There is much more to this story than meets our own eyes. The writer Joyce Maynard has opened mine, inspiring me to write this poem about what I found in Luigi Mangione’s eyes.
The Eyes of Luigi Mangione,
Are telescopes,
Peering deep into our souls,
Past all that’s phony,
Seeing through the masks
We wear, when we are most alone.
The eyes of a killer?
The eyes of a seer?
Eyes abandoned by love?
Hollowed by fear?
Eyes searching for meaning?
And just one, true thing to be clear?
The Eyes of Luigi Mangione
Are not a hero’s eyes.
But pools of terror,
Filled by the pain and surprise
Of how things can quickly fall apart,
Even for those rich, or smart,
“With everything to live for,”
As if those who are poor, do not.
Did pain push him into despair,
Or, was it somehow there,
Hidden deep from his family’s success
Waiting to be unleashed
By excruciating stress
So deep it tore the skin off
What he spent years struggling to suppress?
The Eyes of Luigi Mangione,
Alone, alone, so cornered and cut to the bone,
Carved out by difference, and indifference,
Or rejection, or isolation,
At odds with family expectations,
And the casual cruelty of a soulless nation.
A young Werther for a broken age,
Each day drenched in so much violence,
That individual acts become blurred
With mass murders, or maimed children;
And acts of complicity are reflected in silence,
Even when life’s denial, kills humans softly, over time.
The Eyes of Luigi Mangione
Cry out to us for help, to save him from despair.
Does anybody care? Does no one feel his pain?
How could a parent give up on their child?
Let demons destroy that perfect body,
Or eat away his beautiful brain?
We can focus on the life Luigi took,
And, not or, on the one we took from him.
We can say, without much depth,
That murder is murder, or death is death.
But then we miss that moment of attunement,
To gift those we love, and others, one more breath.
***
(The writing of Joyce Maynard on December 10, 2024, inspired me to look deeply into Luigi Mangione’s eyes, and examine beyond the headlines, the social media memes and the polarized positions that have already framed this human tragedy. The piece from her personal Facebook posting is reprinted in full below, with Joyce Maynard’s permission).
By Joyce Maynard:
Sometimes an individual I read about in the news captures my attention in a particular way that seems to go beyond the scope of the news story itself. This probably has something to do with the odd ways that The Big Story touches issues or experiences in my own life. Sometimes it may be nothing more than a photograph that calls out to me—a particularly compelling image. Often this has to do with the person’s eyes.
It happened again this week, when an employee at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognized the young man bent over his laptop having a hamburger as the person of interest sought by law enforcement officials across the nation for the murder of a health insurance executive in Manhattan last week. It’s hard to grasp how the McDonald’s employee recognized this young man—who was wearing a face mask at the time—as the object of a nationwide manhunt, but having studied the photographs of him that were everywhere for a few days leading up to this event, I think I understand.
The eyes of Luigi Mangione—the young man in question, now incarcerated in a jail cell in Pennsylvania, charged with murder in the first degree—are deep and dark. He’s not simply handsome; his face has a haunting quality. Without wanting to read too much into a story whose bare outlines I know only from a handful of news story, I get the impression, from studying this photograph, that Luigi Mangione is a tormented individual, and a person suffering from an extraordinary measure of pain.
What I’m saying here should not be misinterpreted as any kind of defense of murder. The actions of a victim—including one who presided over a massive corporation that denied insurance coverage to thousands of people who then suffered immeasurable sorrow and pain, possibly loss of life—in no way justify the act of taking the law in one’s own hands and putting a bullet into that person as he headed into a board meeting.
If the young man captured by police yesterday committed that act, he deserves punishment, and will surely receive it. While it’s evidently true—and not surprising—that vast numbers of Americans who have been victimized by the insurance industry are celebrating him as an outlaw hero, his actions speak to a kind of lawlessness we’ve been witnessing plenty of, among certain political leaders of the right, in recent years.
I can no more endorse shooting an insurance executive because you despise his company’s policies than I can excuse the violence of the rioters who desecrated our nation’s capital back in January of 2021 because they were unhappy with the election results.
But there’s no way I can look at the face of Luigi Mangione without thinking about my own two sons (now 40 and 42, both fathers, caring for wives and children, trying to do the right thing in the world). Like Luigi Mangione, my sons were the beneficiaries of great educational resources that included private school and four years at a fine (and expensive) university, in the case of one.
Although I supported my children as a single parent, and my financial resources were probably far less than those of the Mangione family (who have been described in news stories as “a prominent Maryland family”), I made sure my sons and daughter never lacked for books, art supplies, music lessons, tennis lessons, summer camp. Most of all, an abundance of love.
I don’t know the details of the Mangione family’s relationship with their son, but I’m willing to bet he was a well-loved person, when he cut off communication with them some months back and disappeared from view. Until this week, when his photograph was suddenly everywhere.
With the exception of a couple of driving violations when they were young, and an incident in the college career of one, involving a middle-of-the-night plan to scale the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, neither one of my sons ever got into trouble with the law.
