We hold out so much hope for them. They’re born innocent and perfect and we dream of them living charmed lives – prom queen, college coed, and the girl who meets Prince Charming to have two perfect children and live happily ever after. In most cases, that’s the impossible dream. Contemporary women more often than not are fending for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world where competition for good jobs is cutthroat and for the uneducated virtually impossible to find. The sad reality is that too frequently sisters find themselves in the unenviable position of having to trade self for material items and money for day-to-day survival.
It’s a tough and some may say a despicable way to live, but it’s a living — until it isn’t. Often, the circumstances that lead these tragic women to “the life” are also the sources of their demise. Physical and sexual abuse, drugs, poverty and a general lack of resources and options can mean that putting themselves in harm’s way is just an occupational hazard. Women of the night, working girls, and prostitutes spend long nights on rough streets, sometimes performing for their “Johns” and tricks in cars, alleyways and abandoned buildings. On a visit to the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office some months back, I met one such woman. We’ll call her Jane — Jane Doe, in fact, because she was already dead and in the morgue, the victim of the elements she encountered in her struggle to survive.
Jane Doe was lying on a steel gurney in Detroit’s morgue. She was covered from head to toe — well nearly head to toe — with a white sheet. I was able to determine that the corpse was that of a woman by the foot that was exposed and hanging just below the sheet. I didn’t have to read her toe tag or anything like that; there was fire engine red nail polish on the toenails of her small size six, left foot. Judging from the silhouette of the body where the sheet lay in the nook and crannies, she was a small woman, frail even. I asked the coroner why she was in this room alone and not in a body bag in the refrigerated room along with the other unclaimed corpses. He explained that he was waiting for her body to thaw out. She was found huddled in the back corner of an apartment in an abandoned building on Detroit’s eastside — apparently attempting to take shelter from the bitter cold of winter. She was on day three of the thawing process and the coroner explained it could take a day or two longer, since you can’t rush the process of thawing out the dead. –roz edward
Check back tomorrow for step-by-step recommendations to safeguard your daughters.
