The death of a parent is hard enough... but one that involved a FATHER being ambushed when asleep in bed...? How do you explain that to an adult, let alone a CHILD?
THE brutal murder of her brother Jason Corbett by his American wife Molly Martens and her father, and the battle to bring his children home to Ireland, has meant Tracey Corbett Lynch has seen more than her share of heartache. But now she’s written a book and brings them up to heal, love and be happy.
My grief journey was blessed with a wonderful husband, family and four children – including two children who, while I didn’t give birth to them, I love every bit as much as if I had. Jack and Sarah effectively became my barometers in life’s healing. I could gauge my recovery in them.
They became my compass setting for cherishing all that is good and inspiring in this world. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t feel blessed to have Jack and Sarah in my life but, at the same time, I wish to all the depths of my being that the circumstances of their arrival were different.
The death of their mother after an asthma attack and the brutal murder of their father rendered Jack and Sarah as orphans.
But the resilience, strength and courage displayed by these two children is nothing short of inspiring. There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t draw strength from what they have achieved.
Few children have had so much thrown at them in life
Few children have had so much thrown at them by life as Jack and Sarah. They were aged just eight and ten when they lost their father, their sole surviving parent.
Having been brought from their native Ireland to the US in 2011, they then found themand at the centre of a custody battle just four years later that must have seemed both bewildering and very frightening for them. They then found themselves moving for the second time in their short lives – this time back to Ireland, away from their newly-made US friends and classmates.
I am certain that there is a particular type of grief that children suffer when being removed from the life they have known – and it ranks alongside the grief of losing a loved one.
Twice in the space of four years they had lost all their friends and schoolmates.
Worse still, having lost their mother to a freak asthma attack in 2006, they had lost their father to a brutal murder committed in a house where they were sleeping upstairs.
Now, they were learning that the two people they should have been able to trust – their stepmother Molly and step-grandfather Tom – were responsible for making them orphans, and they were also being used as pawns by their stepmother to get away with murder..
No-one could have blamed Jack and Sarah if they had emerged wary from the process – unwilling to trust people, constantly keeping their self-protective barriers raised lest they be deeply wounded again by an adult. It would be perfectly understandable if they slightly withdrew from life because of the bruises they had already endured, and for fear of being hurt again.
But the exact opposite is the case. They have grown into confident, talented, kind-hearted and wellrounded youngsters.
They have embraced life – worked hard at their personal development, have given back to their community are dedicated to exploring the potential of their talents and skills.
All our children have also developed a group of friends that are loyal, supportive and share the same goals.
Resilient, loyal, generous and loving, our children are models as to the sheer courage of the human spirit in times of adversity. I look at each of them and my faith in life is restored daily.
But it wasn’t easy reaching this point – and, for some of you, recovery from your own grief will require the same kind of commitment, hard work and support that Jack, Sarah, Adam and Dean [Tracey and David’s children] were smart enough to accept and committed enough to work towards taking advantage of.
Back in August 2015, when Jack and Sarah arrived back in Ireland, just weeks after their father’s murder, it was heartbreaking to see the grief and confusion etched across their innocent young faces.
They had lost almost everything – their parents, the North Carolina house they had called their home for over four years, their US school friends and almost every facet of their American lives.
They were back in a country that, although their place of birth, was dimly remembered in their young lives. In many ways, it was a foreign country to them.
What they hadn’t lost was their Irish family, as well as the unconditional love and support it offered.
In the beginning, it wasn’t easy. I’d kiss the children goodnight in their bedrooms and realise they were crying themselves to sleep, heartbroken at the loss of their father and confused over their new place in life. I wouldn’t make it two steps down the stairs and I would find myself weeping as well. I could see in their eyes they wanted an explaselves
It was heartbreaking to see the grief and confusion on their faces
nation – a reason why all of this had been done to them. Part of my pain was that I didn’t have any easy answer to offer them.
All I could do was reassure them of our family’s love and support. That was our starting point.
The death of a parent is hard enough for a child to deal with.
