THE STREETS OF BROOKLYN

Hello my name is Sandy, and I am a compulsive gambler. I have been in deep denial for 40 years, and I finally owned up to the fact that I need help. I joined a meeting in the Prescott area, and I am very grateful for the meeting and the people I have had the pleasure of meeting. I only go to the Monday night meeting, and so far for me it is working.

I first started gambling in the streets of Brooklyn, worked my way up to Las Vegas and went downhill from there. I am in the process of bankruptcy, which will be finalized on my birthday December 26 of this year.

If people say there isn't a God, I don’t buy it. I speak to him on a daily basis and that's what works for me. Everybody does what's good for them.

I would like other gamblers to know that you can go to meetings all over the U.S.A. There is a lot of help out there; thing is you really have to want to do it. I hope that you will seek out whatever it will take for you to get that help, because losing family and friends makes it tougher to abstain from the disease.

You must realize that we are all in the same boat regarding our problem. We can either sink or swim, and if you were to ask me I would say, "Please pass me a lifesaver!" And I don’t mean a hard candy!

You must be willing to do something about your problem or it will not be effective. We might have slips in recovery, but it doesn't mean we give up. Remember the old saying: If you fall off the horse, dust yourself off and climb back on. I am proud to say I personally have not yet fallen.

Good luck and remember we are here for each other..............................................Sandy Z-M., AZ

Husband tells tragic tale in hopes of saving others.
By Larry Evans

She was 48, with a loving husband, 3 children, 5 grandchildren, many friends, a good-paying job and a church in which she was very active. So why did she shoot herself?

The long suicide note did not provide a clear answer, according to her husband, who was phoned at work that Saturday morning in July and told to come home, that there was an emergency.

"She was my high school sweetheart," he tells me. They were married 30 years.

"I knew her like I know myself. Or so I thought."

There was 1 thing he did not know. She gambled.

"If this could happen to the best woman I ever knew, it could happen to anyone."

He wants people to know her story. It would memorialize her, he says, if even 1 person in similar trouble would read what happened and say to themselves, "She really didn’t have to do that."

He and everyone else who knew her will always wish she had reached out for help instead of suffering in silence and then killing herself.

I will not divulge this local woman’s name out of respect for her privacy. Here, however, in her husband’s words, is the tragic story:

"After the funeral, her brother came up to me and said, ‘We have to talk.’" They went for a drive.

"He asked me if I knew she had borrowed $10,000 from a family friend."

No, he did not know. The couple had jobs that paid well, and they lived modestly and within their means.

He told his brother-in-law that he was puzzled as to why he and his wife no longer had an $11,000 CD at the bank. When he had gone to the bank, intending to use the money for her funeral expenses, he was told that the certificate had been cashed.

In the suicide note, she wrote that she "messed up the bills," and that everything was in a drawer in the kitchen. She was the one who handled the family’s finances. The day after the funeral, he looked in the kitchen drawer.

"I was shocked when I saw the credit-card bills. We owed well in excess of $100,000."

He and his brother-in-law knew something had somehow gone wrong, because the family had nothing to show for all that money. They decided to go to the Sheriff’s Office.

"A detective asked if there was a computer in our house. When I said ‘yes,’ he asked if he could take a look at it."

They drove to the house. With a few simple keystrokes, the detective found the cause of the debt: Day after day, she had visited 3 online gambling sites.

"She would go to work early and get home around 1 o’clock in the afternoon. I wouldn’t get home until 3 or 4. I had no idea."

The computer was a Christmas gift from him in 1998. He thought she used it to log onto Web sites pertaining to crafts, cooking and opera. He did not know she used it for gambling. In fact, she apparently engaged in no other form of gambling except for very infrequent trips to casinos.

She did not buy scratch-off lottery tickets, according to her friends from work, who do. Nor did she play the horses or the Virginia Lottery. In retrospect, however, he thought back about trips they’d taken to Las Vegas. The first time they went was 15 years ago.

"She loved it. She acted like a kid. She was so much fun to be with that I took her back 3 more times."

Dropping quarters into slot machines was her game of choice.

"I remember the last time we went. On the flight home, she turned to me and said, ‘You know, it’s a good thing we don’t live any closer to this place.’ I laughed and said, ‘Yes, I think you are right.’ After that, we went to Atlantic City 3 or 4 times."

She was his wife of 30 years and his best friend, but he did not know that, for her, gambling had gone beyond entertainment and into a habit she could not handle.

The afternoon before she shot herself, he recalls, he arrived home from work and suggested that they go to dinner. On the way, he said, they could put his paycheck in the bank.

"She said she didn’t feel well, and that she would deposit my check the next morning."

