"Just so cold and unfeeling"

Meghan MacIver writes about working in the notorious "poorest postal code in Canada" and a woman she knew there who had a deep effect on her -- though unfortunately, the reverse wasn't true.

The philosophy of the house where she worked was to let the residents make their own decisions -- which was handy, since the staff coudn't really do anything else. Except go on to shield the residents from the consequences of their own decisions.

This one woman, Rita, came into some money and blew it on drugs.

“She’s a big girl,” the manager said, laughing. Then she reminded us we had a lot of other things we had to deal with and that it wasn’t our place to judge her choices.

Big girl? Physically, maybe ... This came up because:

She got very sick. We all spent weeks of shifts taking care of Rita, carrying her into her room, helping her to go to the bathroom, making sure she didn’t light herself on fire with her cigarette butts.

Rita was soon in extremis, and as they were waiting for the paramedics, Meghan McIver tried to reassure her, touching her hand:

 she flinched sharply, and then her hand went limp. A deep sadness engulfed me in a surprising way. She was just so cold and unfeeling. I thought I meant something to her, but she was too far gone for that now. Maybe she always had been. 

People like that aren't just in the poorest postal codes; they're in the middle and upper ones, in the midst of the last families you'd suspect. In my own -- until they started dying off. 

"I thought I meant something to her" -- with me, the glass was half empty, it was always more "I was afraid I meant nothing to her" or "to him". Finally I found out I didn't -- not enough for them to do anything about it.

"Too far gone" is not to say that these people can't come back. People just like them do it every day. But first, those around them have to admit they're gone -- due to decisions that deserve no respect.