INSIDE OUT INSANITY
'Inside Out Insanity' is based on a life of a woman who did her best to give her
love unconditionally to others and in so doing sometimes forgot her own needs which almost
cost her, her whole life’s value.
CH. 1
THIS IS MY STORY
I suppose we should start at the beginning.
I was born at home in 1948 in Lynn Massachusetts. My Mom said that during the delivery, Dad fainted because the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck so each time I would work my way down the birth canal looking for the exit the cord would yank me back up like a yo yo. After this happened a few times my father fainted and the doctor had to reach up to un-wrap the cord for me to be born. You would think that would make for a cranky baby, but they say I
had big dimples that demanded I claim a more positive presence in the world.
Another event that would add shape to the direction of my life happened just after entering
first grade of public school. As a first grader I was beginning to meet new friends in school that lived around the neighborhood. Adventuring out without family for the first time, I had been invited by some of my little school friends to play down the field at the end of our street. The field was an empty overgrown lot that stretched from Kirtland Street which was our street to
Robinson Street which was on the next block. The grass in the field was very overgrown.
The grass, weeds and bushes in parts were so tall they topped our heads but then again we were only first graders and not very tall. There was a beaten path from people cutting across the field from street to street.
We had been there a while playing in the old abandoned car that had been left to give form to our childish imaginations where we drove to far away places. At first I didn’t notice the kind looking young man who lived across from the field came cutting through the path through the tall grass that came just above his waist as he approached us where we were playing. When I did notice him he was reaching into his pocket and pulled out a pack of gum, One by one he offered my new friends a peace of gum from the pack and each accepted and thanked the kind man but when he got to me the last the new kid to join the field playmates in the park. The young man seemed so sorry he had run out of gum to give me a peace but assured me he did have more. Taking my hand, he said come with me I’ll get you some it’s just at my house over there he pulled me along as he spoke over his shoulder to the others saying “we’ll be right back.”
This was 1955 and back then our little minds were prepared for the stranger our parents warned us about to be a scary ugly mean looking guy that nobody knows hiding in the shadows. A contradicting rule and What was an even more strongly enforced warning was that we should be good and mind adults and do as they say. So although every instinctive nerve in my body screamed that I didn’t want to go with this man I also did not want to act like a baby by showing my fear by crying out like a baby in front of my new friends now that I was a big first grader. I fallowed along obediently letting the young man lead me through the tall grass and across the next street to retrieve the gum at his house.
Knowing what I do today I can see just how lucky I was that an instinct for survival kicked in that day as I sucked back tears to be convincing, when I promised him that I wouldn’t tell and so he let me go home afterwards. It was growing dark when he led me down the back stairs of his house out into the crisp evening air that slapped me with a cold sting making my eyes blink threatening to overflow them with the tears that I had been fighting back from behind the lids. He still had a tight hold of my hand as we crossed the street towards the path in the field. He squeezed my hand even harder still when he asked me one last time if I was going to tell. I was all choked up inside and its strange when you think how at such a young age I somehow knew I had to disguise my true feelings when I answered, so I let my dimples speak for me as I shook my head to imply no I won't tell. When he finally let go of my hand I walked very slowly through the path at first with my head pointed straight ahead and my hands straight down to my side knowing his eyes were fallowing me.
There was a lump in my throat making it difficult to even swallow. A chill was climbing up my back and my teeth were chattering due to an uncontrollable tremble that had taken over my whole body. The gum he had given me that I had unwrapped mechanically and shoved into my mouth lay still clenched in my teeth, Un-chewed, I could not chew I would not chew! It was the one thing I felt I had control of And as soon as I could I would spit the gum out and never want to ever chew gum again!
It was getting dark and I felt very alone and scared. The field was filled with scary shadows,
scary and empty of human life except my own and the young man that I still felt was watching me from across the lonely path. My friends had all gone home for dinner and I felt more alone then I had ever been in my short life. The field no longer felt fun or safe as the evening shadows crept in and wild grasses and sharp thorns from the over grown weeds whipped across my bare legs scratching them. When I reached the half way mark in the field I feared the young man was still behind me but I was afraid to look back to check. I wanted so much to run but instead I began to walk a little faster and then faster still almost causing myself to stumble over the vines that were then stretching clawing like wild animals
As I hurried my walk I felt chafing burning between my thighs that were sticky and wet it burned almost like when I was younger and didn’t make it to the bathroom because I was to busy playing and didn’t wash up or change my panties right away but this was even worse my inner thighs were sticking together and ripping apart each time they separated with each step. But this did not stop me. I didn't even slow down and It couldn't let it slow my pace which was bordering on an awkward run now. The chill in the air and the trembling inside my body grew and my teeth were beating against each other in a fast chatter despite holding tight to the gum in my mouth. The shadows that were cast by the old car and other abandoned junk in the field looked like monsters coming to get me. I feared the winding fallen branches that tripped me up might be snakes. It was the longest short distance walk I had ever taken or would ever take in my young life. My heart beat faster and faster for the field seemed endless! Then at last my
feet hit the cement of the sidewalk on the other side of the field at last and my legs then grabbed freedom to run full out up my street towards my home! I turned my head to see if the monster was still behind me but I saw just blackness. I had to hold my breath to stifle a scream that welled up in my throat threatening to escape through my lips. I was afraid the monster in my wakened nightmare would hear me and run after me to stop me before I could get to the safety of my home and arms of my mother who I was sure was waiting for me to get home.
The darkness was falling like a heavy wool blanket and made it difficult for me to see very far ahead. I had never been out alone this late before, especially away from home and family!
Even though I still couldn’t see it I began to feel a heart felt tug of home encouraging me to keep going I would be home soon. They thought of needing the safety of my mothers arms to hold me gave way to a sob that chocked out from inside me. Screaming for escape my mouth opened and the gum fell out of my mouth. A heavy deep sadness escaped with my sob and overwhelmed my heart and the tears came flooding out followed by a whimper.
Then I heard a familiar voice calling out my name and I could see my older sister Charlotte coming down the street towards me. I cried out and soon she was with me. Seeing my sadness and difficulty walking she scooped me up into her arms and carried me home.
Where my mother was waiting on the porch for me to come home. When she saw Charlotte carrying me she ran down the porch steps and took me from my sister into her arms. Two of my other older sisters were coming down the street and came running when they saw
my mother carry me into the house. They had been out looking for me too. My father was working the three to eleven shift and was not home. But mom had called him when I did not come home and he came home.
I cried an cried in the safety of my mother’s arms. I can not remember telling anyone what happened but I must have because the next thing I remember was Policeman coming to the door and taking me into the front seat of a police car and them driving me to Robinson street to point out the house the young man took me into across from the field. I remember being so cold and the trembling was still uncontrollably as I turned to see two policemen putting the young man into the back seat behind me in the police care with two policeman sitting on either side of him. I don’t know what happened to his after that but the next thing I remember was that it being so dark and late at night. I wasn’t used to be out after dark. The policeman then drove me to a big old building way up on top of a hill that had a steep driveway that caused the car to tip front end up high. It was the old Union Hospital. The policemen brought me into a
huge room with bright lights and lost of long white curtains surrounding metal tables. Someone picked me up and lay me down on a cold, high, metal table with a sheet on it and removed my cloths and covered me with a sheet. There were policeman standing all around me as a man in a white coat came over and began pulling the sheet up to examining me. He bent my knees up and I held my breath as he examined me. It hurt and in between the hurt I would gasp to steel a breath holding back the sobs. Long white curtains hung along the walls and sectioned off some of the other metal tables to offer some sort of privacy in the huge room but around my table the curtains were kept wide open to the policeman who were standing around my table watching. I continued to tremble I was so very cold. I also continued holding my breath as if it was the only thing I could do on my own. I don’t remember what was being said if anything. I had to concentrate on holding back the sobs but I would have to let out a gasp of air here and there and when I did warm tears escaped my eyes as I stayed as silent as I could. The light overhead was very bright and stung througmy tear soaked eyes. There were lots of big ugly pipes hanging down from the ceiling above the metal table I was lying on. The light overhead was so bright it stung my tear soaked eyes. I found it better to shut my eyes tight and keep them shut as long as possible. I know now I was really trying to shut out not just the light but the deep sadness and the hurt and everything else including the memory of what had happened to me. And it worked sort of. I shut it out tight for the next five years. Kids can be so resilient? But then again blocking out unpleasant memories doesn't last forever and can also just be the calm before the later storm.
For the next five years it was as if all memory of the event was wiped out of my fragile brain.
Life and my growing years continued on like for any happy dimple-flashing child. I was an innocent and free to be happy and love life pushing away all thoughts of the boogie man. But there was something hidden behind that smiling dimpled face after that day at the field.
the dimples were just as deep but the eyes seemed to have lost their flash. As I Look back at the pictureof that particular growing season of my life starting with my first grade picture taken shortly after that day at the field. The picture still shows a beautiful child with a deep dimpled winning smile, but no more glittering eyes that were open to the world and all its wonderment. now If you looked deeply you could see a dark hidden secret covered by tell tale sad eyes. Oh, the smile and dimples still stood out strong enough to fool you, but something was very different.
The once bright and innocent eyes that were opened wide to the world were changed and suddenly seemed to slant downward and lose their twinkle and instead of being opened wide to the wonderment of the world they were replaced by a quiet pensive blank stare. The eyes were now a door that stayed shut in protection to allow a child to grow for years holding back the impossible memories that were too difficult for a youthful innocent mind to handle or even understand.
And so grow I did. And life gave way to more obstacles that would shape the path in my life such as dealing with our Uncle George. It seems all families have an Uncle George or someone like my uncle George. He was my father’s sister’s husband Uncle George used to make me feel uncomfortable when he would find me alone for brief moments. This Aunt and Uncle didn’t have any children of their own. And my sisters and I loved Aunt Anna but unfortunately she came with an Uncle George who we all did our best to avoid when they came to visit. We looked forward to their Christmas presents each year though. Aunt Anna always bought us mirrors and brushes and comb sets.. My Aunt Anna had polio as a child, which left her with a brace on one leg. And a surgery to her cheek on her face which she kept bandaged. She had a beautiful singing voice and Uncle George was an amazing piano player And artist. His paintings were amazing.
I loved my Aunt dearly but each one of us Curtin girls individually at our own time and for our own reasons learned to avoid being alone with Uncle George. When I was a baby I can even remember him lifting me up and hurting me with his hand under my dress and I cried to be put down. My aunt was standing right there talking with my mother who took me from Uncle George’s arms not understanding why I cried out. I learned to squirm away from Uncle George after that. When I was older and they came to visit one day after kissing my aunt and visiting with her for a bit she sat down to tea with my mother and I hid on my uncle upstairs
in my parent’s room watching their little black and white TV. I think I was about nine. I liked going up to my parents room to watch their little black and while TV and this day I was up there waiting for Uncle George to leave. But he came up to use the upstairs bathroom
and he found me sitting in a chair in front of the TV. I didn't hear him come into my parents room behind me until it was too late. Suddenly he was there wrapping his arms around me in an Uncle George type of hug while he talked about nothing much. He first began rubbing my shoulders and then he slid his hands down my shirt rubbing my flat 9 year old chest. I didn’t understand why he had to do that, but I did know it made me very uncomfortable so I squirmed away and ran down stairs to where everyone was having a nice time visiting with Aunt Anna.
In comparing notes with my other sisters many years later I found out I was the lucky one when it came to Uncle George’s nasty antics. I also found out he was a bad man in other ways too. He was a heavy drinker and very threatening some years later and gave my parents a hard time. He was even threatening to hurt my Dad or have my father hurt by someone else.
But one of my sisters had an idea to fix that. My new brother in law who Uncle George had not met yet, loved y father and didn't like that George was threatening him so he had some of his friends pretended to be Members of Mafia or Hells Angels I can't remember which and they went to a Bar where Uncle George hung out and Scared the heck out of him. They told him that they were (Hells angels ?) and they very good friends of my fathers and how they had high respect for my father and how no one should ever mess with him or else. They told him if he didn’t leave my parents and us girls alone they would get him some cement shoes. It scared the pants off him and He and Aunt Anna moved back to Lynn. Then Uncle George died fairly young of cancer. I can honestly say I don’t think anyone in our family missed him much. Sad but true.
I was about twelve years old 5’7” and 125.bs when the nightmares first began. And they came with a vengeance. Night after night they would haunt my life sending me trembling and shiver
shaking. Terrible nightmares of terrible things that made me feel scared and even ashamed for having such thoughts. It was just after getting my friend, as we called our menstruation period back then.
There were many disadvantages of being the fourth daughter of a family of eight girls and
one was that you were often accidentally skipped over when it came to receiving
important information. Accidently of course! You know, like that talk mothers give to their daughter to prepare her for the wonderful world of womanhood. Let’s just say they didn’t close that gate till the horse escaped from the barn on this life lesson. Of course my time came when the house was full of visiting relatives. I was using the tiny pantry at the top of the cellar stairs.
right off of the kitchen where everyone was having coffee and chatting. Down cellar my dad had
his workshop and a room full of canaries and finches he was breading He also always had wild animals he was nursing back to health often brought to him by people who would find them in the woods or on the side of the road injured. Everyone knew about Dads kind way with animals. I had a pet hawk for a while who liked to set on my shoulder. Dad was mending his broken wing. The pantry at the top of the cellar stairs used to be used for canned goods and mops and brooms but Dad put a toilet and sink in for a second bathroom mainly for himself because with the eight daughters he could barely ever get in to the one upstairs. This was the bathroom I was in when taken completely by surprise. We can’t blame my mother she had so many daughters she really had thought she had already had the talk with me and prepared me for this marked even. But for me of course not knowing a thing about it, I did what I felt was very
appropriate at the sight of all that blood and let out a blood-curdling scream for help! After all I figured I must be dyeing right? And of course the downstairs bathroom being right off the kitchen where my parents were serving coffee to relatives who all came running with her to see what was the matter. They took one look at me sitting on the toilet and knew. They just as quickly turned away but not without snickering and some even laughing out loud all back to the kitchen to finish their coffee while mother explained the facts of life to me, a quick Condensed version.
Well like I said about then is when the nightmares first began and at first I would have them every month around the same time. As time went on they grew to haunt me more often. They were strange dreams that made no sense to me at all but made me feel embarrassed and ashamed so I was unable to tell anyone about them. They would be of things I never could
have imagined and it felt like being trapped inside a horror movie unable to get out. I would wake trembling and shaking unable to stop sometimes for hours. As time went on the dreams seemed to get worse I wanted but couldn’t share my dreams with anyone. They were unspeakable. I just wanted to stop from having them, forget about them and get on with my happy day dreams at least but the thoughts began to take over those too. Sometimes with different events in my life happening, I would have them several nights in a row and this would make me shiver even during the day yet I was not cold. Then some days I began shivering and
trembling during the day for no reason without the dreams or thoughts. After two years of keeping the torturous nightmares to myself, at age fourteen I finally got up the nerve to
tell one of my older sisters while I was visiting overnight with her at her apartment. I had grown terribly afraid that something was very wrong with me. I was being raised a good Catholic girl who believed you could sin with thought as well as word or deed. And my thoughts although I did not know where they came from I knew were not very pure at all. I needed to know what was wrong with me, How and why I would think such thoughts dream such awful dreams.
I needed for them to go away and leave me thinking and dreaming of clean beautiful things, fun things, and happy things again like I used to. I decided to trust my older sister to help me.
The nightmares made me feel guilty and ashamed. I was a good catholic girl and I loved the Lord and felt my nightmares kept me from being worthy of his love for me. I was ashamed of my thought and I couldn’t hold it inside any longer. I decided that I had to take a chance and tell my sister as much as I dared and see if she could help me. I was afraid of what she might think of me. But I could no longer carry the burden of it alone. I am so glad I told her that night. Who knows how much longer I would have blamed myself for those terrible thoughts! And the truth did set me free once my sister opened up the door I had closed so many years ago. She let me know that my dreams were recreations of a something that happened to me when I was very young and the thoughts were not my fault. No, I was not crazy or demon possessed.
These dreams and thoughts did not just jump into my mind from out of thin air. I was not a bad person. It was not my fault that I had been robbed of my innocence. I had been violated and I had shut the memory out and it was now coming back to haunt me and play havoc on the innocent mind of a twelve to fourteen year old that of course could not have imagine such things out of thin air on her own without seeing or experiencing it somewhere.
But they were distorted memories brought back to the surface by puberty. Unfortunate memories that had been driven deep inside from a little seven-year-old girl unable to process what had happened to her. A child who was too young to deal with such things as being taken away by a stranger and sexually molested and fearing worse. The memories of the experience had been covered up by years of protective denial while a child tried to forget and grow up without fear and I had in all appearance done so. I lived my life and grew up and into a young woman. My sister told me I had nothing to feel ashamed about and that God loved me. I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders and melted the shame away as I saw the dreams for what they truly were. NOT MY FAULT!
I do believe the emotional Scars endured in our youth and even along our life path, play an
important part in shaping our personality and even our destiny. I often wonder, could what happened that day so long ago been the first step to setting me on this path of trying to save other needy children? A couple of years ago my eldest sister reminded me of another incident that took place when I was at the age of fifteen concerning her new beautiful baby boy, Little John who I loved so very much because I helped care for him daily just before his unexpected death at five months old that may also have marked my path I would take in life and leave me with the need I seemed to save children as a way of life.
Do I regret choosing a self sacrificing life lived for others? Now that my husband walked out on me and this life as though it were not a worthy or good life? No, of course not! He may have danced to the beat of a different drummer but I still feel it was such a wonderful and worthy life. But do I sometimes wonder what if? Yes I guess I do, But given the choice I’d like to believe I would still want to do it all again. I don’t want to give up the happy memories we had together as a family, or of being involved in and helping to raise all those children, or the years I was proud of being married and loving my child hood best friend and husband despite the many hard times. I just thought things would be a lot different then they turned out. The dreams and all the hope I carried from childhood have been stolen for me and it has been a difficult to sink my teeth into new ones. The good memories live on in my heart even though they are sometimes hidden by the sharper realities of recent failures. Thank goodness for the wonderful and good memories that peak through this horrible time in my life to remind me that those goals we
once shared together were good. I never could have dreamed that after 30yrs of devotion to Dana and our unique melting pot family would end up like this, with a family so divided and
running to escape could turn against each other over the pain of the loss of it all. I have almost nothing left of the dreams I once had of my husband and myself sitting on her porch side by side watching the generations of our efforts playing and celebrating our life around us. It was not in my dreams for my future that I would marry a man that would leave me to raise his three youngest children alone so he could go get a LIFE to be with a selfish barren self seeking heartless home wrecking harlot. I lived my life with a dream to be Grammy and some of my children have given that name to the barren harlot and withhold it from me like a punishment.
I’ve been counted out like I am the unworthy one because I called everyone out on their mean actions and lies.
I was the mother to many. Five biological and eight adopted children not counting
many others I helped along the way. Children were and still are my joy. God’s wonderful treasures gifted to us all temporarily. Seeing the happiness of children can bring smiles and laughter that could light any path. No matter what the age 5months, five years, fifteen years, and fifty years I was open to love all Gods children.
Somewhere in the midst of the joy of helping others and raising children, I would sometimes find myself feeling alone in a crowd like the clown with that painted smile and wonder why
among all the gifts God has given me in my life, with such a life of joy and purpose. One day I realize that somewhere along the line I had learned to live mostly through the joys or sorrows of other people. I was living on the happiness in their happiness. It was nothing coming from my own happiness. Like that part of me had a door closed tightly as if I gave up my portions to make certain others were well satisfied, weather it be the meat, the bread, the milk, the cloths off my back, money, time or loving others. Doing this and seeing people happy or content or satisfied gave me what I thought for a long time was complete satisfaction. I can see now that this left my own needs unmet and covered emptiness I was denying in myself. I think this was because I truly believed there would be time for me later. And the picture of that later was the
picture sitting on the porch with my husband Dana watching our children and grandchildren playing happily around us in this beautiful family home on our beautiful farmers porch with our beautiful love seat swing on our beautiful family property that we raised all our beautiful children on that gave so many wonderful memorable years together. I worked hard to try and cover all the bases for not just my husband and my family but anyone else that might need but I guess I never thought about what might happen if someone or something came and shattered those dreams. I guess I just took that ending to our good life for granted.
I guess I should have at least given the various possibilities some thought but or prepared for some alternative endings but who wants to look forward to or plan on disappointments?
CHAPTER 2
We take it from the top
I don’t know everything, or have an understanding of how this could have happened, but I do believe my life up until now at least was of great value and I’m proud of the life we had together, my husband and myself, I believed it had and still has such a wonderful purpose, for the most part of it anyway. I know much of my part was driven by my strong faith and my belief that God was blessing my dream of living a devoted and loving life as a good wife to my husband, mother to my children and faithful servant to my God and I was proud of my family and their individual parts in this life and devotion to helping others. I believe I did my best to
exhibit a strong moral code and set a good example to our children and others. I wanted peace and happiness for the world and believed it to be possible one person or child at a time. I also was willing to fight or it if and when needed and tried my best to arm myself with Gods guidance to do so. I did not want to disobey His teaching to love one another, turn the other cheek or when asked for your coats also give your hat and if you lend money don’t ask for it back. I
fought each battle with faith asking the Holy Ghost to speak through my words and knew when this was happening when the calm and clarity and sense of love that would come giving me the right words to speak with love and kindness. I felt God beside me until my husband sinned against me and my family and I was faced with a life changing battle I found myself feeling afraid, alone and unprepared to handle. Suddenly I found it difficult to fight equally for my own needs as I did for others. I fear that as a husband and wife are suppose to be as one, if his sins against me and the family didn’t so reflect on me and my failure to help my husband or stop him from committing these sins. Had I failed him by not trying harder to be a vessel that would help strengthen his faith so he would not commit such sins? Thus like the sins of the father are bestowed on his children so be it with me and his family too. Because suddenly I was alone, I could not hear or feel the Lord in anything that was happening to us and around us. How could this have happened? What did I not do to prevent this from happening to us?
I sometimes wonder if it was because I left a scared screaming 6-year-old little girl
unprotected trapped deep inside me most of my life. I know that as I grew into a woman, I was actively trying to save the world or at least my little corner of it one child at a time, or even 13 at a time. And my most demanding adventure started with trying to save the best friend of my youth, my husband Dana.
We were just 15 when we met I had just moved up to New Hampshire from Lynn Massachusetts. We became best friends and shared our high school years. I confided just about everything to him and he gave me his shoulder to cry on. And in return in the end when he found his fiancée in bed with his best friend while he was in the Navy I comforted him by giving him my hand in marriage. This happened shortly after my own high school boyfriend decided to marry someone else so I guess in fact we were suppose to be saving each other then.
