No memorial service will be held out of respect for her final wishes. Posted on 05/15/2003 2:23:37 PM PDT by Tulsa Brian
Nationally-syndicated columnist Linda Bowles died April 30 at Merced-area hospital after she committed suicide, the Paradise Post learned yesterday.
No memorial service will be held out of respect for her final wishes.
Bowles, 51, whose column appeared in the Chico Enterprise-Record, the Houston Post, Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, Arkansas Democ-rat-Gazette and WorldNetDaily.com, reportedly never recovered from the loss of her husband Warren. She also appeared on and was a frequent guest host for Liveline with Bruce Ses-sions show on KPAY.
In a statement released by her only daughter Mi-chelle Bowles early Wednes-day night she said, "The coroner's re-port will tell you she purposely overdosed on antidepressants. The reality is she died due to complications of the heart."
"To say she had a weak or failed heart would be untrue," the statement continued. "To say she suffered from a broken heart would be an understatement."
John Arguelles, a deputy in the Merced County Coroners office said Bowles' death is still under investigation.
"We haven't completed our investigation and we haven't ruled on the manner of death," Arguelles said.
County officials say that toxicology reports will come back in four weeks.
Her death comes nearly a year after her husband, Warren, died of an inoperable brain tumor. The illness forced Bowles to discontinue her column for Creative Syndicate on Feb. 25, 2002.
In her column that appeared on WorldNetDaily she told readers "This may very well be the last column I will write … I can't see beyond the battle to the future."
Joseph Farah, the CEO and editor of WorldNetDaily, said yesterday Bowles' death was a loss and she never recovered from the death of her husband on May 31 of last year.
"She told me she couldn't live without him," he said. "I kept telling her that she could, just one day at a time. She was devastated by her loss and, frankly, never recovered emotionally from it."
Farah met Bowles when she was a columnist for the Sacramento Union.
"Linda Bowles was an unusually gifted writer," he said. "She had a way of reaching deep into people's souls with her use of the language. It was our honor at WorldNetDaily to carry her column until the day she suspended it due to the death of her husband."
Former Butte County Sheriff Scott MacKenzie said he met Bowles once at a political function and was impressed by her.
"She seemed to be a straight-forward, very sincere person," he said "who was an honest individual and who wrote exactly what she believed."
He called Bowles' death a "real tragedy and a real loss to those who read it and was a good conservative?"
Republican Assemblyman Rick Keene, who represents the Ridge, met with Bowles a few times for dinner and saw her give a couple of speeches.
"Every time she spoke, she spoke about how special her husband was," Keene said. "She adored him. It's very sad to hear and she was gracious person."
Keene said her columns were good for the political debate in the country.
"She stimulated good debate, pulling no punches and that is rare in this day and age," he said.
The company that syndicated her column to papers like Enterprise-Record, Creative Syndicate Inc., didn't know about Bowles' death until a reporter called Wednesday morning asking about it. No one at Creative Syndicate Inc had any comment yesterday.
Her columns also appeared at TownHall.com and for the Conservative Chronicle. A secretary for the Conservative Chronicle said she was unaware of Bowles' death, but had no further comment and TownHall didn't return phone calls yesterday.
Bowles began her writing career through a weekly political column in California's Mariposa Guide. This opened the door for a regular column in the now-defunct Sacramento Union n where Farah was an editor.
She also wrote, various self-syndicated and freelance articles for newspapers across the country until she met Creative Syndicate's Rick 051, through Farah. That led to that company's decision to offer her a"syndicate contract," which Farah said was "very unusual for a practically unknown writer."
She was known to enjoy irritating liberals, telling Townhall.com that "I believe a large audience awaits a good, thorough whacking of left-wing icons and ideology, done with parody and satire."
"To me, Linda was not only a gifted writer," Farah said. "She was my friend — a valued friend. I am feeling the loss today.""
RSilva@paradisepost.com
So sad.
Linda speaking of her late husband.
I guess folks hell-bent on suicide are only thinking of themselves; they're not thinking how their actions will affect those left behind.
A high school classmate of our oldest son killed himself halfway through their freshman year in college. He was an only child. As soon as I heard about it, I called our son and we talked about it for a while. I told him that there was never ANYTHING that was bothering him that he couldn't call or come home and talk to us about.
Suicide is a solution for the person who dies, but it creates even more horrific problems for those left behind, even when the reasons are seemingly understood by the survivors.
My parents had some old, old friends (the father was our family doctor) whose son committed suicide. It just came out of the blue - nobody ever knew why, we all racked our brains and could come up with no "warning signals", no hint that he was depressed. He apparently never confided in anyone.
But his suicide destroyed his family. His father quit his practice, his parents' marriage died as they questioned and worried and blamed each other, his sister struggled with long-term depression, his friends were devastated.
Suicide is never the answer, unless you want to destroy the lives of all the people you leave behind -- and that's a heavy karma for anybody to carry.
Suicidal people get blinders on. About two years ago I inadvertently stopped a friend from committing suicide and didn't even know it until she confessed to me much later, after she had received treatment and was back on an even keel. If she had gone through with it, I would have been scratching my head trying to figure out why.
I think that's why society for so many years had the strictest and most frightening condemnations of suicide that anyone could think of - no rites of the church, no burial in consecrated ground, property confiscated by the government. (And, incidentally, it was a comment to that effect, plus mentioning the idea that suicide is an act of hatred and rebellion against God as contempt for his creation, that dissuaded my friend from taking that fatal step.) The condemnation was not to be mean and hateful to the depressed, it was to discourage those folks thinking about it who never confide in anyone. Now that society is so much more secular, and suicide and even mercy killing are so much less condemned, I'm afraid we're going to see more and more of this.
I had a college prof that died in an accident. His widow never recovered. Everytime I saw her she looked like a wounded doe and she wouldn't let anyone approach her. She committed suicide about 18 months after he died, for the same reasons as Linda Bowles--she could not live without him.
This is so very sad. She must've been in a great deal of pain.
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