The New York Times · https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/us/lindsay-clancy-trial-voice-children.html
Her trial has become a national argument over whether she is a monster or a casualty. Scripture's hardest book about suffering suggests both sides are talking too soon.
They sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.
Job 2:13
Since late July, a courtroom in Massachusetts has livestreamed a trial no one knows how to watch. A mother is accused of killing her three children in January 2023, then trying to end her own life. She denies none of it. The jury must decide what to call it.
The children were Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months.
Her defense points to postpartum psychosis, a rare emergency that can arrive within days of birth, pulling the mind into delusion and mania. Experts call it the scariest illness they know, and among the most missed. The prosecution says she knew what she was doing. Outside the courtroom, the country splits as it always does. Monster. Or casualty of a system that failed her.
Scripture keeps its longest argument about suffering for a book that never explains it. Before Job's friends became the men God would rebuke, they got one thing exactly right. They sat on the ground with him seven days and seven nights and said nothing, because his pain was past words.
Then they opened their mouths. Every speech that follows is a theory: the sin that must have earned this, the defense of God's arithmetic. And in Job 42:7 it is the explainers God rebukes. The man who insisted none of it added up is the one he vindicates.
The urge to explain is not cruelty. It is fear. A horror this size threatens the belief that the world is legible, that mothers are safe, that a mind will hold. Calling her a monster puts the danger outside us. Calling her a diagnosis files it in a chart. Both are ways of not sitting on the ground.