Carolyn's Illness - Murder by Suicide

My sister, Doc, (“back East” and so darned far away from me!) reminds me that “blood remembers.” To explain, Doc believes that the DNA holds ancestral attitudes, events and knowledge, and that those attitudes, events and knowledge run though us in a fine, imperceptible thread of knowing, affecting our perceptions of ourselves and our world as we see it.

Carolyn Harris is a person of sterling character. I have never known her to tell one lie; I have never known her to add color to one truth. She is honorable in all business dealings, faithful and loyal as a friend, and believes in God and the United States of America. It is an honor to know Carolyn and to claim her as my friend.

Carolyn’s DNA originates on the continent of Africa, then further develops in the “Deep South.” If what Doc says about “blood remembering” is correct, then Carolyn’s DNA remembers imprisonment, murder, beatings, slavery, degradation, hopelessness, and defeatism. Her DNA remembers a “whites only” world, segregation, hopelessness and defeatism. Her DNA tells her that she “is just not good enough,” and that she is “black, and a woman, at that.”

When Angel Team was commandeered by Cochise County, Carolyn insisted upon “honoring our lease” on the five room office suite located on Rt. 92 in Sierra Vista. I wanted to let it go; what few private clients we had could barely pay the monthly lease of two thousand dollars, and, frankly, we needed that money to live. If we had no business expenses to pay, we might be able to keep our personal lives intact, I reasoned.

Carolyn was honorable to obligations and insisted upon remaining so, despite the immediate poverty that we were experiencing. I knew, yet Carolyn did not know that I knew, that she was in denial; that she believed that – any minute now – this bad dream would be over - the phone would ring, we would have our contract back and our world would again be right-side-up.

I called our office every day for a year, and the phone was answered. “Good morning (afternoon), Angel Team. This is Carolyn.” She always sounded bright and cheerful, despite the fact that the office was dark and devoid of everything but one desk, a telephone and Carolyn.

Carolyn was in the office, and I was on the couch.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, all events being so overwhelming, but sometime after I was shakily on my feet, I called the office one day and the phone had been disconnected.
I called Carolyn’s cell phone; she sounded a bit strange, and said she would call me back.

It was not until the next morning that she called. We had a nice talk; I told her about “Little Bubba,” the Australian Shepherd puppy who, along with Piggy, was doing his best to fill up the holes in my heart.

She told me that she was going to get her real estate license and move forward. I was very happy about that. We were “still in litigation,” though neither of us spoke about the overwhelming inadequacies of our attorney and the shoddiness with which our case was being handled.

Later, she was to tell me that she did not know what had happened to her: One day she was sitting there waiting for the phone to ring and “something popped in her head.” She left the office, never to go back, and to seek solace in a new companion – alcohol.

Carolyn did not “ease into” drinking. She slammed it hard from the first drink. Alcohol became her constant companion – it stopped the pain.

Carolyn’s beloved aunt, Dawn Mae, became critically ill and was discharged from the hospital on hospice services. The night Dawn Mae died, the hospice nurses found Carolyn dead-drunk beside Dawn’s bed.

“They (Cochise Health Systems and Cochise County) didn’t want me, Mary!” she sobbed to me once while drinking heavily. “Because I’m the black woman!”

The past two years have been a suicide run for my beautiful beloved friend. She is mostly unconscious now, and I don’t believe that she wants to come back to this world. She is finally at peace.

Carolyn’s blood remembered.