It just made sense to me at the time. Dana was with me almost every day through out our high school years. As one of my very best friends he knew most of my dreams and secrets. Many times he jokingly would ask me to marry him and I would just say “Oh Dana you’re my best friend and like a brother to me but I love Billy. This did not change our friendship. The only time we had difficulty was when he tried to teach me algebra and didn’t get it. Boy was he impatient about it almost losing his temper saying why you don’t see this it’s so simple! I knew not to ask him for help with homework after that.
We were still best friends after high school although our lives had to go in different directions.
Dana was into his last year of the Navy and I was just laid off from working at the General Electric Company in Lynn Mass where I had been working sense our high school graduation and then I got a job in men’s and boys department in Simons Department store in Plaistow and was able to move back home to New Hampshire.
Dana was stationed in Cuba and just home on leave due to his Stepfathers illness, and fight with cancer. I visited him in the nursing home with Dana and Herb his stepfather said I wish I could see you two get together. Well Dana was getting over the hurt of finding his fiancé in bed with his best friend and I thought I knew what he was feeling because it hadn’t been that long ago that I found out my high school sweetheart who I thought was the love of my life, was going to marry a woman he met at college. So when Dana told me about his fiancé reminding me of my own heartache, I wanted to wrap my arms around him and protect him and hold him tight and love him, but the timing was off. I had already been dating an absolutely wonderful man named Joseph Troisi who was everything I needed to help with the healing of my own broken heart and I was quickly falling in love with him, he was very gently and kind to everyone and treated me like a Princes. He was a hard worker and was a strong Catholic raised believing in and loving God like me. He was such an easy man to love. His heart was open and giving. When My father had herd I was seeing an Italian at first he was upset but after he met him he loved him and gave his approval. Joe’s mother did not approve of me an Irish Catholic girl so she used to turn away my phone calls. She would say, is this the Irish girl and when I said yes she said “No Joey live here!” and hung up on me. After that I had to get my room mate Judy to call and she told Joe’s mother she was an Italian girl and her family was from Cicely so she would call Joe to
the phone and then she would give the phone to me. To me Joe was the older man representing security and solid ground. He was a man of twenty five but he had such a youthful joyful spirit he could run with me through the streets jumping, dancing and playing like a child and his
peter pan personality brought me much joy and laughter the perfect choice for a husband and father. Everyone loved him and he had just asked me to marry him and given me a beautiful
ring. Maybe it was too soon, or maybe I just wasn’t ready, or maybe I didn’t believe I deserved such happiness from a man. Or maybe he was just too tame, But when Dana came home on leave from Cuba that year Knowing my high school sweetheart was out of the way gave him the idea to finally pursue me in a different light, even knowing I had just accepted an engagement ring from Joe didn’t deter him. Dana began to shower me with flowers candy and attention competing with Joe for my affection in a way I had never seen Dana. I don’t know or understand how I justify breaking up with Joe such a wonderful guy to marry Dana except that Dana felt like an old safe comfortable shoe and his mother didn't scare me like Joe's mother did. I tell myself it was because I wanted to save Dana. But I don’t understand it myself today. In Gods truth how I could justify hurting Joe to fix Dana’s broken heart. It sounds ridiculous to me now, or even
worse, it sounds untruthful. I wonder how often we humans lie to ourselves in order to justify our behavior or choices and just how long it takes us to realize it. I think it was one of the most mean and thoughtless things I ever did and I have only myself to blame for the results of it.
Meanwhile back to Dana, When he first came home on leave and told me about his fiancé
cheating on him. I remembered saying to him half joking and half really wanting to save him from being hurt, “Why don’t we just marry each other we want a dozen kids and I bet we could make a great together.”
And He continued the game saying, “If we did get married you could come back with me to Cuba.”
We were only talking but something underneath those words was about to once again rock my path. This was the weakening moment that set Dana into pursuing me and me into questioning on which direction I should go next. I admit I was afraid of Joe’s family especially his mother accepting me and Dana seemed more familiar and the future with him looked safe with staying with my family environment instead of the Italian customs. Could that be the reason why or at least partially? All I really know is that in time Dana was the push to decide to break it off with
Joe. I wonder what would have happened had Dana not come home from Cuba at that time. Where would we all be today? I’m pretty sure I would not have been married to Dana.
Although Dana had plenty of uniforms he had no decent street cloths or a suit to be married in. He spent his money as fast as he got it. I had been working for the General Electric for a few years and I enough saved for us to have a nice wedding and to buy him pants, shirts underwear,
socks and of course the suit, tie and shirt we would be married in. It was a small wedding. We
didn’t need frills. My girlfriend Jean and I made my beautiful gown. And we bought the rings on time payments an my charge account at Ross Jewelry store in he Square in Lynn Mass where I had a credit account established after buying my
father a ring for his birthday and my mother a mothers ring.
Dana and I were happy and anxious to tell his step farther Herb before he died that we decided to get married. I do believe Herb played a big part in convincing me to marry Dana and
our decision to get married right away. We wanted to bring him some joy at the news of it before it was too late. He was slipping fast. went on long family riding trips with Dana’s mother and Herb before he got sick.
At the time of our decision to marry my mother was recovering from a heart incident and my oldest sister Bunny was caring for her and gave me a hard time about trying to see my mother. Mom loved Dana, but just not for me. He used to steel the cookies out of the cookie jar and she got a kick out of it. But she had never thought of him as husband material, at least for me.
But eventually she gave us her blessing and came to our wedding on July 3, 1970 at the little Baptist Church in Newton Jct. As I walked down the isle on my fathers arm and he passed me over to Dana I thought I felt it was the beginning of a good life together. All the people we loved were there to watch as Dana and I said our vows promising to love honor and obey through sickness and health till death do us part. Being married to my best friend I believed it would last
forever.
Unfortunately we found out after the wedding that I could not go after all because there was a long waiting list and other wives married were ahead of me.
It was a small sweet and memorable wedding at seven o’clock on a Friday night. My gown
was so beautiful and fit perfectly showing my youthful thin figure that I was not going to keep for long. It was made of brocade and a soft eyelet lace panel down the front and sleeves. Our honeymoon, was just a long weekend was spent fixing up our apartment and then serving our first dinner of Steak and potatoes to a couple of our best friends. Dana left a day late to get back to his base but was excused when they found he had gotten married that weekend. Our Honeymoon night had a few problems; Dana had a bit too much to drink that and the next couple of nights I think I got pregnant the night before he left for Cuba. Eight months later Dana got an early out and came home from Cuba just in time to settle in before our daughter Tammy was born. He got out of the service early because he said he wanted to be home for the birth of our first child and then didn’t get to see her birth because he went home to take a nap and ended up sleeping through it.
This truly marked the beginning of what life was going to be like with Dana and that plus our honeymoon weekend was to mark our relationship And how our life together as a family began and would continue on in many similar ways with Dana as a husband and father.
It was my happiest goal to be a wife and mother and I wanted to live a life with my husband nurtured by faith hope and trust. We had some ups and downs right off in the beginning and it wasn’t always wonderful but I did believe once we got over a couple of rough spots that our life together was blessed by God and that meant so much to me and besides I knew nothing came easy in this life today now did it? I understood when I had to make many sacrifices and put much of my own development of my God given gifts and talents aside to stand by my man and his goals. This is what a good wife did, after all he was the head of the house and wanted to be the breadwinner while I was to be a stay at home mom and manage his home for him and I there weren’t many choices for woman back then. When I was younger I had dreamed of becoming a model, an actress, a singer, an artist, a writer and heck even a nun. So who was I to judge my husband for not being able to make up his mind what he wanted to do? He started out a plumber with his father making about $35 a week some weeks. So when I convinced him to try and get a job with my father at General Electric in Lynn where he worked for a few years until he was laid off that seemed like great money and security. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. One of our first challenges came as a result of Dana’s stay in the Navy stationed for long periods of time in quiet places like Machias Maine, and then in Cuba where there was not much to do in your free time. So like his father before him he began to develop a strong drinking habit. Coming from a family of alcoholics I suppose that was only to be expected. When he came home after the service he continued to expect to be able to drink like he had in the service. Our first dinner party he got drunk and passed out by 8 o’clock because he had started drinking early that day while preparing for the party and I was left to tend to our guests alone. He did wake long enough to throw up out the back door all over the side of the house and after trying to show someone how to drink from the other side of the glass while practically standing on his head. People were leaving by then though. He would go for rides with his cousin or his young uncle riding around drinking and driving and come home prepared to accuse me of having someone in the house while he was gone. Not his sober self! When he was in this mood he would back me into a corner screaming at me. My aunt who lived next door worried for my safety but I knew he would never hit me. Not counting the time he swung a long heavy squash from our friends garden at me teasingly. Then convincing me he had a good grip on it so I should put my hands down and trust him. Of course when I did, the squash slipped out
of his hands and hit me in the forehead knocking me back against our car. I cried while he tried his best to convince me it was an accident. If I had followed my instincts I would have kept my hands up knowing the whole thing was a stupid thing to do in the first place. But I wanted him to know I trusted him and that seemed more important at the time. He was so sweet when we were teenagers and when he was sober but he was jealous jerk when he drank too heavily. But when his meanness began to show with our picked up our cat and through her across the room or when he punched our Saint Bernard as hard as he could right between the eyes I began to get worried. Instead of acting remorseful he joked about how Alfy (that was our dogs name) was so strong he just shook his head after he hit him. It broke my heart to see that my best friend who I thought was so gentle and sweet in high school was becoming a mean drunk and bully. I threatened to leave him if he did stop drinking, but as a Catholic girl it was hard to turn
away from my wedding vows. He had been brought up in a home that said when the man comes home from work he deserves his beer and that’s about the extent that he really knew about being a man at that time in our marriage.
Then one day his drunken anger was let lose on our adopted son DJ who was just a toddler. DJ –Dana Jr., was the first of the three children we would adopt from his sister Robin. Forgetting his strength Dana picked DJ up by one of his little arms and spanked his bottom so hard his little body swung like a bell in the air and that was it for me and in my heart I meant it! I told him he had to leave. He moved back into his fathers’ home where he stayed for three weeks. At
the end of the three weeks he agreed he had a drinking problem and convinced me he was ready to give up the drinking for his family. And he did. He remained sober for 25 years as we built our world around our family, which included many children and extended family members. It started with his sisters and brothers and then his sister’s children and then it just grew from there totaling eight adoptions and the birth of five children of our own which included the oldest child a middle child and the three youngest out of a total of 13. I could see it wasn’t always easy for Dana and even without drinking he lost patience with the children and would often scream unrealistic punishments or ground them for indefinite periods of time and then go off to work expecting me to in force them. Some times I could and sometimes I couldn’t’. He was hard and I was soft and sometimes he was too hard and sometimes I was too soft. But then there were those times when we balanced everything so well together things went so smoothly even with this large family and it was absolutely amazing! And those were the times that kept me going and believing I made the right choice to give Dana that other chance. We both kept trying to improve our parenting skills and ourselves for our children, taking classes together, getting involved with Little league and Scouts and Dana didn’t just get involved he always ended up running things. But their always seemed to be something haunting Dana chasing him like a bear I used to say and although it never seem to gain on him keep him running and unable to deal with some very important issues in his life.
So instead of an alcoholic he had become a workaholic and even in between his day job he kept himself very busy doing something at all times. When he did slow down or sit for a moment he was always so tired that he would often just fall asleep in his chair. And then at the age of 45 he had his first heart attack.
Because he was on running mode and I was on saving mode our married life began with our rescuing each other and continued with our rescuing lots of children and other people. Dana’s parents were divorced when he was just ten years old the eldest child in a large family. His father also a heavy drinker married several times bringing the older children with him.
His father was an unfaithful man with one eye on the bottle and the other on a woman in the room.
While pregnant with our first child my love for my husband grew with the many letters we wrote back and forth those eight months he was stationed in Cuba and I wait for his return. It
grew the joy we shared at the thought of having our first child. The war in Vietnam was phasing down and men were being offered an early out from the Navy and Dana chose to put in for one so he could come home in time to see his child be born. He was home for just a short while and then on March 28, 1971 Tammy was born. We didn’t know his early leave would cost us. His insurance for being in the Navy was canceled with the early out and so the birth of the baby was no longer covered. It would take us quite a while to pay off that bill. Especially with the small pay he received for quite some time while working with his father. Dana’s mother picked out our baby’s name. Although I wanted to name her after my older sister I figured there would be more
opportunities because we had both planned on having a large family.
If asked today, Tammy would say she was glad we picked Tammy for her name and a name not shared with an aunt or anyone. We named each of our boys adopted and otherwise after each of Dana’s brothers and my brother, father and grandfather, having ten sons when all was said and done.
When Dana came home from the service my mother and father bought us a cute little yellow cottage in town around the corner from them and just down the street from Dana’s father’s
family. Dana worked for his father back then in plumbing heating and electrical, But working for his father plumbing during this time didn’t get Dana many hours of work or enough money to
support a family only was bringing home $35 in a week most weeks. I had to drop the diaper delivery and wash the cloth diapers in the bathtub not having a washer or dryer or money for the laundry mat. After they were washed I would wring them out by hand and hang them out
on a clothesline that hung from the tiny garage to a tree it was hard work and I loved it! So don’t feel sorry for me. In the winter I strung lines throughout my house. I also didn’t mind the summer months when the well went dry and I would have to string plastic milk jugs with a bathrobe tie hung across Tammy’s baby carriage to make the walk around the corner and down the hill to my mother’s house to fill the water jugs from her well. Once DJ came along, our first adopted son from my sister in law, someone was giving away a free old fashioned wringer washer. That was great fun. It reminded me of when I worked for Dertex in Lawrence with my grandmother on an assembly line when I was just 16 in the summer. I did laminating work and slid my work through two rollers just like doing the laundry with this old wringer washer
now. But it did leak pretty badly so we had to put it out into the garage where we hung the hose out the garage window to drain the water out into the garden that grew quite well that
year.
With the adoption of Dana Jr. my sister in laws second child and then having my first biological son Wayne we out grew the cute one bedroom cottage home with no land to do an addition. Dana finally accepted the fact that he had to stop working for his fathers who was still treating him like a part time school boy giving him next to no hours work but telling him to stay home in case he called him to work. Having a family to support it was time to find a better job with more stable income and maybe even benefits.
Living just down the street from Dana’s Father and stepmothers and their children and up the street from my Mom and Dad and my sisters and brother had proved to be very convenient arrangement for helping out Dana’s siblings, starting with Dana’s fourteen-year-old brother Wayne, who was kicked out of the house and move in with us for a while. He only had to walk down the street and I let him in and let him take over the small attic room for a bedroom. This is when our family first started to grow and change it shape in strange unpredictable ways. It sometimes seemed through our married life as if there were a sign on the door that read bring the troubled or unwanted children here. Next Dana’s 15yr old sister Kim had trouble at home and moved in with us. Dana’s sister Robin who lived with Dana’s mother in Bradford was an unwed mother with many problems. She would often call Dana and I to rescue her from one of her many often self-inflicted emergencies. She came and stayed for six months at a time almost ever year. Each time we would take her in help her out and then try to get her back up on her feet set her back out into an apartment until something else would happened and it would all begin again. When she got pregnant with her second son Jason Eric she did not want him from the beginning and she would hit her stomach crying that she did not want him. So when he was born she asked me to babysit for her one weekend and never came back to get him. He was our first son so I insisted to Dana we rename him Dana Jr. as a first son should be named. (And now that he is grown he is much like Dana in many ways today) Robin had many problems brought on by depression and a mental illness probably caused by a terrible child hood experience at the age of nine I think she was when she was a victim of a vicious attack by a male babysitter who tried to kill her slashing her throat and wrapping a telephone cord around her neck to try and kill her. He left her almost dead when her mother and her fiancé came back from their night out together and found her. She was hospitalized for many weeks and it of course affected the rest of her life. That is why I have so much compassion for her even though she was often very demanding on our lives throughout these years. Because of her emotional and mental instability and the effect it was having on her last two children when she married a Viet Nam vet suffering from the effects of serving in Viet Nam abused the children and then committed suicide The Department of Social Services took away her parental rights Robin turned to Dana and myself to
adopt her other two children Steven and Shawna so the Department of Social Services placed the children with me and her brother Dana to adopt. This unexpected increase in our family caused us to be evicted from our apartment in Plaistow where we had lived in a three bedroom apartment. The Landlord said the two more children even though they were all very little were not in the lease and we would have to move. It was humiliating like by taking in these children
we had done something wrong. I could not believe anyone could be so heartless. But this proved to be
God sent when we were then able to move to rent our home in Newton that we were
eventually able to buy from our wonderful and kind landlords and raise our family in a wonderful town for many years to come. It was a wonderful home with plenty of land for the children to play and even an in ground pool share many fun hot summer days with our family and friends keeping cool and playing together every summer. We did in time adopt Robins other two children Steven renamed Barry after Dana’s brother (and he looks just like his uncle Barry even today) and his younger sister Shawna (we kept her name the same.) along with our two biological childrenTammy and Wayne (Wayne was named after Dana’s brother Wayne) So that gave us five children ages 7 and under. But God pointed our path in a wonderful direction after that when we found a beautiful country cape with two acres of land to rent in Newton a few doors away from the Newton Baptist Church Dana and I had been married in on July 3,
1970. I believed that to be a sign that God was indeed blessing our marriage and our life together.
Tammy was in second grade and Steven
had started first just before we came to Newton. At the Newton Memorial
School they wanted me to
give them permission for Steven to be put into because he had a nervous
stuttering problem after his short life of crises and drama with male nutrition
and deficiencies. But I refused
to let them keep him back. I knew
how smart he was and out going and I believed now that his life was going to be
safer and calmer he would surely improve with his speech.
I knew how smart he was working with him at home and I did not believe he
should be kept back because of a speech impediment.
And I was right; he did well in school and eventually outgrew the
stuttering so that proved to be a good parental decision on my part and the
first advocacy out of many I would be doing for children.
Working with the Department of
Social Services during the first years with Steven and Shawna pre- adopt I began
to find out just how many children there were in need of temporary or permanent
homes. Dana agreed that while I
was a full time stay at home mom anyway raising all these little children I
could take in emergency care and respite for foster parents or children waiting
to be placed in permanent homes after all we were already taking foster
parenting classes for Steven and Shawna.
We did take in
children and I felt much pride in the success I had with a lot of the children
we took in. Dana and I took
parenting classes together and this helped Dana learn how to break some bad
parenting habits he had picked up from his father.
One day we got a call about a sibling group of four, three boys and a
girl ages five going on six and down that needed temporary placement. DSS did not want to place all four with
us so I called my sister Mary to help.
She agreed to take in the two middle children Brian and Amy and I took
the oldest child Jason and the youngest child Adam. This was good so we could
keep them all seeing each other during this difficult time for them besides it
was only temporary. What was
suppose to be three months turned into four years and then the parents signed
surrender papers and they were released for adoption.
A posting was put into Sundays child but eventually the allowed the
children to be adopted by Dana and. They were already part of our family any
way. During this time we took in a
nine year old failed adoption from my cousin. His name was Billy.
My cousin and her husband who could not have children of their own took
Billy who was just weeks old and his older sister Marie in with the intention to
adopt them. But in the end they
sent Marie away and adopted Billy and then later they got a second son from the
foster care system in Mass and his name was Doug.
When Billy was just nine they wanted or needed some respite from Billy
and called me to take him for a while. Once I had him they did not want him
back. When I got him at age nine Billy was a frail nine-year-old who was pulling
his hair out by the roots in patches leaving bald spots.
This seemed to be from nerves and getting him just around the fourth of
July he was scared to death of fireworks or any loud noises. His stomach was
distended like a malnutrition child and he was on the cusp of retardation. With the coming years of love and care
and encouragement he eventually began to grow happy handsome and strong.
But somewhere
in the mix of raising all these children for others I realized – Gosh Gee! I wanted to have biological children of
my own too!” I had always wanted a huge family and was hoping to be able to have
another little girl some day. It
took a little convincing and reminding him that he had agreed with me before we
got married to have 12 children.
So Dana and I worked at finishing up our biological family which added
the three youngest sons William, Jake and Joe. And then we gave up trying to
have that last little girl who didn’t seem to be in the cards.
So our life continued to be
wrapped in children and family. Still Dana managed to find time to reach out
beyond the family life. He enjoyed fishing with his brothers, going to the races
and even fixing, maintaining and running a car in the races.
While my life was committed to keeping score of everyone else’s life and
activities I found little time for myself or my writing or my art. Although
whenever I could I worked on my children’s stories and short stories. There was plenty of Arts and Crafts and
school projects to help out with for the kids though and that was always
fun. I soon learned that having
such a very large family finding a baby setter was next to impossible until my
eldest child Tammy got old enough to help out. Luckily some of my favorite passions in
life were arts and crafts, Music and playing with children. Children have such
vivid imaginations, as did I even still.
Today after all the
sacrifices and complications and unexpected outcomes, I’m not so sure I would
put as much emphasis on the end dreams as I should have put on just relaxing and
enjoying the moments while we still had them. Because that old saying is quite
true, ‘hear today gone tomorrow.” I think of my hopes and dreams about rocking
in a rocking swing chair with my husband on our front porch swing, his arm
around me as we enjoy watching the fruits of our labor bloom in our
grandchildren and great grandchildren.
But this dream has popped into peaces like a Childs balloon.
The dream of seeing our own children having their own children and coming
together in the love filled family home has been blown out of the water. All so that Dana could run off and have
a so called or what he now calls a life.
With Kathryn a woman who could come between a husband and wife, a father
and his children. Crushing a
family thus ending our life together like death ends our breath.
And that didn’t just end things for us all, it made such a mess of many
of our lives and days, weeks and years to come. Such a mess as a matter of fact I do not
know how I got through it this far.
He left and our children went scrambling in all directions. And here I
set for the last six years trying to hold onto threads of our family home, raise
the last of the children alone and make sense of the ending of our life
together.
I can get so devastatingly
sad and angry but yet I still say I lived three lives worth along the way. And
I’m grateful for most of it. I
lived through the joy and accomplishments of my husband in his life and
developing his career helping him reach for his goals.
I watched the children grow and change and seek their own destinies. And
I thought doing this would all be worth the sacrifices I had to make along the
way.
Did the downward
spiral happen that last fate full day Dana suffered another heart attack while
our home was burning to the ground? But everyone in Town was so wonderful, non
of the children were hurt and we learned about how much people cared about each
other in our Town and local communities by the wonderful responses to our needs
being met by even strangers.
After the heart
attack and the house fire I thought we started to pick ourselves up pretty well.
We were putting one foot in front of the other, just like we had time and time
again through the years. I trusted in the Lord, and believed He would help us
and everything would turn out OK and Dana would get well again. I was sure God
would see us through our worry about Dana’s health.
