Slipping into Madness

G1: Off With Your Head!

Create a blog entry (or static item) detailing an event that made you incredibly angry/frustrated. (<1000 words)

Okay, this is going to be a bit long, because I spend a lot of time helping people with my church. Buying groceries, or clothing, screening people for help with rent and utilities, or talking with people who need help because of a change in circumstance like a birth or death in the family. A lot of people when asking for help are friendly and willing to cooperate with the hoops that I need to go through so that I can get reimbursed by the church for the purchases that I've made.

But there are some people. Recently, I went to the funeral of one such person.

Marie (name changed of course) was a person who needed a lot of help. She had housing through section 8 (for those of you not in the USA, that's subsidized housing), and lived off Social Security Disability but needed help with food and utilities most months.

The problem was, she never was happy with anything that we did for her. The first time I bought groceries for her, I was told by the leader of the congregation that she had some health issues and her doctor had told her that she needed to do a low carb diet. What she interpreted was she needed meat. Only meat. But she wasn't happy when I came to her house with a five pound package of hamburger, ten pounds of chicken thighs, and a five dollar package of pork chops (about six in total).

She accepted the food, but a low grade muttering followed me back to the car. No, she wasn't happy because she didn't need chicken thighs. They were too fatty. She needed chicken wings, was I an idiot?

So, the next time, I took her with me to the store so she could choose her own meat. I gave her a budget. She went about fifty dollars over, and nearly gave up on the entire order because I told her I couldn't buy soda for her on the church's dime. If she wanted that, she'd have to use her own money.

At one point, we gave her a new washer/dryer. I was there someone went in to hook up the connections. On every surface of the floor and kitchen were piles of laundry, most of which did not look like hers, which left us with the impression that she was taking in laundry to supplement her income. Very resourceful, although she was unhappy with the fact that we had to come in and that the washer/dryer that she was given were not the kind that she was used to.

Soon after, she had a fire and lost everything (I asked and it apparently didn't have anything to do with the appliances, thank goodness). She'd been in that house for twenty years, and suddenly she was sleeping on her daughters' couch (two different daughters—she couldn't get along with either of them for long enough to stay permanently with one) and needed everything. Food, clothing, furniture, new housing. We did what we could, although listening to her berating the section 8 people over the phone as we drove her from office to store, trying to get things sorted made me feel sorry for the poor people trying to help her.

She'd lost her dentures, so we spent time taking her to the dentist, paid for by checks from the church. She did try to get us to write a check for more work than she needed, according to the dentist, but we could only do what we had an itemized receipt for.

It took about five months, but we were able to set her up with a new apartment (two bedroom, new appliances and while she wanted a house, she was as happy as she ever was), fully furnished by donations from the church.

But always we had to provide a wall between her and the people giving her help because she was never grateful for anything. Now, I'm not saying that someone has to act grateful in order to get help. Plenty of people who are difficult and proud also need to have love and support. But she was the type of person who made it so hard to help her because it was like being constantly slapped down whenever we tried to do something good. We couldn't stop helping, but it was a constant source of frustration.

One week before we got her into the apartment, she had a stroke and was hospitalized. We got her dentures to her in hospital, but she was never able to relearn how to eat, walk, or go to the bathroom by herself, so even though she wanted to get her Independence, she died in a rehab facility about eight months later. The furniture went to another family who needed it.

At her funeral, I led the music and chuckled with the family as the eulogy was read, calling her a difficult woman. Because, what else can we say.

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