But trouble takes many forms. I’ve known a few of these.
I’ve come to know, and care about, a great many young people who aren’t my own children, in my years of life on this planet, in this country, and in the world of generation X and Z: these include the friends of my children, and the sons and daughters of my friends, and more recently, the unlikely but deeply rewarding friendships I made with individuals far younger than my own children, when I returned to college at age 65, and spent my days in the company of 18, 19 and 20 year olds. Theirs is a world that bears little resemblance to the one in which I came of age, filled with forms of influence, danger, confusion and seduction virtually unknown to a person born in 1953.
As much as it matters, still, that a parent loves and cares for her child the very best she can, I no longer believe that it is within the power of any parent, any more, to ensure that her child will make his way safely and healthily into the world of adulthood. So many factors are outside of our control now. They come at children from their cell phones and tablets, the bullying of classmates, news of the world and perceptions (not inaccurate) that the future is filled with uncertainty. And worse.
You can love a child with your whole heart—send him off to a good school, sit there among your fellow parents, listening to him deliver a valedictory address – and still, there he is at McDonald’s, with a gun in his backpack, and a manifesto concerning plans to wreak vengeance on the actions of those he perceives (not necessarily inaccurately) as corporate criminals.
Maybe now is the moment to mention that the faces of not one but two handsome young men occupied the news over recent days. In addition to Luigi Mangione, I read a great deal about Daniel Penny, the 24-year old Marine Corps veteran and architecture student—white—who also chose to take the law into his own hands, when a homeless schizophrenic man named Jordan Neely entered a train on which Penny was traveling, in Manhattan. When Neely began ranting and (according to some) threatening passengers on the train, Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold and kept him there, long after he’d ceased to move (also according to witnesses), to the point where Jordan Neely stopped breathing and died.
Unlike the actions of the killer who shot the United Health Care C.E.O., those of Daniel Penny were not premeditated. Penny leapt to action spontaneously. Some call him a murderer. Some call him a hero. The jury found him not guilty on all charges. He’s a free man now.
Unlike the eyes of Luigi Mangione, those of Daniel Penny, entering and leaving the courtroom, were hard to read. Reportedly, he has expressed no remorse for his actions on the train that day. If he suffers torment, and he may well do so, it remains a mystery. For whatever reason, his story does not haunt me as the one of Luigi Mangione does.
Daniel Penny will go on with his life. What happened on the train that day will alter its course. But he will carry on. He may well earn his architecture degree. He may even publish a book. This won’t be the case for Luigi Mangione.
Suicide has reached epidemic proportions among young people, including young people of privilege, those who have experienced all kinds of advantages many of us once believed might shield them from pain or danger. Fewer of us suppose this now.
What Luigi Mangione is alleged to have done last week represents another kind of suicide. By taking the life of a man who stood for everything he believed to be corrupt and evil, he was destroying his own future as well. At the age of 26, in possession of so many of the gifts and advantages that might have ensured an exceedingly good life, it appears he may have chosen to commit an act that could lock him up forever.
If convicted, he could receive the death penalty. If in fact he is the person who pulled the trigger that day, I am guessing he understood this, as well as any 26 year old can. Which is to say: Not all that well. He could not understand fully, at 26, all that he was taking away, all that he stood to lose, himself.
There is one fact about the life of Luigi Mangione that occupies considerable significance for me, as I read the few scraps of information we know, so far, about this person whose story we’ll be hearing a great deal more of, in the weeks and months to come.
In addition to being a star student, he was evidently a gifted and highly disciplined athlete at school –a runner and a soccer player. Sometime in the last year or so, it appears he suffered a serious injury to his spine which made even simple movement excruciatingly painful. He tried to overcome this –gingerly attempting to work out at a climbing gym. He tried surfing, resisted pain medication.
One small detail from his biography, recounted by one of the friends from whom he recently severed contact from his biography stands out for me: That the back pain suffered by this young man was so great, and so crippling, that it made intimacy with a partner impossible.
Maybe that doesn’t sound so heartbreaking, to a person who has lived a long, full life of love. But when I read that, I imagined a handsome 26 year old soccer player, concluding that simple human touch was no longer a part of his future.
Close one door, burst through into another. One that heads straight to life in prison.
These are my thoughts today, about Luigi Mangione. And I am thinking, too, oddly enough, about the two young men to whom I gave birth, working hard at their jobs, off with their wives and children today, getting ready for a big holiday. Presents. Songs. A big meal, shared around the table with those they love. I won’t be with either of them this year for that day –or with my equally well-loved daughter. But they remain in my heart.
So I am also thinking today about the parents of the young man who sits in an Altoona Pennsylvania jail. And about parents everywhere, who lovingly send their children—our children—out into the world, launching them like little paper boats on rough and swirling waters. Maybe they keep afloat. Maybe they get pulled under. Maybe they pull others under along the way.
I say a prayer for us all.