She knew her creditors had gone to court. The bank had been told not to allow the couple to make withdrawals. She knew that his paycheck, if deposited, would disappear into the dark hole of debt that suddenly confronted her. He had no idea.

"We sat on the sofa and I rubbed her shoulders for about 45 minutes. And then I went out and cut the grass."

While he cut the grass, she used the computer.

Days later, as he tried to piece together what had happened, he decided to use the keystrokes the detective showed him and find out what sites she had looked at that Friday afternoon. She had visited the home page of the American Medical Association and found a diagram of the human body.

"Then she clicked ‘Torso.’ She was looking for where her heart was. While I was out mowing the grass, she knew what she was going to do."

The next morning, they both showered and dressed for work. Both usually left the house at about 5 a.m., although they would drive separate cars.

That morning, she told him she was going to go to work an hour later that day. When he left, she was sitting in a rocking chair in the living room. No one else was in the house.

What was in the house was a .357-caliber revolver he had purchased 20 years ago.

"She had never touched it until the day she used it."

When she pulled the trigger, she put holes in the hearts of a lot of people.

THE POWER OF PINK

Empowered Recovery - Part 2 of 4

Think about the color pink. What comes to mind? Pretty flowers, a lovely party dress, a dainty powder room? Chances are we all started out in a nursery wrapped in a pink blanket, maybe with a little pink cap for warmth. Why pink? Well, to signify we were girl babies, of course! Pink is for girls and blue is for boys - the beginning of the power of pink.

Many women today were girls when our world was still divided between the pinks and blues.  If you were born in the 40s or 50s, you grew up with a foot in 2 generations, and pink was not as powerful a color.  Let’s look briefly at tradition, illustrated with a few things we had in common.

• Given dolls to play with when you really wanted to get your hands on the Tinker-Toys.
• Dressed in a skirt or dress when you wanted to wear pants or jeans.
• Labeled a tomboy when you just wanted to climb a tree to look around from a high vantage point.
• Forced to sit with your legs crossed when your feet didn’t even touch the floor yet.
• Taught that all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, astronauts, presidents of companies, senators, firefighters, priests, rabbis, ministers, bricklayers, carpenters, mechanics, ambassadors, news anchors, game show hosts, captains of ships, pilots, army generals ... were men, but not told why.

Teaching led many of us to grow up expecting to be homemakers, mothers, secretaries, clerks, beauticians, cooks (not chefs; they were men), librarians, nurses or teachers. Then came an Empowerment Movement:

During the late 60s and early 70s the U.S. went through a revolution, and we all realized the "other sex" was capable of doing any or all of the previously named jobs. We have lived to assimilate two words for many common jobs today: fireman/firefighter, policeman/police officer, stewardess/flight attendant, mailman/letter carrier, and many other examples.

We don’t have to marvel at the "lady doctor" anymore; it is now far more common to see women in the operating room, the Boardroom, the White House situation room, the judge’s chambers, the cockpit. But women didn’t get into these traditionally "blue" professions by wearing only pink. Women went to court and fought for the right to enter all male schools of science and engineering. Some women remember fighting for the right to be in a carpenters’ union, or to join the Job Corps to be a mechanic instead of a secretary, because mechanics made much more money.

 Finally, becoming a single mother after divorce no longer represented a shameful failure, but became recognized as a tough task worthy of pride in its accomplishment. Women went up against regulations made for men to get the jobs they always had wanted. Women who wanted to serve their country as pilots, ship captains and field officers wanted to go to the Naval Academy and West Point and now they do.

Growing up girls we have lived through a great many changes. The most important change relates to our own mental image of ourselves. Ask yourself if your mother told you as a child, "You can be anything you want to be." Then ask yourself if you ever told your daughter, "You can be anything you want to be." That message empowers a new generation to think outside a box - to believe opportunity is for everyone and simply being born female doesn’t automatically preordain a 2nd-class life or constitute an employment handicap.

Empowerment affects more than employment; its positive effects can improve relationships in all areas of a woman’s life. Empowerment can enlarge and multiply accomplishments. And an empowered recovery can set a compulsive gambler’ life on a path to happiness and fulfillment.

In WHW’s March issue, nationally lauded Joanna Franklin will examine the world’s changed definitions of women and opportunity - in the kitchen, the nursery, the bedroom, the boardroom and in Las Vegas.

Marilyn asks - Will Cindy from Colorado Springs please forward your address to Marilyn -
(You forgot to enclose your address.)
email: Mslancelot@aol.com , BettyCampb@aol.com
We thank the gals from Phoenix and our friend in Texas
for their contributions towards our printing and mailing costs.