A word of warning.

This chapter deals with the extreme depression and the thoughts of suicide in response to the breakup of my first marriage and the way that happened. Looking back, I realize that the state of depression occurred well before my discovery of my wife's affair because of the behavior changes that occurred after the birth of our son. But, the worst time period for me was between July 1984-January 1985.

I write about it to contrast the difference that a year made for me from Christmas 1984 until Christmas 1985. I did not recover alone, however. I sought professional help and I had many good friends who were willing to listen while I processed the various events and helped me rediscover my value. It was the sense of worthlessness, in conjunction with the pain of loss, that I was fighting and I nearly lost that battle.

In the end, I'm glad I stuck around.

It's Christmas Time!

I was pretty sore from my skiing debut on my new skis. I guessed that trying to wrench them around was a lot more strain than I thought. I didn't remember feeling that tired or that much muscle soreness after skiing on Mount Hood in September. Later, I realized that the conditions at Mount Hood were "easier" than some of the other conditions I was experiencing on the ski slopes of Beech Mountain. I was too much of a novice skier to know that at the time.

Christmas was quickly approaching and I had decorations to buy and set up and preparations for my Christmas party on December 21st. Unlike the previous Christmas (1984), I was going to celebrate Christmas this year (1985) in a much bigger way than I had in a long time and perhaps in a way I hadn't over the entire span of my life of 32 years.

My Christmas of 1984 was depressing. It was more than seven weeks after my wife had moved out of the house. Her boyfriend hadn't moved in (yet and officially) but the Christmas' where I had been celebrating with my wife and her family in North Carolina, as I had in the previous nine years, came to a sudden halt. Although I gathered presents for my son and others, I didn't set up a tree or put up any decorations in 1984. I tried to hide how depressed I was as my son was going to be with my ex-wife over Christmas. But I did hear back later through the grapevine that he thought I wasn't having Christmas because I was "so sad that mom moved out." At the age of four, he was quite perceptive.

The closer Christmas got, the worse I felt. I got my son his Christmas presents and wrapped them and I was going to make sure that he got them. Somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas I had made the decisions that I wasn't "going to be here." I had asked for and was granted permission to take the company truck during the Christmas Holiday. The only thing that anyone knew was that I was going to be on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My father-in-law pointed that nothing was going to be open out there on Christmas (like stores or places to eat). I told him that was fine because I wasn't going to need anything.

In the grips of an ever deepening depression, there was the sense that I should have some way to effect change and it didn't seem to have any effect, left me "lost." I described it, at the time, as a gray fog that eliminated all sense of direction, all points of reference. It was the terrifying sensation that any move was a wrong move and that I was coming apart from the inside out. This wasn't a sensation that just occurred overnight. It had been building for months when I knew "something was wrong" but didn't know what it was. Until I knew about her affair, I had the sense of unease and it struck me like a lightning bolt with that momentary sensation that you're about to get hit, before you actually are and it knocks you for a loop if you're lucky.

But having discovered the affair and being able to do something to repair the marriage seemed beyond my power. It was also ego bruising. It was with what/whom I was being replaced that was so ego bruising. It would have been one thing to be replaced by the Z.Z. Top "Sharp Dressed Man," particularly one that was seven years younger than either of us. But this guy was (to me) just some overweight graduate student who couldn't get a real date and he got lucky by finding an unhappy new mother that he could validate her every unhappy feeling she was having (about me as a father/husband unit). He was plying her with "If he really loved you, then he wouldn't [fill in the blank with whatever complaint she had about me]." In the end, I'm not sure who was more desperate; him or her.

No matter how committed I pledged myself to working on our marriage, she just couldn't/wouldn't let him go so we could actually work together. That came home to me in the fall of 1984 when I was in New York City. I was teaching a class in the Federal Building in the building with the US EPA. I was sitting in a phone booth in a row of phone booths when I found out that she just couldn't let him go. I don't know why I called her in the afternoon, but I think it had to do with a change in plans associated with the other half of the week when I was going to be on Long Island teaching this same course. (Note: I did go up to the top of the World Trade Center and I do have the pictures I took from the observation deck on the top). Of course, at that time I was thinking in the context of "monogamy." A polyamorous relationship wasn't even on my radar.

