She came. She saw. She failed.

 
She tried hard, she thinks, to juggle life’s jellyfish: American middle-class corporate entity turned stay-at-home mom.  Autistic child. Too much stuff. Unresolved emotional issues. Overbearing future ex-husband. Money problems. Ever-present sparkly physical pain–and, obviously, pain meds. Alcohol. More pain meds (“Hey, a DOCTOR prescribed them.”) and inevitably, pain meds WITH alcohol.

Just one of the REAL housewives of New Jersey . . . until the World Trade Center blew up while Future Ex-husband was standing outside smoking a cigarette.  The jellyfish hit the ground hard. Lost the house, the car, the college funds, the retirement plans, the health insurance, the friends — and all pretense of sanity.

She wakes up four years later, in the looney bin at Trinitas Hospital in Elizabeth, New Jersey next to a screaming geriatric paitent strapped to a gurney. 

She is now reconsidering her life.