The Perils of Privilege

I always wondered why they didn't have children.
They were both young, beautiful, deeply in love and wealthy.
Libby was ten years younger than me. Her husband Eddie, was the same age as she was.
He was a construction worker when they met. She was the heiress to an oil fortune, she told me. She already had a sizable account due to family inheritance, gifts and whatever entitlement rich young kids get in that silver spoon they are being served from.

I never grew up with a sense of "entitlement" though I know a lot of people who have...
and are still there. And there's a whole generation of young entitled kids coming up the pike

I grew up one of five kids from a middle class family. We never went without, though we never had excess either. My parents had one ultimate expectation of all of us: that all five children would get college degrees. And we did.

My dad provided, by working with his hands and mind, to get just about all the money it took get us through college. It wasn't shortly after my younger sister, the fifth child, finished college, that my mother decided to a back to college. My father was delighted, he joked how he could retire and she could support him.

Mom graduated shortly after my dad died at age 57.
Now my mom, at 82, works a 40 hr hour week as a therapist.

The inheritance my father left us was not financial, it was better than that.
It was knowing I could do and be anything I want. A writer, a private eye, a University instructor. A blogger! Whatever.
The only thing I have never been... is rich.

That said, back we go to my rich heir or heiress friends.

Throughout my lifetime and travels (both of which have been extensive) I have been privileged to meet many people of privilege.

A lot of the money in those families is distributed monthly in stipends, like an annuity account, until the much anticipated big death unloads the vast fortune on whoever gets their hands on it first. Usually, it all ends up in probates courts for a year or two, sometimes many years... which feeds the probate attorneys and their families.

So as I stated in a previous blog about a probate surveillance I did, in some families where there's a lot of money in place, there occasionally -- or ultimately -- comes this battle that rapidly turns into a war... over money.
Deaths are just like divorces on the money end. Financially contentious.

In inheritances, it all filters down from the top.
There are rich grandparents. Or rich parents. It's their children who are the first layers of inheritors. And rich people tend to divorce, so there are divorced spouses and stepchildren to complicate the inheritance equation.
After that there are grandchildren.

And it appears from the day the silver spoons enter the mouth of some of these kids, that is all they think about.... the money they have or they money they will get. After all, they think they are" to the manor born."
What they don't get is this: that their manor born can turn into a house of cards if they don't play theirs right.

I do not intend this as a generalization or judgment.
There are perfectly wonderful, absolutely normal trust fund babies out there who live frugal lifestyles and keep their vast sums of wealth or potential wealth to themselves.Or at the very least, on a low key.

Others flash their cash with bling and things.
Libby was not like that. She was quiet, laid back, caring, loving, sweet.

When you got to know her, you knew there was money there.
It was the reason she and Eddie lived on this perfectly manicured large, private parcel of lush green land surrounded by trees and spotted with tiny little buildings -- a greenhouse here, a storage shed there, a special garage for the most expensive tractor I'd ever seen anyone use just for mowing a lawn. It cost as much as car.

Libby and her husband were friends of ours.
They bought themselves a trailer to live in while they built their little dream home on one their five acres.
We watched it go up slowly and steadily.
She designed it and he built it with his own two hands.
They lived humbly, and simply.
She drove a beat up late model Toyota. He a Pick Up.
They hung out with with friends in the hot tub or around the fire pit.
On weekends they played together, golfed, gardened, or traveled.
She was happy when he jammed with a band he once toured with in the studio they built on their land for just that. She was happy watching the birds and tending the plants, land and flowers...reading historical novels... running the books for a small construction business he had.

They told us when I'd first met them, a decade or so ago, they'd never had a fight. Ever.
I found that hard to believe yet... since most people fight about money or sex. Yet it appeared there was plenty of both around their house, so I guess there really was little to fight about.

She was bit of a hermit, as I am I. We were drawn to the hermitness in each other.... so there were periods of great conversations between us... and long gaps of silence. But always, a friendship more like family. So I was privy to her life -- the ups and downs.

Her beloved mother and best friend in the world developed one of those horrible, lingering cancers which lead to all kinds of catastrophic complications and surgeries.

Libby, the only daughter, and as close to her mother as a daughter could be, moved in with her mom to nurse her through nearly two years of living hell for both. And lots of pain and anti-anxiety Meds meant for her mother... and used by both. Libby became a secret pill addict.

Libby's husband was okay with Libby moving into her Mom's apartment while he tended their land and built their house. Eddie stood by Libby through Mom's death. Libby inherited a lot of money.

Long story shortened goes like this:

Libby used a tons of pain pills and anxiety Meds and other things you drink or smoke. She spent a ton of money on plastic surgery, fancy cars and for reasons I don't know, which could have been a car wreck, she landed once in a fancy rehab.

