Weekend Open Thread: A Not Very Neighborly Harbinger from Ohio, & some Edith Piaf & Percy Sledge!

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Orange Juice Blog regrets starting off the weekend on a sad note, but it is what it is:

In a listing on giveforward.com this year, [Bellefontaine, Ohio resident] Jodi Speidel wrote that both she and her husband, Randy, had chronic illnesses and had been living without gas heat all winter and without water for a week. With $33 in savings, she said, they were eating one meal a day and didn’t have scraps left for their two cats.

“I have turned in every direction possible and don’t know what else to do,” she wrote. “If you can help, we will be forever grateful and will even pay you back once we get back on our feet.”

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[Tuesday, t]he couple had taken two charcoal grills into their bedroom; locked the door; and, amid smoldering coals, died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. A suicide note indicates that both had agreed. She was 46 years old and he was 45. The deaths upset neighbors who said they could have offered help had they known.

“It’s heartbreaking, like they didn’t feel like they had anything,” said Danielle Smith, 21, who lives across the street from the house where the Speidels died. “I wish I knew them better because I could have helped them.”

If you read the whole story up at the link, and I hope that you will, you’ll see that they had applied for assistance but not gotten a reply and had received aid from food banks — but couldn’t use much of it because they couldn’t cook given that their water had been turned off.

We talk about the social safety net: well, this is what happens when it is torn.  This is, as I suspect the Spiedels realized at the end of their lives, what is in effect supposed to happen under our socio-economic-political system.  That doesn’t mean that it’s intended to happen; it just means that its the inevitable consequence of neglect.  Benign neglect, malign neglect — it doesn’t matter.  It still leads to the same end.  We either decide to spend more of our money than we might like to protect those who are living precarious lives, particularly the disabled, or we leave them to devise their own end.

Yes, these are the real killer grills. Detail from photo by Dean Narciso of the Columbus dispatch. You don’t have to look at them, of course. They’re just grills.

Some thoughts:

(1) The way that the story is actually supposed to work, I believe, is that they die a bit later, either homeless or in some sort of dingy public hospital, probably physically separated.  What I suspect is shocking here is that they were eloquent, middle-class, responsible house-dwellers.  They had concerns, aspirations, and thoughts much like those of most of our readers.  They tried to get help and they failed.  Perhaps that’s why it hits home.  From the perspective of our country’s dominant Anglo-American culture, there’s not a single “foreign” thing about them, except that they got poor and sick and surrendered to it.

(2) Some of you will read the story and blame their kids, who lived elsewhere (and were clearly grief-stricken by their demise.)  Kids in their early 20s are not necessarily financially equipped to care for chronically ill parents in their mid-40s.  Furthermore, it seems likely that they specifically did not want to (further?) burden their own children.  Don’t dishonor them by shrugging and displacing responsibility on their kids.

(3) Yeah, they didn’t know their neighbors.  My sense, from having lived in various environments over time, is that homeowners often know their neighbors, poor people often know their neighbors, but working-class to middle-class renters generally do not.  Why?  Maybe its because knowing one’s neighbors creates a vulnerability to being asked for help.  In poorer areas, one may have little choice (to go along with one’s having little privacy); in better-off areas with homeowners, one wants to know them because of the shared stake in a mutual investment.  Among economically precarious households — a choice that we choose as a matter of national (and certainly local) policy to foster — residents want to avoid too many “foreign entanglements” that may drag them down.

(4) Wouldn’t they have been better off had they belonged to a church and had access to its community?  Maybe, although the burdens of caring for too many of their members may drive parishioners elsewhere.  Not always, to be sure — but, I suspect, generally.  Yet, even if they were willing to sign on to be a church’s “charity case,” is this really fair to them?  Should one’s continued existence on the planet be tied to the willingness to adopt a religious creed — and, perhaps, to agree to accept a given official of that church as the proponent of God’s will on Earth?  To me, these sorts of decisions are too personal, weighty, and momentous for us as a society to say “oh, just join a church that will take care of you” as a solution to the problem, even if it did work.  (For the record, some churches such as Mormons and Islamic groups have a pretty good track record here.  So do some “cult follower” sects with extreme and repressive views towards their members.  Mainstream churches, sadly, less so.)  And the notion that people should have to convert to get benefits is one that, at least when it’s a conversion to someone else’s religion (ancient Jews to various sects, Christians converting to Islam to save their skins, etc.) we tend to frown upon.

(5) One thing that strikes my heart about this double-suicide is its gentility.  They chose a method that would not leave blood, brains, and viscera scattered everywhere for whoever discovered their bodies.  They took care of their cats.  They made a mutual decision.  They warned those who might enter their house of the carbon monoxide hazard.  These were good considerate people right down to their planning of their final act — unless you consider suicide (as opposed to dying of exposure on a street or weighing down relatives into economic ruination) innately inconsiderate.  And if you do, then I think that the burden in on you to explain their best, most considerate, available alternative.

(6) And let’s remember one last thing: if either one of them had somehow lived, and not been reduced to mental incapacity by the carbon monoxide, they would have been facing a charge (and perhaps an expensive trial) for the murder of the other.  Because, you know, life is sacred and we are all each others keepers.

The City’s Police Chief said: “What we’re trying to get our minds wrapped around is what led up to this.”  He’s probably a decent and caring man, but all I can say is: “try harder.”  It’s not all that difficult.  When we deliberately tear the social safety net — of which, by the way, Obamacare is now a part (although less so in the states that have courageously rejected the Medicare expansion that was to help many others living similarly precarious lives) — we have resigned ourselves to people falling through those holes to their deaths.

We just don’t generally want to know about it like this.  It hits too close to home — for those of us who have house.

This is your stricken and sour-mooded and surely a bit too socialistic for local tastes Weekend Open Thread.  Talk about that, or whatever else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of decency and decorum.

UPDATE:

Ricardo suggests – and Vern concurs – that we include some videos of the great chanteuse Edith Piaf, whose centenary was just recent, and the magnificent Percy Sledge, who died on Tuesday: