Thoughts

I find that sitting here writing about all the things that happened to Bob I have failed to really include the rollercoaster ride that I was taking at the same time.
How does one justify living in a totally out of control environment? What does that say about me? Several things come to mind, but I think the most obvious is that I simply loved and adored a really sick man. I haven't said much about the sober times, but you should know that those were the times that kept me hanging in there, hoping that one of these times a "CURE" could be found.

Of course I didn't understand then as I do now, that there is no cure for this disease, just simply not picking up that first drink, which by all my witnessing, first hand, was a lot harder than it sounds, especially for Bob.

But during those times when he was not drinking we lived a life that few people will ever know. I loved him to the core of my being and I believe he loved me the same way. How many people ever really and truly experience that kind of love.

We used to compare ourselves to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Like them inspite of all the fighting, relapse and argument's, there was a bond between us that would never be broken. This disease is not for the faint of heart. It takes it out of you. It will drag you down into the deepest caverns of despair and then suddenly lift you high into Euphoric States of excitement and renewed hope when "normalcy" returns. It's like having a honeymoon time over and over again.

It's funny, but I never ever gave up the idea that one day Bob would loose the craving to pick up that first drink. Silly me, but I could not face a life with him if I didn't believe in his sincere desire to be rid of the demon that had a hold on his soul.
Every single time he got sober again, I seemed to have this renewed belief in his ability to "make it" this time.
I really have lost count of the times I said that to my family and myself.
I simply wanted to believe that every time he got sober he would stay sober. I just knew he could. I knew it.

We would spend all those times being such a normal couple. We shared a passion for movies, we both loved taking his daughter places, we wanted to be a happy little family, and during those times we were. The ideal couple, so in love as we were. I was devoted to his every wish, I never wanted to not be there for him.

Having said that, I was also now fully imersessed in AlAnon and it's "tough love" philosophy.
One time we went to a really large AA conference in Palm Springs with all our AA friends and a speaker actually told me that if I continued too "Help" him the way I had been, I might as well just hand him a gun myself, because in her opinion, I was killing him as much as he was killing himself.
That shook me to the core of my soul. How could she I thought. What a terrible thing to say to someone. Little did I know that she was right.
I had to learn the hard way, that one of the things Bob loved about me the most was the fact that I was a World Class Enabler.
Hell, I still would be if he were here today.
I struggled with that one. I would almost have to restrain myself to not be there for him. It just simply got to the point where I would have to unplug my phones so that I wouldn't be tempted to go and break him out of another rehab or nurse him back to health after getting so sick from drinking.

I didn't know how to say no. I couldn't do it. I just learned to not here the question. But the moment that call came in that he was ready to go somewhere, anywhere to get sober again, he knew I would always be there to help him get there no matter what it took and I guess the fact that I with the help of his dad and the attorney, really did go to any length the help him. And just wait until you read the reward that I got for just being there one last time.

When that last call came in for help I hadn't even seen him for at least two or three months, but I somehow knew it was coming, I always knew.

Not so Fast

Of course nothing was ever easy as I knew. I was just holding my breath hoping that he would make it to Salt Lake City.
We had arranged a hotel room for him to stay in that night and the attorney gave him permission to charge dinner and toiletries to the room and of course of pack of cigarettes.

He called me when he checked in. The first part of the trip to Kansas was over. He just needed to stay sober for one more night and catch the flight from Salt Lake to Kansas City. I felt relieved that his trip this far went off without any problems. Maybe he really was serious about getting sober. At least he was calling and saying he was. He called to say good night and told me he was very grateful to have a place to go. It must have been very traumatic sleeping in the desert. So traumatic that it seemed he was willing to do whatever it took to get help this time.
I know from being with him for years that he was most likely very sick at the moment. Otherwise he would not be so willing.
Of course he didn't want to alarm me and tried to make it sound like he was in fairly decent shape, I really knew better.

The next morning he got on a plane to Kansas and again the Attorney made arrangements for him to stay in a hotel for a couple of days. The Menenger Foundation did not have the facility to detox patients, he would have to do that himself. They would not admit him until he was sober for at least five days. This was day two. I was worried because this was a critical time for him.
If he was as sick as I knew he could be, he would go into some sort of bad withdrawal and all he would want was a drink to calm his shakes.

This hotel would not let him charge anything to the room but they were willing to accept an additional charge of $10 and they would give him the money to get some more cigarettes. He always chain smoked but even more when he was detoxing.
I didn't give it another thought. Kansas was a dry State and I didn't have anything to worry about.

Little did I know at the time that he would take that $10, find a "Club" that would sell bottles of alcohol and be off and running again.

I called his room before I went to sleep that night, because I had not heard from him. I started to worry. This was not a good sign. I just had this gut feeling that something was wrong. I barely slept that night.
The following morning I called his hotel again, no answer. I called the desk, they said they had not seen him.
What went through my mind was that he was dead. I thought his withdrawal had been so bad that his heart gave out on him.
I was freaking out.
I called the Menenger Foundation and told them what I was worried about. He was simply gone. The admissions people told me not to worry, they would track him down and find out what had happened to him. They told me to just stay calm, they would find him.

Several hours went by and I finally got a call. Bob was in the Kansas City Jail, and was awaiting sentencing for trying to force his way into a local hospital. He caused such a scene that they had him arrested. That's how sick he was. He hated hospitals with a passion and now he was trying to get himself admitted into one. That was a good sign but he just didn't go about it the right was. The staff called the cops on him.
This was Kansas, not Los Angeles. When he went before the Judge the Judge sentenced him to Menengers, it was no longer voluntary. He had to return to see the judge in two months and at that time he would let Bob know if he was going to lock him away in the State Mental Facility. It wasn't like California, where you could get out in 72 hours. If the Judge wanted to he could lock him in there and throw away the key. It was his discretion. He warned Bob that if he heard one bad report from the doctors at Menengers, that would be the end of his freedom. Bob was scared. More scared than he had ever been.
He was sent back to his jail cell. He was not sober enough to be admitted to the Treatment Center. This place was not really a treatment center for drugs or alcohol. It was a mental hospital that he was waiting to get in to Not the re=hab places that he was used to. This would be an totally different Journey. This time they were going to try and get to the bottom of why he just kept going back to the bottle. Nothing had worked for him so far.

He had tried everything conventional and still he would pick up that first drink. It was as confusing for him as for anyone.
This time, this place was going to approach things from an entirerly new direction. But now there was the added kicker of the Judge doing the decision making.

He could not afford to take this lightly. His freedom was virtually in the hands of some Judge in Kansas that could have cared less about his past history of trying to get and stay sober. He wanted results this time or he was just going to lock him up as a menace to Society for as long as he felt was necessary, even if it meant years.

Need I say Bob was just about to get "SCARED STRAIGHT'.

The Real Bottom

It had been years now, to be exact almost four and a half years of knowing him. He had lived through so many near death traumas it was hard to keep us with all the terrible things that had happened to him.
His heart had stopped once and he had to have the paddles put on him to bring him back. Guns pointed at his head, a knives cut near his eye, slashed wrists, walking on balconeys three stories high and who knows what I don't know. I guess it was never his time.
I had never known anyone who courted death as he did. Whether he was aware of it or not, to me the man had a death wish, I know he wasn't crazy, he had been in enough therapy in all the 31 programs over the years to know that for sure. He just hated being an alcoholic. To him it was a humiliation and he knew it humiliated his family too.