I could not allow myself to think otherwise. I would not survive it or be
able to take care of my children or Dana if I didn’t believe that.
I was very concerned when Dana decided not to hire someone to come finish
the house with the insurance money and that he would build our home himself or
as a family project. I was afraid for his health but proud of his desire to
build a bigger better home for our growing family.
He worked in construction any way, so I agreed and even looked forward to
the development of our new home that we designed together.
Dana seemed happy to draw up the plans for the house with me working on
our dream for a big and beautiful house to share many happy moments with not
just our children and even our grandchildren. I can not believe this was a man with
one foot out the door of this marriage!
Besides Kathryn and Paul his friends at work were still married to each
other at the time.
I was both afraid and excited for Dana, at the thought of building our
own home. I knew how much he had built for other people and now he had the
opportunity to do it for himself and us, his family.
I knew he would have to take it slow but he insisted on taking on the
challenge of building our new house saying “I’ve been in construction all my
life building for others now I have a chance to build it for myself!” So we began as a family, peace by peace
brick by brick board by board the girls and the boys of all ages and Dana and
together we all began the new adventure of building our new home.
This time we would build it up against the old barn, not so close to the
road so we will have more front yard for the children to play and not be near
the road. We would leave the spot where the old house stood as a garden memorial
to the old home and the happy memories we shared in it.
While the house was still
just a shell, barely a roof over our heads, we moved in to it. It was the week
before Christmas just before the real cold of winter overtook us when we moved
out of the trailer we had been staying in on the property and into our
unfinished home to spend our first Christmas. Then the worked began continued from
the inside out. We were doing very well for a while.
But then things began to happen.
At first I thought it began with my accident but now I sometimes
wonder. There was particle
board cut temporary for our stair treads. So we could get up and down the stairs
to work on the house. There were
no railings up. I almost fell over
the side coming down stairs but caught my balance begged Dana to put up a
temporary rail on the temporary stairs so no one will get hurt. He said he would
but did not put it first on his list and I almost fell a second time. I was more demanding about the
rails. Just put two by fours up I
pleaded. He promised he would get
to it but once again did not and the third time I was not so lucky.
But I’m still glad it was me and not someone else to lose balance
carrying things up or down the staircase that still didn’t have any rails.
I recently got an
opportunity to help out temporarily at my daughters work at a residential home
while her boss was going out on maternity leave. One night, while leaving my bedroom to
go to work the 11 to 7 As I gathered my things and left my second floor bedroom
out to the hallway and stepping down with my left foot first of the very first
step of the long winding staircase, my knee went and because their was no rail
to grab went hurling over the side as I screamed “NO!” and demanded it not be
so! As I toppled over the
side down to the foyer on the first floor I hitting my legs on the desk I
flipped over hitting me head breaking both wrists, fracturing my ribs breaking
my teeth and knocking myself out cold for several minutes before my husband said
I gasped a breath and turned myself over. Dana said he thought I was dead. It
was a very bad fall. I broke my wrist badly on one hand and my thumb wrist area
on my other hand and ended up with a cast on each hand that went up to my
elbows. Although I couldn’t seem to stop the room from spinning most of the
concentration remained on my breaks and bruising. My legs were bruised but not
broken. My neck, ribs, and back had much pain. I banged and broke my front teeth that
would later have to be removed.
For months I continued to have a very bad case of vertigo, which was very
debilitating. While recovering at
home and unable to work, I had to lean my head against the wall to walk to keep
from falling over with the vertigo after many weeks I finally got my casts off
my arms and was finding my way around a little better but the vertigo still made
me sick to my stomach, and I had
to fold my arms in and fall onto the bed to get in and even rolling over in bed
was very painful because of my broken ribs, Dana asked me if I would be willing
to help out Kathryn and Paul friends from work. He said Paul had started drinking again
(he and Kathryn were in AA) and because of his drinking he had made some poor
financial choices and while drunk was taken advantage of by a car dealer and
they were now stuck with a brand new car he bought for Kathryn that they could
not afford. They didn’t need help
with money, they would figure that out.
They just thought because I was unable to get back to work with my
daughter while recuperating from my accident. I could help Paul dry out and get
back into his AA meetings while Kathryn was at work. I could watch him while he
dried out in exchange he could help us with the work on the house for the 30
days.
I thought it might helpful to Dana to
have Paul around to help him with building the house so I agreed. After Paul
came, Kathryn had Paul sign everything over to her as if separated, she said
just so they wouldn’t lose it all due to Paul’s mistake with purchasing the car
they couldn’t afford. I didn’t
know about this until Paul told me.
I thought then Kathryn was up to something.
Paul proved to be sincere with his effort to get back to AA and sober up
and was a great help with some of the work we needed done on the house. He was a
pleasure to have around.
Thinking back on it, then while Paul was staying with us Kathryn would
call Dana to come talk with her about things or help her with things around the
house that needed fixing while Paul was staying back here with me.
Near the end of the 30days he was to spend with us, on Paul’s birthday he
wanted to see Kathryn but she said no.
At the end we found out the real reason Kathryn sent Paul to us. Kathryn
gave Paul the boot and was filing for divorce. I was shocked, and felt used. I
complained to Dana “How could she use us like that? I was wondering why she
would make such a big deal of Paul’s slip with drinking when I know she drinks.
She’s an alcoholic too! I
saw her drinking at the business dinners we went to?”
The last day Paul was at our home, he was yelling at Dana in our driveway
accusing him of having an affair with his wife. I was surprised he would accuse
Dana of such a thing. Not my
Dana. So I thought Paul was just
striking out because he was overwrought.
But after, once Paul was out of the picture Dana began acting
differently. He pretended it was
because he was feeling sickly because of his heart condition.
He always called me from work every day before he left to come home, it
was just our routine and he began calling saying he didn’t feel well and was
needing to stop off at Kathryn’s house to rest before he headed home or it
would be Kathryn needed something fixed at her house and so he was stopping off
on his way home. I tried to
remain patent and steadfast and trusting reminding myself this is what our
family did. Help others. Working on our own home began to slow
down to a crawl. I worried more about his health and his overdoing then thinking
something was up between them both.
Not my Dana! I would
beg him to take it easy and quit early when working on our own home on the
weekends. But then Kathryn’s house repair problems seemed to grow without Paul
around to fix things. Dana spent
more and more time there helping her with her house as the work on our own home
seemed to get slower and slower and Dana seemed to getting sicker and
sicker. I insisted he go to the
Doctors to see what was wrong and the Doctor told him, your fine.
Dana Got upset, telling me it wasn’t so on the way home and I agreed with
him saying we should change doctors.
After that Dana continued to act depressed and refused to see another
Doctor and continued having to stop off at Kathryn’s to rest more and more. She
would call me to reassure me he was alright and then he would come home late
would stay awake waiting for him. A few times he didn’t come home until 4 in
the morning saying he fell asleep and Kathryn didn’t want to wake him. When he wasn’t acting sick it was him
helping out at Kathryn’s or Kathryn’s mothers or her sisters helping Kathryn
pack up her mothers house to sell because her mother was being put into a
nursing home and fixing up Kathryn’s house in Ossipee to sell.
And when he did come home he was so beat and sickly he would sleep a few
hours in his recliner and then get up to go to work. Then one day Kathryn called
me from work and told me she believed he was deliberately doing heavy lifting
and stuff at work like he didn’t care if it killed him.
She said I should speak to him about it. When he came home that night I told him
about what Kathryn had said and he said he felt depressed. But refused to go to
the doctors until I told him I was not going to sit and watch him kill
himself. Then he agreed to go and
the Doctor gave him medication for the depression.
In an email to Dana from Kathryn the next day (that I read from his old
file after he left me and moved in with her) she asks him how we are getting
along, any better?” Up until that
night that she suggested I talk to him about what he was doing, I hadn’t known
we were having any problems in our relationship at all. I had been living in
fear of losing him sense his first heart attack at age 45 and I just wanted him
to be happy and well. After that things didn’t change much and I wasn’t getting
much sleep worrying about him expecting to hear the phone ring with someone
telling me he had been rushed to the hospital with another heart attack. I made him go to the doctors several
times during this time and each time after the tests they would say he is fine
his arteries were not blocked and he shouldn’t be having
problems at all. Eventually the doctors began treating him like a
hypochondriac and I was getting angry with them. After all I was living with
him. I could see how sick he was
acting in the evenings whenever he was to sick to drive right home All I knew
was the evenings when he would finally make it home he said he felt so sick he
wouldn’t want us near him and he would eventually fall sleep in the stuffed
recliner saying he was too sick to come to bed.
The week Dana walked out on us, Kathryn would tell me he had been
drinking with her for several months which might explain his staying away from
us when he came home and his wanting to sleep in his chair.
I guess sleeping in the chair and staying away from us was his way of not
letting me smell the booze on his breath.
When she told me about his drinking she tried to act the innocent saying
she didn’t know he was an alcoholic she just thought a little wine would help
his heart. This was bull crap!
When she asked me to help out with her husband Paul she said it was because I
did so well at helping Dana my own husband stop drinking and he had remained
been sober for 25years. That is
until Kathryn decided to seduced him through his weakness for alcohol and the
wine.
Then one weekend Dana
was going to go help Kathryn pack up her two room camp house in Ossipee because
she was moving that weekend to her mothers house to get it ready to sell but she
was just getting over phenomena so he said he was going to spend the night to
help pack her up and overnight Saturday too and then her sister and her sister’s
family and my sons and Dana would get together and move her on Sunday. I have to
admit something was not sitting right for me by now about Kathryn and her
demands on my husband. So I
volunteered to go pack up Kathryn myself and I would not take no for an answer.
I could tell Dana didn’t want me to go with him but I insisted and so the next
thing I know the plans are changed and he dropped me off to help Kathryn and
chose to go home and rest at our house himself instead.
I wondered why he didn’t still want to stay.
But what could he say without pointing out what was becoming so obvious
but still unspeakable.
So with my own concerns for my
own injuries put aside, I painfully packed her two room house all weekend her
cabinets were chuck full of large half-full booze bottles of all kinds. This was not what you would expect to
find in the cabinet of a sober alcoholic, or even a wife of a sober alcoholic. I
could smell the booze on her breath and in the glass she claimed to be soda. I
let her think I believed. While I packed she kept emailing someone on the
computer. I wondered if it was
Dana.
On Sunday everyone
was there to move her and some of her stuff got stored in my cellar back home.
After the last load was packed and we were all ready to go,
It seemed like she for a minute forgot I was there as she began to tell
her sister: “Dana and I will come up and get the plants on Tuesday and then we
will clean up and sweep up the house on
Wednesday.”
I was standing
by our truck not far from Dana when she said this and I spoke up.
“Your sister told me she was going to do that with you.” I told her.
She turned looking
surprised as if she forgot I was there and said “Oh, Oh yes that’s
fine.”
When we got into our
individual cars and trucks, Dana got in our truck with me and we headed home to
bring the load that was going to be stored in our cellar.
Once we were rolling I asked him straight out.
“How long has this been going on?”
Dana played the innocent and said
“What are you talking about?”
I said, “She’s acting like she owns
you! Not only did she feel she did not have to check with me about you both
doing things this week but what’s more important she didn’t feel she had to ask
you! How dare she take for granted you will do these things with her Tuesday and
Wednesday without checking with you or me first?”
I complained.
Dana argued that it’s got
nothing to do with him how she behaved.
“That’s her, not me; she’s just like one of your sisters to
me.”
I said “Well enough is
enough; she’s trying to possess you.
No more helping Kathryn!”
But he said, “I just want to
finish helping her get settled near work then there will be plenty of people to
help her. She won’t need me after
that.”
I had to believe him.
I had to trust him. I had always put my trust in him. He was the husband
of my youth! This might be one sided just like when one of our other friends had
a crush on him. He was flattered
but never acted on it. We had been married for nearly 30yrs.
I bore five children for him. He was my best friend! We had been through
a long life together so far.
We had climbed many mountains and
gone through many valleys together and always came out together and stronger for
it. But down deep I was
beginning to feel very frightened at what seemed to be happening around us or to
us. I did want to trust Dana with
all my heart and I was feeling guilty for thinking he might have a hand in all
this but then again it did sometimes seem like he was dumb when it came to woman
and their wiles and susceptible to there manipulation.
Heck I knew how to get around him in some things didn’t I?
Of course at the time, I didn’t know he had taken up with his old love
the booze.
I did believe totally now though
that Kathryn was up to no good and trying to wrap her wily ways around
Dana. But Not my Dana, he might
not see through her like I did but I believed with my whole heart he would never
leave me for a woman like that after all we meant to each other all these years
but she could cause some havoc in our lives if this kept up like this.
But boy was I wrong!
It was a beautiful home just around the corner from work like they said.
After getting her all moved in I hoped this would put an end to my worries about
what she was up to with my husband.
I hoped Dana would be able to begin to take it easier and putter around
our own home when he felt up to it.
But instead the day after we moved Kathryn into her new home she was
fired from her job at the company she worked at with Dana and then she called
him crying and he had to run up and comfort her and she kept calling him and
emailing him and so I complained and exactly three weeks later Dana moved out on
us and in with her telling me she needed him and how I was strong and a
wonderful person but he needed to be there for her.
The day he called and
left It happened like this: He
called me from work like he had every day for years but this time he said “Linda
I have something to talk to you about when I come home.”
He had never done that before.
We always spoke to each other about everything and anything when he
called home twice a day the first time to talk and the second to say he was
leaving work and going to be on his way home.
When he came home he was
solemn. He sat in his recliner in
our bedroom and when I asked him what was wrong he said “I’m leaving. I need to
have time to think. So I’m going to
stay at my brother Wayne’s for a
while.”
I asked him why and he just said “We
butt heads about the kids.”
I felt this had to be a bad joke, so I
said “Dahh”
With 13 children any
couple would but heads about the kids from time to time.
That’s no reason for him to leave. I was still in a lot of pain with
my injuries and I could not sit long without discomfort in my lower back hip
area so I took a breath and I got up to go around to the back of my rocking
chair to stand and rest my hands on the back of the chair for balance.
Dana jumped up and grouched at me
saying “Don’t bother getting up!
I’ll leave!” And then he
went to the closet to grab a few cloths.”
Shocked by this drama from no where
I said “what are you talking about?
I just got up because my back is
hurting!”
But he didn’t stop to explain he
grabbed a few things from his shelf in the closet stuck and them in a bag and
stormed out of the house. He said
he was going to his brother Wayne’s’ house in Derry but a few days later his
brother told me Dana wasn’t really staying there with him and he wasn’t going to
cover for him. I called Dana’s
cell phone and he admitted he was up to Kathryn’s house staying there. Dana had moved in with Kathryn who at
first said Dana was just like a brother to her and she just wanted to help him
but by Monday she admitted to me she would want to marry him if he was
free. He had claimed she was just
like a sister to him but chose to move in with her, where there were no
children, and he could get back to his old love the drink. He immediately filed
for divorce and it was final November 11th and three months after it
was final Kathryn and Dana were married.
Meanwhile I was left all alone to pick up the peace’s, of a shattered
life. My family a home and our life at home was a mess from shock waves of it
all. I was crazy with grief and
disbelief and just plain Crazy. I
knew I had to somehow try to save myself if I were to be of any use towards
saving any of my family. But at
this point I truly did not know how except to cry it all out to a therapist and
my journal!
Before my accident and Dana leaving I could handle almost anything just
by letting go and letting God direct me. But suddenly it was as if our cable of
communication was cut and God couldn’t hear me or I couldn’t hear Him. I still
trust in the Lord but I just no longer trust I was good enough with the anger
and fear I felt, to know what it was God was trying to tell me to do next or why
or even if I would be willing! The fear and Anger was consuming me. My self
worth with all the confusion inside me was severely depleted and nothing was
clear to me or safe or normal to me any more. I was scared to death and couldn’t
think my way out of a paper bag at that point and if I had known it was going to
be like this for years I think I would have considered killing myself then and
there! If it wasn’t for my therapist and my journaling I hate to think what I
would have done at that point with things so desperately hopeless and the
consuming terror that followed me wherever I went and with whatever I did was
almost more then I could bare.
But lets begin at the
beginning:
_____________Chapter 3___________________
These are the Journal entries and notes that begin my
recollections of this time in my life that I call my
“Inside
Out Insanity!”
It starts off
when I gave my Mom a journal for her Birthday but I gave it to her a day early.
My Dad was scheduled for knee surgery and actually it was for her and Dad to
share their memories of Dads knee surgery and the rest of life adventures.
In the
front on the second page was a block saying this journal belongs to Dad and Mom
Happy birthday Mom Date Feb 23,2000 Love Dana and Linda,
Good luck Dad we love you and also written was Happy Birthday Mom may all
your wishes come true. And this journal is for the family to read or write in
during our waiting and watching Pops recovery. On the top of the page is written To
God be the Glory Great things he has done which was exactly how I felt about my
life raised in a loving home with wonderful parents who loved each other and
were the greatest example for me and my own growing family and our great life
shared between all of us.
The
Journal for my Dads surgery begins on February 22, 2002.
Feb 22, 2000
Mom brought Dad to Exeter Hospital. He hadn’t able to eat for 12 days. Unable to get Drs. to understand that
Dad believes he has a blockage. Tired of being sick and put off by the
doctors. Finally went to the
Hospital and they scheduled him for scope tomorrow afternoon.
Feb 23,
2000
Scope showed blockage
possibly cancer. No wonder he has
been unable to eat or poop.
Aunt Anna called Dad.
He will be operated on tomorrow
at noon.
Dr Breese is the
surgeon. He’ a small guy about the
size of my five foot Mom, so is the head nurse on days.
She’s great!
Feb.24, 2000
With God all things
are possible.
(Trust)
Today is Thursday and it is Moms
Birthday. It is 9:15 in the
morning and I am sitting in a chair in my fathers’ hospital room at Exeter Hospital. He just walked to the showers around
the corner with a nurse. She got
right in the shower with him to clean him up before he has surgery to remove a
growth in his stomach.
He returned now and
is in the bathroom shaving.
One by one everyone came, sometimes
more then one. Soon the room was
filled overflowing to the hall at times.
My daughter Tammy and
her husband Jorge brought their new baby Andrew. Pop asked to hold him and soon had him
smiling and cooing. Pop is like
the pied piper with children and babies.
They always smile for him.
Earlier when there was just a few of us here Mom and Pop were exchanging
Moms birthday kisses so we left them alone and went to the Hospital cafeteria.
He’s got Big Band Music on and Flowers in his room #411.
Mr. Thibeau is across the way in a private room.
He too has many daughters that are filtering the hallways with all of us
Dads daughters. They are from Hampstead Too. That’s where we were raised. Some of my younger sisters were
classmates and friends. It’s a small world. One of Mr. Thibeau’s daughters was now
my own son Wayne’s mother in law, Martha Temple. He married her daughter Missy
just five months ago October 1999.
Everyone visited each
other between the two Hospital rooms.
Dad has beautiful flowers from his granddaughter Casey, My sister Karen’s
daughter.
Aunt Anna called Dad here at the
hospital to tell him he was right, the problem with her car was just a loose
cable.
It is 11:50 AM and
Dad just asked my husband Dana “Why did they used to say (Why in the Sam Hill?)
Dana couldn’t say and he just looked puzzled but then my brother in law Tom said
I think it had to do with when Teddy Roosevelt was president and it had to do
with the Battle of San Juan Hill.
Historically it was supposedly because it was suppose to be a Calvary
charge at San Juan Hill and they had no
horses. Teddy Roosevelt led the
charge.
Sgt Major from the Salvation Army
my sister Mary’s family’s church was in Dads room at the time and confirmed the
information.
Then it was Time for
us to kiss Dad good luck because they were going to take him down for his
operation. But then there was a
delay some had left but the rest of us who stayed all filed back into his
room.
12:47 we kissed him so long again
and Dad was brought down for the surgery.
We submit him to Gods hands.
Let Him guide the hands of the surgeon, In Jesus name.
Thy will be done.
We look forward to
watching Dad eating sausage sandwiches again soon.
We should plan a big family corn beef and cabbage boiled dinner for a
Sunday soon with Dad. Billy and
Marge brought Dad two Bouquets of beautiful flowers, But no sausages yet. Everyone split up into small groups to
do the various, Bathroom pit stops, coffee breaks, lunch down the café and even
a Mc Donald’s run, or simply remains in the waiting room, Dads room, and outside
cig breaks etc. After a while and a few trips here and there my niece Kathy,
Charlotte’s
eldest daughter took the elevator and a man shared the elevator with her. She looked up and said “Aren’t you my
grandfathers Dr?”
He said
“Yes.
Kathy said “Well shouldn’t you be
with him then in the operating room?”
He said “He’s still being
prepped.
2:10pm they just
called up to tell Mom that they are just now starting the
operation.
Yesterday when the
minister first came and he learned about all the children Mom and Dad had he
turned to Mom and said what a lot of work you must have had to do.
Dad replied “Nah she just laid down through it all.”
(Joke)
Today Carlene, Karen,
Deborah, Madalyn and Madelyn’s daughters, Nichole and Christen, Bunny and Tom,
Charlotte and Don, Carlene, Mary and her daughter Karen and son Danny and Mary’s
daughter Karen’s son Brendan, My daughter Tammy and her husband Jorge and their
new baby Andrew and our Brother Billy Jr. and his friend Marge are all here
waiting to see how Dad’s operation goes.
(This Journal entry by Linda)
Still Thursday Feb
24
2:25pm we are all hanging around in Papa’s room.
Andrew is asleep in his bed keeping it warm for when he returns. Jorge and I have been talking about
taking Papa to Yankee Smokehouse especially after he began looking at us as
bacon slices and sausage sandwiches.
Don’t worry Papa – We can tell them to hold the barbecue sauce.
Andrew just woke up
and is cooing and smiling. One of
the hospital staff just walked by and asked if he was on the wrong floor when he
heard the baby cry. Andrew loves
his Papa. As Aunt Karen says, Papa
is Doctor Doolittle he’s got such a way with animals and baby’s!
We love you Papa!
Love Tammy, Andrew, and Jorge.
Still Thursday Feb
24
Happily all went well with Dads surgery. The doctor said.
He took half the stomach and the operation went well.
He didn’t need any blood and his heart is good he said.
For two days he’ll feel lousy, but then on the way to good health. We’ll know more about the cancer
later, After they test the lymph
nodes .
He had a
Hemagasterectamy they said which means piece of his stomach removed.
Removal of tumor and has a g-tube to drain his stomach and Jackson prêt which is a
tube draining blood fluids from the site. The g-tube drains the stagnant old food
from the stomach. The green beans
he had weeks ago are now black and chunky. But not smelly like often is in such
cases the nurse said.
