The ghastly death of Carol Anne Gotbaum won't stop haunting me. More details have come out if, like me, you're unfortunately unable to look away from this train wreck:
- She'd probably been drinking when she freaked out over missing her plane.
- Her husband was frantically trying to reach airport officials when his wife was already dead.
- Police's dogged attempts to revive her were not pleasant for them.
- Why she was traveling alone is explained; why a family friend failed to meet her at Phoenix airport is not.
- The Phoenix M.E.'s office has held back parts of Gotbaum's body from a private pathologist hired by the family to conduct a second autopsy.
What haunts me is not the question of whether the cops did or did not act correctly. (It doesn't sound like they were brutal, just insensitive. A compassionate policewoman might have calmed and saved her. According to one story, which I can't find now, she actually said something like, "I need a woman to hold me.") It's the glimpse into the solitary horror of mental illness and its mesmerized rendezvous with wicked fate. Her stepmother-in-law called it "a perfect storm," but it was a storm somehow diabolically engineered by her own vortical psyche, sucking in circumstances and assembling them into the perfect fatal contraption. You've heard of suicide by cop . . .
You can get a taste of Carole Anne Gotbaum's last moments, not by watching the surveillance video of her arrest, but by reading the bipolar poets who somehow managed to transmit to the fortunate sane (a matter of degree, not kind) little stomach-lurching bits of their reality:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. . . .~ Gerard Manley Hopkins
My mind's not right. . . . .
I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell,
nobody's here --
~ Robert Lowell
The dead bell,
The dead bell.
Somebody's done for.
~ Sylvia Plath
UPDATE: And on a lighter note, one commenter here says:
Perhaps the airlines and others should start finding ways to make flying less aggravating th[a]n it is. That might help a lot [of] people, not just those who are mentally ill.
Another comment I think is kinda the last word:
An active alcoholic and/or addict is “an unlovely creature,” as some experts in the treatment once famously wrote. They’re sick and so is their family: That’s why it’s called a “family disease.” When they’re really rolling downhill, whether it’s in an airport, a Fifth Avenue apartment, a Hollywood nightclub or Skid Row, all bets are off. This woman and her family were not capable of making rational decisions. Unless you’ve lived with a person who is suffering this much, you just don’t know. THIS is addiction and this is the pain it brings.
UPDATE !!: No, this is the last word, the bottom line: her husband said at her funeral that "if only one person in that airport had helped her she would be alive today."
That's almost certainly true, and it's a very sobering thought, no pun intended. How many of the commenters here dismiss her as a "nut job"? (Others, of course, blame her husband, sight unseen, for letting her travel alone and then wishing "the kindness of strangers" had saved her life. But perhaps he'd done all he could.) How often have you watched someone having a public meltdown, apparently related to mental illness or addiction, and resolved with a similar combination of disapproval, fear and disgust not to get involved? I have! What if reacting with compassion instead, and getting involved to the simple extent of saying, "Are you all right? Can I help you?" could have saved a life?
Granted that you can't help everyone every time, and also that addicts are very hard to help, but you never know what last straw or small act might tip the scale. If one person in that airport had been "on duty" that day, having his or her day to be the one who does get involved, this woman would be alive. And where there's life there's hope.
Just as I always fasten my seat belt in memory of the beloved friend who died because he didn't, I will think of Carol Anne Gotbaum the next time I see a stranger in distress.
Comments