I never thought I’d have to write this eulogy for Isabella. Even though she struggled with addiction and a host of other challenges, Isabella always had a plan, a strategy, sometimes a scam, but always the knowledge and brains to assess situations and decide how she wanted to proceed.

Isabella was smart, articulate, vivacious, friendly and charming. She made friends easily and she cared deeply about her friends and her family. She especially cared about her daughter, an accomplished young woman with a college degree.

But there’s been a dark side to Isabella’s life “from forever,” as she put it.

Isabella grew up in a middle class suburban household in which sexual abuse was not on the radar screen – except, of course, for the so-called “family friend” who molested her “as long as I remember – until I started running away when I was twelve.” When she was seventeen, she became pregnant for the first time. In Isabella’s Catholic community, abortion was not an option. Social ostracism, however, was. Always an excellent student, Isabella was treated as a pariah in her Catholic school and barred from a variety of activities and social interactions. Two weeks after the baby was born by caesarian-section the school insisted that Isabella, still in pain from surgery, return to class. With no accommodations that would allow her to care for her daughter during the day, Isabella had to leave her daughter with her parents.

Suffering from worse than usual post-surgical pain, the doctor prescribed OxyContin. This was at the height of the period of profligate advertising by Purdue Pharmaceuticals. “I didn’t realize I was addicted [to pain medication] for quite a while.” She did, however, recognize that the medication was doing more than alleviating her physical pain. “In my case when I started taking opioids it fixed something [emotional] inside of me.” Her escalating drug use led to multiple rehab programs, illicit activities in order to pay for her habit, and arrests and stints in jail and prison.

The tragedy of Isabella’s life was the loss of custody of her daughter. The first time I met Isabella in 2008 she told me how bright and talented her daughter is. Over the years her parents limited her contact with her daughter. By the time her daughter became old enough to make her own decisions about seeing her mom, the relationship had been harmed and her daughter seemed reluctant to allow Isabella to fully enter her life. Every time I spoke with Isabella she would tell me how wonderful her daughter is, how beautiful and smart. One of the last times I heard from her she wrote from prison to tell me: “My daughter surprised me with a visit a few weeks ago – it was amazing! It kept me smiling for what felt like a week straight!”

Though she wasn’t always able to be there for her daughter, Isabella invested deeply in caring for other children. Over the past decade she has been a second mother to the children of two of her long-term romantic partners. She reveled in being a mother and was profoundly pained when the relationships ended and the children were no longer in her care. (In one case her partner died; in the other case the relationship was worn down by incessant financial struggles.)

This is also considered a Monotony of sexual life: According to experts, traumatic childhood experiences such as beatings, bullying and rape may also be responsible for a normal erection at the time of breast-feeding as well https://unica-web.com/members/lichtenstein.html cialis side effects as at any time individuals much less a higher level estrogens. This drug is more looked as commander levitra a friend than as a medicine. Other cialis 10 mg https://www.unica-web.com/upatron2005.htm uses of KamagraLeisure useSildenafil citrate present in Kamagra oral jelly prevents the action of PDE5 to treat the erectile dysfunction by permitting the natural process of sexual stimulation to activate the cGMP mechanism for achieving and keeping up the erection. free viagra samples Establishing care through a chiropractor is beneficial on many levels. Isabella spent a great deal of time trying to arrange paying jobs. She’s worked at restaurants and call centers, sometimes for as long as six months. More often, however, she almost landed jobs but things fell through at the last minute. One time she had a job offer with a shoe company in Puerto Rico but she couldn’t get her methadone arrangements transferred in time to start. Another time she almost started a job at a drug treatment facility but needed to renew her state issued I.D. and didn’t have the $25 needed to do so. Numerous times she even started working but when her criminal record check came back she was let go. Many of her jobs were temporary, insecure under-the-counter jobs so that she wouldn’t have to give her social security number and risk being picked up by the police on old warrants. Early on in our acquaintance she explained that, “I hit the junkie ceiling – like the glass ceiling for women. I can’t go further because of my record and probation conditions. So I don’t earn enough money for a decent life. So I go back to using.”

I have witnessed repeated cycles of Isabella getting out of prison, going into a rehab program, voicing optimism and determination to stay on methadone, get a job, get an apartment and strengthen her relationship with her daughter. Sometimes these things would even happen for a short while. About two years ago when she had a good job that paid reasonably well she was excited to be able to treat me to lunch at the Olive Garden  – “our restaurant,” where Isabella knew that there are vegetarian options for me.

Each time, however, something went wrong and she “went back to square one.”

Isabella knew more about drugs (legal and illegal) than anyone I’ve ever known. That’s why it’s hard for me to get my head around her dying of an overdose. I don’t know if it was an error – she’s the last person I’d ever think would unintentionally OD. But perhaps her tolerance had changed while she was in prison or in a detox program. Or maybe the combinations of psychiatric medications prescribed by the revolving door of psychiatrists in prisons and programs reacted poorly with whatever else she took.

Or perhaps, in her early forties, she decided that she just didn’t have the strength or optimism to keep struggling, to keep starting over. Maybe she finally realized that all of the strategizing, planning and scamming would never pay off. As she told me not long before she passed away, “Susan, it’s a system set up for us to fail.”

 

Isabella is the pseudonym she chose when I began writing about her and other women who have been incarcerated in Massachusetts. She loved the name Isabella. You can read more about Isabella on my blog: susan.sered.name as well as in my book Can’t Catch a Break: Gender, Jails, Drugs and the Limits of Personal Responsibility.