Evening 7:30pm Bun just called and
said it was getting very foggy out side.
Dads resting nicely, His BP is 143 over 55 the nurse just checked
him. He opened his eyes when the
phone rang then closed them and is once again resting
peacefully.
7:40pm the phone rang
again but wouldn’t connect then it rang at the desk. It was Marge.
She said Ma just left to go back to the hospital and it’s very foggy out
please call when she gets there.
Dad woke when the phone rang and I asked if the light over the next bed
bothered him. He said no and
closed his eyes and is resting peacefully again.
7:50 pm A Nurse came
in to give him some antibiotics.
She hooked up the bag and Dad didn’t seem disturbed by it.
Another nurse asked her to give him Tylenol every 4 hrs I think it may
have been for someone else though.
We’ll see.
8pm Mom came. Then the nurse came in to check the
site area and then left to get a container to empty the blood from the site so
there would be no infection she said.
Mom got up and watched her and asked questions then covered his arms for
him. The nurse said she could get
a cot for Mom to rest if she would like.
Mom asked “Are you sure it will not be in the way?”
the nurse assured her it would be no problem.
Mom said you can go home now Linda. But I’m
staying!
10:00 pm.
Dad was a little nauseous.
The tube beside the bed was fixed to help the flow and the nurse checked
him all over. He’s
good.
6 am. Friday All is
quiet in the room I believe they are both sleeping soundly.
7a.m. Dad was
breathing heavily moving his head and neck and shoulders.
Mom asked “What’s the matter
Bill?”
He whispered “I’m exercising.” Then he
stated, “The Dr said.”
His temperature was
1.5 and they didn’t want it to go any higher they said.
7:25 The Dr. came in
to check Dad. He used a syringe to
unclog the tube emptying his stomach it showed Dark thick secretions,
Vegetables? That had been in his stomach long times were clogging the tube. The Dr. said they sucked a lot of it out
during the operation. No bad
odor. He asked if he had gotten up
yet. He hadn’t.
He wants him to get up soon.
He had them lower the pain meds so he will be less groggy.
Although Dad seem quite awake to me, for someone who has just been
operated on yesterday afternoon.
He’s eating ice chips.
After the Nurses had
the changing of the guards and checked the epidural it is set up higher on the
back then usual. They will watch
for bruising or blood clot around the site of the epidural periodically they
said. it was
8oclockam. And his temp was
1.2
9:30 a.m. He had a
sponge bath by the nurses. It took four nurses to help him get up.
10:00 they got him up
to walk to the door and back and sat him in a chair beside the bed.
He was week walking for just that minute and is still very week in the
chair and very white and he began to sweat. I remember when my husband Dana was in
the hospital and turned white like that he passed out.
I asked Dad if he was nauseous and the nurse asked him if he was having
trouble breathing and he said yes.
So they put him back in bed.
He was exhausted he said.
“I probably need bacon and eggs.”
The nurses laughed at his response. Then he went right to sleep. Dr Grondan (a woman Dr.) peeked in on
him while he was up.
10:45 the man came in
with a breathing exercise gadget and Dad did a great job with it.
Better then most after stomach surgery he said.
Then the nurses drained his stomach site tubes some more.
There were lots of learning nurses on duty today so Dad is getting lots
of help and attention. I’m sure he
likes that.
12:20 they had
dropped Dads pain meds down to five earlier but after his work out and breathing
exercise they just increased it to seven because Dad said the pain was a 5. Marge and Bill are here.
The head nurse who has been teaching the nurses how to take care of Dad
reminds me of Mom. She is very
small but has great energy and a sociably pleasant nature yet she’s an
exhortative take charge type person.
I love her! She’s super and
real caring to my Dad. She walked
in and said someone smokes! I smell
cigarettes. I pointed to Marge and
said her fake fur is really holding the cig smell. I’m sure that was an
embarrassing moment for Marge.
Bill said, it could be fireplace smoke, to cover up the truth. But the Nurse with her no nonsense
manner said “No it’s not!” calling a spade a spade.
1:00 the nurse came
in to check Dad. She had him turn
on his semi side putting a pillow behind his back.
He was wide awake and gabby with Bill and Marge and the nurse. He then was experiencing what appeared
to be a gas pocket pain under his left clavicle. He asked the nurse to remove the pillow
so he could lie back off his shoulder.
I rubbed the area for him and patted but the beeper on one of the darn
machines kept going off when I did so I had to stop.
Then Bill and Marge left to go home and to Agway to buy chicken feed for
Dads chickens at home.
1:20pm I suggested
Dad lie back and try to get some sleep and before long he was sleeping
soundly. He is looking better and
better. Not much actually coming
out of the G tube for a while. I
wonder if it is clogged again. But
when I asked the nurse about it, she was not
concerned.
Dr. Lunden was his
anesthesia Dr. during the operation. The other anesthesiologist Dr Park will be
in this morning to check Dad.
My sister Deborah is here
now.
2:30 the nurse came
in and wants him to walk to the door again. He’s not happy because he feels he is
too week like the last time. But
she is insisting. But he got a reprieve until 4 o’clock she said.
3:40pm his temp is
101.3 the respiratory guy came in to have Dad do the plastic tube breather
gadget again. “I’d rather wait
until after I walk at 4.” Dad said
and the guy said ok.
Mom and Billy came
back and the Dr came in and syringed the G Tube again.
He said the stuff is getting thinner. That’s good!
Old food is getting out of there.
After a while I insisted Mom go home with Billy and get some rest. She gave in
finally.
And the rest of the day
went pretty much the same.
7:40pm Temp. 101.1
Dad has been trying to stay awake until he doe’s his walk at nine but I can see
he is struggling to stay awake. I don’t think he is going to make it.
Saturday Feb. 26,
2000
Temp 100.3 Dad said
he felt like he fell over backwards in the night.
He said it was a strange sensation. He also said he coughed a lot in the
night. His cough seems tight to me
this morning. He said it don’t
always come up. He decided to
attempt his breathing speromiter.
He got it up to 3000 and kept the ball in the smiley face for a good
bit. He did it 3 times then twice
more in the next 15 minutes.
6:30am.
Dad and Henry the man in the next bed are both dozing peacefully after
their morning wake up check work with the nurses and a little bit of
gabbing. Henry said he had both
knees done and it took about 3 months hard exercise until he was set with his
knees walking good and feeling good.
I can see Dads leg muscles have weakened considerably because he almost
didn’t make it back to the bed after his walk and wash-up in the bathroom this
morning. He made it back by the
skin of his teeth after having to sit back down for a bit on the toilet to
rest. It makes no sense to us (Dad
and Me) how they can expect him to do so much so fast after all he’s been
through especially considering he wasn’t that strong on his knees yet after his
knee surgery and finding cancer as the reason he couldn’t eat for so many months
before his knee surgery and having the stomach surgery for the cancer
immediately after his knee surgery.
Where is he supposed to sap this strength from?? He needs to fuel up with
nourishment for a bit first! That
bottle of liquid food he’s plugged into?
And we both worry if he falls that is not going to be much fun at
all!
The Nurse said he is
starting to get bowel sounds which means his bowels are starting to wake
up. So he’ll be able to have
liquids pretty soon.
6:55a.m.
Dad is trying to cough and getting some breaking up of the junk, (sounds
good!)
The afternoon nurses
yesterday were more concerned with getting his jonnie and sheets and things out
of the way to get him up to walk then his modesty which has got to be just about
gone by now. I guess I can tell
everyone how Dad has a cute butt now that I’ve been left to judge it. LOL I do think the young nurse got a
charge out of having the men have to streak shamelessly down the hall. Its fair I suppose when you consider
what we woman have to put up with when we have to bare all at child birth or our
gynecological exams.
Well if anyone
thought Dad couldn’t handle all this certainly underestimated his
constitution! This man is the
strongest man I know. No fuss no
muss. He just does what he has to
do without a blink or a whimper.
Oh well you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
It’s not like he has a choice in the matter.
“Oh sure” he says to everything in a charming co-operative tone or a
slight cute wise comment or crack.
He is so Darn Loveable!!!!!
7:30am the little
head nurse came in with the other nurses again today.
We tried to get her to understand that he feels his legs are too weak to
do a walk. But it seemed to go over her head. (Twice) then we explained it to another
nurse that came in after they had left the room and finally someone got it. She said “Oh yes, that would be too
much after knee surgery. We wash
you up at the bed for now and save your walk for just walking.”
They finally understand.
Dad had kept saying I can’t
make it! But Nobody believed him I
guess because they weren’t’ thinking about him just having knee
surgery.
The Dr. came in and
checked him. And said he can drink
ginger ale.
9:10 Am.
They gave him half a cup of ginger ale.
He took a good sip. Said it
feels good in his mouth but it tastes funny after not tasting anything for so
long.
10:45am they
came in to take him for a walk out of the room this time.
He took a left down the hall to the end and back to his doorway of the
room where he sat on a chair that was there until they made his bed.
Then he walked in to his room and to his bed and lay back on his bed for
a second then they sat him up on the side of the bed to wash up.
He got sick to his stomach and they gave him something for it.
11:07am
now he’s resting again. His sister
Anna called a little earlier and said Aunt Ellie was on her way up to see
him.
Oops I thought Dad
was snoring but it’s not him it’s Henry!
But people don’t get to snore long here. Soon a nurse was in to interrupt
him.
11:20a.m.
Dads snoring a little now, But just a little, the walk tuckered him out.
11:45am
still sleeping Dad just passed the gas in his sleep. LOL the nurse was waiting
for that next step showing his bowels were coming more awake.
He’s on the road to recover he just passed
gas!
A little earlier the Dr asked Dad
if he thought he could pee without the cath now. Dad said No, because he didn’t want to
have to keep peeing on the nurse’s demand twice each nurse’s shift.
He said I’ve never peed that much!
I can’t pee that many times a
day!
12:00 noon this post is about Dads next bed
mate Henry. They tried to get
Henry up with his broken ankle and he had his knees replaced 5 yrs ago. He couldn’t make it.
They were talking about sending him home today but his bathroom at home
is up0stairs and he is a big man close to Dads age.
His wife is very sickly with Asthma so she can’t lift him or help
him. He said I don’t even know how
I’m going to get home. She doesn’t
drive. The social worker will be
up to straighten things out for him they said.
This reminds me of
how we are so lucky to have such a large family! There is always someone who can
help.
12:30a.m.
Aunt Ellie and my cousin Marlane and her daughter Jenny just came in to
see Dad. It is so good to see Marlane.
We were very close as children.
And we spent many wonderful times at Al and Ellie’s house for cookouts
growing up. Al and Ellie were
some of Mom and Dads best friends.
Al passed away some time ago.
Caroline my Cousin David’s wife
called saying she and David will be here for night duty with Dad. Another Doctor
came to check on Dad. Dr Young a woman Dr who is on for the weekend.
She has long dark brown hair in a braid. She seemed pleased with his
progress. Dad is tired now falling
asleep again. He gets bratty when
he’s tired like my husband Dana does.
Mom said Bun and Tom are on the way to the hospital and she will be here
herself a little later. It’s
always so nice to see Aunt Ellie and Marlane. Ellie was sorry she missed Mom. Marlane said she’ll probably bring aunt
Ellie back up to see her soon. I
hope so. Mom would like that. But it’s good that Dad and Ellie got
together at least. It’s been a
while sense Dad was able to go to Lynn Mass to see her.
Well I’ll be going home for a while so this is the end of my entry into
the journal.
Linda
Still Saturday
4pm Dear Linda went home to
give Tammy her car so Tammy can go to work Linda’s been here 2 nights and 2 days
strait. She’s quite a girl
(daughter) (mother) (wife) (sister) and friend. We all love you Linda.
Your love is with everyone.
Dad is sleeping now.
He’s real tired.
8:30pm. we’re
back! Dana and Linda.
I figure we’ll visit until after Dads 9oclock walk attempt so he can have
someone for moral support in case his legs don’t want to support him still. We don’t expect a miracle with no food
yet to give him the energy he needs to sustain him.
He did great! All
those worries were for nothing I guess.
He seems happy to get it over with though.
He went to the hall and back, Ate ice chips.
He feels there having him walk too often. He’s afraid he’ll fall and hurt his
knees. Dad had some jello
earlier.
Sunday 8am Dad had a
good night. He slept well. He has his breakfast now, Liquid on a
tray. He is still enjoying his
first meal, his first coffee in a long time. But he didn’t quite finish it because I
put to much sure in it. Darn. He drank some sips of apple juice and
ate some jello.
8:30 Dr free just
checked him and said he’s doing fine.
There going to block off the g tube if he feels uncomfortable when he
eats they can open it up again to drain the food from his stomach if he needs
they said. There also going to
remove the catheter so he can begin to pee on his own today.
The Dr. said they do not like to keep it in too long because it can cause
infection. They’ll be taking out
the epidural tomorrow and the Dr seems to think he will be able to go home about
Tuesday or Wednesday. The Dr asked
him if he would like to start solid food yet. Dad said no yet.
He’s just barely started the liquid diet and he doesn’t want to push
it.
9:10 Dad used his
breathing meter several times and got it up past the 4000 mark.
It made Dana very jealous.
He can’t get it up like that even now. Dad’s looking forward to seeing Jeremy
today my sister Deborah’s son. Deb
is supposed to be bringing him.
11:15 Dad was up on
side shaving and got a little Diaphoretic (Sweating) and weak.
He had to lay back down before he was done.
He used a double head razor, not electric. He said it was invented for
the guys in Alaska so they wouldn’t have to use water and
have it freeze.
(Dad is extremely
nauseous. I called the nurse and
she pulled the plug to the stomach drain.
He got instant relief when it drained. He said it felt like a good burp. So they canceled the nausea medicine
because he seems better. A
bit later they disconnected his G tube and pee tube The Dr must have changed his
mind about doing it tomorrow.
This journal entry was by
Linda
Well they finally brought him some food. He ate a quarter of a grilled cheese
sandwich and drank a full glass of cranberry juice.
4 or 5 spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup and half of a dish of
applesauce. (Farted) and put his
bed down and fell asleep. He was
due to walk again in 45 minutes.
OH he doesn’t relish that, but at least he got a choice of the time after
waiting for it all afternoon. He
chose 6pm and the nurse never even told him I went and talked to her about him
not wanting to start eating till the 4pm walk was over.
It was 5 his tray had arrived and he was going to wait to eat till after
the walk. I squealed!
(Told on him) This journal
entry was by Bunny eldest daughter.
6:15pm they washed
him up after his walk and hooked up his G Tube for a while to help his full
tummy. They said there’d be back
in an hour to take it off again.
So now he’s just resting until they do. He’s very gassy and coughed real well
too.
8:10pm Blood Pressure was 128 over
63 and his temp was 99.8 He
feels better and less gassy at the moment. They said it’s been 12 hours sense they
took out the pee cath. So he
should try to pee soon. When he
coughs and clears his lung and spits into spit pan the spit is flemmy and yellow
and thick and chunky. They said as
long as it is not green we don’t have to be concerned.
Monday Feb28, 2000
7:40am Dad looks wonderful he had a good night. They said they wouldn’t disturb him but
they did. So he told them “You said
you weren’t going to bother me!”
The nurse said, “You can’t get much sleep in a hospital” but after that
they did let up on him and the rest of the night was better.
8Am. At breakfast Dad
ate half the scrambled eggs they brought him and a little oatmeal with whole
milk coffee, jello, and he drank all the milk. He had only one pain pill
yesterday. He’ll be getting one
after breakfast so he can be more comfortable to move around today.
Mom came and she’s
starting a cold so Dad sent her back home to
rest.
At 8:15 Dr Young
checked him out. He clea5red his
throat and lung and spit a chunk into the spit dish. There was a small spot of
blood. She said she will keep a
watch on it but its common she said and his lungs sound good.
They will be taking off his leg pumps today and pee cath again so then he
can dangle at the side of the bed when he wishes.
They had put the pee cath back in because he did not pee last night. Pop enjoyed the breakfast.
Mom left at 9:15 and
Bunny came to see Dad. Bunny came
early to take me for breakfast she said.
11Am. Dads all
unhooked from his chains at last. Nothing hooked up anymore.
They sat him in a chair.
11:40a.m. Dad went
walking with a walker which was much better he said.
Then he sat in the chair by his bed for a while.
12:25pm He just
finished washing up and his lunch came so he’s still sitting on the chair beside
his bed. He ate most of his soup
and crackers and sherbet and juice.
2:20pm Dad is still
up in the chair and he went for another walk.
Moms back it’s her shift. I’m going away with Mary to Laconia till Wed. Dad tried putting his hand in warm
water to pee but I guess you have to be
asleep.
Feb 29th
Dad came home today. Resting
Comfortably! Visiting Nurse comes
tomorrow. Mom cleaned up the house
nice. No more smoking in the
house!
March 16, 2000 7pm
Thursday evening, Mom received a call from Dr. Zwan who apologized for not
catching the cancer with all Dads complaints about not being able to eat before
the knee surgery. Dad had
complained saying he thought he had some sort of blockage or something and he
hadn’t been able to eat well because of it for several months before the
scheduled surgery on his knees.
They should have listened to him and investigated further to see why he
was having so much trouble eating.
But all they seemed to have on their minds was performing the surgery on
Dads knees. Had they listened to
Dad maybe they could have caught his cancer months ago and on time.
Now it’s too late to save him and we will never know what could have
been. This is not right! Or fair!
Friday March 17, 2000 St
Patrick’s Day, It is a snowy morning.
Pop got up this morning and started to make corn chowder.
‘No meet on Friday’ He still obeys the old Catholic rules.
So no corned beef and cabbage this day! But then Dad became too weak to stand
so Mom and my sister Carlene had to take over. Dad seems a little frustrated at still
being so weak. The visiting nurse
was come today but she did not come or
call.
Saturday March 18,
2000 Dad is feeling lousy.
Throwing up and he went back to bed to rest.
Mom gave him a prochlospersgin for nausea. Excuse my spelling. Later Dad had a root beer float and sat
in the kitchen chair for a bit so Mom could give him a haircut.
At 3:30pm my sister Charlotte
came with her son Donny in his marine uniform. He was very handsome.
My brother Billy took a short home movie of Don and Pop and they talked
army talk.
The cusp of my inside out insanity
At the end of March
Dana, The husband of my youth left me to be with a woman at work with no
children of her own. This he did
to us after 30 plus years of growing a life together and having and adopting 13
children together. My parents were wonderful to him for all those years and
loved him like a son and helped him through many silly mistakes watching him
grow into a man. But leaving their daughter and their children for a woman at
work was a huge disappointment. He
left us sudden and unexpected. We
had no idea he was capable of such a betrayal. He walked out one day and barely
looked back. His leaving at a time I needed him most made it difficult for me to
deal with my father’s illness and death.
I tried to put Dad ahead of my problem so I called Dana one day and
begged him to visit my father one last time and he did. Dad was able to say
goodbye to him with love. I told
my Father not to worry about Dana leaving me. I was sure he would change his mind and
be back when he got what ever it was bothering him out of his system. I didn’t understand what was happening
to Dana but I thought our life together was good and so I believed he wouldn’t
truly leave it for long.
Dad had just three more months of life at home with us after the
surgery. After a swift decline we
lost him on June 29, 2000 Mom got a phone call just after he passed finding out
that one of his dearest and closest friends Aunt Ellie died suddenly and
unexpectedly at the very same moment Dad did. I wonder what He thought when she
joined him that day I Heaven. And I wonder if Uncle Al – Ellie’s husband was
surprised to see them coming hand in hand to join him and the other friends and
relatives that past before them. Getting together Just like old
times.
My husband Dana did not come to the funeral.
He said it was out of consideration for me.
But how could I ever believe that to be true after what he already was
doing to me and our children by walking out on our life together and leaving his
young children when we all needed him so. I had begged him to come and sit with
Jake and Joe because I had to sit up front with my sisters.
But he didn’t come. It made it even more difficult for me to worry about
how they were feeling loosing their father and grandfather at the same time at
age12 and 14. I know I was devastated when I lost my grandfather when I was
twelve yrs old. And what about me now, After all I was loosing my father and my
husband and recovering from my accident when I fell from the second floor
landing in our home to the first floor foyer because my husband failed to put
up a railing yet despite several pleas for him to do so when I had almost
fallen twice before. The accident
left me with injuries to several areas of my body and a concussion to my head
and still caused me much pain and physical limitations during what seemed to me
to be a much too slow recovery for me because we still had so much to do to
finish the home we were building for our large melting pot family.
I was trying very hard to be patient and I usually felt I could get
through anything swiftly because God was by my side. But things seemed different
this time and life was more difficult.
I was reaching for my husband during this difficult time and he was not
there for me or for our home that he insisted on rebuilding himself rather then
hire people to build it with the insurance money we got for our house fire. He
had been very busy helping friends from work Paul and his wife Kathryn with
their problems this past year and when this resulted in him leaving our 30yr
marriage and taking off with Paul’s wife.
I found I was not as strong as I thought I was and began losing control
of my whole world and I was scared to death! I felt like I was sucked up into a
whirlwind that held me pinned against the sides unable to move.
With my hands tied my head swirling and my eyes screaming out loudly in
terror. How was I going to hold on
and get through this for my family?
I knew in my heart that I needed to lean on God to be strong for my
family especially my mother and my children. Just like I was able to do many
times in the past when a crises arose.
But this time things seemed so different! It was like an evil cloud covered us
and pulled us out of the path of Gods light into darkness.
Life did not seem real to me and I couldn’t grab hold. I began to shake
uncontrollable, trembling would not stop but grew and grew and stayed with me
day and night. It was taking over
my whole body. I begged and pleaded to God crying “God what should I do” But I
could not hear an answer. I began
to feel so very afraid and alone and hurt and angry.
To go on each day each step was so difficult I had to begin singing with
clenched teeth -“Put One Foot In front of the other! And soon you’ll be walking
out the door!” I was able to
create this tool from a memory of the Christmas movie Rudolf and the Abominable
snowman. Otherwise I would not have been able to get out of bed or stop
crying. I had to believe God
would eventually work things out for all of us because I felt so helpless I knew
it was beyond my control. “I hoped
that if I could just be patient. God would set things straight for us. ” But meanwhile the trembling got worse
and worse until it gripped my days and my nights and I could not even
swallow. That’s when I stopped
eating. Thank goodness I could get down sips of water and a vitamin mix or I
would not have been able to go on, get to work and try to take care of my
children, the house, and the bills.
I lost 33 lbs in 33 days before I was finally able to begin to eat. In
all that time I did not so much as catch a cold. I just screamed and cried out whenever
I could as I stayed fixed with each trembled hard moment continuing to force
myself to put one foot in front of another as the days went by turning into
weeks then months, then years.
