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A VICTIM OF GOODWILL

The Good Samaritans Became Furies Pursuing an Old Lady

The end , the very end of the Mary Northern story, came May 1 when the 72-year-old woman died in General Hospital, Nashville, Tenn.

The autopsy says she died of a blood clot. The doctors' report intimates that if she had not resisted treatment, including amputation, she might be alive today.

But her epitaph says something else. It was written more than 100 years ago by Charles Dickens, who ruefully observed: "It's a remarkable Christian improvement to have made a pursuing Fury out of the Good Samaritan, but it was so in this case and it is a type of many."

Miss Northern spent the last three and a half months of her life pursued by this Fury, harassed by Benevolence, a victim of Goodwill.

It was caring people, our public Good Samaritans, who chased her, all the while bewildered, because she didn't want their "help."

It was social workers who came into her ramshackle, unheated home in January, genuinely worried about her health.

(Continuation of another column)

when caring is helpful and when caring is coercive.

As Willar Gaylin writes in"Doing Good": "We can degrade people by caring for them and we can degrade people by not caring for them, and in matters such as these there are neither simple answers nor simple solutions."

There is only the need for constant monitoring, tuning, to create the sort of social planning that neither ignores a neighbor's plea for help, nor looses the Furies on an unwilling victim like the late Mary Northern, of Nashville, Tennessee.