One day I recieved a call from his dad at work. He was leaving for Maui, but before he went he had made arrangements for his attorney to have the power of attorney in Bob's case. His dad knew that Bob was in serious trouble now, so he covered him before he left town. His dad knew that if Bob would ask for any kind of help it would come from a call to me. I told him that if I did hear from Bob I would do everything I could to get him into a hospital. He had arranged for a long term hospitala in Kansas to admit him. the only thing was, they would not detox him, he had to enter completely sober. I had no idea if Bob would even call me for help I thought he still was with the "Girlfriend". But I gave his dad my word. I would do whatever I could should I hear from him. It was Friday and of course I had the weekend off.

Late on Monday afternoon, I got a call from Bob. I could not believe it. It must have been some sort of connection that we always had that he knew I would always be there to help him when he was ready to get sober. I asked him how he was.
The story he told me seemed impossible.

Bob was living in the desert near Reno, under a bush. He told me about how he trashed his house when he thought that he was being followed and that he had spent several days in his closet sure that he was being watched. He explained in detail how he kicked out the sliding glass doors and overturned all his furniture looking for whomever it was that was following him. He told me he sold his car took the money and hopped on a bus to Reno to get away from this person.

Of course it was all paranoid delusion from the substances that he had been using. None of it was real. I asked him what happened to all his stuff and he said the girlfriend was going to pack it up for him.

I told him I had spoke to his Dad and I wanted to know what his plans were. He told me he wanted help. Thats all I needed to hear. I asked him if he had any money and he said he did not. I asked him what he did have, anything that could get him to an airport. He told me he had a bus ticket to Salt Lake City. I told him to get on it and call me when he got there.
I hung up and called the attorney.

We were on the road to recovery. Thank God.

New Lows

The doctors could not understand why they could not stop the staff infection from spreading. They were giving him massive amounts of anti biotics but still nothing was stopping it. Then a nurse found a bottle of vodka that his new "girlfriend" was sneaking into his room. They immediately banned her from going to see him.

Talking to him on the phone knowing how close to loosing his leg made me more aware of just how advanced his disease had taken him. He was being given so much morphine along with the antibiotics that he actually said he didn't care if he lost his leg. He liked the feeling of being on the morphine. Even many years later he was still telling my roommate this same story.
This is just one little example of how his life was reeling out of control before my very eyes and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

When they finally released him from the hospital, he was now craving morphine. His "girlfriend" had some pretty questionable acquaintances and one night she introduced him to what he called an "Israeli Mob Guy" He was looking for drugs and this man thought he was an undercover policeman. They got into an argument and this guy pulled out a gun and pointed it at Bob's head.
Bob told him to go ahead and shoot him, he would be doing him a favor. The man put his gun down and Bob said he told him he was a crazy Mother Fucker and couldn't be a cop. Bob simply had a Death Wish. It would even show up in his sobriety. He wasn't afraid of dying and put himself in many terrible situations. I thought the man had nine lives.
Bob wore that story on his sleeve for years like a badge of honor. That's how sick he was. That isn't something to brag about in my world. For some reason all these horrible things that happened to him made his"Story" seem all the more interesting to him.
There were times when he was sober in AA that he would comment on what "light weight" some of the speaker's stories were.
He had a tale to tell that was better than theirs. He loved the drama in fact it was as much a part of his addiction and the substance abuse was. He was a total adrenaline junkie. Even starting a fight, he would get his endorphine rush that he was seeking for some type of relief.

This was the beginning of his paranoid phase. Whatever he was taking had pushed him into full blown paranoid delusion.
He started driving around with a baseball bat in his car. One night one of his former friends from the program who was now also drinking again, went out and got into some sort of fight with a guy in a truck. They smashed his windshiel with the bat and then just took off. I got the call from Don that night telling me how out of control Bob's behavior was becomming.
He no longer wanted to hang out with him either.
I wondered what I was supposed to do about it. I was no longer his girlfriend I told Don. It seemed Don didn't approve of her either. Don got sober again right after that incident and stopped hanging out with Bob.
Bob was now pretty much alone most of the time except when someone delivered whatever it was he was taking.

Left on his own his delusions got stronger and stronger. He was convinced someone was after him. Even his cousin who was always trying to be there for him, bailed out. He was simply to far gone to socialize with.
I don't remember if Bob called me or someone else called but one night the call came. Bob had kicked out all the glass doors in his house broke all the furniture, and had to be rushed into the hospital for surgery. The plate glass doors had severed his leg pretty bad and he needed surgery and plastic surgery to save it.

Bob had gone over the deep end. The Bob everyone knew and loved was gone. I had no idea who was in his skin, but it wasn't Bob.

I did not hear from him again for at least a month when he did call it was not good. He was living in the dessert under a bush.

Disappointment's in the Air

It was the roller-coaster ride I simply could not get off of. Just when things were going great all hell would break loose. The only good thing was that this time around we had separate places to live so that I was not in the eye of the Storm.

By this time Bob's roommate was hiding that he was back on some sort of drugs, he was not paying rent, stealing Bob's clothes. Bob wanted him gone. I'm not sure how long it took to get him out because I wasn't around much during this time again.

I was working two jobs to pay my rent and car payments, I didn't really have much time to dwell on the horrors that must have been taking place in his world.
When I wasn't working I was hanging out with our Sober friends and staying really close to the group. At least I wasn't alone in this next relapse. I was being coached the entire time to just not interfere and let it take it's course. It's a very hard thing to do I must tell you. Especially when I knew the nature of his disease. The outlook was always worse and worse.

The only thing Bob really had going for him was that he would get too physically sick to drink for any really long period of time, but that I mean "Years". This time I think it went on for several months.

During that time he did have a few brief spurts of not drinking which always resulted in me getting a phone call wanting to see me. I always said yes.

He invited me to see the new place he rented. It was a cute little house in Studio City. I was pretty surpassed he moved over there but it was a house with a pool, not an apartment. I know he needed to be out from under the scrutiny of any neighbors prying eyes. It was hard to be his neighbor when he was drinking. I'm sure he thought a house could provide him more privacy.

Once again, there was a special room for his daughter. I was not happy with this choice of a residence because in order for his daughter to reach her bedroom, she had to go outside and up a staircase to get there. I think she was only seven at the time. I worried about that.

He wanted us both to forgive him and start fresh. We took his daughter out and let her pick out a puppy, thinking it was a fresh start and maybe he was serious this time. That little bit of happiness didn't last very long. During the week he had to take care of the dog, and himself. He was inches away from another slip.

The dog was out of control running all over the neighborhood and their neighbors started complaining. I will never really know what happened to that little dog, but one day it was gone. He said it ran away. A little Pomeranian just went missing.
I think someone just took it and gave it a better home. He wasn't well enough to take care of it.

During the time in this house all the "Working Girls" started to come over again.
His disease was progressing so rapidly now it was hard to keep up with him. In and out of hospitals and then back to using.
He was so sick at one point he called and asked me to please come over. I did.

He was living on cold cans of soup which he could barely keep down. He was in bad shape but not bad enough to get sober.
There was evidence of drug use going on in the house all over the place. I had never known him to use needles for anything, but his "friends" did. It was a terrible scene.

