Losing It

Where’s the safety net? asks New York Times writer Judith Warner in an October 11th post about Carol Gotbaum. Gotbaum, who lived in Manhattan and was originally from South Africa, died on September 28th in a Phoenix Airport holding cell while on her way to alcohol rehab at a clinic in Tucson. The daughter-in-law of New York City public advocate Betsy Gotbaum, Carol Gotbaum had not flown directly to Tucson because she had wanted to see her children off to school; she ended up taking a later, non-direct flight and was denied access to her connecting flight in Phoenix because she arrived at the gate after boarding was completed. This then happened, according to the October 6th New York Times:

The police say they believe she had been drinking during the layover, and she protested in a way that they later characterized as “crying,” “hysterical” and “irrational.” She was dragged to a holding cell at the airport, hands cuffed behind her back, was shackled to a bench, and was left alone, yelling.

A few minutes later, when she grew silent, officers looked in the cell and found Ms. Gotbaum unconscious with the shackle stretched across her neck. Attempts by the police and medical workers to revive her were unsuccessful.

The Gotbaums have hired a private investigator and a forensic pathologist to investigate Carol Gotbaum’s death.

Warner’s column opens with her noting that she can’t get Carol Gotbaum’s story out of her mind and I have not been able to either.

You may say that you’d never lose your cool like Carol Gotbaum. You’re not an alcoholic. You’re not a depressive. You are supremely self-controlled. Good for you. Right now. Today.

But have you never had the experience of being close to losing it? Have you never felt yourself starting to crack when, say, you’ve been fighting with your husband and your credit card’s rejected, or you’re worried about your health and you’re late for a long-scheduled, absolutely critical doctor’s appointment, and they cancel it, and won’t reschedule it? At times like this, if there’s something bigger going on — and at times like this there often is — it’s very easy to snap.

It’s easiest to snap when you feel you’ve been trying to do your absolute best. This, I imagine, underlay some of the rage that Carol Gotbaum felt when she saw herself stranded in Phoenix.

Yes, it is very easy to snap and I think it’s not simply easy, sometimes it is simply inevitable that we, whether we’re parents of autistic children or autistic ourselves, snap, and snap in public. Our kids struggle in public: So many social mores that can confuse and overwhelm; so much strangeness and unexpectedness can result from unpredictable stangers; so any possible sensory upsets from fluorescent lights, police sirens, the roar of motorcycles, a dog when one was not looking for it. We have traveled a fair amount with Charlie and take him at least once a year on an airplane, and that is never easy: Airports are always stuffy, crowded and tense with travelers tense because they are traveling. Airplanes are confining spaces with recycled air and not much to do….. That said, Charlie, after some very loud experiences (it goes without saying, the whole airplane could hear us) and a few smelly ones (fortunately, he and I can both fit into the airplane bathrooms with some wiggle room), has become fairly accustomed to airplane travel. (I am quite sure that I worry about it more than him.)

But “losing it.” I have certainly done this in public—-when we have been shopping and I’m trying to get some apples into a bag and Charlie has run off and one gets mad and thinks or (worse) says, “can’t you just stand still!” and then instantly regrets it; when Charlie banged his head on someone’s driveway a few years ago; when Charlie had a full-out kicking/banging/screaming/crying/etc. episode in a playground and a dad and two kids on bikes stopped and stared….. I think you get the picture. When I say that Charlie has autism, expressions change, sympathy is broadcast, and help sometimes offered (not that I always want it).

At the end of her column, Warner writes that women—mothers in particular—-have a sort of “self-preservation instinct” that keeps us, even at the last minute, from losing it; that reminds us that we cannot “afford” to put ourselves into a “position of danger.” I know how much Charlie needs me, needs Jim, and it takes something to swallow tears, dash away sweat, ignore staring strangers, and try to get an unhappy child twisted into a pretzel shape off the linoleum. I guess I would have to say that Charlie is a sort of safety net to me. Yes, he is very disabled; yes, he needs his hand or the sleeve of his sweatshirt held when on the subway. I would have to say that taking care of Charlie has instilled that “self-preservation instinct” in me more than anything: I can never really lose it, because my first thought has become, have to take care of Charlie. Maybe being the mother of a child like Charlie—autistic, with so many needs—has made me more responsible, more self-aware of the fact that I have always to be for him, to think about how any thing I decide or do might affect him.

I’ll be thinking of Carol Gotbaum for a long time; what must have been going through her mind in those last, lonely, terribly moments in a cell in the Phoenix airport? How alone she must have felt, and angry and overwhelmed and cut off. And desperate.

And lost.