Chapter 4
The
journals are my therapy
(To be continued)
'Inside Out Insanity' is based on a life of a woman who did her best to give her
love unconditionally to others and in so doing sometimes forgot her own needs which almost
cost her, her whole life’s value.
CH. 1
THIS IS MY STORY
I suppose we should start at the beginning.
I was born at home in 1948 in Lynn Massachusetts. My Mom said that during the delivery, Dad fainted because the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck so each time I would work my way down the birth canal looking for the exit the cord would yank me back up like a yo yo. After this happened a few times my father fainted and the doctor had to reach up to un-wrap the cord for me to be born. You would think that would make for a cranky baby, but they say I
had big dimples that demanded I claim a more positive presence in the world.
Another event that would add shape to the direction of my life happened just after entering
first grade of public school. As a first grader I was beginning to meet new friends in school that lived around the neighborhood. Adventuring out without family for the first time, I had been invited by some of my little school friends to play down the field at the end of our street. The field was an empty overgrown lot that stretched from Kirtland Street which was our street to
Robinson Street which was on the next block. The grass in the field was very overgrown.
The grass, weeds and bushes in parts were so tall they topped our heads but then again we were only first graders and not very tall. There was a beaten path from people cutting across the field from street to street.
We had been there a while playing in the old abandoned car that had been left to give form to our childish imaginations where we drove to far away places. At first I didn’t notice the kind looking young man who lived across from the field came cutting through the path through the tall grass that came just above his waist as he approached us where we were playing. When I did notice him he was reaching into his pocket and pulled out a pack of gum, One by one he offered my new friends a peace of gum from the pack and each accepted and thanked the kind man but when he got to me the last the new kid to join the field playmates in the park. The young man seemed so sorry he had run out of gum to give me a peace but assured me he did have more. Taking my hand, he said come with me I’ll get you some it’s just at my house over there he pulled me along as he spoke over his shoulder to the others saying “we’ll be right back.”
This was 1955 and back then our little minds were prepared for the stranger our parents warned us about to be a scary ugly mean looking guy that nobody knows hiding in the shadows. A contradicting rule and What was an even more strongly enforced warning was that we should be good and mind adults and do as they say. So although every instinctive nerve in my body screamed that I didn’t want to go with this man I also did not want to act like a baby by showing my fear by crying out like a baby in front of my new friends now that I was a big first grader. I fallowed along obediently letting the young man lead me through the tall grass and across the next street to retrieve the gum at his house.
Knowing what I do today I can see just how lucky I was that an instinct for survival kicked in that day as I sucked back tears to be convincing, when I promised him that I wouldn’t tell and so he let me go home afterwards. It was growing dark when he led me down the back stairs of his house out into the crisp evening air that slapped me with a cold sting making my eyes blink threatening to overflow them with the tears that I had been fighting back from behind the lids. He still had a tight hold of my hand as we crossed the street towards the path in the field. He squeezed my hand even harder still when he asked me one last time if I was going to tell. I was all choked up inside and its strange when you think how at such a young age I somehow knew I had to disguise my true feelings when I answered, so I let my dimples speak for me as I shook my head to imply no I won't tell. When he finally let go of my hand I walked very slowly through the path at first with my head pointed straight ahead and my hands straight down to my side knowing his eyes were fallowing me.
There was a lump in my throat making it difficult to even swallow. A chill was climbing up my back and my teeth were chattering due to an uncontrollable tremble that had taken over my whole body. The gum he had given me that I had unwrapped mechanically and shoved into my mouth lay still clenched in my teeth, Un-chewed, I could not chew I would not chew! It was the one thing I felt I had control of And as soon as I could I would spit the gum out and never want to ever chew gum again!
It was getting dark and I felt very alone and scared. The field was filled with scary shadows,
scary and empty of human life except my own and the young man that I still felt was watching me from across the lonely path. My friends had all gone home for dinner and I felt more alone then I had ever been in my short life. The field no longer felt fun or safe as the evening shadows crept in and wild grasses and sharp thorns from the over grown weeds whipped across my bare legs scratching them. When I reached the half way mark in the field I feared the young man was still behind me but I was afraid to look back to check. I wanted so much to run but instead I began to walk a little faster and then faster still almost causing myself to stumble over the vines that were then stretching clawing like wild animals
As I hurried my walk I felt chafing burning between my thighs that were sticky and wet it burned almost like when I was younger and didn’t make it to the bathroom because I was to busy playing and didn’t wash up or change my panties right away but this was even worse my inner thighs were sticking together and ripping apart each time they separated with each step. But this did not stop me. I didn't even slow down and It couldn't let it slow my pace which was bordering on an awkward run now. The chill in the air and the trembling inside my body grew and my teeth were beating against each other in a fast chatter despite holding tight to the gum in my mouth. The shadows that were cast by the old car and other abandoned junk in the field looked like monsters coming to get me. I feared the winding fallen branches that tripped me up might be snakes. It was the longest short distance walk I had ever taken or would ever take in my young life. My heart beat faster and faster for the field seemed endless! Then at last my
feet hit the cement of the sidewalk on the other side of the field at last and my legs then grabbed freedom to run full out up my street towards my home! I turned my head to see if the monster was still behind me but I saw just blackness. I had to hold my breath to stifle a scream that welled up in my throat threatening to escape through my lips. I was afraid the monster in my wakened nightmare would hear me and run after me to stop me before I could get to the safety of my home and arms of my mother who I was sure was waiting for me to get home.
The darkness was falling like a heavy wool blanket and made it difficult for me to see very far ahead. I had never been out alone this late before, especially away from home and family!
Even though I still couldn’t see it I began to feel a heart felt tug of home encouraging me to keep going I would be home soon. They thought of needing the safety of my mothers arms to hold me gave way to a sob that chocked out from inside me. Screaming for escape my mouth opened and the gum fell out of my mouth. A heavy deep sadness escaped with my sob and overwhelmed my heart and the tears came flooding out followed by a whimper.
Then I heard a familiar voice calling out my name and I could see my older sister Charlotte coming down the street towards me. I cried out and soon she was with me. Seeing my sadness and difficulty walking she scooped me up into her arms and carried me home.
Where my mother was waiting on the porch for me to come home. When she saw Charlotte carrying me she ran down the porch steps and took me from my sister into her arms. Two of my other older sisters were coming down the street and came running when they saw
my mother carry me into the house. They had been out looking for me too. My father was working the three to eleven shift and was not home. But mom had called him when I did not come home and he came home.
I cried an cried in the safety of my mother’s arms. I can not remember telling anyone what happened but I must have because the next thing I remember was Policeman coming to the door and taking me into the front seat of a police car and them driving me to Robinson street to point out the house the young man took me into across from the field. I remember being so cold and the trembling was still uncontrollably as I turned to see two policemen putting the young man into the back seat behind me in the police care with two policeman sitting on either side of him. I don’t know what happened to his after that but the next thing I remember was that it being so dark and late at night. I wasn’t used to be out after dark. The policeman then drove me to a big old building way up on top of a hill that had a steep driveway that caused the car to tip front end up high. It was the old Union Hospital. The policemen brought me into a
huge room with bright lights and lost of long white curtains surrounding metal tables. Someone picked me up and lay me down on a cold, high, metal table with a sheet on it and removed my cloths and covered me with a sheet. There were policeman standing all around me as a man in a white coat came over and began pulling the sheet up to examining me. He bent my knees up and I held my breath as he examined me. It hurt and in between the hurt I would gasp to steel a breath holding back the sobs. Long white curtains hung along the walls and sectioned off some of the other metal tables to offer some sort of privacy in the huge room but around my table the curtains were kept wide open to the policeman who were standing around my table watching. I continued to tremble I was so very cold. I also continued holding my breath as if it was the only thing I could do on my own. I don’t remember what was being said if anything. I had to concentrate on holding back the sobs but I would have to let out a gasp of air here and there and when I did warm tears escaped my eyes as I stayed as silent as I could. The light overhead was very bright and stung througmy tear soaked eyes. There were lots of big ugly pipes hanging down from the ceiling above the metal table I was lying on. The light overhead was so bright it stung my tear soaked eyes. I found it better to shut my eyes tight and keep them shut as long as possible. I know now I was really trying to shut out not just the light but the deep sadness and the hurt and everything else including the memory of what had happened to me. And it worked sort of. I shut it out tight for the next five years. Kids can be so resilient? But then again blocking out unpleasant memories doesn't last forever and can also just be the calm before the later storm.
For the next five years it was as if all memory of the event was wiped out of my fragile brain.
Life and my growing years continued on like for any happy dimple-flashing child. I was an innocent and free to be happy and love life pushing away all thoughts of the boogie man. But there was something hidden behind that smiling dimpled face after that day at the field.
the dimples were just as deep but the eyes seemed to have lost their flash. As I Look back at the pictureof that particular growing season of my life starting with my first grade picture taken shortly after that day at the field. The picture still shows a beautiful child with a deep dimpled winning smile, but no more glittering eyes that were open to the world and all its wonderment. now If you looked deeply you could see a dark hidden secret covered by tell tale sad eyes. Oh, the smile and dimples still stood out strong enough to fool you, but something was very different.
The once bright and innocent eyes that were opened wide to the world were changed and suddenly seemed to slant downward and lose their twinkle and instead of being opened wide to the wonderment of the world they were replaced by a quiet pensive blank stare. The eyes were now a door that stayed shut in protection to allow a child to grow for years holding back the impossible memories that were too difficult for a youthful innocent mind to handle or even understand.
And so grow I did. And life gave way to more obstacles that would shape the path in my life such as dealing with our Uncle George. It seems all families have an Uncle George or someone like my uncle George. He was my father’s sister’s husband Uncle George used to make me feel uncomfortable when he would find me alone for brief moments. This Aunt and Uncle didn’t have any children of their own. And my sisters and I loved Aunt Anna but unfortunately she came with an Uncle George who we all did our best to avoid when they came to visit. We looked forward to their Christmas presents each year though. Aunt Anna always bought us mirrors and brushes and comb sets.. My Aunt Anna had polio as a child, which left her with a brace on one leg. And a surgery to her cheek on her face which she kept bandaged. She had a beautiful singing voice and Uncle George was an amazing piano player And artist. His paintings were amazing.
I loved my Aunt dearly but each one of us Curtin girls individually at our own time and for our own reasons learned to avoid being alone with Uncle George. When I was a baby I can even remember him lifting me up and hurting me with his hand under my dress and I cried to be put down. My aunt was standing right there talking with my mother who took me from Uncle George’s arms not understanding why I cried out. I learned to squirm away from Uncle George after that. When I was older and they came to visit one day after kissing my aunt and visiting with her for a bit she sat down to tea with my mother and I hid on my uncle upstairs
in my parent’s room watching their little black and white TV. I think I was about nine. I liked going up to my parents room to watch their little black and while TV and this day I was up there waiting for Uncle George to leave. But he came up to use the upstairs bathroom
and he found me sitting in a chair in front of the TV. I didn't hear him come into my parents room behind me until it was too late. Suddenly he was there wrapping his arms around me in an Uncle George type of hug while he talked about nothing much. He first began rubbing my shoulders and then he slid his hands down my shirt rubbing my flat 9 year old chest. I didn’t understand why he had to do that, but I did know it made me very uncomfortable so I squirmed away and ran down stairs to where everyone was having a nice time visiting with Aunt Anna.
In comparing notes with my other sisters many years later I found out I was the lucky one when it came to Uncle George’s nasty antics. I also found out he was a bad man in other ways too. He was a heavy drinker and very threatening some years later and gave my parents a hard time. He was even threatening to hurt my Dad or have my father hurt by someone else.
But one of my sisters had an idea to fix that. My new brother in law who Uncle George had not met yet, loved y father and didn't like that George was threatening him so he had some of his friends pretended to be Members of Mafia or Hells Angels I can't remember which and they went to a Bar where Uncle George hung out and Scared the heck out of him. They told him that they were (Hells angels ?) and they very good friends of my fathers and how they had high respect for my father and how no one should ever mess with him or else. They told him if he didn’t leave my parents and us girls alone they would get him some cement shoes. It scared the pants off him and He and Aunt Anna moved back to Lynn. Then Uncle George died fairly young of cancer. I can honestly say I don’t think anyone in our family missed him much. Sad but true.
I was about twelve years old 5’7” and 125.bs when the nightmares first began. And they came with a vengeance. Night after night they would haunt my life sending me trembling and shiver
shaking. Terrible nightmares of terrible things that made me feel scared and even ashamed for having such thoughts. It was just after getting my friend, as we called our menstruation period back then.
There were many disadvantages of being the fourth daughter of a family of eight girls and
one was that you were often accidentally skipped over when it came to receiving
important information. Accidently of course! You know, like that talk mothers give to their daughter to prepare her for the wonderful world of womanhood. Let’s just say they didn’t close that gate till the horse escaped from the barn on this life lesson. Of course my time came when the house was full of visiting relatives. I was using the tiny pantry at the top of the cellar stairs.
right off of the kitchen where everyone was having coffee and chatting. Down cellar my dad had
his workshop and a room full of canaries and finches he was breading He also always had wild animals he was nursing back to health often brought to him by people who would find them in the woods or on the side of the road injured. Everyone knew about Dads kind way with animals. I had a pet hawk for a while who liked to set on my shoulder. Dad was mending his broken wing. The pantry at the top of the cellar stairs used to be used for canned goods and mops and brooms but Dad put a toilet and sink in for a second bathroom mainly for himself because with the eight daughters he could barely ever get in to the one upstairs. This was the bathroom I was in when taken completely by surprise. We can’t blame my mother she had so many daughters she really had thought she had already had the talk with me and prepared me for this marked even. But for me of course not knowing a thing about it, I did what I felt was very
appropriate at the sight of all that blood and let out a blood-curdling scream for help! After all I figured I must be dyeing right? And of course the downstairs bathroom being right off the kitchen where my parents were serving coffee to relatives who all came running with her to see what was the matter. They took one look at me sitting on the toilet and knew. They just as quickly turned away but not without snickering and some even laughing out loud all back to the kitchen to finish their coffee while mother explained the facts of life to me, a quick Condensed version.
Well like I said about then is when the nightmares first began and at first I would have them every month around the same time. As time went on they grew to haunt me more often. They were strange dreams that made no sense to me at all but made me feel embarrassed and ashamed so I was unable to tell anyone about them. They would be of things I never could
have imagined and it felt like being trapped inside a horror movie unable to get out. I would wake trembling and shaking unable to stop sometimes for hours. As time went on the dreams seemed to get worse I wanted but couldn’t share my dreams with anyone. They were unspeakable. I just wanted to stop from having them, forget about them and get on with my happy day dreams at least but the thoughts began to take over those too. Sometimes with different events in my life happening, I would have them several nights in a row and this would make me shiver even during the day yet I was not cold. Then some days I began shivering and
trembling during the day for no reason without the dreams or thoughts. After two years of keeping the torturous nightmares to myself, at age fourteen I finally got up the nerve to
tell one of my older sisters while I was visiting overnight with her at her apartment. I had grown terribly afraid that something was very wrong with me. I was being raised a good Catholic girl who believed you could sin with thought as well as word or deed. And my thoughts although I did not know where they came from I knew were not very pure at all. I needed to know what was wrong with me, How and why I would think such thoughts dream such awful dreams.
I needed for them to go away and leave me thinking and dreaming of clean beautiful things, fun things, and happy things again like I used to. I decided to trust my older sister to help me.
The nightmares made me feel guilty and ashamed. I was a good catholic girl and I loved the Lord and felt my nightmares kept me from being worthy of his love for me. I was ashamed of my thought and I couldn’t hold it inside any longer. I decided that I had to take a chance and tell my sister as much as I dared and see if she could help me. I was afraid of what she might think of me. But I could no longer carry the burden of it alone. I am so glad I told her that night. Who knows how much longer I would have blamed myself for those terrible thoughts! And the truth did set me free once my sister opened up the door I had closed so many years ago. She let me know that my dreams were recreations of a something that happened to me when I was very young and the thoughts were not my fault. No, I was not crazy or demon possessed.
These dreams and thoughts did not just jump into my mind from out of thin air. I was not a bad person. It was not my fault that I had been robbed of my innocence. I had been violated and I had shut the memory out and it was now coming back to haunt me and play havoc on the innocent mind of a twelve to fourteen year old that of course could not have imagine such things out of thin air on her own without seeing or experiencing it somewhere.
But they were distorted memories brought back to the surface by puberty. Unfortunate memories that had been driven deep inside from a little seven-year-old girl unable to process what had happened to her. A child who was too young to deal with such things as being taken away by a stranger and sexually molested and fearing worse. The memories of the experience had been covered up by years of protective denial while a child tried to forget and grow up without fear and I had in all appearance done so. I lived my life and grew up and into a young woman. My sister told me I had nothing to feel ashamed about and that God loved me. I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders and melted the shame away as I saw the dreams for what they truly were. NOT MY FAULT!
I do believe the emotional Scars endured in our youth and even along our life path, play an
important part in shaping our personality and even our destiny. I often wonder, could what happened that day so long ago been the first step to setting me on this path of trying to save other needy children? A couple of years ago my eldest sister reminded me of another incident that took place when I was at the age of fifteen concerning her new beautiful baby boy, Little John who I loved so very much because I helped care for him daily just before his unexpected death at five months old that may also have marked my path I would take in life and leave me with the need I seemed to save children as a way of life.
Do I regret choosing a self sacrificing life lived for others? Now that my husband walked out on me and this life as though it were not a worthy or good life? No, of course not! He may have danced to the beat of a different drummer but I still feel it was such a wonderful and worthy life. But do I sometimes wonder what if? Yes I guess I do, But given the choice I’d like to believe I would still want to do it all again. I don’t want to give up the happy memories we had together as a family, or of being involved in and helping to raise all those children, or the years I was proud of being married and loving my child hood best friend and husband despite the many hard times. I just thought things would be a lot different then they turned out. The dreams and all the hope I carried from childhood have been stolen for me and it has been a difficult to sink my teeth into new ones. The good memories live on in my heart even though they are sometimes hidden by the sharper realities of recent failures. Thank goodness for the wonderful and good memories that peak through this horrible time in my life to remind me that those goals we
once shared together were good. I never could have dreamed that after 30yrs of devotion to Dana and our unique melting pot family would end up like this, with a family so divided and
running to escape could turn against each other over the pain of the loss of it all. I have almost nothing left of the dreams I once had of my husband and myself sitting on her porch side by side watching the generations of our efforts playing and celebrating our life around us. It was not in my dreams for my future that I would marry a man that would leave me to raise his three youngest children alone so he could go get a LIFE to be with a selfish barren self seeking heartless home wrecking harlot. I lived my life with a dream to be Grammy and some of my children have given that name to the barren harlot and withhold it from me like a punishment.
I’ve been counted out like I am the unworthy one because I called everyone out on their mean actions and lies.
I was the mother to many. Five biological and eight adopted children not counting
many others I helped along the way. Children were and still are my joy. God’s wonderful treasures gifted to us all temporarily. Seeing the happiness of children can bring smiles and laughter that could light any path. No matter what the age 5months, five years, fifteen years, and fifty years I was open to love all Gods children.
Somewhere in the midst of the joy of helping others and raising children, I would sometimes find myself feeling alone in a crowd like the clown with that painted smile and wonder why
among all the gifts God has given me in my life, with such a life of joy and purpose. One day I realize that somewhere along the line I had learned to live mostly through the joys or sorrows of other people. I was living on the happiness in their happiness. It was nothing coming from my own happiness. Like that part of me had a door closed tightly as if I gave up my portions to make certain others were well satisfied, weather it be the meat, the bread, the milk, the cloths off my back, money, time or loving others. Doing this and seeing people happy or content or satisfied gave me what I thought for a long time was complete satisfaction. I can see now that this left my own needs unmet and covered emptiness I was denying in myself. I think this was because I truly believed there would be time for me later. And the picture of that later was the
picture sitting on the porch with my husband Dana watching our children and grandchildren playing happily around us in this beautiful family home on our beautiful farmers porch with our beautiful love seat swing on our beautiful family property that we raised all our beautiful children on that gave so many wonderful memorable years together. I worked hard to try and cover all the bases for not just my husband and my family but anyone else that might need but I guess I never thought about what might happen if someone or something came and shattered those dreams. I guess I just took that ending to our good life for granted.
I guess I should have at least given the various possibilities some thought but or prepared for some alternative endings but who wants to look forward to or plan on disappointments?
CHAPTER 2
We take it from the top
I don’t know everything, or have an understanding of how this could have happened, but I do believe my life up until now at least was of great value and I’m proud of the life we had together, my husband and myself, I believed it had and still has such a wonderful purpose, for the most part of it anyway. I know much of my part was driven by my strong faith and my belief that God was blessing my dream of living a devoted and loving life as a good wife to my husband, mother to my children and faithful servant to my God and I was proud of my family and their individual parts in this life and devotion to helping others. I believe I did my best to
exhibit a strong moral code and set a good example to our children and others. I wanted peace and happiness for the world and believed it to be possible one person or child at a time. I also was willing to fight or it if and when needed and tried my best to arm myself with Gods guidance to do so. I did not want to disobey His teaching to love one another, turn the other cheek or when asked for your coats also give your hat and if you lend money don’t ask for it back. I
fought each battle with faith asking the Holy Ghost to speak through my words and knew when this was happening when the calm and clarity and sense of love that would come giving me the right words to speak with love and kindness. I felt God beside me until my husband sinned against me and my family and I was faced with a life changing battle I found myself feeling afraid, alone and unprepared to handle. Suddenly I found it difficult to fight equally for my own needs as I did for others. I fear that as a husband and wife are suppose to be as one, if his sins against me and the family didn’t so reflect on me and my failure to help my husband or stop him from committing these sins. Had I failed him by not trying harder to be a vessel that would help strengthen his faith so he would not commit such sins? Thus like the sins of the father are bestowed on his children so be it with me and his family too. Because suddenly I was alone, I could not hear or feel the Lord in anything that was happening to us and around us. How could this have happened? What did I not do to prevent this from happening to us?
I sometimes wonder if it was because I left a scared screaming 6-year-old little girl
unprotected trapped deep inside me most of my life. I know that as I grew into a woman, I was actively trying to save the world or at least my little corner of it one child at a time, or even 13 at a time. And my most demanding adventure started with trying to save the best friend of my youth, my husband Dana.
We were just 15 when we met I had just moved up to New Hampshire from Lynn Massachusetts. We became best friends and shared our high school years. I confided just about everything to him and he gave me his shoulder to cry on. And in return in the end when he found his fiancée in bed with his best friend while he was in the Navy I comforted him by giving him my hand in marriage. This happened shortly after my own high school boyfriend decided to marry someone else so I guess in fact we were suppose to be saving each other then.