During this time he met up with a woman whom he said was a "Madam" or something. Who knows. All I know is that his poor daughter had to spend time with him and this woman and her child. He informed me that this was his new fiance.
One night she called me to give me the happy news. I have no idea why she would do that, but I actually congratulated her.
Of course it wasn't sincere because I knew what she was in for. She said they were going to take a trip to Tahiti, a trip I refused to take with him. Actually I refused to go anywhere with him unless he was sober. I would not have wanted to be her for anything.

So off they went to Tahiti. Only a couple of addicts could turn Paradise into a nightmare vacation. It was a vacation from hell. When he got home he landed in the hospital just about to have his leg amputated from a cut he got on a coral reef that was not properly taken care of.

A new kind of nightmare was about to unfold.

Living alone

So after all the drama of the past few years, believe it or not living without him was harder than living with him. I was so sad. The world seemed bleak.
One day I was walking down Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills and I ran into his old Legal Secretary. I just burst into tears when she asked me how I was and how Bob was. I was heartbroken. In spite of everything we had been through, I still just loved this man.

I often think about how some people can just end a marriage or a relationship and start dating the following week. I was in mourning. I had a constant knot in my stomach. The days and nights became endless for me so I started hanging out with all of our former friends in the AA program. There was this amazing group called "Try God" that was full of relatively young sober friends of ours. They reached out to me in this horrible time for Bob and included me in all their activities which included dances, movies, barbques and even a outing to Magic Mountain and the State Fair.

Little by little I was learning to have some real fun again. I tried dating a little but my heart was never in it so I just hung out with the girls in the group. I think I've been to more AA meetings than any non drinker I ever knew. I know the 12 step programs like the back of my hand. It gave me hope. Something to grab onto, because in my heart I just knew that Bob wanted to be sober more than he wanted to be drunk. I just knew it.

Several months had gone by since I moved out and I wasn't around when he also moved out of our shared apartment, but he had a new place that was all his own now. He was spending a lot of time with his cousins at the time and I have to say not always the best company where the "Ladies" were concerned. It was during this time that he would meet one of the most beautiful women I have ever met in LA. She was a former Prom Queen in her home town and came to Hollywood to make it big and become a "Star" Well, she was a working girl, but not in the movie industry. Another sad story of a shattered dream.
The reason Bob was always attracted to the "Working Girls" were their access to the things he couldn't get from the doctors. I won't spell it out but you get the hint.

One of Bob's weaknesses was that he just couldn't stand to be alone, ever. With this crown he found he could pay for company so that he didn't have to be alone in addition to the rest of it.

I haven't much to tell of this period until something tragic was about to happen. We started speaking again and he took me over to his new apartment to show it off. He had set up a really nice place for himself and even had a great room for his daughter. I was impressed. I think hanging out with his cousins had curbed some of his drinking for a while. During this time one of his cousins was having some very serious problems with the other cousins best friend. There was a dispute and the friend was asked to get out of the apartment he was renting because another friend was going to be moved in.

Things just started to get out of hand and Bob went to a hearing to testify that Stephen was a loose canon ready to go off the deep end at any moment. As a former Assistant Deputy DA, Bob did have a sense of these things. He had learned to interprete the criminal mind rather well. He warned the woman who was the mediator that Stephen was going to cause great harm to someone. She just dismissed the idea altogether like they were all paranoid. Less than a week later Stephen attacked and Killed his cousin Michael in a park in Beverly Hill's public bathroom.

That event shattered an entire family who till this day struggle with the tragety. Bob tried to warn the mediator, no one listened.

I didn't see too much of Bob after the funeral. He sunk to the bottom of some bottle and didn't surface until he called me from yet another hospital.

This time I really thought he would stay sober. Life was just too painful to relive the scene without Michael. Sobriety seemed his only relief.
It was at this rehab that he was part of what the group "The Wild Bunch" affectionatly named themselfs. Bob was starting to be less and less embarrased by his disease. He had been through enough rehabs and listened to enough other patients to finally believe he was not a bad man, just a man with a terrble disease which when he picked up a drink he was no longer capable of making any rational choices. He was always ending a drunken run now either in a hospital or in trouble with the police like drunk driving or drunken disorderly etc.

One of the guys in this group was Gary, a former heroine addict who did not have anywhere to live when he got out. It was right around Christmas and Bob invited him to live with him until he got on his own two feet.

I thought maybe it would be just the thing to help him stay sober. Two people in a house supporting each other's commitment to sobriety. Things were good.

We decorated the house for Christmas together. We bought a tree, presents. the entire holiday could not be better. Because Gary was living in the bedroom set up to be his daughter's on the weekends they would stay with me. We were back together and we all seemed happy.

Bob his daughter and I even had a great New Years Eve together. We spent it at my apartment and we got hats and noise makers and it was fun. Every now and then I look at the pictures of us wearing our New Years Eve hats and remember how much fun we used to have together. I loved them both very much.

Could this last? That was the question.

And On and On

To the best of my recollection sobriety lasted until after Christmas that year. I can't remember just when but it started to get a rhythm going 6months sober, six weeks sober, six days, sober and then always another rehab.

I can only remember the worst events accurately because the rest just blended in to one another. As I mentioned I lost count after 31 times. For example.

Bob goes to Camarillo where he is in a locked ward for trying to slash his wrists again and I desperately tried to get him out.When I got there the place scared me. During the day they would lock the patients out of their rooms for some reason and they were just all wandering around the halls until evening. I was appalled. I'm sure I must have called his dad and finally I think his dad had arranged to have him transferred to a private hospital near Westwood. He was grateful to be there. It was there that he learned to make little frogs in ceramic class or something. He was there twice.

The night John Lennon was killed, Bob was in Rehab in a great place in Tustin. I broke the news to him there. It was one of the places I helped him get out early from. At that time I didn't know how to practice touch love yet.

Then he started to hang out with the "MOB" guys again and that's whey I just couldn't do it anymore. He announced when I got home from work that we were having this thug Jimmy over for one of my special Italian dinners. I would not cook and pretend to entertain a bunch of drunken hoods. I gave him an ultimatum them or me.
He choose them. I left and slammed the door behind me. I went to the receptionist house for several hours and when I got home all hell broke loose.

Bob was beyond drunk and he was really angry. He threatened to throw me out of our apartment and he called the police. Fortunately for me after he called them he went outside to wait for them. I locked him out. He created such a disturbance outside that when the Police got there they hauled him off to the Beverly Hills Police department for the night. It was a Friday, I will never forget it because the next day, Saturday Morning his friend, an attorney, who bailed him out of jail, called me and told me if I was smart I would just leave and move out.

I packed a bag, and I never lived there again. I spent the weekend looking for a place to live and my friend put me up at her apartment until I did. I finally found a two bedroom cute apartment and I rented it. I called his dad and I asked him if he could loan me $500 to move in. He was so kind and I got the money to make the move.

Ten days later, I had to pick a day when Bob was not home to move all my stuff out. I was terrified that he would come back, but he did not. All the furniture in the place was mine except for the bed we bought together. I left it for him along with some kitchen stuff and towels.

I was on my own for the first time in almost two years. My how the time flew between dramatic events.

The Cycle Begins

Bob came out of rehab and we decided to move out of the "hood". With his father's financial help we found a really wonderful two bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills. It was one of those two story fantasy apartment buildings. We loved it and so did his daughter. She was close to her mom's house when we had her on the weekends and I'm sure everyone felt much better that she was in a very safe area now. I was cutting hair in a salon in Beverly Hills now, so it was really convenient for me also.

