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I just found out via email that an old friend from my Shire-breeding days had died. Specifically, she committed suicide, and wasn't found for 2 weeks.
She and her ex-husband sort of mentored me as I found my way in the Shire world, and helped teach me what was correct and incorrect with Shires, Shire conformation, and breeding. I used their stallion to breed my first Shire foals. I stayed in touch with them, but gradually our contacts became farther apart.
In 2008, I heard through the grapevine that she and her husband were getting a divorce. She had had weight loss surgery, but had complications from adhesions, and was in a huge amount of pain almost all the time. She had become addicted to pain killers, and became more and more divorced from reality as the pain and the drugs consumed her world, her personality, and eventually her relationship with her husband and her son. Her doctors were not providing her with pain killers anymore, so she was buying them on the street, using money from their breeding operation.
There was apparently some domestic violence involved, she on her husband, and he had a restraining order filed on her around Christmas time 2008. She left the family home, they divorced, and their Shire and Gypsy Horse breeding farm was dispersed last May.
I had written to her several times, offering her a listening ear, but I never heard back. This is the first I've heard about her since the divorce. And it has to be this.
I'm shocked to my core -- she was an amazingly funny, smart, witty, vibrant woman. She loved her son, who's now about 9 or 10, with all her heart. It astounds me that she chose this, depriving her son and her friends of her presence in their lives forever. I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm shocked, the world has dropped out from under my feet.
I wish suicides were able to think about how the people who love and care for them will be affected by their act. They may be out of their pain, but their family and friends will bear the pain of losing them forever.
She and her ex-husband sort of mentored me as I found my way in the Shire world, and helped teach me what was correct and incorrect with Shires, Shire conformation, and breeding. I used their stallion to breed my first Shire foals. I stayed in touch with them, but gradually our contacts became farther apart.
In 2008, I heard through the grapevine that she and her husband were getting a divorce. She had had weight loss surgery, but had complications from adhesions, and was in a huge amount of pain almost all the time. She had become addicted to pain killers, and became more and more divorced from reality as the pain and the drugs consumed her world, her personality, and eventually her relationship with her husband and her son. Her doctors were not providing her with pain killers anymore, so she was buying them on the street, using money from their breeding operation.
There was apparently some domestic violence involved, she on her husband, and he had a restraining order filed on her around Christmas time 2008. She left the family home, they divorced, and their Shire and Gypsy Horse breeding farm was dispersed last May.
I had written to her several times, offering her a listening ear, but I never heard back. This is the first I've heard about her since the divorce. And it has to be this.
I'm shocked to my core -- she was an amazingly funny, smart, witty, vibrant woman. She loved her son, who's now about 9 or 10, with all her heart. It astounds me that she chose this, depriving her son and her friends of her presence in their lives forever. I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm shocked, the world has dropped out from under my feet.
I wish suicides were able to think about how the people who love and care for them will be affected by their act. They may be out of their pain, but their family and friends will bear the pain of losing them forever.
