The Limits of Narrative in a Limited Space
JonBenét Ramsey, Part II
It’s impossible to feel good about describing a girl two years younger than me who never got to grow up. I think about who she might have been if she hadn’t died and I have to stop. That is cruelty. Her life meant something as it was. The future that died with her was the future in which she hadn’t been killed, no more and no less.
JonBenét Ramsey was born to parents who loved her. Her life was cushioned by affluence and bounded by shelter. Her own glamor shots hung in her bedroom. Family weekend trips were organized around her pageant competitions. Her parents—especially her mother—created a pink and white fairyland for her, where she was both the subject and the object.
The cross-section of people who were convinced or felt called to provide memories of her largely agreed at the time that she was a lovely little girl. She could be bossy, but she was generous. She cared very much about what her father thought of her, she made sure her brother wasn’t left out at family parties, she and her mother—well. That’s harder to gauge. Certainly, it seems to me, many of the people in her orbit were more hesitant to defend Patsy and JonBenét’s relationship in print. (When talking to Lawrence Schiller, at any rate.)
But JonBenét Ramsey viewed through the distorted lens of being the most famous murder victim in America is a different person from JonBenét the night before her death. It would have taken immense effort to overcome the sudden myth closing around her. Rough edges smoothed out, the volume turned down on any tantrums she had. The applauding phrases in a report card at an expensive private school become incontrovertible statements of fact. She was a living human child who got in trouble, made messes, talked back to adults sometimes, a person who had preferences and feelings and questions, and then she died somehow. Her death was not only a removal—it was a replacement.
She became a fair copy of herself. The ultimate innocent victim, first among the angels. The perfect victim, a little white girl who was dressed up to look like a tiny woman, already sexualized by competing in child beauty pageants—a subculture that, in the ramping up of third wave feminism, was viewed with distaste. But she was too young to have real agency. Everyone agreed on that, even if they didn’t agree on anything else.
The people most critical of her in the series of books I read to satisfy my own curiosity as an adult were her grandmother and her mother’s housekeeper. That seems telling to me. It seems important. When people criticize a six-year-old, they’re really criticizing that six-year-old’s mom.
As Freud apocryphally said: we look to the mother.
Patsy’s involvement in her children’s lives, what some people thought of as her over-involvement, wasn’t all that out of the ordinary for the mothers of kids I knew growing up. She was a helicopter parent before that phrase became ubiquitous. Money masks anxiety. A woman trying to make up for the fact of having had cancer and its effects on her children, when she has enough money, might come across as overbearing and flashy. And maybe she was an outsider in mid-nineties Boulder, as Schiller’s book harps on. People said she didn’t quite fit in, whatever that means.
But how could she, once her daughter’s body was found in her basement? Patsy before she’s a murder suspect is a very different person from Patsy after. Who would have wanted to claim her? The Ramseys were a popular family in the rosy Before, with a community of close friends. So close that some of them were called only moments after the police were when JonBenét was discovered missing, hours before she was discovered found.
She clearly wanted a particular experience for her children—an experience of material abundance and possibility. And maybe, for JonBenét, a particular kind of success. One that she and her sister had enjoyed when they were young, both competing in the Miss America Pageant. From the time JonBenét began competing in pageants, Patsy had aspirations for her daughter. Was that love? Probably.
Besides—people who say they love their children hurt them all the time.
Did she really love her daughter? The question hovers over the various versions of their relationship, versions where both of them recede before the anxious wave of projection that inevitably crashes over the entire endeavor.
We like to say “that’s not real love” when confronted with behavior we dislike and behavior we despise interchangeably, as if love is only good or it is nothing. As if we have to save the idea of ‘love’ as purely nourishing and good for the person being loved, as if we should be able to tap people like maple trees and get love-sap out of them, as if we are, above all, entitled to love that totally understands us in every moment, that demands nothing, that is never uncomfortable or wrong-footed.
Writing it out like that reveals its impossibility. Love is the ultimately complex emotion. The way we love others is inextricable from our own trauma and healing and expectations and hopes, and all the endless permutations therein. “Love” has no boundaries, or at least, very amorphous ones. We will accept nearly any type of behavior from another person if we can be convinced, or convince ourselves, that they love us. If their love is imperfectly communicated, it must be because we are an imperfect receiver for it.
Whether JonBenét’s mother loved her is a dead end disappearing over the horizon. A culture obsessed with serial killers to the point of passion, a culture that morphs stalkers into hapless swains, shouldn’t be so fussy about love. It is telling to me that no one ever questions if her father loved her. John Ramsey is allowed to remain at a distance, maybe because the projected horror of having to carry your child’s rigid, lifeless body up from the basement is worse than the possibility of having killed that child. John is rarely directly implicated in her murder. He seems too far away.
Claiming love exists is no kind of license to abuse another person. But we do a very bad job in our society of recognizing most kinds of abuse, of intervening, of redirecting. And not all behavior that is questionable or unpleasant is abusive. Being a bad fit, or incompetent, or hubristic, or traumatized—that does not preclude the presence of love, or some collection of feelings and responses that we each call love in ourselves and try to recognize in others.
You could also kill someone and sincerely regret it without experiencing love for them. Murder is a mess.
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This is the second piece in my essay series on JonBenét Ramsey. If you think someone you know would like it, forward it along! If you want to talk about it, you can find me here or @writingmiranda on Twitter Dot Com.