The only problem was that Bob no longer was practicing law and his days were spent waiting for me to come home from work. In the beginning he would read all day, something he did all the time from that point until the end. I would get home and we would head into Westwood to see a movie and have a bite to eat.

This sober period lasted for approximately six months, then one day he just picked up a drink and the nightmare started all over again. I honestly cannot tell you how many times he started and stopped drinking before the next attempt at killing himself happened. He had been out of another rehab and they released him with antabuse. It is supposed to help alcoholics not drink. Well Bob took an entire bottle with a fifth of vodka and had to be rushed to the Hospital. They held him for a couple of days to evaluate him and make sure he was physically ready to be released. When he left his doctor gave him a really good talk telling him how much he had to live for and wondered why he would try to end his life.

Bob came home and immediately went out and bought a bottle of Vodka. It was baffling to everyone. After several attempts at staying sober again his family decided to step in with a solution.

Bob was going to live in Israel on a kibbutz. His uncle and his family were all on their way there and they would take Bob with them. The only thing was Bob would not go without me. I loved him so much that I agreed to move to Israel with him. I could not leave at the same time as they did because I had to quite my job and sublet our apartment. I made arrangements to leave in two weeks.

I felt really lucky because our new receptionist was willing to sublet our apartment fully furnished. I left two weeks later.
I met him in Jerusalem and he had a great hotel with his family there. It was amazing. The following day we went to Tel-Aviv
and again we stayed in an amazing hotel right on the beach. We went into town and started looking for a kibbutz that would take the two of us. There were not that many that would take a non Jewish person, but we managed to find one out near the edge of the country. If you don't know what a Kibbutz is, it is a community run in the purest for of communism. You are provided with everything for your working. Housing, clothing and food.

It was called "NA ON". They were famous for making sprinklers and it was a very wealthy kibbutz by kibbutz standards.
The following day his uncle hired a car and took us there to make sure everything would be ok. When he was satisfied he left. They took us to get our work clothes and showed us to our "room" It was like a migrant farm workers cabin.
That night I cried myself to sleep. I was in a foreign land and was now going to be picking fruit and working in a sprinkler factory. It was a far cry from Beverly Hills.

I dug down deep and pulled myself together. After all, I had no choice. We did not have a return ticket to go back home. The family sent us there forever. I had brought my life savings with me, $500.
I started Hebrew school the following day. One of the rules for allowing us to stay in the same room was that we both had to attend what they call the Ulpon. A school that is taught in Hebrew to learn more Hebrew. I was the only non-Jew there.
I had to beg the teacher to please tell me something in English. I was simply lost. She was kind enough to teach me how to say "I don't speak Hebrew" that was the only thing I ever learned.

We settled into our routine rather quickly. If we had a good attitude it would be ok. The good thing was that all the other people in the Ulpon were young. Most of them were from South Africa and spoke English. As Halloween approached we all got ready for a party. Now we didn't have costumes so I showed up with a bathrobe and a shower cap on. That was the best I could do I don't remember what Bob went as.

What I do remember is that the punch bowl was filled with a alcohol based punch. The nightmare was just beginning again.
Bob did not get drunk that night, but he did drink. I had hoped that maybe he could handle the few drinks without going off the deep end. The next few days seemed to go ok except for his mood swings.

Little did I know that before I arrived, while he was in Switzerland with the family, he had already picked up his first drink. He was a time bomb just ticking away. He was now what they call, into "White Knuckle" sobriety. There was no support group, no rehab, just his staying dry. That is a big difference from sobriety. The weeks just went by with us picking fruit and on the weekends we would hitch a ride into Tel-Aviv. Bob had relative there who were so kind to us. One weekend they invited us to lunch and the younger cousins took us to see Cesarea. I loved it. An ancient Roman city. On other weekends we went to movies, cafes, the beach etc. It would not be so bad living there I felt.

Then the fateful night happened, Bob picked a fight with me, as was his habit when he wanted to get drunk, and he left the Kibbutz. I was frantic. I had no way of reaching him, no cell phones in those days and I knew he would be in grave danger if he started drinking.

Just like today, it is not safe to wander around as a Jew or an American in Arab territory alone, especially if you were the kind of drunk Bob was. Our kibbutz was right next to what is now famous for being Saddam Houseins home. Ramallah.
I don't know how he survived that night. When he came back the next morning, he told me that he was so drunk, they probably just thought that he was crazy and left him alone. That was the good news, the bad news was that he told me to pack up, we were leaving. I didn't know what we were going to do, but I followed him and we took a bus into Tel-Aviv.

We didn't have much money left from the $500 I brought with me, but we found a hotel for $25 a night. It was in the worst part of town. I didn't know that there was a "red light" district but there is and we were staying in it. Our room had holes in the walls and it was pretty dirty. Except for the sheets which were clean. Bob wanted to go out and get really drunk, I refused to go with him. He was gone for several hours and when he got back another beating was in store for me. This time I ended up with a battered face and a big black eye.

The next morning when he took a look at me I guess he beat me up in a black out, he decided to go drown himself in the ocean. He just wanted to die. I ran after him, and watched him swim as far out as he could. I was screaming for someone to help me. No one did. I guess he had a change of heart, and he came back to shore, exausted.
I called his father and begged him to please get us home. He did arrange for two tickets back to America. We managed to get from the Hotel to the airport the next day and we looked so bad, me with my black eye and him just plain sick. We had to be searched and everything. They finally released us and when we got our seats the worst possible thing for us happened.
We were scheduled to spend the night in Copanhagen. I don't know why. The airline put us up in a very nice hotel for the night. Bob went out drinking, and I took a nice hot bath trying to sooth my aching body. He did make it back to the hotel that night ane we managed to get on the next flight back home.
The worst thing happened to us though, we were seated in business class and they let you have free drinks. Bob started drinking heavily. The plain stopped in Seatle before LA and he was so drunk, he was threatning to get off and go visit one of his fraternity brothers. The flight attendant and me stopped him from leaving. We made it back to LA.


When we got there we literally had no money to get us from the airport to his dads house, where my car was parked. We were told to take a cab and he would pay for it. When we got there we rang the bell and his housekeeper answered the door with cab fare and my car keys. We were not let in the house.

We were lucky we had an apartment to go to. My friend who sublet our place changed her mind and left. His father was just about to take everything out and put it in storage and let the place go. We dodged the homeless bullet that night.

We now had to try and get our lives back together. It was the week before Thanksgiving and he really wanted to be with his daughter. I had $82 in an old savings account and I pawned all my jewelry. We had enough money to buy and prepare a nice dinner for her. I covered up my black eyes the best I could. She was too young to notice, but when I look at pictures of myself I can still see them.

Our life was a Nightmare and I did not know how we would ever get out of this horrible cycle.

Off the subject for a moment

Today I had to go to small claims court to try and get money owed me back. I have been trying to get back the money I spent on someoneelses business, whom I worked for as an assistant, although under sworn testimony in court he denied it. But this person is a member of the California Bar Association, so I guess that gives him a license to lie.

Anyway I was totally prepared for his denial and I presented the Court with evidence showing that I indeed did work for him. My very own Lexus Nexis folder along with his. You can only get this if you are an attorney and then you can give your employee's access to the service with their very own password. That was how I got one.

I'm sure he was pretty surprised when I showed up in court with that along with emails sent to my email address pertaining to his business stating I was his assistant. He somehow got 5 people to perjure themselves against me stating in signed documents that I had never been his assistant. Two of these people I have never met and the other three I have only met once and it was on totally different occassions. Outside of his legal work.
This is what our world is faced with. You try and get what is owed you and instead of getting paid back they try to discredit you and slander you.