Although she was afraid, at first, that I might physically hurt him (don't think that hadn't crossed my mind. Castration seemed an appropriate remedy that would be consistent with his Wyoming upbringing) and/or that she might find all of her stuff put out on the curb, what she was most afraid of was that I might not come back and just disappear. That was true when she revealed the affair and that was true on this call. Not that I'd kill myself. But that all of a sudden, I was gone and she'd have to explain why to her family and most of her friends (who didn't know about the affair). But this call took me even deeper into depression and what scared her the most was my silence. She sensed that I was at the point where I'd just walk away and disappear. The reason I know that was because she spent most of the remainder of the call trying to get me to promise that I would come back. Eventually, I gave in and promised. But when I got back, it was obvious that we had come to an impasse and that she needed to be with someone else other than me. Or at least to try out what she thought was the greener grass.

That was a hard choice. And when she moved out, I didn't get any sense of relief or even hope. The downward spiral continued.

So, when it came to me going to the Outer Banks at Christmas, it turned out there was a good deal of fear that I wouldn't be coming back. My therapist was the most concerned. It wasn't that I had said anything about suicide (recently), but there were a good number of my friends and, in particularly her dad, that knew that it was during the guys trip to the Outer Banks (Ocracoke) in May 1984 with his son and sons-in-law, that I was first figuring out that there was something seriously amiss in the marriage.

He knew something was wrong, too. He even asked me if there was something going on that I needed to talk to him about. But he was thinking it was more likely that I was having an affair because of my upbringing and the fact that my dad seemed to willing to fuck anything that wore a skirt. When I said "no," he even told me "Don't do anything that would hurt my daughter." If I had told him at that time that I thought his daughter was having an affair with a fat, ugly grad student that lived nearby and rode the bus with her, I'm not sure how that would have gone over with him. But once it was announced that we were separating and that she was having an affair, that put his question in that time period in a whole different light (and he apologized to me about what he thought and for what she was doing).

After dropping off the presents on December 22, 1984, I went home to make a show of it that I was just going to go away for a few days. I made a number of calls on Christmas Eve to friends and family to wish them a Merry Christmas because I'd be travelling and to tell some of them that I loved them. And then I drove away. All the way to Nags Head and Manteo, down Highway 12 to Hatteras and then the ferry to Ocracoke.

It is very, very isolated and desolate out there at that time of year. What I had planned was to drive the truck to one of the beach access points, maybe park it there or maybe take it out onto the beach above the high tide level and leave it there and just walk out into the water. Just let the cold water and the hypothermia take me and take me away and it would all be over. I was well beyond the point of "I'll show her" or "She'll be sorry for what she did to me." I had those thoughts as a kind of revenge thinking early on. But I also realized that none of that mattered because I wouldn't be around to watch or "enjoy" my revenge. There was some irony, though, that "revenge is a dish best served cold." No, I wanted the pain, the sense loss and helplessness to stop dominating most of my life. I later described it as being worse than when someone close to you dies. There's a finality when someone close to you dies. This was worse in that she was still there and I couldn't have any positive effect. Negative effects, certainly. But if I was going to leave this life, I wasn't going to take anyone with me.

I write this to provide the contrast that a year made and how much meeting Catie lit up my life. Moreover, I am still here nearly 40 years later. So, what happened?

In the solitude of the cold grey skies (and frankly crappy weather), I was reading through some of the pages I wrote in my journal (very depressing even if insightful). One of the things that came through what I was missing and had been writing about was fatherhood. My therapist and I had talked about this aspect of my life because there was a conflict around what I had experienced growing up, how I wanted to BE as a father.

The challenge that I encountered with my wife was her "motherhood" crowding out my fatherhood (the way I put it at the time). Even the marriage counselor that we first used identified that issue; that all her complaints were about me as a father, not me as a husband or a lover. She was having none of that. Although, I may have given up on the marriage, there was still a role for me as a father.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that committing suicide was not the thing that I wanted to define my son's life beyond that. I had friends whose fathers had committed suicide (no note, no reason given) and had seen a different side of how bent out of shape their lives were and continued to be in the aftermath of those events. Somewhere down the line it would click for him that "my dad committed suicide when I was 4 years old, six weeks after my mom moved out and her boyfriend moved in." And that would be the least damaging conclusion. The worst would be him thinking he was to blame and that was something that I had zealously guarded against since the beginning. In the end, I wasn't going to let that happen no matter how badly I felt about losing my marriage. And that was the spark that brought me back from the water's edge.

I had also been reading some books trying to make sense of my experience, to see if there was something that I had missed because there was definitely something missing. Why had things that seemed so wonderful come apart so badly. And where was that wonderful gift of insight that I'd always had? (Answer to that question was that it was still there, it just didn't seem effective in producing the outcome I was looking for.)