It just made sense to me at the time. Dana was with me almost every day through out our high school years. As one of my very best friends he knew most of my dreams and secrets. Many times he jokingly would ask me to marry him and I would just say “Oh Dana you’re my best friend and like a brother to me but I love Billy. This did not change our friendship. The only time we had difficulty was when he tried to teach me algebra and didn’t get it. Boy was he impatient about it almost losing his temper saying why you don’t see this it’s so simple! I knew not to ask him for help with homework after that.
We were still best friends after high school although our lives had to go in different directions.
Dana was into his last year of the Navy and I was just laid off from working at the General Electric Company in Lynn Mass where I had been working sense our high school graduation and then I got a job in men’s and boys department in Simons Department store in Plaistow and was able to move back home to New Hampshire.
Dana was stationed in Cuba and just home on leave due to his Stepfathers illness, and fight with cancer. I visited him in the nursing home with Dana and Herb his stepfather said I wish I could see you two get together. Well Dana was getting over the hurt of finding his fiancé in bed with his best friend and I thought I knew what he was feeling because it hadn’t been that long ago that I found out my high school sweetheart who I thought was the love of my life, was going to marry a woman he met at college. So when Dana told me about his fiancé reminding me of my own heartache, I wanted to wrap my arms around him and protect him and hold him tight and love him, but the timing was off. I had already been dating an absolutely wonderful man named Joseph Troisi who was everything I needed to help with the healing of my own broken heart and I was quickly falling in love with him, he was very gently and kind to everyone and treated me like a Princes. He was a hard worker and was a strong Catholic raised believing in and loving God like me. He was such an easy man to love. His heart was open and giving. When My father had herd I was seeing an Italian at first he was upset but after he met him he loved him and gave his approval. Joe’s mother did not approve of me an Irish Catholic girl so she used to turn away my phone calls. She would say, is this the Irish girl and when I said yes she said “No Joey live here!” and hung up on me. After that I had to get my room mate Judy to call and she told Joe’s mother she was an Italian girl and her family was from Cicely so she would call Joe to
the phone and then she would give the phone to me. To me Joe was the older man representing security and solid ground. He was a man of twenty five but he had such a youthful joyful spirit he could run with me through the streets jumping, dancing and playing like a child and his
peter pan personality brought me much joy and laughter the perfect choice for a husband and father. Everyone loved him and he had just asked me to marry him and given me a beautiful
ring. Maybe it was too soon, or maybe I just wasn’t ready, or maybe I didn’t believe I deserved such happiness from a man. Or maybe he was just too tame, But when Dana came home on leave from Cuba that year Knowing my high school sweetheart was out of the way gave him the idea to finally pursue me in a different light, even knowing I had just accepted an engagement ring from Joe didn’t deter him. Dana began to shower me with flowers candy and attention competing with Joe for my affection in a way I had never seen Dana. I don’t know or understand how I justify breaking up with Joe such a wonderful guy to marry Dana except that Dana felt like an old safe comfortable shoe and his mother didn't scare me like Joe's mother did. I tell myself it was because I wanted to save Dana. But I don’t understand it myself today. In Gods truth how I could justify hurting Joe to fix Dana’s broken heart. It sounds ridiculous to me now, or even
worse, it sounds untruthful. I wonder how often we humans lie to ourselves in order to justify our behavior or choices and just how long it takes us to realize it. I think it was one of the most mean and thoughtless things I ever did and I have only myself to blame for the results of it.
Meanwhile back to Dana, When he first came home on leave and told me about his fiancé
cheating on him. I remembered saying to him half joking and half really wanting to save him from being hurt, “Why don’t we just marry each other we want a dozen kids and I bet we could make a great together.”
And He continued the game saying, “If we did get married you could come back with me to Cuba.”
We were only talking but something underneath those words was about to once again rock my path. This was the weakening moment that set Dana into pursuing me and me into questioning on which direction I should go next. I admit I was afraid of Joe’s family especially his mother accepting me and Dana seemed more familiar and the future with him looked safe with staying with my family environment instead of the Italian customs. Could that be the reason why or at least partially? All I really know is that in time Dana was the push to decide to break it off with
Joe. I wonder what would have happened had Dana not come home from Cuba at that time. Where would we all be today? I’m pretty sure I would not have been married to Dana.
Although Dana had plenty of uniforms he had no decent street cloths or a suit to be married in. He spent his money as fast as he got it. I had been working for the General Electric for a few years and I enough saved for us to have a nice wedding and to buy him pants, shirts underwear,
socks and of course the suit, tie and shirt we would be married in. It was a small wedding. We
didn’t need frills. My girlfriend Jean and I made my beautiful gown. And we bought the rings on time payments an my charge account at Ross Jewelry store in he Square in Lynn Mass where I had a credit account established after buying my
father a ring for his birthday and my mother a mothers ring.
Dana and I were happy and anxious to tell his step farther Herb before he died that we decided to get married. I do believe Herb played a big part in convincing me to marry Dana and
our decision to get married right away. We wanted to bring him some joy at the news of it before it was too late. He was slipping fast. went on long family riding trips with Dana’s mother and Herb before he got sick.
At the time of our decision to marry my mother was recovering from a heart incident and my oldest sister Bunny was caring for her and gave me a hard time about trying to see my mother. Mom loved Dana, but just not for me. He used to steel the cookies out of the cookie jar and she got a kick out of it. But she had never thought of him as husband material, at least for me.
But eventually she gave us her blessing and came to our wedding on July 3, 1970 at the little Baptist Church in Newton Jct. As I walked down the isle on my fathers arm and he passed me over to Dana I thought I felt it was the beginning of a good life together. All the people we loved were there to watch as Dana and I said our vows promising to love honor and obey through sickness and health till death do us part. Being married to my best friend I believed it would last
forever.
Unfortunately we found out after the wedding that I could not go after all because there was a long waiting list and other wives married were ahead of me.
It was a small sweet and memorable wedding at seven o’clock on a Friday night. My gown
was so beautiful and fit perfectly showing my youthful thin figure that I was not going to keep for long. It was made of brocade and a soft eyelet lace panel down the front and sleeves. Our honeymoon, was just a long weekend was spent fixing up our apartment and then serving our first dinner of Steak and potatoes to a couple of our best friends. Dana left a day late to get back to his base but was excused when they found he had gotten married that weekend. Our Honeymoon night had a few problems; Dana had a bit too much to drink that and the next couple of nights I think I got pregnant the night before he left for Cuba. Eight months later Dana got an early out and came home from Cuba just in time to settle in before our daughter Tammy was born. He got out of the service early because he said he wanted to be home for the birth of our first child and then didn’t get to see her birth because he went home to take a nap and ended up sleeping through it.
This truly marked the beginning of what life was going to be like with Dana and that plus our honeymoon weekend was to mark our relationship And how our life together as a family began and would continue on in many similar ways with Dana as a husband and father.
It was my happiest goal to be a wife and mother and I wanted to live a life with my husband nurtured by faith hope and trust. We had some ups and downs right off in the beginning and it wasn’t always wonderful but I did believe once we got over a couple of rough spots that our life together was blessed by God and that meant so much to me and besides I knew nothing came easy in this life today now did it? I understood when I had to make many sacrifices and put much of my own development of my God given gifts and talents aside to stand by my man and his goals. This is what a good wife did, after all he was the head of the house and wanted to be the breadwinner while I was to be a stay at home mom and manage his home for him and I there weren’t many choices for woman back then. When I was younger I had dreamed of becoming a model, an actress, a singer, an artist, a writer and heck even a nun. So who was I to judge my husband for not being able to make up his mind what he wanted to do? He started out a plumber with his father making about $35 a week some weeks. So when I convinced him to try and get a job with my father at General Electric in Lynn where he worked for a few years until he was laid off that seemed like great money and security. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. One of our first challenges came as a result of Dana’s stay in the Navy stationed for long periods of time in quiet places like Machias Maine, and then in Cuba where there was not much to do in your free time. So like his father before him he began to develop a strong drinking habit. Coming from a family of alcoholics I suppose that was only to be expected. When he came home after the service he continued to expect to be able to drink like he had in the service. Our first dinner party he got drunk and passed out by 8 o’clock because he had started drinking early that day while preparing for the party and I was left to tend to our guests alone. He did wake long enough to throw up out the back door all over the side of the house and after trying to show someone how to drink from the other side of the glass while practically standing on his head. People were leaving by then though. He would go for rides with his cousin or his young uncle riding around drinking and driving and come home prepared to accuse me of having someone in the house while he was gone. Not his sober self! When he was in this mood he would back me into a corner screaming at me. My aunt who lived next door worried for my safety but I knew he would never hit me. Not counting the time he swung a long heavy squash from our friends garden at me teasingly. Then convincing me he had a good grip on it so I should put my hands down and trust him. Of course when I did, the squash slipped out
of his hands and hit me in the forehead knocking me back against our car. I cried while he tried his best to convince me it was an accident. If I had followed my instincts I would have kept my hands up knowing the whole thing was a stupid thing to do in the first place. But I wanted him to know I trusted him and that seemed more important at the time. He was so sweet when we were teenagers and when he was sober but he was jealous jerk when he drank too heavily. But when his meanness began to show with our picked up our cat and through her across the room or when he punched our Saint Bernard as hard as he could right between the eyes I began to get worried. Instead of acting remorseful he joked about how Alfy (that was our dogs name) was so strong he just shook his head after he hit him. It broke my heart to see that my best friend who I thought was so gentle and sweet in high school was becoming a mean drunk and bully. I threatened to leave him if he did stop drinking, but as a Catholic girl it was hard to turn
away from my wedding vows. He had been brought up in a home that said when the man comes home from work he deserves his beer and that’s about the extent that he really knew about being a man at that time in our marriage.
Then one day his drunken anger was let lose on our adopted son DJ who was just a toddler. DJ –Dana Jr., was the first of the three children we would adopt from his sister Robin. Forgetting his strength Dana picked DJ up by one of his little arms and spanked his bottom so hard his little body swung like a bell in the air and that was it for me and in my heart I meant it! I told him he had to leave. He moved back into his fathers’ home where he stayed for three weeks. At
the end of the three weeks he agreed he had a drinking problem and convinced me he was ready to give up the drinking for his family. And he did. He remained sober for 25 years as we built our world around our family, which included many children and extended family members. It started with his sisters and brothers and then his sister’s children and then it just grew from there totaling eight adoptions and the birth of five children of our own which included the oldest child a middle child and the three youngest out of a total of 13. I could see it wasn’t always easy for Dana and even without drinking he lost patience with the children and would often scream unrealistic punishments or ground them for indefinite periods of time and then go off to work expecting me to in force them. Some times I could and sometimes I couldn’t’. He was hard and I was soft and sometimes he was too hard and sometimes I was too soft. But then there were those times when we balanced everything so well together things went so smoothly even with this large family and it was absolutely amazing! And those were the times that kept me going and believing I made the right choice to give Dana that other chance. We both kept trying to improve our parenting skills and ourselves for our children, taking classes together, getting involved with Little league and Scouts and Dana didn’t just get involved he always ended up running things. But their always seemed to be something haunting Dana chasing him like a bear I used to say and although it never seem to gain on him keep him running and unable to deal with some very important issues in his life.
So instead of an alcoholic he had become a workaholic and even in between his day job he kept himself very busy doing something at all times. When he did slow down or sit for a moment he was always so tired that he would often just fall asleep in his chair. And then at the age of 45 he had his first heart attack.
Because he was on running mode and I was on saving mode our married life began with our rescuing each other and continued with our rescuing lots of children and other people. Dana’s parents were divorced when he was just ten years old the eldest child in a large family. His father also a heavy drinker married several times bringing the older children with him.
His father was an unfaithful man with one eye on the bottle and the other on a woman in the room.
While pregnant with our first child my love for my husband grew with the many letters we wrote back and forth those eight months he was stationed in Cuba and I wait for his return. It
grew the joy we shared at the thought of having our first child. The war in Vietnam was phasing down and men were being offered an early out from the Navy and Dana chose to put in for one so he could come home in time to see his child be born. He was home for just a short while and then on March 28, 1971 Tammy was born. We didn’t know his early leave would cost us. His insurance for being in the Navy was canceled with the early out and so the birth of the baby was no longer covered. It would take us quite a while to pay off that bill. Especially with the small pay he received for quite some time while working with his father. Dana’s mother picked out our baby’s name. Although I wanted to name her after my older sister I figured there would be more
opportunities because we had both planned on having a large family.
If asked today, Tammy would say she was glad we picked Tammy for her name and a name not shared with an aunt or anyone. We named each of our boys adopted and otherwise after each of Dana’s brothers and my brother, father and grandfather, having ten sons when all was said and done.
When Dana came home from the service my mother and father bought us a cute little yellow cottage in town around the corner from them and just down the street from Dana’s father’s
family. Dana worked for his father back then in plumbing heating and electrical, But working for his father plumbing during this time didn’t get Dana many hours of work or enough money to
support a family only was bringing home $35 in a week most weeks. I had to drop the diaper delivery and wash the cloth diapers in the bathtub not having a washer or dryer or money for the laundry mat. After they were washed I would wring them out by hand and hang them out
on a clothesline that hung from the tiny garage to a tree it was hard work and I loved it! So don’t feel sorry for me. In the winter I strung lines throughout my house. I also didn’t mind the summer months when the well went dry and I would have to string plastic milk jugs with a bathrobe tie hung across Tammy’s baby carriage to make the walk around the corner and down the hill to my mother’s house to fill the water jugs from her well. Once DJ came along, our first adopted son from my sister in law, someone was giving away a free old fashioned wringer washer. That was great fun. It reminded me of when I worked for Dertex in Lawrence with my grandmother on an assembly line when I was just 16 in the summer. I did laminating work and slid my work through two rollers just like doing the laundry with this old wringer washer
now. But it did leak pretty badly so we had to put it out into the garage where we hung the hose out the garage window to drain the water out into the garden that grew quite well that
year.
With the adoption of Dana Jr. my sister in laws second child and then having my first biological son Wayne we out grew the cute one bedroom cottage home with no land to do an addition. Dana finally accepted the fact that he had to stop working for his fathers who was still treating him like a part time school boy giving him next to no hours work but telling him to stay home in case he called him to work. Having a family to support it was time to find a better job with more stable income and maybe even benefits.
Living just down the street from Dana’s Father and stepmothers and their children and up the street from my Mom and Dad and my sisters and brother had proved to be very convenient arrangement for helping out Dana’s siblings, starting with Dana’s fourteen-year-old brother Wayne, who was kicked out of the house and move in with us for a while. He only had to walk down the street and I let him in and let him take over the small attic room for a bedroom. This is when our family first started to grow and change it shape in strange unpredictable ways. It sometimes seemed through our married life as if there were a sign on the door that read bring the troubled or unwanted children here. Next Dana’s 15yr old sister Kim had trouble at home and moved in with us. Dana’s sister Robin who lived with Dana’s mother in Bradford was an unwed mother with many problems. She would often call Dana and I to rescue her from one of her many often self-inflicted emergencies. She came and stayed for six months at a time almost ever year. Each time we would take her in help her out and then try to get her back up on her feet set her back out into an apartment until something else would happened and it would all begin again. When she got pregnant with her second son Jason Eric she did not want him from the beginning and she would hit her stomach crying that she did not want him. So when he was born she asked me to babysit for her one weekend and never came back to get him. He was our first son so I insisted to Dana we rename him Dana Jr. as a first son should be named. (And now that he is grown he is much like Dana in many ways today) Robin had many problems brought on by depression and a mental illness probably caused by a terrible child hood experience at the age of nine I think she was when she was a victim of a vicious attack by a male babysitter who tried to kill her slashing her throat and wrapping a telephone cord around her neck to try and kill her. He left her almost dead when her mother and her fiancé came back from their night out together and found her. She was hospitalized for many weeks and it of course affected the rest of her life. That is why I have so much compassion for her even though she was often very demanding on our lives throughout these years. Because of her emotional and mental instability and the effect it was having on her last two children when she married a Viet Nam vet suffering from the effects of serving in Viet Nam abused the children and then committed suicide The Department of Social Services took away her parental rights Robin turned to Dana and myself to
adopt her other two children Steven and Shawna so the Department of Social Services placed the children with me and her brother Dana to adopt. This unexpected increase in our family caused us to be evicted from our apartment in Plaistow where we had lived in a three bedroom apartment. The Landlord said the two more children even though they were all very little were not in the lease and we would have to move. It was humiliating like by taking in these children
we had done something wrong. I could not believe anyone could be so heartless. But this proved to be
God sent when we were then able to move to rent our home in Newton that we were
eventually able to buy from our wonderful and kind landlords and raise our family in a wonderful town for many years to come. It was a wonderful home with plenty of land for the children to play and even an in ground pool share many fun hot summer days with our family and friends keeping cool and playing together every summer. We did in time adopt Robins other two children Steven renamed Barry after Dana’s brother (and he looks just like his uncle Barry even today) and his younger sister Shawna (we kept her name the same.) along with our two biological childrenTammy and Wayne (Wayne was named after Dana’s brother Wayne) So that gave us five children ages 7 and under. But God pointed our path in a wonderful direction after that when we found a beautiful country cape with two acres of land to rent in Newton a few doors away from the Newton Baptist Church Dana and I had been married in on July 3,
1970. I believed that to be a sign that God was indeed blessing our marriage and our life together.
Tammy was in second grade and Steven
had started first just before we came to Newton. At the Newton Memorial
School they wanted me to
give them permission for Steven to be put into because he had a nervous
stuttering problem after his short life of crises and drama with male nutrition
and deficiencies. But I refused
to let them keep him back. I knew
how smart he was and out going and I believed now that his life was going to be
safer and calmer he would surely improve with his speech.
I knew how smart he was working with him at home and I did not believe he
should be kept back because of a speech impediment.
And I was right; he did well in school and eventually outgrew the
stuttering so that proved to be a good parental decision on my part and the
first advocacy out of many I would be doing for children.
Working with the Department of
Social Services during the first years with Steven and Shawna pre- adopt I began
to find out just how many children there were in need of temporary or permanent
homes. Dana agreed that while I
was a full time stay at home mom anyway raising all these little children I
could take in emergency care and respite for foster parents or children waiting
to be placed in permanent homes after all we were already taking foster
parenting classes for Steven and Shawna.
We did take in
children and I felt much pride in the success I had with a lot of the children
we took in. Dana and I took
parenting classes together and this helped Dana learn how to break some bad
parenting habits he had picked up from his father.
One day we got a call about a sibling group of four, three boys and a
girl ages five going on six and down that needed temporary placement. DSS did not want to place all four with
us so I called my sister Mary to help.
She agreed to take in the two middle children Brian and Amy and I took
the oldest child Jason and the youngest child Adam. This was good so we could
keep them all seeing each other during this difficult time for them besides it
was only temporary. What was
suppose to be three months turned into four years and then the parents signed
surrender papers and they were released for adoption.
A posting was put into Sundays child but eventually the allowed the
children to be adopted by Dana and. They were already part of our family any
way. During this time we took in a
nine year old failed adoption from my cousin. His name was Billy.
My cousin and her husband who could not have children of their own took
Billy who was just weeks old and his older sister Marie in with the intention to
adopt them. But in the end they
sent Marie away and adopted Billy and then later they got a second son from the
foster care system in Mass and his name was Doug.
When Billy was just nine they wanted or needed some respite from Billy
and called me to take him for a while. Once I had him they did not want him
back. When I got him at age nine Billy was a frail nine-year-old who was pulling
his hair out by the roots in patches leaving bald spots.
This seemed to be from nerves and getting him just around the fourth of
July he was scared to death of fireworks or any loud noises. His stomach was
distended like a malnutrition child and he was on the cusp of retardation. With the coming years of love and care
and encouragement he eventually began to grow happy handsome and strong.
But somewhere
in the mix of raising all these children for others I realized – Gosh Gee! I wanted to have biological children of
my own too!” I had always wanted a huge family and was hoping to be able to have
another little girl some day. It
took a little convincing and reminding him that he had agreed with me before we
got married to have 12 children.
So Dana and I worked at finishing up our biological family which added
the three youngest sons William, Jake and Joe. And then we gave up trying to
have that last little girl who didn’t seem to be in the cards.
So our life continued to be
wrapped in children and family. Still Dana managed to find time to reach out
beyond the family life. He enjoyed fishing with his brothers, going to the races
and even fixing, maintaining and running a car in the races.
While my life was committed to keeping score of everyone else’s life and
activities I found little time for myself or my writing or my art. Although
whenever I could I worked on my children’s stories and short stories. There was plenty of Arts and Crafts and
school projects to help out with for the kids though and that was always
fun. I soon learned that having
such a very large family finding a baby setter was next to impossible until my
eldest child Tammy got old enough to help out. Luckily some of my favorite passions in
life were arts and crafts, Music and playing with children. Children have such
vivid imaginations, as did I even still.
Today after all the
sacrifices and complications and unexpected outcomes, I’m not so sure I would
put as much emphasis on the end dreams as I should have put on just relaxing and
enjoying the moments while we still had them. Because that old saying is quite
true, ‘hear today gone tomorrow.” I think of my hopes and dreams about rocking
in a rocking swing chair with my husband on our front porch swing, his arm
around me as we enjoy watching the fruits of our labor bloom in our
grandchildren and great grandchildren.
But this dream has popped into peaces like a Childs balloon.
The dream of seeing our own children having their own children and coming
together in the love filled family home has been blown out of the water. All so that Dana could run off and have
a so called or what he now calls a life.
With Kathryn a woman who could come between a husband and wife, a father
and his children. Crushing a
family thus ending our life together like death ends our breath.
And that didn’t just end things for us all, it made such a mess of many
of our lives and days, weeks and years to come. Such a mess as a matter of fact I do not
know how I got through it this far.
He left and our children went scrambling in all directions. And here I
set for the last six years trying to hold onto threads of our family home, raise
the last of the children alone and make sense of the ending of our life
together.
I can get so devastatingly
sad and angry but yet I still say I lived three lives worth along the way. And
I’m grateful for most of it. I
lived through the joy and accomplishments of my husband in his life and
developing his career helping him reach for his goals.
I watched the children grow and change and seek their own destinies. And
I thought doing this would all be worth the sacrifices I had to make along the
way.
Did the downward
spiral happen that last fate full day Dana suffered another heart attack while
our home was burning to the ground? But everyone in Town was so wonderful, non
of the children were hurt and we learned about how much people cared about each
other in our Town and local communities by the wonderful responses to our needs
being met by even strangers.
After the heart
attack and the house fire I thought we started to pick ourselves up pretty well.
We were putting one foot in front of the other, just like we had time and time
again through the years. I trusted in the Lord, and believed He would help us
and everything would turn out OK and Dana would get well again. I was sure God
would see us through our worry about Dana’s health.
