Buckle up.
On a Friday, that happened to be my anniversary, I went to my mother’s house after work to decorate for my daughter’s birthday party. I have split custody and even though her birthday was two days previous, my opportunity to celebrate it was the next day. (Maybe the day after. Memory is a funny thing.) So I went to my mother’s, whom I have a strained relationship with, and we enjoyed an late afternoon of each other’s company and decorating. A rare, happy occurrence between us.
After decorating, I went to pick up my youngest from daycare. I did that, and something… I don’t know what it was, but something told me to drive by the bar that my partner had a tendency to frequent where the staff doesn’t wear clothing. (And, I also found out that the staff can be hired for private parties for… Adult entertainment and then some.) (Does anyone have a hard time understanding why I was out of actual mind that my partner was frequenting this establishment?) He’d made promise after promise to stop going. And like a total nincompoop, the last promise was one I’d bought. But there was that something. So after getting the baby from daycare, I drove the way home that would necessitate a look-see in the parking lot of that bar.
Guess what I saw in the parking lot?
It was our anniversary. Talk about betrayal. So instead of slashing the tires on his truck, which, trust me, I thought about, I went home, packed as much as I could into my tiny, broken car and got a motel for the weekend that I could afford. (That means that I saw real-life pro******** in the lobby and coming and going. It was filthy.) I felt like a bad mother bringing my child to such a place. But I felt even worse putting up with a husband that blatantly had chosen pro********* over his own family. I had to draw the line. The only reason he walked all over me was because I’d let him. So I put my foot down. And I finally left.
I had nowhere to go. The motel was a very temporary solution with an expiration coming up all too quickly.
I’ll spare the details but a friend of mine realized that a mutual friend between us happened to have a need that I could fill, and that fulfilling that need would in turn fulfill a need that I happened to have. Our mutual friend, Harold, was a man in his 90’s who had lost his wife a number of years prior. He was unbelievably spry for a man his age, and cognitive. There wasn’t a shadow of cloud in that man’s mind. Brilliant. Probably undocumented genius.
So I went over to his house, by my friend’s recommendation. “Harold, I here you have a need that you’re having trouble fulfilling.” He replied, “You know, I do. I hear you as well are in a way of need yourself.” And thus began the conversation. Harold had punctured a lung a couple of years prior, and broken his back in the process. Prior to that, his cognition and his physical health were in sync. He had a massive plot of land on the outskirts of the county we lived in, not outrageously rural, but enough. But he also had an intricate house, a large one. Decorated and detailed by his late wife. And he was having trouble upkeeping it. And he hated to cook.
What Harold needed was a person to cook his meals, take care of the home chores, laundry, housecleaning, and to hire help for things like having the pool cleaned and maintenanced. I’m a professionally educated and trained mechanic, so I agreed to undertake the maintenance of the vehicles and motorized things on the property, and to assist in scheduling the help for the other property needs. In exchange, I and my 2 year old son would be given the master bedroom, which was up the stairs and too troublesome for him to get to anyhow. Off the master was the widow’s walk balcony with the private jacuzzi, and naturally, being the master, it’s own private bathroom with jacuzzi tub. Across the hall from the master was the smaller of the guest bedrooms, which I had permission to turn into my son’s room, including paint and theme to my desire, carpeting or flooring to match, etc. He even offered to replace the existing bed with a fun bunk bed for him. The larger of the bedrooms upstairs had been his wife’s craft and sewing room. He’d asked me not to alter it in a major way, but invited me to make use of it’s contents and add my own. She had an embroidery machine you’d drool over, a serger, a sewing machine, I mean… Name it. Floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall. Offered up for mine and my son’s use.
He wanted nearly nothing from me. Companionship on drives to his regular estate sale and garage sale hunts, and aside from that, meals cooked, light cleaning. His only other request was that I never was to bring my partner there and that if I chose to interact with my partner for more than just what was required for co-parenting, that I could caretake for him, but not live on the property. He saw in me the pain I was in, and he was advocating for me in a way I needed someone to, but didn’t know how to express.
I knew he was right. I knew what I needed to do. He began to open the rest of his enormous home to me. First, his office. With floor to ceiling bookshelves on every wall but the fireplace wall. Then the library. Then the billiard room. And on and on. He told me that we’d work together and that he’d teach me what was taught to him when he “made his first million”. He implied there were more than one of those in his arena.
What I saw was a man who was frustrated that his body was deteriorating quicker than his mind. A man who saw value in me as a human, as a woman, as someone’s wife. Someone who wasn’t going to be complicit in letting that woman settle for less than she deserved. I saw a man who missed his wife. A man who was full of vitality and knowledge he wanted to desperately to share. His kids, older than me, were scarce, but around. I took good care of Harold for awhile. Or I tried. What was out of my reach to care for I found reliable help with. The property care, etc.
But I never moved in. Because there as something massive, like the force of gravity that was pulling me back to my partner. And eventually, I did begin to start the process of mending things with my partner. And my partner became jealous of my time at Harold’s. And because of that, I eventually stopped going.
A year has gone by almost since I last saw Harold.
Yesterday, the mutual friend that connected Harold’s needs and mine went into the house to cook him a meal and found him. I can’t begin to, nor would I want to, explain the detail of what a .357 round does at point-blank range.
I am not trying to make this situation about me. I’m not that self-absorbed. Harold was clearly in a lot of pain. Emotional and physical. But there’s a part of me that can’t help but feel like if I had been there with him, that this wouldn’t have happened.
I feel as if something has literally crawled up inside my very Muchness that isn’t good. It feels sickening. It feels gross. My friend will never be able to erase the image from his head. He will probably lose many night’s sleep over it. Harold’s kids, however estranged and unhelpful they were, have to mourn their father, not from the natural causes of a ninety year old, but from a self-inflicted gunshot.
I have myself had the barrel of a gun loaded gun in my mouth. But when I did it, and my begging for the courage to pull the trigger was met with the one and only failure to fire that firearm had since it’s creation, I changed.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone that I love and care about, which is every human on earth, could ever feel so empty and alone that they chose to walk that route.
I need to know:
Is Harold walking among angels right now? Does God understand his pain? Is he granted mercy and grace? I need something to make this not right, nothing could begin to make this right, but I need to make it something I can cope with. I need to know that Harold is with God.
It wouldn’t hurt to know if Harold is capable of knowing how sorry I am. I feel pretty hollow right now.
F