Taking off: “what care I?”
Brenda Heist vanished over ten years ago. Despite a huge search she was never found, and was finally presumed (and even legally declared) dead.
Brenda and her husband had been on the brink of divorce, and he remarried. Her two children, 8 and 12 at the time of her disappearance, grew up to be fine people. But the mystery haunted them all and was never cleared up—until now, when Heist has resurfaced.
Did I say “cleared up”? In one sense it has been, because Heist is alive and able to tell some sort of coherent story. But the story is merely descriptive and lacks explanation, and in some ways the mystery is deeper than ever:
Last week, Heist reappeared, a thin specter seemingly risen from the dead to family and police who never stopped searching for or thinking of her.
Heist surfaced in Florida, where she has been living under bridges and in tents, working day jobs, panhandling and eating food discarded from fast-food restaurants for more than a decade.
As for the “why” of the story, your guess is as good as hers. In the middle of a supposedly amicable divorce, feeling the financial pinch of wondering how she’d be able to survive economically, Heist went to a local park, sat down on a bench, and cried.
And then some people happened by:
Two men and a woman approached her and struck up a conversation.
“They said they were homeless, and leaving right then to go down to southern Florida,” he said. “This was Feb. 8. It was a cold time. They said, ‘You’re more than welcome to come with us, if you want.’
“She said she made a split-second decision. … She doesn’t know why she did it. She just left.”
Several theories come to mind. Was she mentally ill, despite no reports of such a history? Was/is she a sociopath, despite having been described as a good mother prior to her disappearance? Neither drugs nor alcohol seem to have been involved. She was in her early 40s at the time, not a young and irresponsible teen. And it’s unclear as well what made her finally identify herself to authorities and come back.
The story gave me a cold chill, and I almost immediately thought of a song I learned as a child which had attracted me because I found it both beautiful and mysterious, and yet simultaneously repellent because of the cold heart of the woman it described: “The Wraggle Taggle Gypsies O” (sometimes spelled “raggle”). You may know it too; it’s pretty famous.
In the song the lady is wealthy, unlike Heist. And gypsies at least sound (or sounded to me as a child) a lot more romantic than homeless people in Florida. But the parallels are clear—it’s even three gypsies who come to the lady’s door to entice her away, like the three people who approached Heist on the bench.
In the version of the song I knew as a very young child (learned from a large book of folk songs from which a talented piano-playing friend of mine used to sight-read while we both sang; that’s why a lot of old folk songs still sometimes rattle around in my head), my shiver was engendered by the repetition of the phrase “what care I?” from the lady—her utter absence of remorse or explanation or sense of loyalty, her ability to throw away everything for a life that seemed aimless and harsh and yet magnetic, at least to her.
My recollection is that there was also a verse in the version I knew about leaving some children behind, as in Heist’s case. That would have amplified the chill for me. But I can’t seem to find a lyric about that, although the Wiki entry mentions a variant in which her husband, on finding her, asks, “Would you forsake your husband and child?”
The tune is haunting, as befits the subject, and YouTube has many versions. Here are two I like very much that differ greatly from each other in tone and style. The first has a beautiful violin solo, and the second features a singer who does all the voices himself:
You left out the two Youtube links
This is so Irish its not funny.
It’s in my blood, the wanderlust. Sometimes it has an ultimate price.
Time for a pint, a morning pint, an early lark I’ll be on for some time now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWLHEPPd95A
But its universal, of course.
I remember a scene from the movie “Missing” where Tommy Lee Jones explains why he left his home and family:
“Well, the hawk kept flyin.”
Actually, the name of the movie is “The Missing.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338188/
Human research into manipulation methods often have a common foundation, which is that humans are much easier to manipulate when they are weak spiritually, emotionally, or physically.
You can make almost anyone, do almost anything, if you have all 3 of those factors working.
Destroy their beliefs and plant it with one geared towards a Utopian design, and you make it more likely for that person to be convinced to do whatever is necessary for the cause, no matter who the target is or how evil the act is.
Destroy their heart and they will believe almost anything in order to return to that feeling of safety.
Destroy their body and their emotions will force them to obey, merely to survive.
Paul A’Barge: now, that’s the third time that’s happened.
I put up a post, it looks fine to me, and a little while later the YouTube videos are gone.
It’s not links, by the way, it’s videos.
And when I replace them, they stay up there just fine. It’s very weird. But thanks; I’ll fix it now.