I could not allow myself to think otherwise. I would not survive it or be
able to take care of my children or Dana if I didn’t believe that.
I was very concerned when Dana decided not to hire someone to come finish
the house with the insurance money and that he would build our home himself or
as a family project. I was afraid for his health but proud of his desire to
build a bigger better home for our growing family.
He worked in construction any way, so I agreed and even looked forward to
the development of our new home that we designed together.
Dana seemed happy to draw up the plans for the house with me working on
our dream for a big and beautiful house to share many happy moments with not
just our children and even our grandchildren. I can not believe this was a man with
one foot out the door of this marriage!
Besides Kathryn and Paul his friends at work were still married to each
other at the time.
I was both afraid and excited for Dana, at the thought of building our
own home. I knew how much he had built for other people and now he had the
opportunity to do it for himself and us, his family.
I knew he would have to take it slow but he insisted on taking on the
challenge of building our new house saying “I’ve been in construction all my
life building for others now I have a chance to build it for myself!” So we began as a family, peace by peace
brick by brick board by board the girls and the boys of all ages and Dana and
together we all began the new adventure of building our new home.
This time we would build it up against the old barn, not so close to the
road so we will have more front yard for the children to play and not be near
the road. We would leave the spot where the old house stood as a garden memorial
to the old home and the happy memories we shared in it.
While the house was still
just a shell, barely a roof over our heads, we moved in to it. It was the week
before Christmas just before the real cold of winter overtook us when we moved
out of the trailer we had been staying in on the property and into our
unfinished home to spend our first Christmas. Then the worked began continued from
the inside out. We were doing very well for a while.
But then things began to happen.
At first I thought it began with my accident but now I sometimes
wonder. There was particle
board cut temporary for our stair treads. So we could get up and down the stairs
to work on the house. There were
no railings up. I almost fell over
the side coming down stairs but caught my balance begged Dana to put up a
temporary rail on the temporary stairs so no one will get hurt. He said he would
but did not put it first on his list and I almost fell a second time. I was more demanding about the
rails. Just put two by fours up I
pleaded. He promised he would get
to it but once again did not and the third time I was not so lucky.
But I’m still glad it was me and not someone else to lose balance
carrying things up or down the staircase that still didn’t have any rails.
I recently got an
opportunity to help out temporarily at my daughters work at a residential home
while her boss was going out on maternity leave. One night, while leaving my bedroom to
go to work the 11 to 7 As I gathered my things and left my second floor bedroom
out to the hallway and stepping down with my left foot first of the very first
step of the long winding staircase, my knee went and because their was no rail
to grab went hurling over the side as I screamed “NO!” and demanded it not be
so! As I toppled over the
side down to the foyer on the first floor I hitting my legs on the desk I
flipped over hitting me head breaking both wrists, fracturing my ribs breaking
my teeth and knocking myself out cold for several minutes before my husband said
I gasped a breath and turned myself over. Dana said he thought I was dead. It
was a very bad fall. I broke my wrist badly on one hand and my thumb wrist area
on my other hand and ended up with a cast on each hand that went up to my
elbows. Although I couldn’t seem to stop the room from spinning most of the
concentration remained on my breaks and bruising. My legs were bruised but not
broken. My neck, ribs, and back had much pain. I banged and broke my front teeth that
would later have to be removed.
For months I continued to have a very bad case of vertigo, which was very
debilitating. While recovering at
home and unable to work, I had to lean my head against the wall to walk to keep
from falling over with the vertigo after many weeks I finally got my casts off
my arms and was finding my way around a little better but the vertigo still made
me sick to my stomach, and I had
to fold my arms in and fall onto the bed to get in and even rolling over in bed
was very painful because of my broken ribs, Dana asked me if I would be willing
to help out Kathryn and Paul friends from work. He said Paul had started drinking again
(he and Kathryn were in AA) and because of his drinking he had made some poor
financial choices and while drunk was taken advantage of by a car dealer and
they were now stuck with a brand new car he bought for Kathryn that they could
not afford. They didn’t need help
with money, they would figure that out.
They just thought because I was unable to get back to work with my
daughter while recuperating from my accident. I could help Paul dry out and get
back into his AA meetings while Kathryn was at work. I could watch him while he
dried out in exchange he could help us with the work on the house for the 30
days.
I thought it might helpful to Dana to
have Paul around to help him with building the house so I agreed. After Paul
came, Kathryn had Paul sign everything over to her as if separated, she said
just so they wouldn’t lose it all due to Paul’s mistake with purchasing the car
they couldn’t afford. I didn’t
know about this until Paul told me.
I thought then Kathryn was up to something.
Paul proved to be sincere with his effort to get back to AA and sober up
and was a great help with some of the work we needed done on the house. He was a
pleasure to have around.
Thinking back on it, then while Paul was staying with us Kathryn would
call Dana to come talk with her about things or help her with things around the
house that needed fixing while Paul was staying back here with me.
Near the end of the 30days he was to spend with us, on Paul’s birthday he
wanted to see Kathryn but she said no.
At the end we found out the real reason Kathryn sent Paul to us. Kathryn
gave Paul the boot and was filing for divorce. I was shocked, and felt used. I
complained to Dana “How could she use us like that? I was wondering why she
would make such a big deal of Paul’s slip with drinking when I know she drinks.
She’s an alcoholic too! I
saw her drinking at the business dinners we went to?”
The last day Paul was at our home, he was yelling at Dana in our driveway
accusing him of having an affair with his wife. I was surprised he would accuse
Dana of such a thing. Not my
Dana. So I thought Paul was just
striking out because he was overwrought.
But after, once Paul was out of the picture Dana began acting
differently. He pretended it was
because he was feeling sickly because of his heart condition.
He always called me from work every day before he left to come home, it
was just our routine and he began calling saying he didn’t feel well and was
needing to stop off at Kathryn’s house to rest before he headed home or it
would be Kathryn needed something fixed at her house and so he was stopping off
on his way home. I tried to
remain patent and steadfast and trusting reminding myself this is what our
family did. Help others. Working on our own home began to slow
down to a crawl. I worried more about his health and his overdoing then thinking
something was up between them both.
Not my Dana! I would
beg him to take it easy and quit early when working on our own home on the
weekends. But then Kathryn’s house repair problems seemed to grow without Paul
around to fix things. Dana spent
more and more time there helping her with her house as the work on our own home
seemed to get slower and slower and Dana seemed to getting sicker and
sicker. I insisted he go to the
Doctors to see what was wrong and the Doctor told him, your fine.
Dana Got upset, telling me it wasn’t so on the way home and I agreed with
him saying we should change doctors.
After that Dana continued to act depressed and refused to see another
Doctor and continued having to stop off at Kathryn’s to rest more and more. She
would call me to reassure me he was alright and then he would come home late
would stay awake waiting for him. A few times he didn’t come home until 4 in
the morning saying he fell asleep and Kathryn didn’t want to wake him. When he wasn’t acting sick it was him
helping out at Kathryn’s or Kathryn’s mothers or her sisters helping Kathryn
pack up her mothers house to sell because her mother was being put into a
nursing home and fixing up Kathryn’s house in Ossipee to sell.
And when he did come home he was so beat and sickly he would sleep a few
hours in his recliner and then get up to go to work. Then one day Kathryn called
me from work and told me she believed he was deliberately doing heavy lifting
and stuff at work like he didn’t care if it killed him.
She said I should speak to him about it. When he came home that night I told him
about what Kathryn had said and he said he felt depressed. But refused to go to
the doctors until I told him I was not going to sit and watch him kill
himself. Then he agreed to go and
the Doctor gave him medication for the depression.
In an email to Dana from Kathryn the next day (that I read from his old
file after he left me and moved in with her) she asks him how we are getting
along, any better?” Up until that
night that she suggested I talk to him about what he was doing, I hadn’t known
we were having any problems in our relationship at all. I had been living in
fear of losing him sense his first heart attack at age 45 and I just wanted him
to be happy and well. After that things didn’t change much and I wasn’t getting
much sleep worrying about him expecting to hear the phone ring with someone
telling me he had been rushed to the hospital with another heart attack. I made him go to the doctors several
times during this time and each time after the tests they would say he is fine
his arteries were not blocked and he shouldn’t be having
problems at all. Eventually the doctors began treating him like a
hypochondriac and I was getting angry with them. After all I was living with
him. I could see how sick he was
acting in the evenings whenever he was to sick to drive right home All I knew
was the evenings when he would finally make it home he said he felt so sick he
wouldn’t want us near him and he would eventually fall sleep in the stuffed
recliner saying he was too sick to come to bed.
The week Dana walked out on us, Kathryn would tell me he had been
drinking with her for several months which might explain his staying away from
us when he came home and his wanting to sleep in his chair.
I guess sleeping in the chair and staying away from us was his way of not
letting me smell the booze on his breath.
When she told me about his drinking she tried to act the innocent saying
she didn’t know he was an alcoholic she just thought a little wine would help
his heart. This was bull crap!
When she asked me to help out with her husband Paul she said it was because I
did so well at helping Dana my own husband stop drinking and he had remained
been sober for 25years. That is
until Kathryn decided to seduced him through his weakness for alcohol and the
wine.
Then one weekend Dana
was going to go help Kathryn pack up her two room camp house in Ossipee because
she was moving that weekend to her mothers house to get it ready to sell but she
was just getting over phenomena so he said he was going to spend the night to
help pack her up and overnight Saturday too and then her sister and her sister’s
family and my sons and Dana would get together and move her on Sunday. I have to
admit something was not sitting right for me by now about Kathryn and her
demands on my husband. So I
volunteered to go pack up Kathryn myself and I would not take no for an answer.
I could tell Dana didn’t want me to go with him but I insisted and so the next
thing I know the plans are changed and he dropped me off to help Kathryn and
chose to go home and rest at our house himself instead.
I wondered why he didn’t still want to stay.
But what could he say without pointing out what was becoming so obvious
but still unspeakable.
So with my own concerns for my
own injuries put aside, I painfully packed her two room house all weekend her
cabinets were chuck full of large half-full booze bottles of all kinds. This was not what you would expect to
find in the cabinet of a sober alcoholic, or even a wife of a sober alcoholic. I
could smell the booze on her breath and in the glass she claimed to be soda. I
let her think I believed. While I packed she kept emailing someone on the
computer. I wondered if it was
Dana.
On Sunday everyone
was there to move her and some of her stuff got stored in my cellar back home.
After the last load was packed and we were all ready to go,
It seemed like she for a minute forgot I was there as she began to tell
her sister: “Dana and I will come up and get the plants on Tuesday and then we
will clean up and sweep up the house on
Wednesday.”
I was standing
by our truck not far from Dana when she said this and I spoke up.
“Your sister told me she was going to do that with you.” I told her.
She turned looking
surprised as if she forgot I was there and said “Oh, Oh yes that’s
fine.”
When we got into our
individual cars and trucks, Dana got in our truck with me and we headed home to
bring the load that was going to be stored in our cellar.
Once we were rolling I asked him straight out.
“How long has this been going on?”
Dana played the innocent and said
“What are you talking about?”
I said, “She’s acting like she owns
you! Not only did she feel she did not have to check with me about you both
doing things this week but what’s more important she didn’t feel she had to ask
you! How dare she take for granted you will do these things with her Tuesday and
Wednesday without checking with you or me first?”
I complained.
Dana argued that it’s got
nothing to do with him how she behaved.
“That’s her, not me; she’s just like one of your sisters to
me.”
I said “Well enough is
enough; she’s trying to possess you.
No more helping Kathryn!”
But he said, “I just want to
finish helping her get settled near work then there will be plenty of people to
help her. She won’t need me after
that.”
I had to believe him.
I had to trust him. I had always put my trust in him. He was the husband
of my youth! This might be one sided just like when one of our other friends had
a crush on him. He was flattered
but never acted on it. We had been married for nearly 30yrs.
I bore five children for him. He was my best friend! We had been through
a long life together so far.
We had climbed many mountains and
gone through many valleys together and always came out together and stronger for
it. But down deep I was
beginning to feel very frightened at what seemed to be happening around us or to
us. I did want to trust Dana with
all my heart and I was feeling guilty for thinking he might have a hand in all
this but then again it did sometimes seem like he was dumb when it came to woman
and their wiles and susceptible to there manipulation.
Heck I knew how to get around him in some things didn’t I?
Of course at the time, I didn’t know he had taken up with his old love
the booze.
I did believe totally now though
that Kathryn was up to no good and trying to wrap her wily ways around
Dana. But Not my Dana, he might
not see through her like I did but I believed with my whole heart he would never
leave me for a woman like that after all we meant to each other all these years
but she could cause some havoc in our lives if this kept up like this.
But boy was I wrong!
It was a beautiful home just around the corner from work like they said.
After getting her all moved in I hoped this would put an end to my worries about
what she was up to with my husband.
I hoped Dana would be able to begin to take it easier and putter around
our own home when he felt up to it.
But instead the day after we moved Kathryn into her new home she was
fired from her job at the company she worked at with Dana and then she called
him crying and he had to run up and comfort her and she kept calling him and
emailing him and so I complained and exactly three weeks later Dana moved out on
us and in with her telling me she needed him and how I was strong and a
wonderful person but he needed to be there for her.
The day he called and
left It happened like this: He
called me from work like he had every day for years but this time he said “Linda
I have something to talk to you about when I come home.”
He had never done that before.
We always spoke to each other about everything and anything when he
called home twice a day the first time to talk and the second to say he was
leaving work and going to be on his way home.
When he came home he was
solemn. He sat in his recliner in
our bedroom and when I asked him what was wrong he said “I’m leaving. I need to
have time to think. So I’m going to
stay at my brother Wayne’s for a
while.”
I asked him why and he just said “We
butt heads about the kids.”
I felt this had to be a bad joke, so I
said “Dahh”
With 13 children any
couple would but heads about the kids from time to time.
That’s no reason for him to leave. I was still in a lot of pain with
my injuries and I could not sit long without discomfort in my lower back hip
area so I took a breath and I got up to go around to the back of my rocking
chair to stand and rest my hands on the back of the chair for balance.
Dana jumped up and grouched at me
saying “Don’t bother getting up!
I’ll leave!” And then he
went to the closet to grab a few cloths.”
Shocked by this drama from no where
I said “what are you talking about?
I just got up because my back is
hurting!”
But he didn’t stop to explain he
grabbed a few things from his shelf in the closet stuck and them in a bag and
stormed out of the house. He said
he was going to his brother Wayne’s’ house in Derry but a few days later his
brother told me Dana wasn’t really staying there with him and he wasn’t going to
cover for him. I called Dana’s
cell phone and he admitted he was up to Kathryn’s house staying there. Dana had moved in with Kathryn who at
first said Dana was just like a brother to her and she just wanted to help him
but by Monday she admitted to me she would want to marry him if he was
free. He had claimed she was just
like a sister to him but chose to move in with her, where there were no
children, and he could get back to his old love the drink. He immediately filed
for divorce and it was final November 11th and three months after it
was final Kathryn and Dana were married.
Meanwhile I was left all alone to pick up the peace’s, of a shattered
life. My family a home and our life at home was a mess from shock waves of it
all. I was crazy with grief and
disbelief and just plain Crazy. I
knew I had to somehow try to save myself if I were to be of any use towards
saving any of my family. But at
this point I truly did not know how except to cry it all out to a therapist and
my journal!
Before my accident and Dana leaving I could handle almost anything just
by letting go and letting God direct me. But suddenly it was as if our cable of
communication was cut and God couldn’t hear me or I couldn’t hear Him. I still
trust in the Lord but I just no longer trust I was good enough with the anger
and fear I felt, to know what it was God was trying to tell me to do next or why
or even if I would be willing! The fear and Anger was consuming me. My self
worth with all the confusion inside me was severely depleted and nothing was
clear to me or safe or normal to me any more. I was scared to death and couldn’t
think my way out of a paper bag at that point and if I had known it was going to
be like this for years I think I would have considered killing myself then and
there! If it wasn’t for my therapist and my journaling I hate to think what I
would have done at that point with things so desperately hopeless and the
consuming terror that followed me wherever I went and with whatever I did was
almost more then I could bare.
But lets begin at the
beginning:
_____________Chapter 3___________________
These are the Journal entries and notes that begin my
recollections of this time in my life that I call my
“Inside
Out Insanity!”
It starts off
when I gave my Mom a journal for her Birthday but I gave it to her a day early.
My Dad was scheduled for knee surgery and actually it was for her and Dad to
share their memories of Dads knee surgery and the rest of life adventures.
In the
front on the second page was a block saying this journal belongs to Dad and Mom
Happy birthday Mom Date Feb 23,2000 Love Dana and Linda,
Good luck Dad we love you and also written was Happy Birthday Mom may all
your wishes come true. And this journal is for the family to read or write in
during our waiting and watching Pops recovery. On the top of the page is written To
God be the Glory Great things he has done which was exactly how I felt about my
life raised in a loving home with wonderful parents who loved each other and
were the greatest example for me and my own growing family and our great life
shared between all of us.
The
Journal for my Dads surgery begins on February 22, 2002.
Feb 22, 2000
Mom brought Dad to Exeter Hospital. He hadn’t able to eat for 12 days. Unable to get Drs. to understand that
Dad believes he has a blockage. Tired of being sick and put off by the
doctors. Finally went to the
Hospital and they scheduled him for scope tomorrow afternoon.
Feb 23,
2000
Scope showed blockage
possibly cancer. No wonder he has
been unable to eat or poop.
Aunt Anna called Dad.
He will be operated on tomorrow
at noon.
Dr Breese is the
surgeon. He’ a small guy about the
size of my five foot Mom, so is the head nurse on days.
She’s great!
Feb.24, 2000
With God all things
are possible.
(Trust)
Today is Thursday and it is Moms
Birthday. It is 9:15 in the
morning and I am sitting in a chair in my fathers’ hospital room at Exeter Hospital. He just walked to the showers around
the corner with a nurse. She got
right in the shower with him to clean him up before he has surgery to remove a
growth in his stomach.
He returned now and
is in the bathroom shaving.
One by one everyone came, sometimes
more then one. Soon the room was
filled overflowing to the hall at times.
My daughter Tammy and
her husband Jorge brought their new baby Andrew. Pop asked to hold him and soon had him
smiling and cooing. Pop is like
the pied piper with children and babies.
They always smile for him.
Earlier when there was just a few of us here Mom and Pop were exchanging
Moms birthday kisses so we left them alone and went to the Hospital cafeteria.
He’s got Big Band Music on and Flowers in his room #411.
Mr. Thibeau is across the way in a private room.
He too has many daughters that are filtering the hallways with all of us
Dads daughters. They are from Hampstead Too. That’s where we were raised. Some of my younger sisters were
classmates and friends. It’s a small world. One of Mr. Thibeau’s daughters was now
my own son Wayne’s mother in law, Martha Temple. He married her daughter Missy
just five months ago October 1999.
Everyone visited each
other between the two Hospital rooms.
Dad has beautiful flowers from his granddaughter Casey, My sister Karen’s
daughter.
Aunt Anna called Dad here at the
hospital to tell him he was right, the problem with her car was just a loose
cable.
It is 11:50 AM and
Dad just asked my husband Dana “Why did they used to say (Why in the Sam Hill?)
Dana couldn’t say and he just looked puzzled but then my brother in law Tom said
I think it had to do with when Teddy Roosevelt was president and it had to do
with the Battle of San Juan Hill.
Historically it was supposedly because it was suppose to be a Calvary
charge at San Juan Hill and they had no
horses. Teddy Roosevelt led the
charge.
Sgt Major from the Salvation Army
my sister Mary’s family’s church was in Dads room at the time and confirmed the
information.
Then it was Time for
us to kiss Dad good luck because they were going to take him down for his
operation. But then there was a
delay some had left but the rest of us who stayed all filed back into his
room.
12:47 we kissed him so long again
and Dad was brought down for the surgery.
We submit him to Gods hands.
Let Him guide the hands of the surgeon, In Jesus name.
Thy will be done.
We look forward to
watching Dad eating sausage sandwiches again soon.
We should plan a big family corn beef and cabbage boiled dinner for a
Sunday soon with Dad. Billy and
Marge brought Dad two Bouquets of beautiful flowers, But no sausages yet. Everyone split up into small groups to
do the various, Bathroom pit stops, coffee breaks, lunch down the café and even
a Mc Donald’s run, or simply remains in the waiting room, Dads room, and outside
cig breaks etc. After a while and a few trips here and there my niece Kathy,
Charlotte’s
eldest daughter took the elevator and a man shared the elevator with her. She looked up and said “Aren’t you my
grandfathers Dr?”
He said
“Yes.
Kathy said “Well shouldn’t you be
with him then in the operating room?”
He said “He’s still being
prepped.
2:10pm they just
called up to tell Mom that they are just now starting the
operation.
Yesterday when the
minister first came and he learned about all the children Mom and Dad had he
turned to Mom and said what a lot of work you must have had to do.
Dad replied “Nah she just laid down through it all.”
(Joke)
Today Carlene, Karen,
Deborah, Madalyn and Madelyn’s daughters, Nichole and Christen, Bunny and Tom,
Charlotte and Don, Carlene, Mary and her daughter Karen and son Danny and Mary’s
daughter Karen’s son Brendan, My daughter Tammy and her husband Jorge and their
new baby Andrew and our Brother Billy Jr. and his friend Marge are all here
waiting to see how Dad’s operation goes.
(This Journal entry by Linda)
Still Thursday Feb
24
2:25pm we are all hanging around in Papa’s room.
Andrew is asleep in his bed keeping it warm for when he returns. Jorge and I have been talking about
taking Papa to Yankee Smokehouse especially after he began looking at us as
bacon slices and sausage sandwiches.
Don’t worry Papa – We can tell them to hold the barbecue sauce.
Andrew just woke up
and is cooing and smiling. One of
the hospital staff just walked by and asked if he was on the wrong floor when he
heard the baby cry. Andrew loves
his Papa. As Aunt Karen says, Papa
is Doctor Doolittle he’s got such a way with animals and baby’s!
We love you Papa!
Love Tammy, Andrew, and Jorge.
Still Thursday Feb
24
Happily all went well with Dads surgery. The doctor said.
He took half the stomach and the operation went well.
He didn’t need any blood and his heart is good he said.
For two days he’ll feel lousy, but then on the way to good health. We’ll know more about the cancer
later, After they test the lymph
nodes .
He had a
Hemagasterectamy they said which means piece of his stomach removed.
Removal of tumor and has a g-tube to drain his stomach and Jackson prêt which is a
tube draining blood fluids from the site. The g-tube drains the stagnant old food
from the stomach. The green beans
he had weeks ago are now black and chunky. But not smelly like often is in such
cases the nurse said.
