawyer. He’s not a therapist.

I think we expect spouses, looking backward, to somehow know what every statement means clinically, recognize exactly when something has become dangerous, and know the right intervention. Most people simply do not have that training.

And if your spouse is already seeing doctors, therapists and psychiatrists and has even been hospitalized, I think it is completely understandable that you are relying on the professionals treating them to help determine how serious the situation is and what needs to happen next.

A husband can love his wife deeply and still not understand the severity of her mental illness.

And I also know firsthand how difficult it can be to recognize what is happening when you are the person experiencing it. I was already a therapist when I struggled postpartum, and I still did not fully understand what was happening to me while I was in it.

And then there’s the criticism that Patrick has remarried, traveled, or continued with his life.

People say, “Look, he moved on.”

No. He kept living.

I come from a family of Holocaust survivors. My Zaidy had a wife and five children murdered by the Nazis. He survived the Holocaust literally a walking skeleton. My Bubby had also lost much of her family. They met afterward, married, and had my father.

My Zaidy was not magically okay because he built another family. He was deeply affected by what happened to him for the rest of his life.

But he lived.

That is what people seem to misunderstand about grief.

Continuing to live does not mean you stopped grieving. Remarrying does not erase your dead children. Taking a trip does not tell anyone what happens inside your head when you are alone.

Two things can be true at once: you can be profoundly damaged by loss and still choose to keep living.

We have no idea what it feels like to wake up inside that man’s life every morning. He will carry the deaths of those children every single day for the rest of his life and can still choose to love someone, travel, laugh, work and experience happiness again.

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

I don’t think finding a villain makes this tragedy make any more sense.

And I also think there are some things that, as human beings, we may never fully understand, and maybe we’re not supposed to fully understand.