Brings back to mind the story of the wife and mother who left her family in order to join the Occupy movement. What ever happened to her?
I do believe, with all the redness of my little beating heart, that the artistic pull is our savior (a little “s” for savior) in the same sense that if it were not for the moon, life on earth wouldn’t be what it is.
And what it is can be crass and vulger and punched-addled. The powerful have their way and against them are the artists. But the moon is there, reminding, demanding, pulling us all, every day, into the awesome, the spectacular, the more than money can buy.
What then if the artists become the powerful?
Don’t we call that fascism?
I’m very familiar with that song, mostly in a number of its “Gypsy Davy” or “Blackjack Davy” variants by artists from Woody Guthrie to Steeleye Span, and it’s always bothered me, too. I can’t remember which version is which now, but I believe there is more than one in which a baby is explicitly mentioned. And there is at least one, I think by the Carter Family or some similar old-time American group, in which she goes through the list of things she’s willing to leave behind, but “not my blue-eyed baby, pretty little blue-eyed baby.” That may be Guthrie’s.
Put a different way, when the decade’s long Gramscian project succeeded in largely muting, subverting and/or eliminating Judeo —Christian teachings and associated ethics and values from the public square and education; a primary ethical force that used to permeate and– in one way or another–animate and inform almost every aspect of life here in these United States. When improving land transportation systems, air travel as a common thing, and various economic developments fragmented and spread out families and neighborhoods that used to be tight-knit and geographically close. When the idea that one should not be “judgmental” became widely accepted, and when the “shaming” that used to control behavior when everybody knew who you were and a lot about your business was largely eliminated, and developments in communications made the face-to-face dealings that used to characterize our society largely a thing of the past. When, gradually, “reputation” became much less important in today’s much more spread out and largely anonymous society.
Well, then, in such a largely ethics free atmosphere all sorts of formerly forbidden and shunned behavior now became thinkable, doable, and “acceptable” to lots more people than in the past.
Moreover, once the forces of supposed “liberality” got an inch they took a mile, and galloping decay and decadence are spreading like kudzu vine, and despicable behavior like this in all areas of life are becoming more and more common.
The politization of life meant the loss of play. Suddenly, everything was the polictics of meaning. People are running away from monolithic life. We want work and play.Work and play. We don’t get that with fascism. It’s all one thing.
C’mon people, the sun is shining
the wind is blowing.
C’mon people, the children are playing
the song is singing.
C’mon people and play!
Hear the melody and
feel the rhythm,
there’s nothing you’ve missed
that’s going to get away.
Unless you don’t play.
C’mon and play.
Play, play and play.
C’mon and play.
I was thinking that Fairport Convention would have covered it but I searched and couldn’t find that they did.
Great tune. Great lyrics.
That first version reminds me of Fairport Convention’s cover of Tam Lin
Thanks!
It seems to me that perhaps the most likely explanation for Heist’s behavior lies in the circumstances she faced.
Regardless of how amicable, she faced divorce, economic difficulties and the parental responsibility of two young children to raise. As the divorce was amicable, we can assume she would have had the primary parental custody. She relates that she was emotionally distressed enough to go to a park and had been crying, when the homeless trio approached her and offered her a way out…
Personally, I doubt that mental illness entered into the equation.
She abandoned her children and threw the entire parental responsibility upon the father. I suspect she felt overwhelmed and unable to cope and on the spur of the moment, fled from the responsibilities she faced. Once taken, that path could not easily be reversed when distance brought home what she had done.
The continued homelessness sounds like self-punishment.
As to what made her finally identify herself to authorities and come back, I suspect that her youngest now being 18 and legally an adult was a major factor.
From the book discovered in the wall of the temple titled “Anatomy of an Adult” and also known as “Life Eternal, A King’s farewell.”
Diana,
I have missed our love since you began to love me. Too much has been too little. I don’t know what you want, but I sense it’s my life and not my love.
Call it smothering, but baby, it’s not good anymore. We’re finished, we both know that. You can’t even sing our song anymore.
So I gotta let you go, Diana. You’ll find your way home. Go now, in extremes and tortures find yourself. It takes pain to heal the matrix. You must go to ground; I cannot heal you.
What care I?
Enough to demand you go. And it hurts beyond earth, but here you cannot heal. I could not watch what must happen.
So go. And in another time and another place, we will meet again. And I too, will have known pain.
