Good grief.  I’m making myself sound like one of those saintly types who assists the suicide of a loved one ravaged by terminal disease.  Whereas you all know my husband was in perfectly sound health when I blew his brains out.  The reason you all know.  My attorneys did establish beyond any reasonable doubt that he had been seeing, or should I say “fucking”, Miss Roberta Jencks.   Miss Jencks herself sat before you in this court and, with her copious tears, told how my husband had hired her to help him edit his book on the hereditary roots of social inequality and, well, one thing led to another, as she so tactfully put it.  Which “thing” led which other “thing”, she left to our imaginations.

You of the jury decided that jealousy was no excuse, or to put it in the legal terms we are all so fond of, jealousy in and of itself is not sufficient to prove diminished capacity.  Well, I couldn’t agree more.  I was in perfect command of my faculties.  I knew the difference between right and wrong, legal and illegal.  But I had set my sight on higher values.  The values that were the foundation of our marriage.

What I cared about was him.  What he was doing to himself.  How he was demeaning himself.  I married a good man.  A kind man.  A deeply moral man.  In order to do what he did, he had to transform himself into something he wasn’t and was never meant to be.  Do I make myself clear?  That in order to touch that woman’s hair, to brush her lips with a soft kiss, to caress her bouncy little derriere, to make what she called “love” to her, he literally had to destroy the man he had been.  A man who had been raised as a good Episcopalian by parents who recently celebrated their seventy-fifth wedding anniversary.  A man who had been schooled at Exeter and Princeton.  A man whose Washington think tank had been consulted by five presidents.  A man who I know took his marriage vows as seriously as I did.

What horrible contortions of the soul he must have undergone as he mounted that little slut.  It pains me just to think of how he must have seen himself.  During, and particularly after.  What that must do to a man.  Perhaps not just any man.  But to mine.  To mine.