A Sad and Fatal Innocence
This blog is primarily about self-deceiving [and other-deceiving] systems and organizations, and the destructive impact of that deception on the members of such systems and organzations, and on society as a whole.
One area in which American society has suffered terribly, as a result of both deception and self-deception, is the area of 'personal finance' - of income, credit, and debt. News accounts of job losses and unemployment figures, bankruptcies and foreclosures, are easily 'tuned out' as dry statistics. But those numbers relate directly to human lives. And, sometimes, to human deaths.
I recently read about the tragic deaths of the Wood family, in Middletown, Maryland. There is an aspect to their deaths that terrifies me, beyond and quite separate from the brutal, horrific acts that took their lives. Beyond and separate from the husband's mental status and possible medication use.
I have read Francis Billotti-Wood's blog.
It's an innocuous, sweet-natured series of little posts, written by a woman who loved her life. And it scares me silly.
You see, Chris Wood's gross income was about $97K at the time of his death. Using a strict estimate, he was going to bring home about $80K this year, if he had lived. Yet his family's debt was $450,000. Half of which, apparently, was on credit cards. And Francis Wood was a stay-at-home-mom.
One man, one woman, three children, a dog and a cat. A house. Two cars.
$450,000 in debt.
They married in 2003. She left her office job in October 2006. Within six years of their marriage - or 31 months of his becoming their sole wage-earner - they were looking at a debt load it would take him 5+ years of his entire 2009 net income to repay - without interest. If they spent nothing, nothing at all, on anything else. Which would, of course, be impossible.
I am trying to imagine debt amounting to five years' net salary, as the sole wage-earner for a household of two adults, three children, and two animals. The thought alone is enough to make me dizzy and sick... yet while these debts were mounting, Francis Wood was innocently posting about $16-a-bottle designer shampoo. [She loved it.]
She and her husband were nearly half a million dollars in debt, with a house going into foreclosure in Florida, hundreds of miles away from their rented house in Middletown; and she was innocently posting about wanting to buy another house.
Reading these things in her blog, while knowing their true situation and her ultimate fate, is horrifying.
I saw no apparent concern about their debt, nothing that even acknowledged its existence. Nothing about the fact that their existing house in Florida had not sold and was going into foreclosure, or that they were still legally liable for the costs associated with that house. Not a word about any concerns that these situations would normally produce.
How can it be possible?
How could this quiet, charming, good-natured soul - who worked full time herself until three years ago - have been unaware of the financial quicksand her entire family was floating upon? Of the horrendous strain that situation MUST have created for the man she married, upon whom she and her children and pets depended for their very livelihoods?
When an entire family dies at the hand of one parent, people often avoid thinking about the event via the oversimplification that "something just snapped" in the perpetrator. I usually think that "something just snapped" should be translated as "he was a complete abuser, a total sociopath, and fooled us completely; and we would rather die than admit that, so this is our method of avoiding the truth".
But in this case, I suspect that something did snap in Chris Wood's mind.
I think he was an increasingly frightened, desperate man; a man who had his back to the wall, pushed so hard, perhaps, by his own desire to be 'a good provider' that he forced himself too far away from too much that really mattered to him. With his parents in FL, wife and children in MD, and a 50-mile commute [one way]...
... in pursuit of more money...
... to service more debt.
Because that is what the "American Dream" had become, and he and his wife, like so many other couples, were simply pursuing that American Dream.
I think he lived in increasing terror and increasing exhaustion for months, perhaps years. Alone with it.
And while starvation and bankruptcy drew inexorably nearer and nearer in his mind, his happy, innocent wife saw none of these things. Or, if she did see the debt, she did not really comprehend its meaning.
I think that in one horrific instant Chris Wood went 'over the edge'. "Flipped" from terror to fury, from flight to fight, and mistook that madness for lucidity.
Struck at his loved ones in their innocent sleep, struck them down horrendously.
Then - rightly - could not live with what he had done and become.
I am afraid - very afraid - that what killed Francis Wood, before the bullet ever touched her in her innocent sleep, was a tragic, terrible failure to recognize, to understand, to see the financial peril that her husband saw no possible way to escape.
