My husband was murdered on May 29, 1990. He was shot by person or persons unknown. He was not a domestically violent person. However, his death shattered my whole world, a world I had worked very hard to create and try to keep ordered nice and neatly. Well, obviously, that didn't work out.. It was also the beginning of my descent into madness, hell, whatever you want to call it. I spent the next 18 months, a year and a half, with my "friend". It was the most confusing time of my life. I searched my soul, I denied my grief, I spent months being "stalked" by a man who repeatedly tried to kill me.
My husband, John, and I had lots of friends, friends who stood by me after his death, friends who cared, who were there for me. I probably pushed many, if not most, of them away from me. I felt terribly alone, terribly vulnerable, terribly afraid. I wanted to die too, so I could be with John. I even had it all planned out. However, a friend of ours, that John had introduced me to in 1983, talked me out of that. He was a very dear friend to me during the time shortly after John's death. He did not ask me not to commit suicide, he only talked me into waiting 2 weeks, just to see if I felt any differently at the end of the 2 weeks. In the meantime, he set about showing me that life was not a terribly bad place to be, really.
No matter what else happened, I will always be grateful to him for that. Things happened between us. We became more than friends. We were lovers. We talked about everything. I was so afraid to be alone. He would show up out of the blue. I questioned my faith. He loaned me his. I cried. He dried my tears. I talked, he listened. I needed someone to talk to me, and he talked about everything. I needed love, and he gave me his. There were times when I felt hopelessly inept as a mother, as a friend, as a person altogether. He made me see that the only person who could change my life was me. I then set about doing so. The two weeks passed, and I really did not want to die any more.
I spent the next 18 months with my friend. I fell in love with him, even after he honestly told me that he was not in love with me. He loved me as a friend, but he had no desire to fall in love or settle down. After all, I could always hope, couldn't I? We took a trip to the Ozarks. As we were returning to my home in Iowa, I spotted a log cabin with a for sale sign at the end of the drive. We stopped, looked at the outside, and I wrote down the number of the real
estate agency listed on the sign. When I returned home, I called them up. I went to look at the inside of the place a few weeks later and wrote them a $500 check for earnest money down on the spot. The cabin had been a barbecue restaurant and a flea market. It was huge, 30 x 60. It had a 6 foot picture window set in the front and a hand-built, natural stone fireplace that was 9 feet wide from side to side. It became my dream. There was also a 2-bedroom mobile home on the property, which consisted of about 3.5 acres. It was perfect. I could fix up the mobile a bit, and the kids and I could live in it while we were working on turning the cabin into a home.
I packed my things, resigned from my job, saved up my money, put my house up for sale, and waited for the small life insurance policy to pay off. When it did, I took 3/4 of it and sent it as a down payment on the cabin. They mailed me the paperwork and the keys and stated that they were working on evicting the present tenants of the mobile (who had not paid rent in 6 months anyway). I felt very fortunate that I talked my friend (who was a carpenter) into coming down to the cabin with me and helping me to fix it up. He had become my biggest support and my very best friend. Most of the rest of my friends thought I was jumping too far, too fast. Many of my friends and family tried to talk me out of this move, but I made it anyway. I've always been a stubborn person, and I felt I had good reasons to move away from the place where my husband had been killed.
So began our dance. My friend told me from the beginning that he would not stay. He was very honest with me in that regard. He told me that, although he loved me as a person and a friend, he was not in love with me. He was interested in being a friend, a lover, a spiritual guide, a mentor, even my knight in shining armor, but not in having a permanent relationship. Once the cabin was done, he would leave. He was a wanderer. I knew all that, I believed him. I was honest with him in telling him that I believed him, that I was falling in love with him, and that I would continue to hope for more, to hope that he would change his mind, even though I knew he felt he had to leave when the cabin was done.
We explored the area. We worked our rear ends off on the cabin, the property, and the mobile home. We camped in nearby state parks, drove around during the day just to see where all the gravel roads led to, visited little out-of-the-way shops and stores, flea markets, and antique and gift shops. We walked in the woods, exploring streams, etc. We did daily lessons in the book, "A Course in Miracles". I painted again, which I had not done for years. I wrote poetry again. I began to feel myself healing and growing as a person. We talked endlessly of faith, philosophy, and personal beliefs. We built a sweat lodge. We collected rocks and built a medicine wheel. He made a trip to Iowa, and I stayed at the cabin with the kids. We argued sometimes about our differences in beliefs and values. We made up. As I stated before, I really questioned my own faith during this time. However, I did set about doing a lot of soul searching, with a large dose of self-honesty, and trying to become a better person.
We argued one night about beliefs, my own problems with stress and being uptight, my reservedness. During the argument, in frustration, he threw a lighter down on the bed where I was sitting on the edge. The lighter didn't hit me, didn't even come close to it. However, upon seeing his hand move to throw the lighter, some instinct prompted me to flinch and protect my face with my hands. I don't really know what I thought or why I did it. He was astounded. He said, "You thought I was going to hit you, didn't you?" I was not really sure what I thought, whether it was that he would hit me or the lighter would. However, we explored that. He was very insulted that I had thought he might hit me. "Maybe next time, I should", he told me.
