I stared across the table at her, my thoughts and emotions swirling. As they swirled, three questions kept rearing their unsettling heads: What would the FBI think, if they learned of my wife’s big gift in memory of an accused drug smuggler? What if the money ended up, directly or indirectly, in the pockets of narco traffickers and killers? Last but not least—in fact, worst of all—was it possible that I was resisting the idea because I was actually jealous of a dead man?
Suddenly Kathleen clutched my hand, and for a moment I wondered if she had somehow read my ungenerous thoughts. Then I heard her gasp—a ragged, wrenching effort to draw a breath—and saw the expression of terror on her face.
“Kathleen? Honey, what’s wrong?” She jerked her hand from mine and gripped the table, pushing upward with both arms, as if to keep herself from being pulled underwater. “Oh God,” I said. “No. Please, no.”
Her eyes opened wide, and then wider and wider still—impossibly wide—and she reached across the table, her hands scrabbling, searching for mine. Her gaze remained locked on me, and as I stared, frozen with horror, the fear in her eyes gave way to something else—dawning awareness, perhaps, followed swiftly by sorrow and then—at the last moment—by something I would have sworn was gratitude.
Knoxville News Sentinel
July 13, 2004
Kathleen Walker Brockton, Ph.D.
Scientist, teacher, humanitarian, wife, and mother
Kathleen Walker Brockton died Tuesday after a brief bout with cancer. She was 50. A native of Huntsville, Alabama, Dr. Brockton earned her B.S. degree from the University of Alabama and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Brockton was a professor in the University of Tennessee’s Nutrition Science Department, where she taught for fourteen years. Before moving to Knoxville in 1980, she taught at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. A respected scholar as well as a popular teacher, Dr. Brockton’s research interests focused on the health effects of nutritional deficiencies in children. Her 1997 journal article “Vitamin A Supplements: Saving Sight, Saving Lives” brought widespread attention within her field to the problem of vitamin A deficiency, a problem that causes blindness in an estimated 500,000 Third World children every year and kills approximately half of those children within a year after losing their sight. Chosen as “Author of the Year” by the journal’s editorial board, Dr. Brockton used the award’s monetary prize to establish a nonprofit foundation, Food for Sight, to provide vitamin A supplements to Third World children. During its first three years, Food for Sight provided vitamin A supplements to more than 100,000 children in Asia and Africa. “It costs fifty cents to keep a child from going blind,” Dr. Brockton was often heard to tell prospective donors. “Fifty cents. Who couldn’t—who wouldn’t—give the gift of sight to a child?”
A woman of exceptional intelligence, vision, and compassion, Dr. Kathleen Brockton is survived, mourned, and missed by her husband, Dr. William Brockton; their son, Jeff; their daughter-in-law, Jenny; and two grandsons, Tyler and Walker.
Arrangements are still pending, and a memorial service will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Food for Sight Foundation.
A DOZEN YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE I’D LAST SAT IN this particular chair, in this particular role: in the role of troubled parishioner, seeking counsel from the senior minister at Second Presbyterian. At the time of that visit, I’d been working a series of sadistic sexual murders—murders committed by my nemesis Satterfield. What had brought me here, back in 1992, was a question that had been raised, crudely but powerfully, by a young woman infuriated by the cruelty Satterfield had inflicted on his victims. “Why,” she had raged, “are men such shits to women?”
The minister on that prior occasion was the same as the minister on this occasion: the Right Reverend Michael Michaelson, D. Div., more often (and more simply) referred to by most of his flock as Rev. Mike. I still remembered Rev. Mike’s answer to the memorably crude question about men, women, and the problem of evil. On that occasion, he had responded with a disquisition that was long, learned, and fascinating, one that viewed the issues through a half-dozen different lenses: theology, of course, but also evolutionary biology, sociology, and abnormal psychology. In the end, though, Rev. Mike’s learned comments had proven to be far less illuminating than Kathleen’s brutally efficient explanation: “Why? Because they can be.”