Foreclosure Suicide

One of CNN’s top stories this past week was that of a wife and mother that took her life into her own hands on the day that her house was set to be sold back to the bank during foreclosure proceedings in Taunton, Massachusetts.  She carried her family’s foreclosure secret with her for almost a year – battling alone to plead with lenders and find a way to keep their house.  As a last ditch effort before her devastating decision, she faxed a suicide note to mortgage company that read, “By the time you foreclose on the house today, I will be dead…I will be deceased and John will walk into all this.  I hope you are more compassionate with him and our son.  John will have our insurance…You wouldn’t do anything for me; let’s hope you will help him.”  By the time police were notified and arrived on the scene, it was too late.

My home or my life?  Logically speaking, not actually a choice from most people’s perspective, but once I take a closer look at what it must have been like to walk a mile in this woman’s shoes, I start to understand how the twists and turns her life took lead her to the moment where she took her own life.  Going by the reports I have read, she was the family’s sole accountant, meaning her husband, who had filed for bankruptcy 3 times in the last 5 years, had no idea what was going on in their home monetarily.  As the solitary controller and decision maker I can only imagine the weight this issue placed on her mental health and well-being, and when she was unable to get up to date with payments, she took it personally – feeling as though she had failed her family.  She did an academy award winning job of covering up her worry, evident in the fact that her husband said after his wife was found he had no idea they were so much as late one a payment, much less that they had almost completed a foreclosure.

As someone that has lived through a foreclosure and dealt with a number of heartless, spineless, money hungry, mortgage representatives on the phone, I can understand the feelings of helplessness that go along with foreclosure.  Here she was, dealing with all of this on her own, and trying to explain her despair to someone who only cares about the bottom line.  These are the same people that would call our home from 6 am to 10 pm asking personal questions about our lifestyle, insulting our decisions, and once even telling Butterfinger that his blood had value, even if he did not have a dollar in his bank account (death threat?).  These are the same spineless people who were so eager a few years ago to doll out adjustable rate mortgages with no money down to Jim, Joe, Bob, and the monkey down the street because ‘everyone deserves to be a homeowner’.  They knew it would come to this, they knew that a lot of these people would not be able to keep up with their mortgages when the rates adjusted, but they went ahead and did it anyway.  All these companies and their employees care about is MONEY, having it, making it, spending it, wasting it – with very little value placed on people’s quality of life.

Am I saying that a mortgage company killed Carlene Balderrama?  No.  However, I do think it is important not to overlook the role that poor lending practices and societal conditioning regarding home ownership played in contributing to her death.  This woman’s family should have never been approved for this home, and as a result, she spent the last few years of her life dealing with bankruptcies and foreclosure proceedings, choosing to take her own life so that her husband and child could stay in their house; ultimately she put her family’s needs before her own.  This was a desperate woman, a woman so wrapped up in her dealings with finances that she could not look past them to realize that her life was so much more valuable than a home, and for that, America should take the blame.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I just hope that Carlene’s story can serve as a lesson to us all that nothing in this life is more important than life itself.