My little community is sad this week and it's started a lot of serious conversations.
A woman I knew, not extremely well but I had been out with her, been to her home, and listened to her stories on some long group trips when I was driving...committed suicide this week. She was new to the church--about a year. Turns out she was severely alcoholic, had hidden it from most but one woman knew it all.
The things I remember from talking to her were her desperation to get a good job (she looked for 9 months--so many people in this economy have looked for YEARS). She had once had a fine house, a marriage, etc. She has two grown children in their 20s, both accomplished and okay. But evidently about a decade ago she began drinking and it became completely uncontrollable. She sabotaged herself in many ways common to the disease--finding fault with AA, trying the church but rejecting it as not like her old one, even finding a job and leaving it (or perhaps urged to leave, I don't know) a few weeks later. She was arrested for DUI once, then again, and after the 2nd time was facing jail time next week. Her lease was up, she'd burned through her 401K and just didn't want to live any more. Another friend found her.
Some of the convos have been about "middle class" people who've never experienced poverty and who have no resilience...no way to re-envision their lives on a much lower economic scale and still find them meaningful. How one has to rally one's spirituality, find meaning and purpose--apart from money.
(Easy to say, if one has shelter and some prospects for survival.) What I picked up on from her was a form of denial--I think she could not tolerate her losses of status because to do that would be to accept where she was now, rather than try to pretend she was going to find a way to reclaim it all. She did not feel connected to her own inherent worth and dignity. And so she lost her life and her kids lost their mother and have that tragic legacy now.
It's incredibly sad. The alcoholism was the dominant thing--my friend asked her recently how much she was drinking, and C. said, I can't tell you how much because I am drinking all the time. She had had a few periods of sobriety, maybe one rehab, I don't know.
She was extremely smart, and beautiful, and very talented. She had taught in China, the Middle East, and had a tremendous amount of communications and business skills. She was 53.
My other friend, with whom I'm staying, wanted to make "Falling Out of the Middle Class" a discussion topic. It's ironic to feel sympathy, in the world, for folks who have fallen down a couple rungs but who, by most standards, are still ON a liveable ladder. But it's interesting to hear my host-friend say, but they have no experience being poor...and some, just can't take it.
(And, I wanted to share this:
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/12/someone_to_hold_me/).
love,
Hops