I also brought along a couple of books that I had either had on my bookshelf and not read recently or had recently bought, both by Richard Bach. I had read Illusions when it was first published but hadn't read recently. I realized that it reflected a lot of the way that I processed my world view. The newer book had been just released The Bridge Across Forever. As I read through it, it spoke to me in a way that I really needed at the moment. I felt like I was beginning to fit pieces of a scattered puzzle back together; The shattered pieces of the inner me. And I recalled my reading of Gail Sheehy's Passages, though I didn't bring it along on this trip. All of this had me commit to going home...alive.

I think it was a relief to everyone concerned that I did return when I said I would. I actually came back the evening before I had told everyone (even though there was no such plan). It was a miserable drive in the cold rain on those empty highways in eastern North Carolina.

The depression didn't lift much for several months. But I started with refurnishing the house by buying a waterbed and a brass bed frame (because if I was going to stay around, I was going to need it). I went skiing for the first time in late March 1985, my son and I shared and recovered from chicken pox together in early march 1985. At the office, my life was becoming more sane with less time on the road. And by April 1985, I knew I was going to come out the other side when I was hiking on a trail in the mist and the fog and appreciated and was moved by a simple flower of a wild azalea. I wasn't sure what that life was going to look like and I had short-lived periods of incredible sadness. But I was going to emerge.

So here I was at Christmas 1985 and I was going to celebrate Christmas again. I had done so much in the eight months since I sensed I was going to survive. I had met Catie just three months before and our sexual adventures had blossomed into a strangely wild and wonderful love relationship that I had not expected. I still wanted to celebrate Christmas with her but I respected her priorities. More importantly, this was my first Christmas after the separation and my son and I would be together for our Christmas and a new Christmas ritual. My ex-wife was going to be in Atlanta over the Christmas week, so she and her boyfriend wouldn't be celebrating part of their Christmas with him until after they got back from Atlanta and my son and I returned from DC.

And so there was a tree to be bought as well as new decorations. I bought both red and silver ornaments for the tree, and red and white strands of mini lights for the tree and the house decorations. I won the best Christmas decorations for the neighborhood because all my windows were outlined in lights as was the deck and my mailbox. I had a big artificial wreath on the front of the house illuminated by a spotlight. Inside the house even the stairway and the balcony had the mini-lights, as did my brass bed. I felt like celebrating Christmas in a way I had never celebrated it. I took several pictures of me on the decorated bed and sent them to Catie so that they could remind her of what she was missing and who was waiting for her.

It was during this time that Catie and I decided I would fly to Portland to be with her on New Year's Eve and that we would ring in the New Year together. I told her that I didn't really need to be at a New Year's party, I just wanted to be with her (preferably in bed as my balls pumped another load of cum inside her).

I was very busy that week before Christmas and getting ready for the party I had scheduled on Saturday. My son was very happy to see the decorations and helped me as only a five year old could. We made a real production of decorating the house together.

On the evening of the party, he would be going to the Kinston area to attend the traditional family Christmas party with the extended family. This would be the first time that most of my ex-wife's extended family would meet my "replacement." The feedback I got was there were mixed reviews, some of which were familiar to me (she left you for him?) and others that were less flattering and questioned the choices made and being made by her, and I'll leave it at that.

My house was filled with the smell of freshly baking bread and other items I was preparing for the party when my ex-wife came by to pick up our son.

And when he left, the house suddenly felt so empty and it was for another couple of hours.

The party went extremely well and most people were amused at the way I had decorated my bedroom. There was Christmas music and socializing among friends and peers. But there was something, or more accurately, someone missing. In the past it would have been my wife. Now it was Catie. I had really hoped to introduce her to "my people" this Christmas and at my party. That would have to wait to a later date.

One thing was certain. I was definitely in a better place (mental health wise) than I had been just one year before. It had been a very long time since I had been in such a dark place. Christmas of 1985 was such a remarkable contrast to the Christmas of 1984 and I was thankful to have stayed around to see it unfold.

I sent the attached photos to Catie for her Christmas in Oregon to remind her of what she was missing in NC after her experiences with me in my waterbed (when she couldn't watch our videotapes of us together). I had given her another similar set with the bed undecorated with Christmas lights and had a couple of them framed in her bedroom. She kept the wallet-sized ones in her wallet. The ones she liked the most was the one of me on my knees and erect. It reminded her just how deep I could plunge into her vaginally or anally.