My grandfather on my father’s side went away with a harvest crew in the fall of 1915 leaving his wife and three children behind. Two years later when nothing had been heard of his whereabouts, he was officially declared dead and my grandmother officially became a widow. She soon remarried and had a long, successful marriage that included two more children.
His three children, my father among them, felt deep loss from that abandonment. A loss that they never really came to terms with.
In 1978 a letter turned up that my grandfather had written to his sister some years earlier. He had been living in Milwaukee, but said he was very ill and going to California to die. He gave no reason why he had disappeared. The sister didn’t reveal the letter to anyone. It was found in her papers when she died and sent to my father’s older sister.
When I learned of the letter, I remember feeling both angry and mystified. I was angry because the abandonment had affected my father in a negative way, which had, in turn, affected me. Mystified because my father’s mother was an angel of a woman that any man should have been thankful to have as a wife.
These kinds of stories are riddles wrapped in enigmas. The reasons for such actions are elusive. But the damage from abandonment is deep and cruel. I can understand why the song induces a cold chill, neo.
J.J.: what a sad story. Events like that can reverberate down through the generations.
Oops. Make that” …and despicable behaviors like this, in all areas of life, are becoming more and more common.”
J.J.,
I lost my mother when I was six and thus know from personal experience the damage that results. I can’t agree however that generally explanations are illusive. Barring mental illness and circumstance beyond their control, generally it amounts to the immaturity and selfish narcissism that places self above offspring.
There’s no substitute for healthy, loving, fully committed to each other parents, who raise their children with the proper mix of unconditional love and the discipline that holds children accountable to principled behavior.
The current state and trends within our country undeniably testifies both to that conclusion and demonstrates the societal results that arise from abandonment of what once was the most common sense of child-raising assertions.
48 Percent of First Children Born to Unwed Mothers
raising a generation of deluded narcissists
“A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.”
That entitlement mentality can be counted upon to find an external circumstance to blame, rather than accept personal responsibility, when ‘the real world’ does not support their illusions.
“Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.”
Geoffrey Britain: I think it’s more than narcissism. Plenty of people are narcissists who don’t go anywhere near this far. Another odd thing about this story is that the woman had given no hint beforehand of narcissism, apparently; she was described as having been an involved and loving parent before her disappearance.
neo,
Oh I agree, there’s more involved than just narcissism (I’m suggesting it as a common factor) and it’s certainly possible that an undiagnosed mental condition was responsible for her behavior.
Mentally stable, ‘involved and loving parents’ however, do not normally abandon their children. In fact, the more involved and loving the parent, the less narcissistic the parent and, the less likely that abandonment would even be possible, yes?
Anyone can feel overwhelmed and incapable of coping with a situation. Perhaps it was her way of forcing the father to take the responsibility she couldn’t handle. Perhaps it just as simple as choosing to flee.
If so, she had to know, at least on a subconscious level, the emotional impact abandoning her children would result in and thus the self-punishment.
So I have to wonder as to the depth of her involvement and love and most of all, her character. Character, being doing the right thing when it will cost us to do so.
Take character out of the equation and you’re left with “oh well, I just couldn’t handle it and it sucks to be you”… “sorry about that” just doesn’t cut it.
Is what is going on more than normal?
Can it be good vs evil?
You incredibly barnacled and fossilized human.
Wake up.
The unseen coffins are pounding your conscience. Please, I beg you, be silent and listen.
Wake up. Please. Wake up.
Worship the state (Obama) or worship something else. But you will worship. As Bob Dylan says, “you gonna serve somebody.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXCoHxX1OC8
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXCoHxX1OC8
Like it or not, it’s who we is. (Unless you have a different definition of what is is. See. See how that kind of illustrates things.)
The Muslims express it?
In other words, “Who among the Muslim authorities will “celebrate” homosexuality?
Better find what are your finds are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OvVd3VH3f4
An interesting case: so many people seem to disappear without a trace every year. It’s good to hear not all the cases are necessarily sinister.
I don’t claim any expertise on the subject, but to me the case appears very clear cut.
Assuming she had no existing mental disease, I would guess that Brenda Heist was happily married, and in a “perfect” world — a view her husband didn’t share. She likely utterly lacked the situational awareness to see a problem, and was totally blindsided by the divorce. Most likely her self-image was of a (near) perfect wife/mother in a (near) perfect family and marriage.