Did anyone see the movie Liar Liar? Well I say no more.

Playing cat and mouse with Oblivion

The disease was progressing into something I could not comprehend. I had never been in the presence of someone who simply hated his existence and probably himself.
He was acting out, they call it a "cry for help". I heard his crys Loud and clear and still I could not help him.

I would come home and find him lying in bed with his wrists slit, actually there is still blood stains on the mattress of the pull out couch which was our only bed at the time. I would clean him up, feed him, and try to reason with him about how much he had to live for.

He didn't feel that way. His family was practicing tough love on him and simply left him to his own destructive behavior.

He was the "Golden Boy" in the family. They first one to get into Stanford in his family which started a whole line of relatives that would follow in his footsteps.
In the DA's office he never lost a case except I believe one. He was the smartest person I had ever known. I could not understand his fall from all that.

I have witnessed what it is to be a "Torchered Soul" it was heartbreaking and frustrating. We were both now 30 years old and life seemed too painful for him to continue. He tried to jump out of our apartment window one night. I must tell you that this apartment was in the Ghetto. The neighborhood was so bad that we were the only people living in our building that didn't have multiple families living with us.
He was no longer working, didn't have a car and started hocking whatever to get money for booze. I can't tell you how many times he walked down to the corner liquor store with a pocket full of pennies and change to buy a bottle of cheap Vodka.

We had two visitors at this apartment, one was my ex who literally broke into tears when he saw where I was living, it was a far cry from the house in Sausalito that we had together. The other visitor was his father, who offered to move us to a better neighborhood for the sake of his young daughter's safety.

When she came to visit on the weekends I think she must have been so scared when I look back at it. There was always a lot of loud music playing from the neighboring apartments, and once there were people spying on her through their windows.
She lived in a beautiful house in Beverly Hills, with her mother, and had the maids taking care of everything. It was like being in two different world for all of us.

That's what love can do for a person. I never cared about our surroundings. I just wanted to be with him. I wanted to SAVE him from himself. I just didn't know how.

After almost a year of being drunk and sick Bob checked into St. Johns Hospital for yet another attempt at getting sober. This was the first of many attempts at sobriety while we were together. I lost count somewhere after 30 times.

The one thing that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that Bob wanted to be sober more than he wanted to be drunk. The sheer number of attempts to get sober where testimony enough in my mind.

What I had to learn was how to not Enable him. It was the hardest part of our life together.

The first time the hospital staff made me go to an Al-Anon Meeting, I left there upset and appalled at what I heard. In my world I always thought that you had to help your loved ones. They told me that I was not helping him, but hurting him by taking care of him. I did not agree. Actually had I listened to their advice, I think Bob would have died many years before he did.

The one person he knew that would always be there for him, no matter how tough or how many bad things that happened, was me. I am grateful to my God that I never abandoned him, no matter how angry he made me, I always forgave him. He was a sick man, not a bad man, as so many people viewed him. He simply needed help.

R.I.P. BOB

Today, Bob would have been 58 years old. I really wish he knew how much Matt and I miss him.
I took a small potted rose bush to place by his head stone and I had this cold chill run throgh my entire body when I read what was written or should I say not written on his grave marker.

BERNARD J PICK

(his name in Hebrew)

1948- 2005

You are in our thoughts.


That was it. Cold so cold. Bob deserved so much more than that. No mention that he was a beloved son, a beloved father, a beloved brother, or the best friend you would ever have. A kind man, the kind of man that would and did, give you the shirt off his back. A man who lived to make his children happy. And even when he was torchered by all his demons, that part of him remained consistent. It was the reason I fell in love with him and remained loyal to him even when our own relationship shattered under the chaos of his disease.

When Bob died so suddenly all the arrangements were made by his family. First of all I was in too much shock to be of any use, as he died practically in my arms, and second, I am not Jewish so I could not be involved in any of the details.
This can't possibly be all he meant to his family, it must be an oversight on someone's part, at least I hope so. They no longer speak to me because when he passed away so suddenly, our divorce was not final and his executor and I are in the middle of settling it. In my mind and by California Law if you have a long term Marriage, with no prenuptuals, the other party gets half. But not in this family. My step daughter would rather give money to attorney's than give me what is legally mine. But enough of that for today.

It makes me wonder if once Bob was gone how the real feelings of his death affected certain people. I got to the cemetery around 1:30. I thought I would go late enough so that if his daughter wanted to visit he father's grave site we would not run into each other. No one had been there or to his father's grave either. I brought them both flowers and sat and had a nice "talk" with them. How is it that once you are gone that's just the end of it. GONE No visits no flowers no sadness just nothing. It wouldn't have been so obvious to me if there were some sentimental statement carved into the marble for all the world to witness how loved and missed he was. But there was nothing, not even a date that he was born or died. The Basics.

Is that all he deserved? I think not. His every breath was consumed with love for his children. Even when that love was not returned his love never faltered. Even when his heart was broken by deeds of his daughter. He always forgave her. Like a puppy dog just wanting to be loved by an abusive master. That's how he was.

At least he was loved and appreciated by others and I hope that he took that love with him. I hope that he is resting in peace finally. I hope he found the peace that eluded him so much of his life. I pray he is looking down at his son and myself and he knows that our world has come to an unbearable black hole that we will try to get over. But everyday the phone does not ring with him calling to wake me up, or just to see how I am, is like an eternity.

Unless you have lost your soul mate, none of this will make any sense to you. He was my soul mate. I was the one in his life that forgave him everything, always. Right up till the end. I would never abandon him. Divorce could not separate us, nothing could. The silence is earth shattering without the sound of his voice calling me "STEPH". He must have called my name a billion times over 25 years that we were together. I used to cringe when he called, our son and I would make jokes about how many times he called my name, wanting me to do something for him. Now I would give anything just to hear my name called out by him just one more time. The silence is deafening and I can't hear anything but my own heart yearning to have him back in our world. To make it work this time. We were so close to regaining our lives and then within a second it was ripped away and I am left picking up the pieces of our broken life. Trying to figure out why. I loved this man so deeply so totally, that I tried everything I knew to help him get "better". In the end tough love was not the answer. I was replaced with another enabler. someone who would see it like he did because they shared the same problems.
But I was not an enabler and he would come to me and ask for advice on how to handle the situations that he found himself in. At least he came to know that it wasn't easy to watch someone hurt themselves. He knew that the only way to help someone was not to enable them. He got it finally, and we were going to try and build a life again based on that foundation.
It worked once before, I believe it could have worked again, but now it's all speculation.

If you are up there watching me today Bob, I know you feel how much I love you and I miss you. Rest in Peace my love.

Deceptive

How could such an incredibility smart, well educated, handsome man be so torchered in his life that he no longer found a reason for living. This was the journey we were about to embark on. He just simply could not stop drinking. In the beginning I didn't believe that. I really thought it was mind over matter. It wasn't. It was a very misunderstood disease. I spent all my free time trying to find out what was going on. Why was his life reeling out of control. A divorce could not have been the entire reason, especially since he was not happy being married.

He decided that maybe a change of scenery would help him to feel better. We started out on a "Road Trip" to see his best friend up in Northern California. They had grown up together from the high school days. They both went to the same boarding school and were like brothers. He thought seeing his friend would do him good. So off we went to Northern California.

