by Leigh Sales
The Kovco case was also marked by much military secrecy and obfuscation, which created the perception of a cover-up. Ultimately, two separate inquiries – one inside and one outside the military – found there was nothing sinister at work, and that Jake Kovco had accidentally killed himself while skylarking with his own gun in his barracks.
Jake was an only child and his mother, Judy, was shattered. Because of the way her grief played out, she could not accept any explanation that had Jake himself at fault. Judy was the one who pushed for the second, independent coronial inquiry after she dismissed the military investigation’s findings. She desperately wanted an outcome that didn’t blame her own son. Was it a murder? An accident that was being hushed up to protect other soldiers?
Watching Judy testify at the second inquest was an unsettling experience for everybody there. She looked perfectly together, with her neatly made-up face, coiffed blond hair and calm voice, but something was amiss. She seemed oddly absent, as if she had roused herself only momentarily from a bed of grief. She grimaced strangely and attempted jokes that fell flat. She stared into the distance with a half-smile on her face, as though she and her son were having a private conversation in her head.
‘I still feel today that I made perfection,’ Judy declared to the courtroom at one point.
There was an awkward pause.
‘By perfection, you are referring to your son?’ a lawyer asked.
‘Of course,’ she replied, as if puzzled that this wasn’t entirely obvious to all present. ‘Jake was perfect.’
The way she said it, it wasn’t simply a mother’s hyperbole; she appeared to believe it was objectively true. Judy made other jarring pronouncements too, such as that she and her son had not a single secret between them. On the stand, she never burst into tears or lost control, yet the impression she gave was of a bird trapped inside a house, frantically flying in circles, smashing into the windows trying to escape. When she stepped down, every person in that courtroom would have been in no doubt as to how thoroughly her son’s death and the bungled return of his body had annihilated his mother. My heart ached for her.
When any person suffers a traumatic blindside, they will usually fall apart initially but eventually – and incredibly – the majority adapt to their new normal. Just how long they stay in the first phase and how well they adapt during the second differs enormously. Why do some people seem to remain fractured for a long time while others seem to fairly rapidly return to basic functioning? What are the factors that make adaptation more likely?
On arriving home from Thredbo, I once again turn to psychological research. It seems to me that the things that influence how well we adjust to a game-changer can be divided into three groups: the nature of the event itself; our genetics; and our internal beliefs about the way the world works, formed largely through our personal history.
That the nature of the event itself dictates how well a person recovers seems self-evident. Stuart Diver’s experiences prove that point – as he explained, watching his first wife die in front of him was more traumatic than the death of his second wife, for which he had time to prepare. Many events in life are difficult to process, but some – such as the death of a child or witnessing the violent death of a loved one – are particularly confronting, as is an event in which a person’s own life is seriously and suddenly threatened.
Beyond the event itself, our biology and the character traits we inherit from our parents account for about 40 to 50 per cent of how well or otherwise we adapt to adversity. This is no doubt why Stuart commented, ‘You can ask my family and good friends who knew me before: I’m the same person.’ He’s probably right. The fact that he was already resilient, determined and positive would have helped him enormously in coming to terms with his tragedies.
The personality traits associated with recovery include optimism, extroversion, hardiness and a healthy ego. Optimists are more likely, for example, to be able to make meaning of an awful event by concentrating on the good that may come from it, such as Walter Mikac taking comfort in the Alannah & Madeline Foundation. Being optimistic is linked with positive outcomes in numerous studies of affliction, including cancer, heart disease, rheumatic disorders and HIV. The research is so overwhelming that it perhaps explains why we seem to live under the tiresome tyranny of ‘positive thinking’, as if optimism itself is a miracle cure and not just a coping tool. Telling people they need to ‘think positive’ if they’re not so inclined is potentially harmful, as it can lead to repression or feelings of failure.
One influential theory about adaptation is that we are all born with a fixed level of emotional equilibrium and happiness called a set point. It’s kind of like an internal spirit level. Good or bad fortune makes it fluctuate in the short term but then it returns to its original level.
In a famous 1978 study on this matter, researchers compared three groups of people: a control group, a group of lotto winners, and a group of people who had recently suffered devastating spinal injuries. Short-term, winning lotto was definitely a big boost and losing mobility was obviously terrible. But after a year, things had changed. The lotto winners were not significantly happier than the control group. The spinal-cord injury individuals were less happy than both the control group and the lotto winners, but nowhere near as unhappy as they had been straight after their accidents. In 2013, a similar study concluded. It had used different groups of people and looked at them not one year after their original injury, but twenty years later. Over the two decades, all three groups had adapted to their changed circumstances and returned to their original set points.
Since that 1978 study, psychologists have raised questions about whether our equilibrium is really so fixed. A German study monitored 40,000 people for twenty-one years and a British one followed 27,000 people for fourteen years. Charting huge groups of people for such a long time allowed the researchers to scrutinise the impact of all sorts of major life events – divorce, death of loved ones, unemployment, loss of children, and the onset of disabilities. Some people did find their set points enhanced or depressed permanently. It’s an area that’s ripe for future research.