But a death that involved a father being effectively ambushed when asleep in bed and murdered by two people who he should have been able to trust? How do you explain that to an adult, let alone a child? It was a challenging time for us, and all we could do was be totally supportive of the children, respectful of their needs and searingly honest with them in everything we did. We also had to explain how they needed age-appropriate support to help them deal with what had happened.
Dave and I had taken childcare qualifications as foster parents in the past, and we both understood that Jack and Sarah needed help – expert professional assistance that was beyond our capabilities.
Our job was to offer the children unconditional love, support and care – as well as a happy home that made them feel safe and secure.
Dave and I decided there and then that we had to listen to their grief far more than asking questions. We didn’t need to talk.
We practised active listening and responded to their indicators. There were so many markers of time during the years of healing.
I understood that only through counselling could the children address the deep-rooted issues that, if left ignored, could scar their development in later years and into adulthood.
They had endured two of the biggest traumas that any child could possibly suffer, and they needed help dealing with the issues arising.
Part of my childcare training was an appreciation of the fact that studies have shown that some difficulties in later adult life can be traced back to unresolved issues from childhood, most especially circumstances surrounding childhood trauma.
You can choose to ignore it, bury it deep within you and try to forget all about it. But it doesn’t forget about you – and, when you least expect it, the seismic tremors from that deeply buried tumour of hurt can
Our job was to offer them love, support and care, as well as a happy home
challenge the very foundations of your hard-built adult life.
We were fortunate to be guided towards skilled counsellors in Limerick who had superb experience in dealing with children who had suffered trauma and the aftereffects of grief and loss. Over the years, they painstakingly worked through the issues that Jack and Sarah needed to deal with.
Some of these were very difficult. Many involved the events leading up to and surrounding the murder of their father.
Some involved the way the children
What healthy person would tell a child their father had killed their mother
had been treated over the years by Molly, the woman her friends hailed as a so-called ‘SuperMom’.
What healthy person would tell a child from the age of five that their father killed their mother by suffocating her? And that if they told anyone, that he would do that to them too? The psychological implications of what they had just gone through were immense and simply could not be underestimated.
If any mature, experienced adult had gone through what Jack and Sarah had endured through the loss of two parents in such awful circumstances, I suspect they would not have coped as well as these two incredible children.
But it was natural that those losses left the children with fears and anxieties.
Should the future be feared? What would happen if they were to lose another loved one?
Maybe the best way to protect yourself is to maintain an emotional distance from others? How do you process emotions like hurt, fear and anger? Children – much more than adults – also need reassurance about their role in the events involved. In the case of Jack and Sarah, they were the innocent victims of an appalling crime perpetrated against the person who loved them most in this world. Yet the fact remained, it was Molly who triggered the events of that evening because of her insatiable desire for control of the children. Reassuring the children was a vital part of the counselling process, not to mention reinforcing the fact that their father loved them, cared for them and would have done anything to protect them.
His refusal to allow Molly to adopt them – which we believe was the trigger for the horrific attack that night, amid her fears that the children would be brought to Ireland and out of her reach – was a core part of Jason protecting them.
It took time – months and years of counselling. Don’t underestimate the effort that is required.
There were days when the frustrations over what Jack and Sarah were working their way through – and my fury at what those two children had been put through by adults and by life – proved so great I wondered if we could stick with the course. There really are the most insidiously cruel and sick people who abuse children for their own warped motives. Sometimes behind a pretty smile.
But we persevered, in part because I realised we had no other choice. The worst thing we could have done for the children was to quit. That would have sent out entirely the wrong message: that in life, when things get tough, you simply stop trying.
So we tried it all – art, sport, music, equine therapy, journaling and new experiences. There was also the fact that we could see the counselling was working and the children were slowly dealing with the issues involved.
I wanted Jack and Sarah to leave the emotional baggage of what had been done to them firmly in their past. I didn’t want negative elements of their childhood experiences hindering their progression as young adults.
They both had such enormous potential in life, I didn’t want any brakes being applied to or limits imposed on their aspirations. They had suffered enough. We were all determined to give them the future of limitless potential they both deserved. Jason and Mags would have insisted on nothing less.