In the end, she sat in her chair, and drank and threw up, and then drank some more. She stopped eating and became extremely thin. She had worked in the medical field, so she must have been aware of her rapidly declining health. Sadly, she left a son without a mother, whose father is no where in sight.
She used to say that life wasn't supposed to be like this, it wasn't supposed to be this way. I think she suffered a lot. She found being a single parent with the added responsibility of caring for her aging mother who had suffered a stroke more than she could bear. Money was not the problem. In fact, she had enough to support herself without working. Clearly, money didn't buy her any happiness. Something in her ached so badly, that she tried to drown her sorrows in the bottle.
Alcoholism was just a symptom of a much larger problem. There was something about Jean, that made it hard for her to cope. Maybe there is someone reading this now, who feels the same way. Maybe you kill the pain with drugs or alcohol. But these things are not the solutions to your problems. In fact, they will worsen all of your problems, and ruin your relationship with your children. Jean's son had been neglected emotionally for years, and began to have problems in school from an early age. His acting out should have resulted in an investigation of his home life - but none ever came. Sadly, they both fell through the cracks.
No one seemed to know exactly what it was that ate at her so badly. An entire community watched as she died slowly. No one knew what to do. In the end, too weak to walk to the bathroom, she died in her home. Some of her closest friends live with the guilt that they should have done more, intervened, taken her to the hospital, or something - ANYTHING. Though no one should feel this kind of guilt, friends who cared do. Really, her death is not the failure of any one person, but the failure of an entire community. A community that failed to reach out and support her in words and deeds.
