Here is a well written article by Geneen Roth on

“What I gained by losing in Madoff”

She articulately explains the feelings she struggled with while coping with the loss of a major part of her life savings to the ponzi scheme of Madoff.

Here’s an excerpt:

Over and over again, I’ve asked myself: why didn’t I secure the most basic of all things– shelter itself. Why didn’t I pay my mortgage off? And if I don’t engage in blame, I see the answer clearly: because I believed in something else more. I believed in accumulating. And when you believe in accumulating, you see what you don’t have, not what you do. You lose touch with what you value more than money.

The truth is that my relationship to money was no different than my relationship to food, to love, to fabulous sweaters: I never felt as if I had enough. I was always focused on the bite that was yet to come, not the one in my mouth…