Then she relapsed and had a second accident, a bad one involving another driver. This resulted in arrest for DWI, jail time and everything else that goes with it. Including another stint in a rehab Libby hated. It was more like a prison, she said.
Since her mother's death, and release from the second rehab, Libby claimed to be sober again and started day-trading with her inheritance. I tried to talk her out of it to no avail.

It got worse from there.

Somewhere along the way, Libby was prescribed a pain med for a disease she has which causes her spinal column to harden.
That pain med should never be prescribed to opiate addicts, which Libby clearly was.
That medicine also causes seizures, which it did with Libby. Libby had a big seizure in Las Vegas, which caused her to fall, hit her head and frontal lobe on concrete... and go unconscious for five minutes.

Unknown to anyone, Libby stopped the Med that caused the seizure cold turkey, without a doctor's assist and went psychotic.

In the past month... or is it two?... Libby has been sinking slowly in the quagmire of insanity. She has been incarcerated in jail, locked in the hospital psycho ward, then dragged screaming and kicking into a mental hospital.

Still her husband took her back. We had dinner with them 2 days after she got out of the hospital. She was alternately normal and delusional. It was alarming to everyone, including her brother who stopped by.

Then she called me two days later to say kicked Eddie out and wanted a divorce. He moved out.

She'd gone through almost all her money, she said.
She spoke to an attorney yesterday about a divorce.
Her family knows she's lost it, she's sinking fast.

Occasionally, I am called to contact her, just to make sure she is alive. Every time I speak to her I say "The prescription drugs are doing this to you."
I tell her she's acting crazy and nuts for divorcing her husband, who really is one of the coolest guys on the planet. She ignores me or changes the subject.

Thinking of Libby, I think a lot about the dog I had that once would've drowned in the mudflats at low tide. I blogged about this once.
Her name was Karma and her head was the only thing sticking out of the mud as the in-coming tide rushed towards her. She was crying and somehow, someway, through some miracle, act of God, any and all of the aforementioned... my husband, with a dislocated shoulder, managed to dislodge Karma from that mud and drag them both to shore and my car.. My first look at them was a profound experience -- two of them, together, covered head to toe with a thick brown gooey sludge.... survived.
And only because one living creature extended a hand to another.

So last night I extended my hand. I called Libby, one last time.
I told her she had to listen to me -- she was on drugs that affected her thinking and made her delusional. I said she needed to get off the drugs -- in another rehab or cold turkey -- so she could save herself. I said there are instructions on the net on how to withdraw all by yourself if you don't have money for a rehab.

I told her she was truly nuts for kicking her husband out and filing for divorce. I told her to think long and hard during that separation time the state requires. I told her it won't feel good when she wakes up one day to realize she lost the man she loved to another woman due to drug abuse.
I said there were a ton of women out there ready to snap up her husband in a heartbeat.
I told her in most divorces, women end up in poverty.

She heard none of it. Not a word.

And so I drifted off to sleep and woke up and thought I have to let this go.
Nothing can be done to pull her out of that mud.

Her husband called and asked our opinion on committing her again. We all agreed re-committing her will destroy her and what is left of their finances.
She must bottom, sink on her own, as each one of us has in our lives...
and I can only hope she has the strength to crawl out of the mudflats by herself as we all did.

So I started this blog post and a phone call came. It was from an aunt of Libby's, someone I didn't know existed. Eddie told her about me and my efforts with Libby.

So this aunt told me about her Libby, their family, and about the aunt's perceptive abilities, which were spot on.
This aunt visited a sacred Indian (Native American elder type Shaman) who said that Libby has holes in her brains that are caused by drugs that are letting evil spirits enter her brain . So, the Indian has begun a ritualistic healing thing for the next seven days... and I am thinking... why the heck not?
No one else can do anything.

Some people, they have to truly want to live to live.
Otherwise you can't stop them from jumping off that bridge, hanging themselves from the closet or tree, shooting themselves in the head.
Google "suicide", you'll see its so much more common than you can imagine.
And for some, who are in an inconsolable pain, it is the only way to truly end that pain.

What I think people don't get is this:
that taking cocktails of prescription drugs is also suicide.
Albeit a slower form of it.
Heath Ledger, John Belushi, Janis Joplin, Anne Marie Nicole and her son, killed by drugs. Almost forgot two -- Michael Jackson and Elvis. People taking pills pretend they are escaping the pain. Truth is they are killing themselves slowly.

Amazing but true. Today, more people in the United States are dying from prescription drugs than car accidents.

I have a friend, Libby, going there right now.
It's her choice, it's her path and its her only life.
I do not know if she will make it back to reality.

Sometimes, it's the "letting go" that allows the "coming back."

And sometimes, it's the Indian Shaman.

Only time will tell... as it always does.