A Criminal Act

When Gary Peters shot his son in the head, he did so with a look of pure pity, but his son wanted to die, and would have killed him if he hadn't pulled the trigger first.  For the next few days, which would lead into months, and into years, where his wife would leave him, and his community shun him, Gary Peters kept his resolve.  In the end though, he did die a poor broken down drunkard, whose only redeeming joy was knowing that his son was no longer dying in this hell we call life.  He found solace in that.  On the Tuesday night before his wife left him, the pair had tried to make love, but the fornication was less than erotic and ended rather abruptly.  It wasn't from lack of trying, but Mary had remarked that she continually saw their sons smile on his face, and just minutes later when he attempted to spoon with her that she hated him with everything she could hate with.  Gary understood of course, he had been the one to take aim, and fire.  He had been the one whose moral code was so far from the rest of his community to pull that trigger to come to the inevitable conclusion that he had come to.  If it had been a hollywood film Gary suspects the loving, hero father would have thrown his gun to the side, and accept being slain by his only son, because removing his offspring from this beautiful world would have been to painful.  And then Gary suspected the event would transform the boy, and the boy would learn to love the life his father loved so dearly.  But this wasn't hollywood and no one was closer to his son than he.  Even when he laid dying in that bed so many years down the line, he knew he made the right decision.  When the prison sentence eventually came down Gary Peters spent fifteen years behind bars for the murder of his son.  But he could never wrap his head around the event being dubbed murder.  Murder was something down out of hate, or lack of love, abscense of love, murder seemed emotionalf, murder was something sociopaths did, those serial killers who felt nothing did, this was done with every ounce of pain, and love, and bitterness, that comes with making a tough love decision.  The world had gone to shit, and his son couldn't take it anymore, there was some deep cerebral thing that wouldn't allow his son to function in the shit world.  If this cerebral thing was always there dormant in his mind, he would never ever be able to function in this world, now or at anytime.  And so when Gary took that shot, he knew he'd made the right decision.  It wasn't until the final inevitable faulter of his heart, on that deathbed that final moment of his final moment, that Gary Peters believed he was mentally ill.