We are summoned to the bedside of one strong woman, whose prognosis, delivered callously over the phone by a doctor she had never met, was "just a few months" a year ago. The last time I saw her she told me she felt better now than she ever has in her life, and that she was grateful. She was keeping busy fighting the cruelty of her neighbours towards the animals in their household, and was successful in getting an abused dog removed from its home and the owners both charged with cruelty and evicted from her complex. We've been asked to go to her immediately, but not by her. Her partner called to tell us we should come, that she didn't want to bother us by calling herself. What I keep thinking is what a bizarre thing it must be to have someone tell you that you are in the "final stages" of your life. To know that; to have everyone else around you know that, and to still not think that sort of thing worthy of others' attention.
And the young woman who, the last time I saw her (just a month ago) was impeccably dressed, nourished, determinedly optimistic, enrolling in school, writing poetry. A report from a friend today tells me that she was seen stumbling around, scars on her face, dirty and bleeding, ten pounds lighter. She wouldn't seek support from us in her state, "not like this," she said, ashamed, to the woman who, although she barely knows the girl, gave her a hug and a sandwich and money and smokes. "We pray for our fallen angels," the woman wrote to me earlier this evening; i don't even believe in angels or prayer, for that matter, but I felt like starting tonight, because I didn't know what else to do with the pain in my heart, and that seems to work for some people. I know how this young woman would be judged, what problems she'd be diagnosed with, and it isn't what you'd think. It's almost absolutely never what you'd think, i can swear to that. It is not her failure to stay clean that has her in the state she is in; it's her child being ripped away from her from an inhumane system of "protection" that fails families over and over. It's the impacts of chronic street-level as well as domestic violence and a staggering lack of support for survivors. It's the culture we cultivate within which a mother can spend years calling her neglected, disabled and victimized daughter a 'junkie whore' and that blames only the daughter for the choices that she makes believing that, because she is deficient, she has no other.
Stigma is so powerful that it prevents people from even seeking the support of people whose sole role in their lives is to do so. This is the third woman today (today) who I found out chose to go it alone because she was too ashamed to ask for help, and didn't believe she deserved it. I'd likely feel the same way. A female who does sex work (strike one), lives in poverty (strike two), experiencing structural or physical violence, or both, (strike three) recieves triple the blame for her situation. It is not, in this context, a stunning revelation that mass murderer W. Pickton for years got away with the slayings (and attempted killings) of dozens of women even though in 1998 a woman who he stabbed and who escaped him risked further violence to tell her story, including that of seeing abandoned purses and bloody clothing on the infamous farm, to police, but was dismissed as not being a credible enough witness. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/844124--pickton-jurors-not-told-of-victim-who-got-away
