John Colapinto: As Nature Made Him

For all David’s unhappiness, nothing could bring him closer to the edge than a fear of abandonment by his wife, Jane. She was central to David’s existence, crucial to his sense of himself as a male, and was a devoted wife—despite the marriage’s manifest difficulties. David’s tendency toward fierce possessiveness made him defensive and frightened whenever Jane showed any signs of independence. For years she had been a stay-at-home mother entirely reliant on David for money (which he doled out in small dribs and drabs to insure her continued dependence). But in the final two years of their marriage she began to strike out on her own, finding a job at a local factory and walking regularly to lose weight. David was clearly threatened by Jane’s growing financial and emotional autonomy. Jane was frustrated by David’s withdrawal. The couple fought. On the afternoon of May 4, 2004, Jane told David she thought they should separate for a while. She assured him she was not talking about divorce.

“I said, ‘David, I love you,’” Jane recalls. “But looking at the whole pattern, I can see now that he was feeling like a failure. He said he had failed me and the children because of the money he lost in the golf course.” But his sense of failure went much deeper than that: it went back to the ur-injury at the age of eight months that set David’s life on its disastrous course. “He started crying that night,” Jane says. “He was feeling sexually inadequate. I said ‘I love you. When I married you I made that choice.’” But David either could not hear or did not believe Jane’s consoling words. He stormed out of the house in tears. “My fear was that he would do something stupid,” says Jane. She filed a missing persons report. The police informed Jane the next day that they had found David—alive—but that he didn’t want her to know where he was. (Jane later learned that David had gone to stay with his parents, who obeyed David’s injunction that they not inform Jane of his whereabouts.) Jane was relieved to learn that David was still alive. Convinced that the crisis was over, she went to work that day. David returned to the house he shared with Jane and retrieved a shotgun, which he took into the garage. There he sawed off the barrel with the terrible, methodical fixedness of the suicide. Then he drove to the nearby parking lot of a grocery store, parked, raised the gun, and (I hope) ended his sufferings forever.

JOHN COLAPINTO’S articles have appeared in Vanity Fair , The New Yorker , Esquire , Mademoiselle , Us Weekly , and Rolling Stone . As Nature Made Him is based on a landmark National Magazine Award–winning article published in Rolling Stone . John Colapinto lives in New York City with his wife and son.