Woman Who Set Husband on Fire May Be Victim Too

I suspect that more than a few people were surprised by their reaction to the Santa Ana woman who doused her cancer-stricken husband with rubbing alcohol and then set him on fire. And all because he ate one of her chocolates.

It sounds on the surface like the kind of story that would make you want to send the perpetrator to the gallows.

Instead, you felt kind of sorry for her, didn’t you?

I don’t know if June Carter has a legal leg to stand on as she awaits a meeting today with her court-appointed public defender, but I have a strong hunch that this case is about much more than her paying her husband back for eating her candy.

Admittedly, there’s some reading between the lines necessary here. Maybe June Carter, who’s been charged with attempted murder and two related felonies and is still in jail, will be shown to be the cruelest woman since Lucretia Borgia.

Or maybe, as I suspect, she’ll be shown to be a woman crying out for help.

June Carter, 68, told police that her husband, Paul, has been sick the last four years. She’s been taking care of him, by herself, in their home.

No matter what the wedding vows say about “in sickness and health,” providing nursing care for a critically sick spouse is beyond the powers and patience of the average person.

That’s why when Bettylou Schauer heard about the incident, she didn’t rush to judgment about the horrors of what June Carter allegedly did.

Schauer is the director of volunteers and the bereavement coordinator for the Hospital Home Health Care Agency in Fullerton. Last year, the agency got 2,770 calls from people who either had a terminally ill patient whom they wanted to keep in their home or an elderly patient who was not necessarily near death. In many cases, Schauer said, the callers “were just about ready to break.”

Anyone who has an elderly relative in the throes of seriously declining health knows the toll he or she can take on the rest of the family. Our instinct is to want to take care of the relative, but the reality often becomes that we’re not capable of it.

“Most women aren’t even ready for their husbands who are going to retire and be home all day,” Schauer said. “Then when they get ill, they (the wives) are feeling guilty if they go out and leave them home alone. Then the other spouse feels bad because he knows his wife feels awful and they blame each other and it’s like a ball bouncing back and forth.”

Schauer didn’t want to discuss the Carter case, but I asked her if the chocolate incident sounded familiar from other experiences. Sadly, it did. “It seems so trite and yet it probably was one of the only treats she had for herself, and she probably has felt that for a long time she has had nothing, that he gets all the attention. She’s just there to be the servant, and it’s very difficult. I think after you work with cases like this, then when you pick up the papers and see someone pushed someone down the stairs, you can’t judge them unless you’ve lived in their situation.”

The Carter story wasn’t a shock to Peggy Weatherspoon, either. She’s the director of the county-run Area Agency on Aging. “We see it (cases like that) more just in exasperation, frustration, burnout and tearfulness,” Weatherspoon said, especially with relatives of Alzheimer’s patients.

I asked her if it’s the average person’s inability to provide home care that leads to disasters. “I don’t think it’s an inability,” she said. “It’s an accumulation of stress and accumulation of responsibility, with no relief or respite from it. Anyone of us can do anything for 24 or 48 hours, but to do something day in and day out 36 hours a day, it begins to wear down the natural ability we have to cope with difficult situations. And when we never get relief or respite, finally you get to the breaking point.”

Weatherspoon said she guesses that lots of Orange County families understand all too well the Carter situation. Twenty-one percent of the county’s elderly population have at least one chronic disability, she said, and 8% are homebound or shut-ins.

In human terms, that means that thousands of people not trained or skilled in providing care are somehow trying to do it for the people they love the most--and for the people who frustrate them the most. It surely means that there are lots of frazzled nerves out there.

We all sympathize with the infirm. Their hell seldom goes away.

But in sympathizing with their plight, we--and prosecutors--should also reflect on the private hells in which spouses of the chronically ill often live.

They, too, are victims of a cruel fate.