I will start this blog with a quote from the AP story by Colleen Long and Tom Hays, Associated Press, hoping that it will shield me from judgement by those who may read this and not understand why feel such a gut sadness about the news of the suicide of Bernie Madoff’s son, Mark:

Ronnie Sue Ambrosino, who leads a group of Madoff victims who have been fighting for restitution in the case, said the death is just more evidence of the pain the case has wrought.”’It’s sad. It’s very, very sad that any life is taken,” she said. “It’s so wasteful.”  She said she doubted any of the victims were taking pleasure in the Madoff family’s sorrow. ‘That’s not going to help the Madoff victims find the justice and the restitution they deserve.”

The whole thing just makes me sick – the scam, the pure greed for more money than anyone needs to live a decent life, the loss of moral direction that destroyed life after life after life and culminated in a young man with a young family, due to guilt or fear of indictment or reality of what his father did becoming to much to bear, or reasons we may never know, hanging himself  while his 2 year old son slept nearby.   I don’t know what part Mark Madoff had in the whole mess, we all assume he was fully informed about it all, but the jury is still out on what Mark knew and when he knew it.  Isn’t that irrelevant when we are talking about someone taking his own life?

I’ve been putting VHS movies on DVD and reliving the lives of my little boys who have grown into manhood.  Part of the reason I’m sick at heart is that I look at the eyes in the photograph of Mark Madoff and I know he started out just like we all do, just like my little boys did.  We come out of the womb.  We have no choice as to whether we are placed in a family of good people or bad people, smart people or stupid people, peaceful countries or war-torn countries.   The little baby Mark was raised in a moral vacuum and in some ways his life was doomed to end where it did, hanging from the end of a dog leash in an apartment in Manhattan.  Most of us would rather die ourselves than experience the death of a child, and to experience it because of our own actions would be unbearably painful.  Does Bernie Madoff feel that way?  Will this spark a moment of remorse in his dark, dark soul?

I do not have compassion for Bernie Madoff and I highly doubt he feels the same deep sorrow for his own son that I feel for a young man about whom I know nothing, who took his own life.  He is a sociopath, a man who could hurt and steal from other human beings and not think twice about it.   Sometimes it’s just hard to figure, but I was glad to hear the words of the woman quoted above.  A voice like that is what keeps good people moving forward in dark corners of the world, a voice that implies forgiveness even in the face of having been terribly wronged, a voice of compassion.  Unlike Bernie Madoff, it doesn’t sound like she wanted restitution money for money’s sake, at the cost of a young man’s life.  She just wants to be made whole. 

If Bernie Madoff has no moral code, at least his victims do, and knowing that beautiful truth is, for me, worth more than a hundred beachfront properties, which in turn are worth much, much less than the life of the human being who was born as Mark Madoff.  If only Bernie Madoff could have understood that truth before his greed became a tidal wave of human tragedy, even drowning his own flesh and blood.