That became for him, and thus for them all, a literal deathtrap.
Lord, have mercy.
One area in which American society has suffered terribly, as a result of both deception and self-deception, is the area of 'personal finance' - of income, credit, and debt. News accounts of job losses and unemployment figures, bankruptcies and foreclosures, are easily 'tuned out' as dry statistics. But those numbers relate directly to human lives. And, sometimes, to human deaths.
I recently read about the tragic deaths of the Wood family, in Middletown, Maryland. There is an aspect to their deaths that terrifies me, beyond and quite separate from the brutal, horrific acts that took their lives. Beyond and separate from the husband's mental status and possible medication use.
I have read Francis Billotti-Wood's blog.
It's an innocuous, sweet-natured series of little posts, written by a woman who loved her life. And it scares me silly.
You see, Chris Wood's gross income was about $97K at the time of his death. Using a strict estimate, he was going to bring home about $80K this year, if he had lived. Yet his family's debt was $450,000. Half of which, apparently, was on credit cards. And Francis Wood was a stay-at-home-mom.
One man, one woman, three children, a dog and a cat. A house. Two cars.
$450,000 in debt.
They married in 2003. She left her office job in October 2006. Within six years of their marriage - or 31 months of his becoming their sole wage-earner - they were looking at a debt load it would take him 5+ years of his entire 2009 net income to repay - without interest. If they spent nothing, nothing at all, on anything else. Which would, of course, be impossible.
I am trying to imagine debt amounting to five years' net salary, as the sole wage-earner for a household of two adults, three children, and two animals. The thought alone is enough to make me dizzy and sick... yet while these debts were mounting, Francis Wood was innocently posting about $16-a-bottle designer shampoo. [She loved it.]
She and her husband were nearly half a million dollars in debt, with a house going into foreclosure in Florida, hundreds of miles away from their rented house in Middletown; and she was innocently posting about wanting to buy another house.
Reading these things in her blog, while knowing their true situation and her ultimate fate, is horrifying.
I saw no apparent concern about their debt, nothing that even acknowledged its existence. Nothing about the fact that their existing house in Florida had not sold and was going into foreclosure, or that they were still legally liable for the costs associated with that house. Not a word about any concerns that these situations would normally produce.
How can it be possible?
How could this quiet, charming, good-natured soul - who worked full time herself until three years ago - have been unaware of the financial quicksand her entire family was floating upon? Of the horrendous strain that situation MUST have created for the man she married, upon whom she and her children and pets depended for their very livelihoods?
When an entire family dies at the hand of one parent, people often avoid thinking about the event via the oversimplification that "something just snapped" in the perpetrator. I usually think that "something just snapped" should be translated as "he was a complete abuser, a total sociopath, and fooled us completely; and we would rather die than admit that, so this is our method of avoiding the truth".
But in this case, I suspect that something did snap in Chris Wood's mind.
I think he was an increasingly frightened, desperate man; a man who had his back to the wall, pushed so hard, perhaps, by his own desire to be 'a good provider' that he forced himself too far away from too much that really mattered to him. With his parents in FL, wife and children in MD, and a 50-mile commute [one way]...
... in pursuit of more money...
... to service more debt.
Because that is what the "American Dream" had become, and he and his wife, like so many other couples, were simply pursuing that American Dream.
I think he lived in increasing terror and increasing exhaustion for months, perhaps years. Alone with it.
And while starvation and bankruptcy drew inexorably nearer and nearer in his mind, his happy, innocent wife saw none of these things. Or, if she did see the debt, she did not really comprehend its meaning.
I think that in one horrific instant Chris Wood went 'over the edge'. "Flipped" from terror to fury, from flight to fight, and mistook that madness for lucidity.
Struck at his loved ones in their innocent sleep, struck them down horrendously.
Then - rightly - could not live with what he had done and become.
I am afraid - very afraid - that what killed Francis Wood, before the bullet ever touched her in her innocent sleep, was a tragic, terrible failure to recognize, to understand, to see the financial peril that her husband saw no possible way to escape.
That became for him, and thus for them all, a literal deathtrap.
Lord, have mercy.
posted by Stormchild at
Saturday, May 09, 2009
