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Karen
Who does the damn bell toll for, anyway??
I almost missed it.. just a silly human interest story on the news buried between the turkey and the football games on Thanksgiving. It was on and gone before I could assimilate the barest of facts...
"Daughter D.O.A. at hospital - suspected starvation...15 years old.. Mother and grandmother questioned".
It was like a Dali acidflash.. some sort of cruel joke on one of the sweetest holidays of all.
It was Monday before I got around to reading Sunday's paper, and there was an A.P. wire story hidden inside the smaller type subsections of the lifestyle part of the overabundant daily. There were more details and one of them stopped my heart for a moment. The fifteen year old girl weighed 15 lbs 1oz on arrival at the hospital in Janesville Wisconsin, just a six hour drive from Bloomtown.
The article reported that medical authorities around the nation were astonished at the idea that this child could even be alive at all... I, myself, was absolutely flabbergasted.
Even allowing for the facts....the young girl named Karen had been born as the result of an incestuous relationship between her mother (Kay) and her uncle (Wayne), she was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy at the age of two, she was only forty two inches tall at the autopsy... and she lived in the state, after all, that gave us Ed Gein (the real life Norman Bates and Hannibal Lector, who set the hallmark for every Jeffrey Dahmer since to follow)... even allowing for the normal muscle deterioration inherent with C.P. this was an astonishing figure. It's three bags of sugar... about fifteen baseballs... fifteen pounds, fifteen years.
I wondered what life was like for this family all those years. I went online and found the Janesville Gazette, and I read the few stories that were there. I found out that, in 1993, Karen and her mother Kay, grandmother Eunice, "father/uncle" Wayne and second uncle Gary were found living in a storage shed next to the highway and sent to a shelter. At the time, it is reported, Karen could not lift her head, or speak or control body functions. Three months later the Cook County Department of Social Services and Community Programs concluded that reports of child abuse and neglect were "unsubstantiated". In 1997, ECHO - a local church community service group - gave the family a week's worth of groceries and a voucher for an Easter meal. At that time, Kay and Eunice brought in $921 a month in social security checks. They were living, along with Gary, in a house that Kay bought.
By 1998, the three women (and maybe the brothers) were subsiding on what they could raise by scavenging for resalable trash and recyclable deposit items. Karen, who had apparently never weighed more than 36 lbs. at any time in her life, who had never attended any type of schooling, and who spent her days in front of the television, was eating baby food and wearing diapers.
Neighbors commented on the friendliness of Kay, the teetotal beliefs, the tidiness of the home and the yard, the privacy of the family (almost no one even knew of Karen's existence...). It seemed like a normal, albeit desperately destitute family and yet there was apparently plenty of food in the house.
I was tempted to judge the mother... and the grandmother... not to mention the two brothers and Kay's grown son, for allowing this ... this... horror story to exist at all, never mind to continue for fifteen years.
I was struck that, at the hospital Kay almost offhandedly told the police that "Everyone's got to go sometime..." and I have to admit that the simple honesty of the statement made me review my judgments.
Clearly, if there was ever the template for a dysfunctional family, this was it. Obviously this family didn't fall between the cracks.. it hurtled into a yawning chasm. Adamantly this small and twisted family unit was unabashedly ignored by the very social and community groups who are designed to not simply help such folks, but actually raise them out of their circumstances and render them as close to self sufficient as possible. There were visiting nurses as recently as 1994.. did they see nothing?? Were there no reports?? Did it not occur to the police that a virtually helpless young girl living with four adults in a storage shed next to a highway was reason for a follow-up??
Or, just perhaps, was there really nothing at all actually wrong??
Could one not suggest that this young girl had a pretty good shake of the dice for fifteen years. Apparently, although deprived of many of the material pleasures to which most of us aspire, she spent her life - a far lengthier one than most experts would forecast, given her condition - in the bosom of a caring and close group of supporting family members. Maybe, after fifteen years of helping support her mother, her son, her two brothers and the round the clock care of her ailing tiny child... just maybe this mother had simply had enough, and decided to let go. And who among us could attach much blame to her for that?... (well, the local police has charged Karen with neglect, but I'm not sure that they'll have much sympathy from the closely knit Wisconsin community).
We are too often led to hysteria by our own horror at events that so dramatically stray from the norm and sometimes we lose perspective.
It would be nice to think that the good folk of Janesville Wisconsin might sensibly conclude that Kay has had to wade through and live in quite enough......shit in her life, and that perhaps she should be left to attempt to actually develop a life as best she can, with her long time burden finally lifted from her shoulders.
In the grand scheme of things, the death of one pitifully developed child who managed to outlive expectations by about 1000 percent should be cause for relief and maybe even amazement at the resilience of the human body and the human spirits who dedicate such effort to preserving that resilience.
I do know this one fact. I shall never celebrate another Thanksgiving holiday, as long as I live, without thinking of Karen.... small almost beyond belief, and Kay... dealt an unimaginably devastating hand in life.
I shall be interested to see what transpires in Janesville.
I have a small hope that the town might be known, in the future, as Karensville.
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