His friend was actually teaching at their old school and also living there. It was weird for me to go to this old mansion which was now his friends apartment also. He had an apartment type situation on the top floor of this old former mansion which was and had been a part of this Prep School that they went to.

The first night there Bob got really drunk "surprise, surprise" and opened the windows on the top floor and crawled out on the ledge and started walking around out there. He was three stories up high and I was freaking out. I begged him to come back inside. It was the first time I realized he indeed was a man with a death wish. An adrenaline junkie or whatever. I would come to accept in time that he had no fear of dying and at times actually seemed to get pleasure from putting himself in harms way.
The only problem was he couldn't find the courage to do it, so he flirted with danger with an attitude of "Whatever". There was no fear ever.

journey into my world: Change

journey into my world: Change

Change

We drove home from Palm Springs without saying a word to one another. When I got back to his house I promptly packed up my belongings and went to a friends house. I had just recently agreed to move in with him. I couldn't bear to admit to my other friend that I just moved out from, what had happened in Palm Springs, so I went to a new mutual friend's house. A woman who went out to the clubs as much as we did. I liked her and she agreed to let me stay there. She warned me that any man who hits a woman more than likely has done it before in her experience. I wanted to give him the benefit of a doubt that it would never happen again course not knowing anything of his past I had no reason to not believe it was an isolated incident that it would never happen again. After about five days I moved back into his rented house with him. Everything quieted down after that and it was getting closer and closer to the holidays he was on his best behavior for a while. For some reason it was easier for him to not drink so much around the holidays for some reason. We got a Chistmas Tree and it was the first tree his daughter had ever had, I also baked cookies and stuff with her. We ended up having a really nice Xmas. His family didn't celebrate it so we were all excited, I wanted him and his daughter to have the best Xmas experience ever. We did.
The new year brought an entirely different reaction. Time to get really, really drunk again. He started hanging out with small time "MOB" guys and a really seedy bar in Hollywood. I was getting really uncomforable around these people. I had spent my adult years trying to not hang out with people like he was totally attracted to. I was less than happy. I was spending much less time going out at night with him and his "Boys".

I come from an Italian family in the Midwest with a lot of "Mob" activity surrounding it. I had an uncle that was shot and killed right on the front door steps of his house. Several years later his son went to Vegas, because he discovered who shot his father. He never came back. The story was he had a "Heart Attack" in Vegas. That's how it was in my family. No one ever told the truth about the goings on. My real father and mother is another great "Story" I was raised by an aunt and uncle and when I was around ten years old, my grandmother told me that the man who I thought was my uncle, was really my father. My aunt went to bed with one of her "headaches" after that for a week. They never discussed it, but instead they told me she abandoned me.
After my son was born, I hired a private detective to track her down. I located the divorce papers from California. They were never signed!!!! That was very informative seeing as though my real father had remarried and had three more children. He was either a bygamist or a killer. I had my suspicions it was the latter when there was not one soul in the entire family that would discuss the matter with me or my brother.
One of my older relatives, literally on his death bed, would not tell my brother anything. After my real father died, his wife did send a letter from my real mom that my father had kept all those years. In the letter she was telling him how she would have never gone to California ahead of him had she known that he would not follow her there with me. He lied to her and basically abducted me. These days it's kidnapping. In a mob family they all keep their mouths shut and let what happened to me go unspoken, ever. I was just given away to an aunt and uncle who wanted a little girl. No adoption papers or anything. The State had no clue.

My "Aunt" was always paranoid that my real Mom would come and get me, or at least that's what I used to think. She was so overprotective it was ridiculous. My real Mom was a dancer. They used to say she was a "Rocket" by who knows. I do know she really was a dancer because I was forbidden to ever take dance classed. Guess my Aunt didn't want me to turn out like my real Mom. I did anyway.

I was never like the rest of the family ever. As far back as I can remember, my head would tell me that I was never going to live like they did. I'm also quite a great dancer. It was one of the things I loved about hanging with Bob, in the beginning we went dancing every night but the weekends when we had his daughter.

Well enought Back Story on my childhood, but I have a real thing about low life Mob Guys.

Bob was so smitten by the company of this one guy from New York who had been a semi professional boxer. They started going out to the bars almost everynight. Of course the harder they drank the more "bar fights" started happening. One night they both got so drunk that they picked a fight with an Arab Shiek at the club. Well what they didn't expect were the shieks' body guards carring around a sap with him. So before they both knew what happened they were both on the concrete in the parking lot. They both had moderate injuries that had to be looked at by a doctor.
Bob was thrown out of the club after that. He was becoming more of a problem than was worth to them. They didn't want to alienate the Shiek with all his money so Bob, was out.

All that meant was that the seedy little bar known as "The Bottom Line" became the bar of choice for the boys. I was watching Bob's drinking start to take precidence over everything. His partner confronted his about his drinking and wanted to end the partnership after Bob went to court still drunk one morning. He was up all night and just borrowed my car to go to court just to turn in a postponement. I can only imagine how his client felt when he saw him in that condition. That was the last time he ever tried to get it together enough to go to work. It was going to be just a matter of time before bad went to worse. A few times I even called his brother and asked him if I could stay at his place in Westwood for the night, Bob's temper was scary, and I did not ever want to be there for another physical fight. After a few times of doing this I realized I no longer wanted to call his brother, I just started calling my friends when I needed to get away from Bob. It just felt better to not involve his family any longer. Bob didn't have any contact with them during this period so it was better to not involve them.

After Bob's divorce he gave his Mercedes back to his wife. I followed him to her house and watched him drop it off. He got into my car and we drove off. Now he no longer had a car. His family gave him his Mom beautiful Jaguar which he loved. That only lasted for a few months. One night I got a call that he was in a car wreck. He was driving drunk in Beverly Hills someplace and to the best of my recollection, I think he ran a curb and hit a tree. The car was totalled.

With no car, no job there wasn't much left to keep him from drinking full time. His friends would come and pick him up so transportation wasn't an issue.
He would wake up so sick in the morning but by the time I got back from work in the evening he was already "better" and the drinking would begin again. But a few months went by and now it was taking days to get better. He was really drinking himself sick.
The worst was yet to come.

Journey into Hell

After two weeks of calling him everyday without a return call, I finally got a call from him. I was elated to say the least. He told me that he did indeed remember me, the girl with the beautiful smile, but he had a rule not to date women who were married or had boyfriends. Looking back that was so ironic because he was constantly cheating on his own wife before I met him. I guess the consequences took a toll on him, because she divorced him and aborted their unborn child. It would haunt him for life. Anyway the message was clear to me, if I wanted to ever see him again I would have to be free of the situation I was in. I called one of my friends up and asked her if I could move in with her. She said it was fine, so that same night I went home, told the man I was living with that I had met someone I was very interested in getting to know, but he would not see me unless I was free. I moved out in a couple of hours. The next night I went to the private club where I first met him hoping to see him again. He was a member and as fate would have it he was there. That was the beginning of my new life. From the moment I saw him again I went up to him and asked him if he remembered me, of course he did. We became inseparable. We spent all of our time together when we were not working. I was with him so much I barely went home to my friends apartment. He confided in me one night that he was an alcoholic, I came from Wisconsin, everyone I knew drank too much. It didn't occur to me that it would be a problem. After all he was only twenty nine years old and going thru a really hard emotional breakup with his wife, and his mother had passed away within the year. He was also torn up because he was losing his child in his mind. He loved her so much. He had gone through an unsuccessful series of rehabs already and was already in and out of AA. I should have seen the writing on the wall, but I was blinded by "Love". I felt sorry for him, he told me all about time spent in Vietnam and how awful it was. This was the saddest man in the world. Several years later, I would be telling his brother about his war stories and he told me he had never been in the war, he was never in the military, period. I was stunned. Why did he need to make up such a terrible story to get my sympathy? I already was sympathetic to his situation. I passed it off as drunken story telling and let it go.

