文章基本信息

标题：Traumatic loss in low-income communities of color
本地全文：下载
作者：Sandra Susan Smith
期刊名称：Focus
印刷版ISSN：0195-5705
出版年度：2014
卷号：31
期号：1
出版社：Institute for Research on Poverty
摘要：“Keith Wiggins,” a 28-year-old lifelong resident of one of San Francisco’s poorest and historically most violent neighborhoods, had experienced an inconceivable amount of loss. The loss primarily came with the early and violent deaths of people he loved and admired, but its face took many forms. First, when Keith was a boy, his young grandmother died in her sleep from a heart attack. Though he was heartbroken by her death, it would probably be the least traumatic loss he would suffer.1 Several years later, during early adolescence, he lost three friends to gang violence; he showed me where, in the middle of a neighborhood street, a close friend was shot in the back of the head assassination-style by a rival gang member. Then at sixteen, Keith lost his sister, two years his junior and his best friend, from complications associated with cerebral palsy. He wept as he described her passing as if it had occurred 12 days, not 12 years, before. And then at age 19, Keith lost a close cousin. They were essentially raised together, and so the two boys considered each other brothers more than cousins. The cousin died in his sleep from a drug overdose; he was barely out of his teens. And then he lost his mother—or so he thought. After grieving her loss for four months, Keith discovered that she was living just a few towns south of San Francisco, having conspired with another of Keith’s sisters to fake her own death and leave her old life behind.2