Mother of 8 Takes Her Life : For Devastated Divorcee, Firing Was Final Failure

For more than 30 years, Esther Gaudet’s life revolved around loads of laundry, family dinners, shopping, the chores of a housewife with eight children.

Then it fell apart. Divorce was followed by failure at a new job. A month ago she was fired and dropped from sight. This week a body believed to be Gaudet’s was found in her car on a Chatsworth street. Investigators said she apparently had taken her own life.

“Before the divorce, she was just a wonderful person--really nice, always giving,” said Lisa Gaudet, 23, one of four Gaudet children who were living with their mother in San Fernando.

Last year, Gaudet’s husband left her for someone a decade younger. Battling depression and in the work force for the first time since she had married, Gaudet, 52, got a clerical job in a clothing factory. She was laid off several months later, her children said.

Didn’t Mention Firing

She next went to work in the credit department of a Van Nuys lumber company. On Dec. 6, after several warnings, she was fired because she couldn’t do the work.

Gaudet didn’t tell her children. They learned about it the next day when they called the company because she hadn’t come home.

Her children, aged 17 to 32, notified police and searched for their mother, calling friends, relatives and hospitals.

“The whole family was united in its efforts to find her,” San Fernando Detective Ernie Halcon said.

About 10:30 p.m. Sunday a Los Angeles police officer broke into the car after seeing it parked for several weeks on Plummer Street at Variel Avenue. He found the body inside.

Gaudet apparently had driven there, spread lighter fluid inside her car and lit a match. The fire burned parts of her body and she apparently suffocated, Los Angeles Detective Wayne Newton said.

Lisa Gaudet said her parents were divorced in November after 31 years of marriage. She said her father has remarried, but the children planned to keep that from their mother until after the holidays.

Gaudet’s son Andy, 22, said his mother got the house and an “adequate” settlement in the divorce. He said his mother was working so she could get out of the house, not out of financial necessity.

Tried Suicide Before

Within weeks of the separation, Gaudet tried to commit suicide by taking pain killers and alcohol. “After that she told us she would never do it again,” Lisa Gaudet said. At the urging of her children, she briefly sought counseling but said it didn’t help.

“She was just so tired all the time, never wanted to do anything,” Lisa Gaudet said. “She’d never even get up and go to bed. She’d just sit there and doze with the TV on.”

On her last job, at Chandler Lumber Co. in Van Nuys, she had problems. She couldn’t master the telephone system and would disconnect customers she was trying to put on hold or transfer, company credit manager Gary Weis said. When asked for a document, she sometimes got mixed up and brought the wrong one, Weis said.

He said he gave Gaudet several warnings before discharging her. She left seeming “very much in control of herself,” Weis said.

Homemakers who are divorced after years of marriage suffer tremendous problems, typically experiencing a long period of trauma, intense depression and guilt, said Laurie Shields, co-founder of the national Older Woman’s League.

OWL is a 5-year-old group that advocates better housing, health care and other services for middle-aged and older women. The group has 14,000 members in 103 chapters nationwide, Shields said.

Most women of Gaudet’s era “were brought up with the idea that you got married and believed the saying ‘till death do us part,’ ” said Shields, an Oakland resident who wrote the book “Displaced Homemakers: Organizing for a New Life.”

“Society changed. Mores changed. . . . Some of us wound up being dumped for a younger woman. The older woman whose husband divorces her for another woman thinks, ‘It’s my fault. Why didn’t I keep in shape? How am I going to take care of the kids? How am I going to do this alone?’ ”

Out of Equilibrium

Many women never recover their emotional or economic equilibrium, Shields said.

“Mind you, there’s the other side of the coin,” she said. “There are some older women who go through this process and hang on and realize it’s the best thing that could ever have happened to them, and they go on to lead good, independent lives.

“There will be the few who end up five years down the line saying ‘I was better off.’ But unless the woman initiated the divorce or it was mutually initiated, I’m not sure they ever recover.”

Lisa Gaudet said her mother’s dismissal was probably the last straw.

“She used to always tell me what a failure she was, and when she got fired I think that was it,” her daughter said. “She just must have been really devastated, so desperate.”