It’s a safe bet she was house-proud, a loyal wife and a good mother, clear in her views of what her purpose in life was, and happy the she was achieving that purpose. She probably lived as an extension of her husband, rather than as her own individual — something she saw as appropriate in her wifely role, and something he may have liked at first, but which over time simply became a drag. My guess would be her husband (assuming her was a decent enough guy) drifted away from the over-organisation and standardisation of his life, and the clinginess of his wife, and wanted to be with someone with a little more spontaneity and independent personality. Not saying he was right and she wrong — he may have been an ass to not have appreciated having such a great wife — just saying at that point in time, their perceptions of the marriage were likely completely polarised, but only he was aware of that.
She was probably utterly blindsided the divorce and the challenges and change of life that entailed, and was mentally was unable to cope. Maybe it was an extreme form of cognitive dissonance, maybe a mental breakdown, or shock — a psychologist could describe it better — whatever the correct descriptor, in simple terms, she wasn’t of sound mind.
At a low point, alone on a park bench, trying to find a way to even think about how her hitherto “perfect” world was so abruptly ending, along came an apparently friendly enough group of people with a lifestyle pretty much the exact opposite of hers. On a complete spur of the moment choice, in a state of mind that was not rational (basically it was some form of temporary insanity), she made the decision to go.
And having made that choice, she stayed. Whether this was because she went into a state on extended “temporary” insanity, a mental breakdown that stayed broken, or because of shame and self-loathing at how low she had fallen, possibility a continued resentment that her family had turned against her — I see these all as variations of the same thing: a form of insanity where the person, having entered a rut, cannot exit on their own.
Whatever the actual facts, and whether my guesses and close or wide of the mark, it strikes me of a sad story of a person who simply could not cope with a harsh reality, and who retreated to an escape-ist/fantasy world to avoid dealing with it. She just happened to be unlucky (or lucky — depending on how you look at it) that her fantasy world was one she could actually sustain for many years — most would have been found wandering in a mental fog and taken to hospital.
We can criticise her for not being able to cope, and for running away — most people don’t do this. Different people however have different breaking points. Brenda strikes me as someone strong in one sense in that she likely had firm, clear beliefs, and lived by them. But it was a brittle strength, offering no resilience or ability to adapt. She was sort of a one-trick pony in her lifestyle: fine as long as that paradigm existed, and utterly lost when it changed. Everyone may have their breaking point, but for some it comes way earlier than others. Ironically she then went on to apparently thrive in a lifestyle most of us would recoil from — but it was a lifestyle devoid of responsibility and duty; existing rather than living.
MBE,
Very plausible and, unquestionably for the kids a tragic story. You do though leave one aspect unmentioned; why did she ‘awaken’ 10 years later, rather than say 8 or 15 years later and did the fact that her youngest had just turned 18 play a part in that ‘awakening’? At best, quite a coincidence.
I suspect that 10 yr mark to be significant and if so, then something a bit deeper is going on. It seems to me that it becomes less a case of inability to cope and more escapism, conveniently put aside, when safe to do so.
11 years?! I can somewhat understand her having a moment of desperation or depression or temporary insanity that led to her bailing on her family and trailing off to Florida to live what at least started out to be a completely responsibility-free life. But I can’t fathom spending over a decade pretending–literally telling other people–she had no living children.
It would almost be better if she’d never resurfaced. Now her children have to deal with the knowledge that their mother was both willing and able to ignore their very existence for over a decade.
Talk about emotional damage.
randomthoughts,
Shame and guilt over abandoning her children may have been so severe that she felt that she simply couldn’t face them. But if so, that too places self above her children’s welfare, which makes me wonder how involved and loving she truly was prior to the divorce.
I suspect that MBE’s analysis is not far off the mark in that her love and involvement had more to do with her own self image and self-worth than actually seeing her children as separate human beings deserving of her love, loyalty and commitment.
Would that be The Fireside Book of Folk Songs? I grew up on it, and my Father’s copy is now in my desk draw.
If it is, the Lady there is exonerated of child abandonment, as she is described as newly wedded.
Caedmon: bingo.
Oh good. That book was so formative to my own imagination that before you mentioned the Wraggle Taggle Gypsies the same thought had occurred to me.
When she was a little girl, one of my sisters decided to herself that the reason the lady ran off is that she was a secret gypsy – which is sweet and romantic interpretation.