Army Doc’s Fiancée Suicide Doesn’t End In Tragedy For All

Research Community Helps To Turn Tragedy Into Hope

A Farmhouse Suicide Of Fiancee Doesn’t End Hope Of Reviving Family Farm For A Woman Who Gave Her Medical Career To The US Army.

Story Of Hope Lost, And Hope Regained.

A 101st Airborne Doctor Returns To Her Family Farm In Michigan To Fulfill Her Father’s Wish, Only To Face To Suicide Of Her Fiancée.

Set on a 73-acre farm in the central Michigan town of Albion, a woman in her late 40’s, returned home to her family farm after attaining her medical degree, becoming a Captain in the US Army, going to the front in Kosovo at Camp Bondsteel during the Yugoslav NATO wars, conducting a practice in emergency medicine, and then building a success then building a successful clinical practice in Texas after leaving the US Army.

“KarmaDoc” attached to Airborne Assault group of 101st Infantry Special Forces.

The woman Army doctor, let’s call her ER KarmaDoc, had but one regret after a successful medical career in the far-flung, war-torn nations of the former Yugoslavia.

Her Father’s dying wish was that ER KarmaDoc keep the farm in the family, and Father want his legacy farm to be worked by the hands of his flesh and blood. Father, let’s just call him Father, for now, was a muscular millwright before taming this swath of American Gothic farmscape.

Father had a love for big machines that could force multiply his broad shoulders and walnut-cracking biceps. He took his tenacity for fashion order out of raw steel to the rich, black earth of Albion, investing in gutsy tractors and farm vehicles to maximize his daily dominion over his blessed plot.

Our woman Army doctor, ER KarmaDoc, busy with her medical practice in Texas, planned to return to the earth of Michigan to requite her father’s wish for a legacy family farm, but her practice demanded long hours with emergency response in Texas.

“KarmaDoc” specialized in Emergency Medicine

Mother, let’s just call her Mother, for now, tend to all other things of the farm, especially her garden. In my three days here on the Albion farm, all the friends and family that knew her spoke of Mother’s love for her giant garden, and the giant, luscious vegetables that came out of it.

Mother was the envy of Albion, and everyone who has spoken of both Mother and Father has invoked hushed tones of reverence and respect for the pristine conditions and orderliness of their farm, always being somewhere between amazement and envy.

Mother died of ovarian cancer in 2011, and Father passed the following year, but not before repeating his desire to his Army Doc daughter to keep the farm in the family. The Army Doc angled away at her schedule and medical practice to create an opening for her to return to the farm to work the land, but nature’s entropy quickly devoured the absences of Mother and Father.

Our Army Doc, ER KarmaDoc we called her, had seen her sister die at fourteen years old after a vaccination, literally in front of her eyes. Her brother had followed her ill-fated sister into death a few years beyond that tragedy. Only one brother remained to fulfill Father’s last requiem, and his relationship with Father and Mother had become strained.

Whether out of a desire to rebuild the idyllic relationship of her parents or simply love or a combination of both, our Army Doc began a relationship with a Marine’s Son, let’s just leave it at that, a Marine’s Son, a man in his early forties, who had lived in a nearby town. The Marine Son had rebuffed his father's discipline in some manner that is not clear as of yet to me, descending into a depression of alcohol and moodiness.

KarmaDoc here in Kosovo

Our Army Doc, perhaps seeing the promise in the father, the Marine, the discipline driver, that begat the Son, decided to enter into a three-year effort to rehabilitate the Marine’s Son. All hope of that ended near the Fourth of July, a few days ago, with two shots, with the Marine’s Son suiciding himself after a night of drunken pistol waving at the Army Doc and threats.

Army doctors are trained to respond to tragedy, not shrink from it. But in the year the Marine’s Son had lived in the farmhouse, the conditions of the farm had accelerated into disrepair. I arrived two days after the suicide, and I must admit, the situation at the farm seemed quite overwhelming.

All the wishes and dreams of Mother and Father seemed to be hauntingly echoed as a Satan mocked them in the waist-high grass of overgrowth.

But volunteers came from the neighboring States of Ohio, Illinois, and from as Virginia, and Florida, as well as a hefty hank of Michiganders with skills in all things mechanical. And after a few days of flailing and scything, gradually the overgrowth of pain gave way to the signs of life and sparkles of lawn art that the Army Doc had created on her sojourns from Texas to the Michigan Farm. The Michiganders got almost all the farm equipment running again after years of sitting idle year after year, enduring Michigan winters without shelter.

Somehow, over the droning engine of the Farmall tractor, I could hear Father’s applauses and whoops of approval.

Got the 3rd tractor running that had been started in fourteen years. This wasn’t going to be a story about lost hope.

A turn of sorts had been made from the despair of the suicide and decades of disrepair of the Farm.

The Army Doc also has the desire to resurrect another Michigan legacy lost to the COVID shutdowns - Neighborhood News, a new channel dedicated to training citizen Journalists. The founders of Neighborhood News, Aaron Adler, and Andy Dybala, were on hand to whack back six-foot weed stocks and adopt bobcat kittens that had taken up residence under the farmhouse as well.

Slowly, but surely now, hope is emerging from the tragic suicide. And perhaps, Father and Mother, get their wish.

An Illinois citizen journalist dubbed the project “Operation New Start”, and that name seems very fitting indeed.

Here KarmaDoc is setting post for the new Neighborhood News Studio deck.

I am glad to have been a small part of this story. We will bring more of this story as it develops.

At times, a new project helps take the mind away from tragic events of the past. KarmaDoc is hosting another news gathering event on her farm in Albion, Michigan on August 19th-23rdon a request for invitation basis.

After five days working here on the farm, cleaning up the disheveled and dilapidated state of the KarmaDoc farm, I have learned more about the couple I call Mother and Father in this story. I am more convinced than ever that I have portrayed them correctly, as well as my portrayal of KarmaDoc. She was an M-16 toting, front line doctor in Kosovo.

KarmaDoc currents sports a .50 caliber machine gun weighing 35 pounds if you thought I exaggerated the case. I will continue to verify this story as my farm work there continues. I verified the weight of the machine gun. It is quite heavy, even for a man.

We have been able to build a deck for the new Neighborhood News studio as well as getting most of the farm equipment running.

George Webb with Andy Dybala, a founder of Neighborhood News at the new home of NNS.

Getting the front end loader going will help KarmaDoc tame her farm.

We have even put in a few days of getting a tractor started that hasn’t run in twelve years since Father died. KarmaDoc even had me pose for my “Lee Harvey Oswald” shot that the FBI will use to prove I am a Cherokee or White Supremacist, depending in if Elizabeth Warren is up for re-election.

Running a farm with live animals in Michigan while commuting to her medical practice in Texas is KarmaDoc’s latest challenge.