Gene Kehoe: No choice but to forgive, support

Gene Kehoe wants you to know this: Michelle was a good wife, a good mom.

She worked hard to make sure her two boys had what she didn't growing up - stability, opportunity, a loving home. She wanted them to be happy.

Gene doesn't know you, or you him - although you've followed the story of his shattered family for more than a year. He knows you might not believe him: “It's very, very difficult for people to understand.”

At first, he wrestled with whether to forgive the woman, whom he loves, who will spend the rest of her life in prison for killing their youngest son.

He decided the price of not forgiving was too great, and though he has to support her from afar - can't touch or visit or even send a message to Michelle - he does.

“Can you understand how something could not be a choice?” he asked when he and I talked Thursday. Gene can, because by the time last fall when Michelle parked the family van on the shoreline of the Hook 'N Liner Pond near Littleton, they had been living with her mental illness for years.

When Gene met Michelle in 1993, he just saw a bright, caring woman he enjoyed being with. When they married three years later, he knew more about her traumatic childhood: her parents' alcoholism and divorce; her father's fatal car accident when she was 6; her subsequent, chaotic life with her mother; her childhood sexual abuse.

But Gene wouldn't learn of Michelle's mental illness until about 10 years ago, when she shut herself in the garage and attempted suicide.

“Why?” he asked her.

Everything seemed so hopeless, he remembers her replying. “It was a solution, I guess,” he told me.

So Michelle sought treatment, and they felt their way forward, living with an illness that wasn't always front and center but was always there.

If she wasn't feeling right, she'd take a break, step back. She'd see her therapist. They managed.

Until the blows began in December 2007: Michelle lost control of the car, plunging herself and the boys into the Iowa River. Gene was laid off from work. Ethan Sueppel - whom she'd tended while working at Handicare day care - was killed by his father, Steve, along with his three siblings and his mom, Sheryl. Michelle's estranged mother became ill, and Michelle took off work to help care for her - the first time they'd spent much time together since she'd sent Michelle to live with an aunt at age 13.

Gene knows now that Michelle was missing appointments with her psychiatrist that summer, that her medication must not have been working.

That in between trips to visit her mother, between the nightly bedtime stories, Michelle's sick brain was plotting.

He gets it, why people would want to distance themselves from the terrible things that happened next, why they would look for easy answers.

But he can't.

“I can't give it up. I'm involved,” he said. “I don't have that choice - and I guess I don't want that choice.”

How could he, when his family, including Michelle, is so important to him?

“I'm there for support,” he said and then corrected himself. “I was there for support.”

Since the court forbade it in April, Gene hasn't talked to his wife. He has seen her only in courtrooms and can't even send her a note, but he can't walk away, either. So he does what he can, which is to take care of surviving son Sean and himself.

He won't linger on what if? He has to deal with what is.

When he gave a victim impact statement at his wife's sentencing last week, he asked for forgiveness - for Michelle. He knows that's hard to understand.

“People think you have to make a choice between your wife and your son,” he said. “I don't think that.”

It doesn't mean he loves Sean any less, that he loves Seth any less.

“Seth was ...” his voice broke. “Believe me, there's a big hole in our house and in our hearts, but there's nothing I can do for Seth.”

Nowhere to go but forward.