I don't know what to do. There is a friend I have been avoiding for some time, and I feel badly about it. We've known each other for several decades, one of the few people who've stayed in contact with me and I with them. So I feel especially badly about "abandoning" her but I honestly do not know what to do. Or who I can even go to.
The simple reason is that it seems like for the last few years nothing good has ever happened in this person's life, either to her or to anyone in her family. When she calls, it's pretty predictable. Someone is in the hospital, someone has had an accident, someone has died. She is in poor health, the doctors can't seem to do anything for her, the prescriptions they give her have side effects. The doctors tell her she has only a couple of years or so to live due to heart conditions caused by diabetes. She and her husband (who is also in poor health) are living on public aid, with no transportation and basically unable to leave the apartment.
As someone with Asperger's, empathy isn't my strong point, and I think most of you can relate to that. I'm not very good at "just listening". I want to step in and help, to solve problems, to straighten out the situation. Yet I am so goddamn helpless in the face of all these problems. I don't know how to cheer her up. I don't know what to say. Now the latest is her daughter's on-going marital problems, which are serious and complicated, running from one abusive relationship to another. From where I sit I can see nothing but bad decisions going to worse decisions, the daughter dumping it all on mom who is in no shape to deal with it; she is so fragile mentally.
I feel so selfish for wanting to run. I can't give her the help she needs, I don't even know where to turn for it for myself. What's more the kind of help she needs takes money, and when you are that poor, that kind of help is a luxury. It's not a priority for those who are dishing out the money. I'm not Mother Teresa; I don't want to take time off work and run around battling doctors, social services, welfare workers, nurses aides, the whole damn establishment. And part of me says, where is the rest of her family? They should be the ones stepping in, but the only ones who are able to help out have cut and run.
It is so bad that some times after I get off the phone with her I feel like taking a gun to my head and shooting myself. Is that what life holds in store for me down the road? Why struggle? She says she doesn't want to die and I say to myself, what do you want to stay alive for? Where is the happiness, where is the joy? Sometimes I feel like coming out and saying to her, hasn't anything GOOD ever happened recently? But I know the answer. No. Nothing has and nothing will. So why even torment each other with the question.
I hear a lot of talk about the love of God. Well, I would like to know just where the love of God is in this situation and why He doesn't step in. So many "little" things that just add up burden after burden. Like when she had to go to a nursing home and the aide dropped her while bathing her--"oops, oh sorry"--and the aide went on her merry way and my friend went to the emergency room with an injury. Couldn't that little act of carelessness have been prevented? Where is the love and compassion? You won't find it in a nursing home, that is for sure.
I guess I get a little angry with some of the people in my church--you might say I am a bit jealous--when I see how they live and where they live. Not that they live high on the hog, they are just average middle-class suburbanites. But they are so damn insulated from the poverty I have to deal with on a daily basis. And I am SICK of dealing with poverty, of seeing it, of living around it. They don't know a damn thing about poverty, but they think they can come into my neighborhood and spread the Gospel to us poor benighted trailer trash heathens. It's not as easy as that.
The simple reason is that it seems like for the last few years nothing good has ever happened in this person's life, either to her or to anyone in her family. When she calls, it's pretty predictable. Someone is in the hospital, someone has had an accident, someone has died. She is in poor health, the doctors can't seem to do anything for her, the prescriptions they give her have side effects. The doctors tell her she has only a couple of years or so to live due to heart conditions caused by diabetes. She and her husband (who is also in poor health) are living on public aid, with no transportation and basically unable to leave the apartment.
As someone with Asperger's, empathy isn't my strong point, and I think most of you can relate to that. I'm not very good at "just listening". I want to step in and help, to solve problems, to straighten out the situation. Yet I am so goddamn helpless in the face of all these problems. I don't know how to cheer her up. I don't know what to say. Now the latest is her daughter's on-going marital problems, which are serious and complicated, running from one abusive relationship to another. From where I sit I can see nothing but bad decisions going to worse decisions, the daughter dumping it all on mom who is in no shape to deal with it; she is so fragile mentally.
I feel so selfish for wanting to run. I can't give her the help she needs, I don't even know where to turn for it for myself. What's more the kind of help she needs takes money, and when you are that poor, that kind of help is a luxury. It's not a priority for those who are dishing out the money. I'm not Mother Teresa; I don't want to take time off work and run around battling doctors, social services, welfare workers, nurses aides, the whole damn establishment. And part of me says, where is the rest of her family? They should be the ones stepping in, but the only ones who are able to help out have cut and run.
It is so bad that some times after I get off the phone with her I feel like taking a gun to my head and shooting myself. Is that what life holds in store for me down the road? Why struggle? She says she doesn't want to die and I say to myself, what do you want to stay alive for? Where is the happiness, where is the joy? Sometimes I feel like coming out and saying to her, hasn't anything GOOD ever happened recently? But I know the answer. No. Nothing has and nothing will. So why even torment each other with the question.
I hear a lot of talk about the love of God. Well, I would like to know just where the love of God is in this situation and why He doesn't step in. So many "little" things that just add up burden after burden. Like when she had to go to a nursing home and the aide dropped her while bathing her--"oops, oh sorry"--and the aide went on her merry way and my friend went to the emergency room with an injury. Couldn't that little act of carelessness have been prevented? Where is the love and compassion? You won't find it in a nursing home, that is for sure.
I guess I get a little angry with some of the people in my church--you might say I am a bit jealous--when I see how they live and where they live. Not that they live high on the hog, they are just average middle-class suburbanites. But they are so damn insulated from the poverty I have to deal with on a daily basis. And I am SICK of dealing with poverty, of seeing it, of living around it. They don't know a damn thing about poverty, but they think they can come into my neighborhood and spread the Gospel to us poor benighted trailer trash heathens. It's not as easy as that.