I went thru the pains of his divorce with him. I would be there when he was on the phone with his ex trying to work out all the details of the divorce. In the end she got everything. The house, his car, his personal papers from school, his artwork that was given to him by his mother, everything. He got half of what was in the checking account. That was it.

One day I followed him to his wife's house and he dropped off the Brown Mercedes and that was the end of it. He got into my car and we drove off. I don't know how the courts didn't just divide it all up 50/50 but she got everything. It was the tie that bound us. When I left my former husband I gave him everything also, just to be free. I gave up a new house in Sausalito, a twelve unit apartment building and three townhouses. All because I made a promise that I would never take his property. I kept my word. My ex lost it all anyway.

My former husband had developed a terrible cocaine addiction and used up the equity in all the property for coke. So there we were, young and broke. Both having lost quite a lot of material stuff seemed to bring us closer together. He was gun shy of relationships to say the least. Although he felt a lot for me, he told me that he was not going to jump from the frying pan into the fire of another serious relationship. He needed to be free to date other people. I let him do whatever he needed to do. I would be the one he would call after his "dates" were over. He always called wanting to know if I would come over and be with him. I always went. I didn't play the games I could have. He loved my company and the attention and unconditional love I gave him.I just loved being with him and I was very patient with him.

In the beginning we had a lot of fun together. I would meet him every night after work and we would go to dinner and then out for drinks and dancing at the club. I was only 29 myself. I was having a good time. I didn't know that he wasn't doing it for fun, he had to go out drinking. His drinking was getting progressively worse. I was too blind to see what was really going on. His moods started to change little by little. The happy fun drunk, who only drank after five, was getting darker and darker. There would be little fights in the club that would start over little comments or whatever. Because he was a club member, they put up with his behavior because he was spending a lot of money there every night. The only time he wasn't there was on Saturday and Sunday nights because those were the days he got to have his daughter, and he never drank on the weekends. Those were the best times of the week. In fact when our relationship became more serious he told me that his daughter would always come first and if I had a problem with that we could not be together. It was one of the most admirable qualities he had. The kind of father he was made me adore him even more. He may have been a terrible husband, but there was never any question that he was a stellar father. That quality remained with him forever.

Our "Honeymoon" period in this relationship lasted about 4 months. Even though his temper seemed to be getting a bit out of control at the bars, we were still having fun when he had people over to his little house in the hills of Hollywood. I was cutting hair and he was still practicing law, but the hours we were keeping had me going into work later and later. He hardly made it to the office at all, or only if absolutely necessary. He shared an office with his partner at the family owned business. I guess they knew more about his condition that I had any idea about. I did get an opportunity to meet his father one day, very unexpectedly I might add. He paid us a visit at the house for some reason, I wasn't told why he just came over. I didn't ask any questions. His father seemed really nice and he was very kind to me. I could sense something was not quite right between the two of them. We never brought it up after his Dad left.

His Birthday was coming up and he wanted to go to Palm Springs, I totally agreed I thought it would be great to be alone and celebrate it together. I could not have been more wrong. That night we checked into a nice little hotel and it was so warm we decided to go for a swim. Of course he brought a bottle of Vodka with him to the pool. He proceeded to get very, very drunk. I asked him if we could just go inside after about 40 minutes because I was getting tired and cold. It was when the "other" guy showed his ugly presence for the first time.

We went inside and he started to beat me up. I never saw it coming, I had no idea that he had a violent temper like that, unprovoked. The nightmare had begun. It would never be the same from that day forward. I never quite felt comfortable watching him drink and I never drank with him again after that. I felt I needed to be totally sober and alert to his mood swings.

He sensed that I was no longer just having fun, I was gaging the drinking and the atmosphere around him when he did drink.

div style="text-align:center">
Want this badge?

The Power of

Till this day I still am baffled by the hold love can have on someone. I took one look into the eyes of this sad, amazingly handsome young man, and I was totally hooked. I never believed in love at first sight, I actually never gave it any thought what so ever. But here I was, looking into those eyes and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was looking into the eyes of the man I would marry. It was that clear to me. I sat and talked to him for hours that night, in one of LA's hottest private clubs, we may as well have been alone, I never noticed anyone but him. He told me his entire sad story of how devestated he was at the divorce he was getting. He told me about the abortion his wife had and how heartbroken he was by everything. I was smitten. He was the saddest man I had ever met, it made him all the more attractive to me. His honesty and vulnerability was seductive. That night ended with him giving me his business card. So clear was my intuition that I went and told my friends what had just happened to me. I met a man I was going to marry. It didn't seem to matter that I was in a relationship at the time. I wasn't happy in that relationship and wanted out. In fact that was the first night I ever went out with any of my friends. I was finished. I had to believe it was divine intervention. I was being led down a road on an incredible journey. One that I could never have dreamed up. I would be loved, adored and betrayed on so many levels on so many occassions, but the power of love has kept that flame burning. Don't ask me why. I can't even explain it.

Having a child is a monumental life changing experience. Your every thought and action now has new meaning. It should be the glue that holds a relationship together, but sometimes that doesn't happen. Who knows why, but as much as he loved his little angel it wasn't enough to hold the relationship together. The demise of the marriage would have devistation reprocussions down the road. The level of anger that simmered under the surface of his former wife and her family would eventually be transferred to that little angel, and there would be nothing to undo the damage it caused. No matter how much he tried to make up for the end of the "family" she would hold it against him for the rest of his life. It is sad to think that even in the end he could never do anything to make her love and respect him. He used to refer to himself as "the human credit card" it was all she ever really wanted from him. Not his time, not his company, just his cash. I guess that was his punishment. The sadest thing is that because of what she must have been told, she was denied the experience of having know what true unconditional love was. He adored her, constantly forgave her any hurt he felt from her constant criticism and her passive aggression and rejection. He knew when she called, she always needed something, but still he was happy to talk to her.

The Players

He told me the story of the love of his life the first night I met him.
She was perfect he told me. He had counted all her little fingers and toes just to make sure. It was his daughter. He would dedicate his every thought from that moment on to make sure that she had whatever her little heart desired. It was love at first sight for him. No other woman in his world would ever come close to the love he felt for her, or the gut wrenching disappointment he would come to know at her coldness and indifferance to him many years later.


He wondered how he would ever be able to provide the kind of life he knew she deserved. He was only in his mid twenties when she was born. Not really established in the Legal Community and he just loved being in the DA's office. No money there to speak of. So he opened his own practice at the encouragement of his wife's family.
He was a young attorney with a law practice and a mortgage to maintain. He wasn't making a lot of money and his young wife was the product of a wealthy life style. He was constantly reminded by his inlaws that he needed to give their daughter the kind of home she deserved. He tried his best. At 27 he had a lot of responsibility. He had dreamed of becoming a journalist but his parents wanted him to go to law school. They were very convincing and he finally gave in. Actually if he hadn't agreed to go the Law School he would have never met his wife. After becoming friends with her brother, they found themselves in love and planning a wedding after six months. Life was rushing past him almost too fast to keep up with. His days were consumed with working and in the beginning studying for the bar exam. Two years or so had flown by and today he was looking into the eyes of his angel. Could this be enough to put the happiness back in his world? His mother was so sick, his job was exhausting him, he was finding solice in a bottle not to mention the ability to escape all the problems he seemed to have. He wanted to make everyone happy, he always did. It was part of his problem, the more guilt he felt, the more he would seek oblivion in the bottom of a glass.

