“But would that excuse BL parents for not responding to GP parents phone calls and texts. IMO that was inexcusable”
Except…. Here’s my imaginary scenario:
The calls and texts “flooded in” on the tenth of September. It is plausible to me that no confession or even a reference to harm/death (eg, accidental or by another’s hand) was made prior to that date. They may or may not have sensed that something more serious than a breakup was going on, but, like Gabby’s parents (who articulated thoughts along these lines to the press): who would have imagined such a thing (as what actually happened) to have occurred? There is the worry/concern that we all experience from time to time (when someone is unusually late, when we can’t put our finger on what’s “off” about a loved one’s behavior, when we haven’t heard from someone for what feels like “too long”…). We have learned to minimize these worries for ourselves and others, to talk ourselves down from the places our imagination wants to take us—because, more often than not, it really is/was “nothing”. It isn’t until we run out of excuses that the real dread/panic/fear are allowed to set in.
Maybe Gabby’s parents reached that awful place before the Laundries. Maybe it was their messages on the 10th that popped the Laundries’ “everything is probably OK” bubble. What do I do when I get a message to which I’m not immediately sure how to respond? Answer: I don’t immediately respond. It’s possible the very first text they received either took them aback a little or outright alarmed them — triggering the need to think and discuss before replying. Yes, the messages probably fairly quickly struck them as a possible/likely emergency situation that required answers and action—but…. It’s also probable, given the fact they NEVER REPLIED, that as they mulled over how best to respond, the situation escalated in their minds to a very real crisis, and—in all their confusion and fear—they reached out for advice from a particularly trusted and knowledgeable source: their lawyer. And we all know what happened (or didn’t happen) next.
What do you do when the utterly unthinkable happens? We can all hypothesize and judge to our hearts’ content, based on who and where we are in our lives right now (and, perhaps, who and where we THINK we are in our lives right now!)—but reality is all too frequently a different beast. JMO
Edited:
OOPS! I originally forgot to include the quote? Something is looking wonky on my end…
Typos, clarity…