There was a death in the family yesterday

[Jenne]

...my husband's family, in Aghanistan. Kabul, to be exact.

Now, it wasn't what you and I would jump to believe, knowing what we all now know about Afghanistan (and wasn't readily or easily known before 9/11/01). There was no roadside bomb. No suicide jihadist mission. No public square hanging for not wearing a burkah the right shade of color.

None of that.

Instead, there was a lonely, desperate 21 year old mother of 2 who killed herself with rat poison. After surviving the Talibs, and civil war, this woman's life was so awful, that she ingested rat poison so that she can no longer life in this plane of existence. She was my husband's mother's niece. His cousin.

We have a digital video of her from when my husband was in Afghanistan visiting her last year in May. She's usually off-camera, though. Somehow, she manages to not be in the shot more often than not, even though the whole family is gathered on the floor around a glossy mat, with food and drink all over the place.

Apparently, she was being abused and beaten by her in-laws. To the point where her brothers, one of them a powerful police chief for the new Afghan government, had taken her from her husbands' family's home and removed her to Kabul. But this, apparently, had not been enough, and they are now at her funeral, mourning the loss of this one young and desperate life.

Depression is rife in Afghanistan. Years of being shut away behind closed doors with curtains on the windows so that passersby cannot look in, and continued use of burkahs in public, as well as other factors that make it really difficult to be a woman in Afghanistan has brought about a nationwide suicide epidemic. It's getting better, but there are some societal ills, like in-law abuse (you wouldn't believe how rife it is...I know at least 4 or 5 different stories telling the same exact tale just in my husband's family alone).

Basically, for those who don't know, when the woman marries into the husband's family, she leaves her own family for good. She is not to return. To return to her family's protection is a shame brought upon her people who raised her. Essentially, she is the property of her husband, and any children she has by said husband are retained as the husband's family's property as well.

So this cousin of my husband's, though she had two strong, strapping brothers to help her, she really had her hands tied in a lot of ways. Her only support was her brothers, but the abuse had set in, along with the depression, far along enough that she had to take her own life, leaving her children to the mercies of their father's abusive family.

Now, this situation isn't particularly juicy in terms of newsworthiness. It's sort of a blip on the radar. I had to watch my sons' fish that we'd kept as a pet for the last 4 years die its last breath two days ago, and I have to say that incident, watching my sons cry and get upset over losing one of their only two pets, probably affected me more than the news of this woman's tragic demise.

However, it affected me enough to want to share it here...however unworthy it might be to read and ponder. It points to a lot of obvious problems in this woman's subculture, such as treatment of women, lack of medical resources for depression, etc. etc. But it also points to a funky aspect of the human condition. I know that I, myself, might be dead by my own hand if it weren't for my own two children.

And so I have to wonder at what this woman had been through, that ending her life through such pitiful and desperate means, would bring her to such a pass. Even with so much to look forward to, so much survival behind her, and the luck of having family willing to support her and help her out, against convention though that may be.