April Diamanka, 32, who is white, is raising her three-year-old daughter alone. Her daughter’s father is an alcoholic, she told me, and he lives in a different city and doesn’t contribute to the family. Diamanka told me that her two best friends are also raising children alone in Chillicothe—one woman’s husband got deported, the other woman’s husband is in jail. “Money-wise, it’s hard to do it on your own,” she told me. Finding a new partner isn’t possible, she said, at least in Chillicothe. “A lot of people here are on drugs and I don’t want that in my life,” she said.
But even for the women who make enough to support their families, living without a partner can be a nightmare. Kemper-Hermann says she never expected that her husband, Jason, would die of a heroin overdose. He would have periods during which he was sober—Kemper-Hermann refused to marry him until he had been sober for a year. But then he’d relapse, and disappear for days on end, losing his job and blowing their money. She kept working, because she knew his income wasn’t reliable. “It was always in the back of my mind—I have to make sure things are okay and I can pay the bills, because I don’t know if he’s going to bring his next paycheck home or go somewhere with it,” she told me.
Her husband used to joke that he lived like a rock star, Kemper-Hermann told me, which meant she was constantly worrying about him getting into trouble—she would watch news reports about bank robberies and hope the culprit wasn’t her husband. “One of the hardest things was not having the emotional support—not knowing what I was coming home to,” she told me.
Jason was three months sober when he died. The couple had just had entered into a contract on a new house, but Kemper-Hermann had to pull out of the deal because she couldn’t afford it on her income alone. She and her daughter instead moved in with her parents.
Now, the two live on their own, but Kemper-Hermann’s daughter is about to graduate high school and move to Columbus. Kemper-Hermann is trying to find a new life, using her grief to get more involved in prevention efforts. She started a local chapter of a group, Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing, for people who have lost a loved one to overdoses, and counsels other people who have lost someone. It doesn’t, she says, make it any easier to know that she’s not the only woman who has found herself alone.
Article Appeared @https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/men-women-rust-belt/525888/