Of course with the drinking came a lot of very unaceptable behavior. All in all he had plenty of reasons to feel guilty he told me. It was a vicious cycle.
The one thing besides his daughter that he loved was his work. He was a great prosecuter. He was working in Compton and making quite a name for himself. He had only lost one case out of ten. The problem was that there is no money in the DA's office, at least not for what was expected of him.

Somewhere along the way, they managed to talk him into starting his own Criminal Defense Practice.
This is what he was doing when I first met him. I should actually say that is what he was supposed to be doing. He was pretty much non functional at that time. He did still have an office, but there was no work really going on there by him. I think his partner was carring the load of the office.

Pictures of me and my friend Dawn

The Journey of Love

When does an Ordinary Life warrant writing about? Does anyone have an interest? Millions of People die in this world only to be forgotten by all but their loved ones and when they die that's it.
Unless a person achieve some sort of notoriety in their life, it is but a blur. Why is that? The world is run by ordinary people. They even make films about them hence "Ordinary People" was a box office smash.
Sometimes the lives of these people don't want to be remembered by their families.
I went to a very successful Doctor's funeral many years ago, the father of one of my best friends, and all that they could say about him at the eulogy, is that "He was a Difficult Man".

Personally I was quite taken aback by that. I don't think his patients would have Eulogized him quite the same way. He had helped so many people. In Los Angeles to be a renowned surgeon and one of the Top Hospitals is not an easy thing to achieve. Even I took my son to see him when I found no answer to a simple problem he had with his feet as a small infant. This man looked at Matt, gave me a hug and told me to do nothing. He was fine. I will always be thankful that he was honest and didn't put my son or our Family through needless worry, like two other "Specialists" had recommended.

I never dreamed that one day an my son's own father's funeral the best his other child could do was to read an essay she wrote about him in high school ten years before that. It wasn't all that flattering and a simple I loved you and will miss you would have been much more appropriate. But then again, what do I know. I always wear my heart on my sleeve. And love me or hate me don't ask me a question if you are not willing to hear the answer.

I decided to honor the man that I married and to put down in writing that which was so thoughtlessly omitted from his headstone. He was a great man, a troubled man, at times a more than difficult man with a heart of gold and a capacity to love like I had never experienced before. Not the kind of man that you can just sweep under a headstone and forget about him.

I won't let that happen. Every now and then I hear a song by Celine Dion and it never fails to bring me to tears. It's called "Because You Love Me." It was our song. Lyrics that just cut to the core of our often turbulent love for one another. A song of redemption and retributions. Almost like a story, our story.

We danced to it at our son's Bar Mitsfa, just weeks after yet another relapse. I couldn't hold my tears back, it was too beautiful and too painful to hear at the time. I was filled with so many emotions that day it's hard to look back without thinking it was so bitter sweet. I was grateful he was sober, basically grateful he was still alive but at the same time I was so angry with him for scarring me and the family right before such an important time in our son's life. I literally had to hire a sober member of AA to watch him that day, so that he would not be tempted to take a drink. It was exhausting to play the perfect hostess to family and friends and all the while praying he would not be tempted to take a drink. It was all done very discreetly so not many people except his AA friends knew he was being guarded all day long. I can't even begin to express my gratitude that they all helped Bob get through that day. Later on a few people complained about the bathroom being too far from where the tent was. I really had to laugh to my self because I was thinking that if they only knew what the real problems were they wouldn't have even bothered to complain about anything. Believe me when I tell you that I could have cared less if the family didn't like the music the food or the fact that they had to walk to the bathroom. They should have been relieved we still had Bob there for the event. Funny how forgetful ones own family can be.

So when that song played and especially when Celine sings the line, "You Saw the Best There Was In Me" I just broke down. Bob had always told me that if it wasn't for me loving him so much and never giving up hope that he could get sober, he would be dead. He had just come back from Las Vegas and dodged yet another bullet. He went there to Die. Just like in the film "Leaving Las Vegas".

When that movie came out he was obsessed with it. It struck a nerve deep in his subconscious mind. He never wanted to be an Alcoholic, He had gone fourteen years without picking up that drink, and now the monkey on his back wouldn't let go.
He was more torchered that he ever was. Felt more like a failure because he had it all, and threw it all away on a drink and what goes along with it. He was simply tired of fighting the obsession to pick up a drink, day after day, hour after hours.
He was ready to give up but just couldn't. Our lives were never the same after that. We had moments of happiness, but never like during the fourteen years when he hadn't picked up that drink.

Everything we did to make sure that he could stay sober were now proven wrong. Nothing could stop a person from picking up that first drink. I had heard it a thousand times in AA meetings but now it was glaring at me. What a fool I had been to believe my own hype. If we moved to a place where it didn't remind him of his drinking it would be better. If we moved to a quiet little town with nothing to do, he would be safer. If we didn't socialize with normal people who drank socially, he wouldn't be tempted. Well none of that turned out to be true. He went to work one day and decided to buy a small bottle of Vodka. End of Sobriety, end of life as we knew it.
I will always be thankful that our son got to live in a sober house hold for twelve years. We had a more than average life, an ordinary life of PTA Meetings, Little League Games, Karate, Basketball, movies and dinners at McDonald's. With one swallow, that all came to a crashing halt.
What we lost that day was something that could never be replaced. Much more important than his losing his sobriety, which if you believe in AA is only a one day thing anyway, We lost the TRUST that we had gotten back and kept for all those years.
Trust is like your health, without it you have nothing.

I really don't expect anyone to read this blog or comment on it for that matter. I'm writing it as more of a healing exercise along with documenting some of the things that I have experienced in my life. As in any one's life, there have been many many highs and lows.
There are things I have been through that so many other's have experienced, I am no different than anyone of thousands of people who are hopelessly in love with an Alcoholic or Addict. We have all lived through the eye of the storm so to speak, I don't regret one moment of my life and it's important to keep that in mind when you read this, if there is anyone but me reading this.

Some of what I'm writing is true, some of it is fiction. The characters will know who they are and know what is true and what isn't. It may be interesting or it may bore you. It doesn't matter. It is what it is.

Everything I have been through has made me the woman I am today. Whatever that is. The one thing I am not, is a person who gives up in the face of adversity. I have learned to be strong and stick up for the truth and for myself. If you are weak in your life, I have learned , the vultures will be waiting to go in for the kill. Waiting to get what they think you are too weak to defend.

I should define that word "Vulture" as I now have come to understand it and how it apply's to my life.In my world a vulture can be the people you loved and trusted the most who surprize you when you really should have seen it coming all along. Of course that can also mean the newer people in your life. The ones you turn to for help, in your time of need. The lawyers you have to seek out for their advice. You don't really have a choice. You have to have one of more. What a nightmare that experience is.

If there is the slightest scent of weakness, a vulture will sense it. Trust me when I sat "TRUST NO ONE" it is the best advice I can give to you. Here is the main player in my story. A bit of back story is important so bear with me.