Stuart Diver said another thing during our interview that, along with his personality, is key to understanding the process of adaptation. He told me that with the help of a therapist he worked out that before the landslide, he held ‘thirteen or sixteen fundamental beliefs’ – core assumptions about how the world operates. All of us, whether consciously or unconsciously, hold these ingrained beliefs, called schemas. They differ for each of us. They form in our earliest years, through our personal experiences and what adults teach us. A devastating event smashes a person’s schemas, causing a kind of mental car crash. Sometimes schemas are pieced back together again and sometimes they are destroyed and replaced by something else.
One person holds many different schemas, covering beliefs about justice, control, predictability, spirituality and self-esteem. Juliet Darling and I rattled through a few at the end of our conversation: things work out for the best, hard work pays off, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The most common schemas can be classified into three categories. The first is about the benevolence of the world, notions like ‘if you’re a good person, good things will come’ or ‘love will ultimately triumph over hate’. The second covers how the external world works, such as ‘people get what’s coming to them’ or ‘your fate is set from birth’. The third is about self-esteem, and might include such ideas as ‘I must be a bad person because bad things always happen to me’ or ‘I’ve worked hard, so I will achieve my dreams’.
Schemas, whether you’re aware of yours or not, powerfully influence your thoughts, actions and behaviour. They’re the filter through which you interpret other people’s behaviour and they help you decide how to act with friends and strangers. They also help you anticipate and plan for the future, and they even govern what you notice and what you remember when new information comes along. We all pay more attention to things that re
inforce our schemas and downplay or negate incoming data that conflicts with them – something known as confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias helps us remain emotionally and mentally stable. As we’ve seen, humans are predisposed to desire cause and effect. We need explanations for why things happen so that our brains can move on to thinking about something else. The more an incident fits into our existing schemas, the easier it is for the brain to file it away. A sudden, life-changing event is mentally and emotionally destructive because it shatters schemas and stops the brain from knowing how to understand or interpret the world – How could something so awful happen to my child? What did I do to deserve this? I’m a good person!
When schemas are up-ended, the human brain responds in one of three ways. It can go into denial, shutting down, repressing reaction and refusing to process what has happened. Denial can actually be a useful short-term coping mechanism, because it’s protective. Or the brain can assimilate, finding a way to integrate what happened into schemas, as Stuart did when he learned to think about his final moments with Sally as evidence that he was somebody who cared about other people, even under the greatest possible stress. The third way is accommodation. This is when a person fundamentally changes a core belief about how the world works. Juliet no longer believing that things will work out for the best if you’re a good person is an example of accommodation. The more successfully a person is able to respond in the second or third of these ways, the better they will be able to adapt to a blindside and move forward.
An attempt to make a tragedy fit with our schemas is one of the reasons we almost always ask, ‘Why me?’ after something awful happens to us. And in fact this is a profoundly important question, because it’s the first step in helping the brain process the event. There are literally dozens of studies cataloguing how many people ask themselves this after a traumatic incident – it’s almost universal – and what impact the exploration of that question has on recovery.
One of the most influential of these studies involved twenty-nine full-time patients at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Aged from sixteen to thirty-five, all had become paraplegics or quadriplegics in serious accidents, victims of the type of random calamity that could befall any of us. Among the group were eleven car crashes, six diving accidents and four shootings, along with a private-plane crash, a motorcycle accident, a hang-gliding accident, a tumble down a flight of stairs, a dive into a haystack, and a high school football tackle. There was also a victim of a falling beam in a farm building, and another of a falling piece of machinery. Each case was in itself a rich story of luck, fate, chance, and sliding doors.
The researchers interviewed each patient, along with their doctors and carers, to get a sense of how well or otherwise they were coping with the aftermath of their accident. Every single patient had spontaneously asked themselves, ‘Why me?’ as soon as they were able. Their answers fell into six categories: predetermination, probability, chance, God, deservedness, and re-evaluation of the event as a positive. The most popular answer was that God had a reason, and the person had to trust in that reason whether or not it made sense to them (much like Louisa Hope and Michael Spence). Putting the tragedy down to chance was also a very common explanation, along the lines of ‘It was just a freak accident that could have happened to anybody.’
There’s a fascinating correlation between the answers to ‘Why me?’ and the ability to cope. Those people coping best answered in a way that indicated they believed they couldn’t have avoided the accident, or that ultimately it was their own fault, not somebody else’s. For example, one patient who was managing well said, ‘It was bound to happen eventually . . . I’ve been driving around fifteen years . . . you know that eventually, somewhere, there’s a fatal accident around.’ If the activity was something the person chose to do freely and regularly, they were inclined to see the accident as something that could have happened to anyone and that they were simply unfortunate.
