On the morning of April 15, 2024, Patrick Clancy ran the Boston Marathon. His 5-year-old daughter’s hair bow was pinned to his jersey. On one wrist he wore his 3-year-old son’s wristband, and on the other, a bracelet that had belonged to his 8-month-old baby. Written on his back: “In memory of Cora, Dawson & Callan. Every mile, every day.” He finished in just under four hours and raised more than $75,000 for Boston Children’s Hospital, where 15 months earlier his youngest son had been declared brain-dead and removed from life support, just days after the deaths of both his other children.
Here was a man who had lost everything, and wasn’t hiding it. At the time, strangers cheered his name along the course. But two years later, the internet, which spent this summer obsessively watching the trial for his children’s murders, dug up the footage and turned against him. Patrick Clancy was coping too well. This isn’t how someone who’s grieving should act. He should be too busy crying to train for a marathon. He must have done it.
Seeing this gave me flashbacks to the relentless scrutiny of my own behavior in the wake of my roommate’s murder in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, for which I was falsely imprisoned. There is no one “right” way to react to trauma, or to grieve, but when the lens of suspicion falls on you, everything is wrong. When I cried, they were crocodile tears; when I didn’t, I was cold and unfeeling. When I smiled at my family in the courtroom—a brief glimpse to let them know I was okay—I was a whore for the cameras.
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