Part 8- The Final chapter

One of the things I had wanted to do when I came back from LA was to help Sam (Sam= John Boucher in this post.) I wasn’t ready to give up on the marriage. I had been in love with him once, possibly still loved him; he had given me three fine children and we had spent over 20 years together. It was kind of hard to give up on all of that. So I tried to help.

I sent him to the local org…there he was told he had to take the PTS/SP course….that’s the way Scn handles anyone with mental problems…they label them Potential Trouble Sources. It’s a good label, because that is what they are, but it doesn’t help them.

Sam hated the course and he blew. He refused to go back. There was no one at the org Sam respected and no one that could get him to agree to take the course. I had come to the conclusion that maybe Sam was right and it wasn’t the course for him. So I concentrated harder on getting him to LA.

We finally got him out there. It was now much later than I had planned. Many things had happened that we didn’t know about…the most critical being the death of Lisa McPherson and the effects it caused.

Sam’s family history became an issue. Sam’s mother had worked for the CIA briefly when she had been younger –well over 40 years before. But, it might as well been present time. Sam was denied auditing because HCO and OSA considered him a security risk. Sam was devastated.

He called me from LA when he was told he would have to petition. He was angry. He felt betrayed. He had given Scn over 30 years; he had gone to Portland when he was asked; he had helped in Washington D.C. when asked; he had supported the IAS to the point of jeopardizing our family’s needs; and still, they said he was a risk. Scn demands a great deal of allegiance and gives none in return.

I was angry, too. I felt the same way I had when we blew staff almost 30 years before. If he had said we were walking away, I wouldn’t have argued.

His petition cycle was a joke from day one. The first petition was written without Sam being shown references and then it was lost by ASHO’s MAA. Sam thought he was new on post, very scared about doing the cycle with Sam and much younger than Sam.

The second petition was sent via our local org and OSA---it took months before it was acknowledged and then months to get an answer.

The letter came from the Snr C/S office around the holidays. It said before they could really decide if Sam could have auditing, Sam needed a PDH check. Sam took it like a punch to the gut. He was in shock. COS thought he had been PDH?

I believe that is when Sam lost it, although it would be weeks before it was apparent to even the most naive. Sam was probably clinically depressed long before this, but this put him over the edge.

One of my sons remembers an argument that woke him one morning. Sam and I were in the kitchen and I was screaming at him to at least think of me and the kids—didn’t we mean anything to him?. Sam had just handed me all the money in his wallet saying, “Here, you are going to need this more than Iwill.” I couldn’t even bring myself to say the word, let alone ask him what he meant…I knew.
I got him to promise not hurt himself that day and then went inside and called the org.

Sam went because he really wanted help…he was desparate for it. He did conditions and sounded better at one point until he reach Doubt. Then he stalled. This is called “Hang-up at Doubt” and is handled by PTS handling—which Sam couldn’t receive fully because the interview is an auditing action and he couldn’t be audited in an org.

But, I think he had finished his Doubt formula, he just didn’t have the guts to tell the MAA or me what he had decided.

In the end it took 127 days for sam to implement his final step of his Doubt formula. It was a waking nightmare. Sam was a corpse, walking around the house, but not really alive. He said once that he didn’t want to help me stack the firewood because there were “Martians out there.” I wasn’t sure he was joking. He was on a PAB 6 handling…his parents moved in to help me for a few weeks. I started looking for work…hard to do in a small town and disabled, but I looked anyway. The boys were gone—at school and only Samantha was at home. We kept an eye on Sam….

Sam tried to go back to work, but lasted only two weeks before being fired. I cashed in IRAs, CDs and other savings so we could continue to pay our bills and to give a semblance of normalcy, but nothing was normal and it wouldn’t be normal again for a very long time.

Approximately 127 days after that first visit to the org and doing Conditions, Samantha and I took a day off and went to the Spring Carnival outside of a nearby town. We were gone all day. When we came back the house was empty.

I thought Sam had left us…just walked away, abandoning us. I reported this to the police. Friends of ours and Samantha went looking for him. We found him six hours later.

Sam (John) had hung himself in the barn behind our house.