Evening 7:30pm Bun just called and
said it was getting very foggy out side.
Dads resting nicely, His BP is 143 over 55 the nurse just checked
him. He opened his eyes when the
phone rang then closed them and is once again resting
peacefully.
7:40pm the phone rang
again but wouldn’t connect then it rang at the desk. It was Marge.
She said Ma just left to go back to the hospital and it’s very foggy out
please call when she gets there.
Dad woke when the phone rang and I asked if the light over the next bed
bothered him. He said no and
closed his eyes and is resting peacefully again.
7:50 pm A Nurse came
in to give him some antibiotics.
She hooked up the bag and Dad didn’t seem disturbed by it.
Another nurse asked her to give him Tylenol every 4 hrs I think it may
have been for someone else though.
We’ll see.
8pm Mom came. Then the nurse came in to check the
site area and then left to get a container to empty the blood from the site so
there would be no infection she said.
Mom got up and watched her and asked questions then covered his arms for
him. The nurse said she could get
a cot for Mom to rest if she would like.
Mom asked “Are you sure it will not be in the way?”
the nurse assured her it would be no problem.
Mom said you can go home now Linda. But I’m
staying!
10:00 pm.
Dad was a little nauseous.
The tube beside the bed was fixed to help the flow and the nurse checked
him all over. He’s
good.
6 am. Friday All is
quiet in the room I believe they are both sleeping soundly.
7a.m. Dad was
breathing heavily moving his head and neck and shoulders.
Mom asked “What’s the matter
Bill?”
He whispered “I’m exercising.” Then he
stated, “The Dr said.”
His temperature was
1.5 and they didn’t want it to go any higher they said.
7:25 The Dr. came in
to check Dad. He used a syringe to
unclog the tube emptying his stomach it showed Dark thick secretions,
Vegetables? That had been in his stomach long times were clogging the tube. The Dr. said they sucked a lot of it out
during the operation. No bad
odor. He asked if he had gotten up
yet. He hadn’t.
He wants him to get up soon.
He had them lower the pain meds so he will be less groggy.
Although Dad seem quite awake to me, for someone who has just been
operated on yesterday afternoon.
He’s eating ice chips.
After the Nurses had
the changing of the guards and checked the epidural it is set up higher on the
back then usual. They will watch
for bruising or blood clot around the site of the epidural periodically they
said. it was
8oclockam. And his temp was
1.2
9:30 a.m. He had a
sponge bath by the nurses. It took four nurses to help him get up.
10:00 they got him up
to walk to the door and back and sat him in a chair beside the bed.
He was week walking for just that minute and is still very week in the
chair and very white and he began to sweat. I remember when my husband Dana was in
the hospital and turned white like that he passed out.
I asked Dad if he was nauseous and the nurse asked him if he was having
trouble breathing and he said yes.
So they put him back in bed.
He was exhausted he said.
“I probably need bacon and eggs.”
The nurses laughed at his response. Then he went right to sleep. Dr Grondan (a woman Dr.) peeked in on
him while he was up.
10:45 the man came in
with a breathing exercise gadget and Dad did a great job with it.
Better then most after stomach surgery he said.
Then the nurses drained his stomach site tubes some more.
There were lots of learning nurses on duty today so Dad is getting lots
of help and attention. I’m sure he
likes that.
12:20 they had
dropped Dads pain meds down to five earlier but after his work out and breathing
exercise they just increased it to seven because Dad said the pain was a 5. Marge and Bill are here.
The head nurse who has been teaching the nurses how to take care of Dad
reminds me of Mom. She is very
small but has great energy and a sociably pleasant nature yet she’s an
exhortative take charge type person.
I love her! She’s super and
real caring to my Dad. She walked
in and said someone smokes! I smell
cigarettes. I pointed to Marge and
said her fake fur is really holding the cig smell. I’m sure that was an
embarrassing moment for Marge.
Bill said, it could be fireplace smoke, to cover up the truth. But the Nurse with her no nonsense
manner said “No it’s not!” calling a spade a spade.
1:00 the nurse came
in to check Dad. She had him turn
on his semi side putting a pillow behind his back.
He was wide awake and gabby with Bill and Marge and the nurse. He then was experiencing what appeared
to be a gas pocket pain under his left clavicle. He asked the nurse to remove the pillow
so he could lie back off his shoulder.
I rubbed the area for him and patted but the beeper on one of the darn
machines kept going off when I did so I had to stop.
Then Bill and Marge left to go home and to Agway to buy chicken feed for
Dads chickens at home.
1:20pm I suggested
Dad lie back and try to get some sleep and before long he was sleeping
soundly. He is looking better and
better. Not much actually coming
out of the G tube for a while. I
wonder if it is clogged again. But
when I asked the nurse about it, she was not
concerned.
Dr. Lunden was his
anesthesia Dr. during the operation. The other anesthesiologist Dr Park will be
in this morning to check Dad.
My sister Deborah is here
now.
2:30 the nurse came
in and wants him to walk to the door again. He’s not happy because he feels he is
too week like the last time. But
she is insisting. But he got a reprieve until 4 o’clock she said.
3:40pm his temp is
101.3 the respiratory guy came in to have Dad do the plastic tube breather
gadget again. “I’d rather wait
until after I walk at 4.” Dad said
and the guy said ok.
Mom and Billy came
back and the Dr came in and syringed the G Tube again.
He said the stuff is getting thinner. That’s good!
Old food is getting out of there.
After a while I insisted Mom go home with Billy and get some rest. She gave in
finally.
And the rest of the day
went pretty much the same.
7:40pm Temp. 101.1
Dad has been trying to stay awake until he doe’s his walk at nine but I can see
he is struggling to stay awake. I don’t think he is going to make it.
Saturday Feb. 26,
2000
Temp 100.3 Dad said
he felt like he fell over backwards in the night.
He said it was a strange sensation. He also said he coughed a lot in the
night. His cough seems tight to me
this morning. He said it don’t
always come up. He decided to
attempt his breathing speromiter.
He got it up to 3000 and kept the ball in the smiley face for a good
bit. He did it 3 times then twice
more in the next 15 minutes.
6:30am.
Dad and Henry the man in the next bed are both dozing peacefully after
their morning wake up check work with the nurses and a little bit of
gabbing. Henry said he had both
knees done and it took about 3 months hard exercise until he was set with his
knees walking good and feeling good.
I can see Dads leg muscles have weakened considerably because he almost
didn’t make it back to the bed after his walk and wash-up in the bathroom this
morning. He made it back by the
skin of his teeth after having to sit back down for a bit on the toilet to
rest. It makes no sense to us (Dad
and Me) how they can expect him to do so much so fast after all he’s been
through especially considering he wasn’t that strong on his knees yet after his
knee surgery and finding cancer as the reason he couldn’t eat for so many months
before his knee surgery and having the stomach surgery for the cancer
immediately after his knee surgery.
Where is he supposed to sap this strength from?? He needs to fuel up with
nourishment for a bit first! That
bottle of liquid food he’s plugged into?
And we both worry if he falls that is not going to be much fun at
all!
The Nurse said he is
starting to get bowel sounds which means his bowels are starting to wake
up. So he’ll be able to have
liquids pretty soon.
6:55a.m.
Dad is trying to cough and getting some breaking up of the junk, (sounds
good!)
The afternoon nurses
yesterday were more concerned with getting his jonnie and sheets and things out
of the way to get him up to walk then his modesty which has got to be just about
gone by now. I guess I can tell
everyone how Dad has a cute butt now that I’ve been left to judge it. LOL I do think the young nurse got a
charge out of having the men have to streak shamelessly down the hall. Its fair I suppose when you consider
what we woman have to put up with when we have to bare all at child birth or our
gynecological exams.
Well if anyone
thought Dad couldn’t handle all this certainly underestimated his
constitution! This man is the
strongest man I know. No fuss no
muss. He just does what he has to
do without a blink or a whimper.
Oh well you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
It’s not like he has a choice in the matter.
“Oh sure” he says to everything in a charming co-operative tone or a
slight cute wise comment or crack.
He is so Darn Loveable!!!!!
7:30am the little
head nurse came in with the other nurses again today.
We tried to get her to understand that he feels his legs are too weak to
do a walk. But it seemed to go over her head. (Twice) then we explained it to another
nurse that came in after they had left the room and finally someone got it. She said “Oh yes, that would be too
much after knee surgery. We wash
you up at the bed for now and save your walk for just walking.”
They finally understand.
Dad had kept saying I can’t
make it! But Nobody believed him I
guess because they weren’t’ thinking about him just having knee
surgery.
The Dr. came in and
checked him. And said he can drink
ginger ale.
9:10 Am.
They gave him half a cup of ginger ale.
He took a good sip. Said it
feels good in his mouth but it tastes funny after not tasting anything for so
long.
10:45am they
came in to take him for a walk out of the room this time.
He took a left down the hall to the end and back to his doorway of the
room where he sat on a chair that was there until they made his bed.
Then he walked in to his room and to his bed and lay back on his bed for
a second then they sat him up on the side of the bed to wash up.
He got sick to his stomach and they gave him something for it.
11:07am
now he’s resting again. His sister
Anna called a little earlier and said Aunt Ellie was on her way up to see
him.
Oops I thought Dad
was snoring but it’s not him it’s Henry!
But people don’t get to snore long here. Soon a nurse was in to interrupt
him.
11:20a.m.
Dads snoring a little now, But just a little, the walk tuckered him out.
11:45am
still sleeping Dad just passed the gas in his sleep. LOL the nurse was waiting
for that next step showing his bowels were coming more awake.
He’s on the road to recover he just passed
gas!
A little earlier the Dr asked Dad
if he thought he could pee without the cath now. Dad said No, because he didn’t want to
have to keep peeing on the nurse’s demand twice each nurse’s shift.
He said I’ve never peed that much!
I can’t pee that many times a
day!
12:00 noon this post is about Dads next bed
mate Henry. They tried to get
Henry up with his broken ankle and he had his knees replaced 5 yrs ago. He couldn’t make it.
They were talking about sending him home today but his bathroom at home
is up0stairs and he is a big man close to Dads age.
His wife is very sickly with Asthma so she can’t lift him or help
him. He said I don’t even know how
I’m going to get home. She doesn’t
drive. The social worker will be
up to straighten things out for him they said.
This reminds me of
how we are so lucky to have such a large family! There is always someone who can
help.
12:30a.m.
Aunt Ellie and my cousin Marlane and her daughter Jenny just came in to
see Dad. It is so good to see Marlane.
We were very close as children.
And we spent many wonderful times at Al and Ellie’s house for cookouts
growing up. Al and Ellie were
some of Mom and Dads best friends.
Al passed away some time ago.
Caroline my Cousin David’s wife
called saying she and David will be here for night duty with Dad. Another Doctor
came to check on Dad. Dr Young a woman Dr who is on for the weekend.
She has long dark brown hair in a braid. She seemed pleased with his
progress. Dad is tired now falling
asleep again. He gets bratty when
he’s tired like my husband Dana does.
Mom said Bun and Tom are on the way to the hospital and she will be here
herself a little later. It’s
always so nice to see Aunt Ellie and Marlane. Ellie was sorry she missed Mom. Marlane said she’ll probably bring aunt
Ellie back up to see her soon. I
hope so. Mom would like that. But it’s good that Dad and Ellie got
together at least. It’s been a
while sense Dad was able to go to Lynn Mass to see her.
Well I’ll be going home for a while so this is the end of my entry into
the journal.
Linda
Still Saturday
4pm Dear Linda went home to
give Tammy her car so Tammy can go to work Linda’s been here 2 nights and 2 days
strait. She’s quite a girl
(daughter) (mother) (wife) (sister) and friend. We all love you Linda.
Your love is with everyone.
Dad is sleeping now.
He’s real tired.
8:30pm. we’re
back! Dana and Linda.
I figure we’ll visit until after Dads 9oclock walk attempt so he can have
someone for moral support in case his legs don’t want to support him still. We don’t expect a miracle with no food
yet to give him the energy he needs to sustain him.
He did great! All
those worries were for nothing I guess.
He seems happy to get it over with though.
He went to the hall and back, Ate ice chips.
He feels there having him walk too often. He’s afraid he’ll fall and hurt his
knees. Dad had some jello
earlier.
Sunday 8am Dad had a
good night. He slept well. He has his breakfast now, Liquid on a
tray. He is still enjoying his
first meal, his first coffee in a long time. But he didn’t quite finish it because I
put to much sure in it. Darn. He drank some sips of apple juice and
ate some jello.
8:30 Dr free just
checked him and said he’s doing fine.
There going to block off the g tube if he feels uncomfortable when he
eats they can open it up again to drain the food from his stomach if he needs
they said. There also going to
remove the catheter so he can begin to pee on his own today.
The Dr. said they do not like to keep it in too long because it can cause
infection. They’ll be taking out
the epidural tomorrow and the Dr seems to think he will be able to go home about
Tuesday or Wednesday. The Dr asked
him if he would like to start solid food yet. Dad said no yet.
He’s just barely started the liquid diet and he doesn’t want to push
it.
9:10 Dad used his
breathing meter several times and got it up past the 4000 mark.
It made Dana very jealous.
He can’t get it up like that even now. Dad’s looking forward to seeing Jeremy
today my sister Deborah’s son. Deb
is supposed to be bringing him.
11:15 Dad was up on
side shaving and got a little Diaphoretic (Sweating) and weak.
He had to lay back down before he was done.
He used a double head razor, not electric. He said it was invented for
the guys in Alaska so they wouldn’t have to use water and
have it freeze.
(Dad is extremely
nauseous. I called the nurse and
she pulled the plug to the stomach drain.
He got instant relief when it drained. He said it felt like a good burp. So they canceled the nausea medicine
because he seems better. A
bit later they disconnected his G tube and pee tube The Dr must have changed his
mind about doing it tomorrow.
This journal entry was by
Linda
Well they finally brought him some food. He ate a quarter of a grilled cheese
sandwich and drank a full glass of cranberry juice.
4 or 5 spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup and half of a dish of
applesauce. (Farted) and put his
bed down and fell asleep. He was
due to walk again in 45 minutes.
OH he doesn’t relish that, but at least he got a choice of the time after
waiting for it all afternoon. He
chose 6pm and the nurse never even told him I went and talked to her about him
not wanting to start eating till the 4pm walk was over.
It was 5 his tray had arrived and he was going to wait to eat till after
the walk. I squealed!
(Told on him) This journal
entry was by Bunny eldest daughter.
6:15pm they washed
him up after his walk and hooked up his G Tube for a while to help his full
tummy. They said there’d be back
in an hour to take it off again.
So now he’s just resting until they do. He’s very gassy and coughed real well
too.
8:10pm Blood Pressure was 128 over
63 and his temp was 99.8 He
feels better and less gassy at the moment. They said it’s been 12 hours sense they
took out the pee cath. So he
should try to pee soon. When he
coughs and clears his lung and spits into spit pan the spit is flemmy and yellow
and thick and chunky. They said as
long as it is not green we don’t have to be concerned.
Monday Feb28, 2000
7:40am Dad looks wonderful he had a good night. They said they wouldn’t disturb him but
they did. So he told them “You said
you weren’t going to bother me!”
The nurse said, “You can’t get much sleep in a hospital” but after that
they did let up on him and the rest of the night was better.
8Am. At breakfast Dad
ate half the scrambled eggs they brought him and a little oatmeal with whole
milk coffee, jello, and he drank all the milk. He had only one pain pill
yesterday. He’ll be getting one
after breakfast so he can be more comfortable to move around today.
Mom came and she’s
starting a cold so Dad sent her back home to
rest.
At 8:15 Dr Young
checked him out. He clea5red his
throat and lung and spit a chunk into the spit dish. There was a small spot of
blood. She said she will keep a
watch on it but its common she said and his lungs sound good.
They will be taking off his leg pumps today and pee cath again so then he
can dangle at the side of the bed when he wishes.
They had put the pee cath back in because he did not pee last night. Pop enjoyed the breakfast.
Mom left at 9:15 and
Bunny came to see Dad. Bunny came
early to take me for breakfast she said.
11Am. Dads all
unhooked from his chains at last. Nothing hooked up anymore.
They sat him in a chair.
11:40a.m. Dad went
walking with a walker which was much better he said.
Then he sat in the chair by his bed for a while.
12:25pm He just
finished washing up and his lunch came so he’s still sitting on the chair beside
his bed. He ate most of his soup
and crackers and sherbet and juice.
2:20pm Dad is still
up in the chair and he went for another walk.
Moms back it’s her shift. I’m going away with Mary to Laconia till Wed. Dad tried putting his hand in warm
water to pee but I guess you have to be
asleep.
Feb 29th
Dad came home today. Resting
Comfortably! Visiting Nurse comes
tomorrow. Mom cleaned up the house
nice. No more smoking in the
house!
March 16, 2000 7pm
Thursday evening, Mom received a call from Dr. Zwan who apologized for not
catching the cancer with all Dads complaints about not being able to eat before
the knee surgery. Dad had
complained saying he thought he had some sort of blockage or something and he
hadn’t been able to eat well because of it for several months before the
scheduled surgery on his knees.
They should have listened to him and investigated further to see why he
was having so much trouble eating.
But all they seemed to have on their minds was performing the surgery on
Dads knees. Had they listened to
Dad maybe they could have caught his cancer months ago and on time.
Now it’s too late to save him and we will never know what could have
been. This is not right! Or fair!
Friday March 17, 2000 St
Patrick’s Day, It is a snowy morning.
Pop got up this morning and started to make corn chowder.
‘No meet on Friday’ He still obeys the old Catholic rules.
So no corned beef and cabbage this day! But then Dad became too weak to stand
so Mom and my sister Carlene had to take over. Dad seems a little frustrated at still
being so weak. The visiting nurse
was come today but she did not come or
call.
Saturday March 18,
2000 Dad is feeling lousy.
Throwing up and he went back to bed to rest.
Mom gave him a prochlospersgin for nausea. Excuse my spelling. Later Dad had a root beer float and sat
in the kitchen chair for a bit so Mom could give him a haircut.
At 3:30pm my sister Charlotte
came with her son Donny in his marine uniform. He was very handsome.
My brother Billy took a short home movie of Don and Pop and they talked
army talk.
The cusp of my inside out insanity
At the end of March
Dana, The husband of my youth left me to be with a woman at work with no
children of her own. This he did
to us after 30 plus years of growing a life together and having and adopting 13
children together. My parents were wonderful to him for all those years and
loved him like a son and helped him through many silly mistakes watching him
grow into a man. But leaving their daughter and their children for a woman at
work was a huge disappointment. He
left us sudden and unexpected. We
had no idea he was capable of such a betrayal. He walked out one day and barely
looked back. His leaving at a time I needed him most made it difficult for me to
deal with my father’s illness and death.
I tried to put Dad ahead of my problem so I called Dana one day and
begged him to visit my father one last time and he did. Dad was able to say
goodbye to him with love. I told
my Father not to worry about Dana leaving me. I was sure he would change his mind and
be back when he got what ever it was bothering him out of his system. I didn’t understand what was happening
to Dana but I thought our life together was good and so I believed he wouldn’t
truly leave it for long.
Dad had just three more months of life at home with us after the
surgery. After a swift decline we
lost him on June 29, 2000 Mom got a phone call just after he passed finding out
that one of his dearest and closest friends Aunt Ellie died suddenly and
unexpectedly at the very same moment Dad did. I wonder what He thought when she
joined him that day I Heaven. And I wonder if Uncle Al – Ellie’s husband was
surprised to see them coming hand in hand to join him and the other friends and
relatives that past before them. Getting together Just like old
times.
My husband Dana did not come to the funeral.
He said it was out of consideration for me.
But how could I ever believe that to be true after what he already was
doing to me and our children by walking out on our life together and leaving his
young children when we all needed him so. I had begged him to come and sit with
Jake and Joe because I had to sit up front with my sisters.
But he didn’t come. It made it even more difficult for me to worry about
how they were feeling loosing their father and grandfather at the same time at
age12 and 14. I know I was devastated when I lost my grandfather when I was
twelve yrs old. And what about me now, After all I was loosing my father and my
husband and recovering from my accident when I fell from the second floor
landing in our home to the first floor foyer because my husband failed to put
up a railing yet despite several pleas for him to do so when I had almost
fallen twice before. The accident
left me with injuries to several areas of my body and a concussion to my head
and still caused me much pain and physical limitations during what seemed to me
to be a much too slow recovery for me because we still had so much to do to
finish the home we were building for our large melting pot family.
I was trying very hard to be patient and I usually felt I could get
through anything swiftly because God was by my side. But things seemed different
this time and life was more difficult.
I was reaching for my husband during this difficult time and he was not
there for me or for our home that he insisted on rebuilding himself rather then
hire people to build it with the insurance money we got for our house fire. He
had been very busy helping friends from work Paul and his wife Kathryn with
their problems this past year and when this resulted in him leaving our 30yr
marriage and taking off with Paul’s wife.
I found I was not as strong as I thought I was and began losing control
of my whole world and I was scared to death! I felt like I was sucked up into a
whirlwind that held me pinned against the sides unable to move.
With my hands tied my head swirling and my eyes screaming out loudly in
terror. How was I going to hold on
and get through this for my family?
I knew in my heart that I needed to lean on God to be strong for my
family especially my mother and my children. Just like I was able to do many
times in the past when a crises arose.
But this time things seemed so different! It was like an evil cloud covered us
and pulled us out of the path of Gods light into darkness.
Life did not seem real to me and I couldn’t grab hold. I began to shake
uncontrollable, trembling would not stop but grew and grew and stayed with me
day and night. It was taking over
my whole body. I begged and pleaded to God crying “God what should I do” But I
could not hear an answer. I began
to feel so very afraid and alone and hurt and angry.
To go on each day each step was so difficult I had to begin singing with
clenched teeth -“Put One Foot In front of the other! And soon you’ll be walking
out the door!” I was able to
create this tool from a memory of the Christmas movie Rudolf and the Abominable
snowman. Otherwise I would not have been able to get out of bed or stop
crying. I had to believe God
would eventually work things out for all of us because I felt so helpless I knew
it was beyond my control. “I hoped
that if I could just be patient. God would set things straight for us. ” But meanwhile the trembling got worse
and worse until it gripped my days and my nights and I could not even
swallow. That’s when I stopped
eating. Thank goodness I could get down sips of water and a vitamin mix or I
would not have been able to go on, get to work and try to take care of my
children, the house, and the bills.
I lost 33 lbs in 33 days before I was finally able to begin to eat. In
all that time I did not so much as catch a cold. I just screamed and cried out whenever
I could as I stayed fixed with each trembled hard moment continuing to force
myself to put one foot in front of another as the days went by turning into
weeks then months, then years.
Chapter 4
The
journals are my therapy
(To be continued)