The people who coped worst were those injured doing something they wouldn’t normally do (for example, they had accepted a lift in a car when they usually travelled another way), because they saw the accident as something they could have avoided and they found it hard to stop ruminating on the ‘if only’ scenario. The brain couldn’t file the event away. Poor coping also correlated with blaming somebody else for what had happened. Among the worst copers was the sole person who had not been able to come up with any answer at all to the ‘Why me?’ question. It seems that almost any explanation, even one as odd as ‘The devil got into God that night and made God do something wrong’ (another patient’s offering) is better as a coping mechanism than no explanation at all. Any story that allows the brain to maintain the illusion that there’s an underlying order and meaning to our existence helps with recovery.
When the brain keeps ruminating on an awful event (keeping it in what psychologists call the active memory), it torments a person with intrusive, recurrent thoughts. Sometimes this is because the gap between what happened and a person’s schemas is too difficult to bridge. Other times, the brain can’t easily construct new schemas. It’s what causes a person to have difficulty moving on, or ‘finding closure’ as the annoying term has it. As I’ve mentioned, short-term, this mental train wreck happens to almost everyone who’s shattered by grief or a terrible event, and most people do adapt. But failure to adapt is not uncommon, and it causes predictably dysfunctional behaviour – people can begin to obsess over conspiracy theories, they may ascribe blame or intent where there is none, and they sometimes write endlessly to authorities or demand inquiries.
In legal circles, these people are known as querulous complainants. They pop up so regularly that The Australasian Coroner’s Manual includes a section on how to compassionately manage them. It notes that ‘they are relentlessly driven by a pursuit of justice . . . [Their] complaints cascade in type and target over the years and secondarily devastate their own lives.’ Families can split and people can lose jobs and friends because their brains become so stuck on the unfairness or inexplicability of what has happened.
Skimming through the Coroner’s Manual makes me realise something. Nearly every case I’ve looked at so far in this book wound up before a coroner. There were inquests into the Lindt Café siege, the Port Arthur massacre, the Toowoomba floods, the deaths of Nick and Chloe Waterlow, the Thredbo landslide, and the case of Private Kovco. I wonder if a coroner, a person whose job immerses them in unexpected tragedy every day, might be able to explain a little more about how people react when life blindsides them.
I need to find the name of the coroner who sat on the bench when I slipped into the public gallery every day to report on the Kovco inquest. She had a kindly way about her, that’s all I remember.
I keep my notebooks and papers from the two Kovco inquiries in a large maroon cardboard box on the top shelf of my linen cupboard. Taking it down and spreading the pages on the floor of my study, I see that the coroner in the case was Mary Jerram. I also see that, time and again, I’ve remarked on her compassion in my notes. She had such an encouraging and sympathetic way about her, always putting people at ease. There’s even a letter that I wrote to her but never posted. ‘Dear Magistrate Jerram,’ it reads, ‘. . . I thought many times during the hearings that if ever I was in the unfortunate situation of having to appear at such an inquest, I would hope to be in front of somebody as thoughtful and decent as you.’
‘That’s nice to hear,’ says Mary Jerram when I go to visit her, almost ten years after tucking that letter into a notebook and forgetting about it. In a stroke of good luck for me, Mary, who retired in 2013, is back for a stint as Acting New South Wales Coroner, and the court where she works every day is just a ten-minute walk from where I live. She’s been asked to fill in while her successor, Michael Barnes, presides over the lengthy Lindt Café inquest. The interruption to her retirement was meant to last for only a few weeks but it’s turned into months.
Mary is in her late sixties and has s
hort brown hair. She wears a black turtleneck with a jacket over the top and a chunky brown and orange necklace with yellow resin earrings. Her glasses have black and red frames and she gestures with them in her right hand as we talk. She has sparkly eyes and a bright, energetic manner, and although there’s a gigantic wooden desk in her office, she ushers me to a couple of comfortable armchairs facing each other so we can sit and chat more informally.
If you’re a fan of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, or you watch NCIS, you may think a coroner is somebody who heads to crime scenes in the middle of the night, snaps on latex gloves and picks wet leaves off corpses, regularly finding clues that the police miss, such as tiny letters of the alphabet inserted under fingernails. I’m sorry to shatter the illusion, but in Australia that’s not what a coroner does. Here, they are not medical examiners or profilers. They don’t perform autopsies or do forensic work at crime scenes, although they can observe that if they wish. Australian coroners are lawyers by training, usually former magistrates or judges.
A coroner is basically a fact-finder. Their job is to inquire into sudden, unexpected, unexplained, violent or suspicious deaths. They try to find out how an individual died. Was somebody responsible? Are there wider implications? A coronial inquest is not a trial, although it can recommend that people be charged, and unlike a trial, an inquest doesn’t have to prove something ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The standard is ‘on the balance of probabilities’. To get as close as possible to the truth of how somebody’s life ended, the coroner will turn over every possible rock and burrow down every last hole, even if it sometimes means that embarrassing facts come to light or privacy is breached. All sorts of different people help the coroner in this detective work: police, lawyers, psychologists, doctors, pathologists, and even experts in fields such as geology or ballistics.
