The Sins of The Father

I’m so touched by the suicide of Mark Madoff, the son of Bernard Madoff in prison for a $50 billion scheme. He and his brother Andrew were the people who alerted the authorities after their father privately confessed. My father when he had Alzheimer’s invested in what turned out to be a Ponzi scheme and after his death the Receiver appointed by the court to recover the money came after me since I had figured out it was a strange investment and redeemed it as soon as I could meaning I was able to prevent the loss of funds. I know what it’s like to be wrongly accused, to have motives ascribed to you that are not yours, to have to defend yourself and essentially have to prove a negative whether or not you have the documentation. I succeeded because I found a lawyer who understood my situation and was willing to fight for me. But of course lawyers cost money and in my case ate up what the investment made. In Mark Madoff’s case, the legal actions against him, according to the NYT report, included his children and were far more serious than those against me. Further, he had, he believed, become unemployable. Not only must he have had many feelings about having had to turn in his father, as part of trying to prove to the authorities he had no part in the fraud, he also had to cut off having any contacts with them. Our mettle, spiritual or otherwise is often decided by how we handle injustice. Regardless of what wrong he did or what law he may have broken,injustice does appear to be involved here somewhere. Is that why he decided to forfeit his own life?