I didn't take that seriously. Right before Christmas, however, we sat in the office he had built for me in the cabin, telephoning friends and family to wish them a happy holiday. We had a few drinks. The kids were all asleep in the trailer. We had decided that he would go to Iowa to spend Christmas with his family, and I wanted to stay at the cabin to spend our first Christmas in our new home there. As we made our phone calls, we talked about many things. He had told me just days earlier that he thought he was falling in love with me, that he might decide to stay, that it might be time for him to settle down. I was ecstatic about that. It had been a good evening, we had not argued about anything for days. The phone calls made me miss friends and family though, at this first holiday away from them. Combined with alcohol, I'm sure I got misty and maudlin over missing loved ones.
After we finished our phone calls, he looked at me very seriously. With a smile on his face and in a very matter-of-fact voice, he asked me, "Do you know how long it takes to kill someone?" I replied, "No, I never really thought about it". The conversation had taken a completely unexpected turn, and I was not sure if I had missed something or not. He told me, "It only takes about 15 seconds. You place your fingers here and here (demonstrating on his own throat), and you can rip somebody's windpipe completely out." I did not know what to say, so I said nothing. He went on, "You have a bad attitude this evening. I am going to go to the bathroom. If you have not changed your attitude by the time I come back, I'm going to kill you". It was all said without anger, very matter of
fact, even with a smile on his face. He then left the room. My mind raced. I was stunned. I did not know if it was a joke or for real. I knew I could not get out through the front door without going past him, and I knew he could outrun me. I could not get to the mobile home to get the kids and get out without getting caught. I could not leave the kids. I could not go out the back door which was located directly behind me, because we had nailed it shut just a few days earlier. I decided to try to bluff my way through it.
When he returned, I had a smile on my face. I was pleasant, attentive, and loving. He smiled back at me. He thanked me for changing my attitude. We went to bed soon afterwards and had sex. The next day, I was not sure if I imagined the whole thing or if it really happened. I knew it had happened, but then I shrugged the whole thing off as a bad joke. He was just trying to shake me out of feeling sorry for myself and missing people who were far away. I dismissed the whole thing. A few days before Christmas, he left for his family gathering in Iowa. It was obvious that he did not really want to go. It was also obvious that he thought I wanted him to go, that I wanted him to leave so I could be alone for a few days.
I got a phone call early the next morning from his uncle, who informed me that my friend had been arrested for drunk driving, was in fact sitting in jail. His family was raising bail money, and they had gotten his van out of impound already. His grandfather put up the bail money, and I drove to Iowa to attend his family gathering with him. In Iowa, we stayed with another friend, someone who had been a close friend of mine for a long time, a lady I went to college with. While at her home, he told me he believed I was keeping something from him. He hounded me relentlessly to find out what it was. He knew I was feeling guilty about something, and he wanted to know what it was. Finally, he agreed to stop hounding me, stop arguing, if I would only give my word that once we returned to our cabin, I would tell him what it was.
It was a long drive home. I felt guilty because I had insisted that he go to Iowa by himself, and he had gotten stopped for drunk driving. Somehow, he picked up on that guilt and drove it home. Sometimes, he knew my thoughts better than I did. We discussed it back at the cabin, and he told me that he felt it was my fault he got stopped, that somehow I had made it happen through my mental wishing, my mental powers. I had "wished" it true, and he felt this was because I did not want him to return, because I knew he had finally fallen in love with me, and now that I had gotten what I wanted, I was no longer interested. These were his fears, and he was honest with me regarding those fears. I reassured him, I lavished him with attention and love.
I took the blame. He told me that he had admitted to himself that he was "in love" with me.. that he was seriously considering wanting to settle down with me, maybe even get married, and that this whole thing had been bothering him for a while, that was part of his problem right before Christmas.
Things began to deteriorate from there. I began to suspect that I was losing my mind. Letters from family and friends became few and far between. It seemed as if, just as my friend told me, my friends and family were growing away from me because I no longer lived close to them. Even phone calls grew farther apart. I had made no friends in our new home. We had gone to a meeting for cub scouts for the boys, but we decided not to enroll them after all. I did not know anyone there except for the old gentleman who had sold me the property. My friend even seemed to resent this old man, to be jealous of him. I was very isolated, and had only my friend to rely on for companionship, for conversation, for love.
I soon began to doubt my own sanity. I began to have nightmares. Things would not be where I thought I had put them. When I would find something in a different spot, my friend would say, "Don't you remember putting it there? I saw you do it just yesterday", or something similar. He would repeat conversations we had, word for word, except he would remember something I did not. Yet, he remembered the rest of it word for word, he must be right also about the parts I did not remember. He told me I was becoming "paranoid". We stayed up late at night. I had started my own business and got up very early in the mornings to work in my office at the cabin. I was convinced that he could read my mind.
I began to lose sleep, suffering from nightmares that were more and more severe. Our philosophic beliefs and values often clashed, and bitter arguments would ensue. I had agreed to become his student, and he felt that I was refusing to learn, refusing to even try at times. Little things of value to me would often disappear. We argued bitterly one night, and he lost control. He not only hit me, he beat me severely. I stayed up all night long, praying, terrified that he would come back to the trailer from the cabin and repeat the episode. I did not even think to call the police or anybody else. I was truly isolated by then.
The next day began our "honeymoon phase" as it's called. We talked. He explained himself. The blame was mine.... obviously. Some of it was his, in that he had lost his control and let me manipulate him into doing that (of course, this was all according to his view, which I believed at the time). I was more than willing to share the blame, even take it all, if we could change things, make them different, learn and grow from this episode. However, the pattern was set, and it continued to happen. During our honeymoon phases, life was wonderful. He was the man I had dreamed of and searched for my whole life. Then would come the tension phase, where things would build up. I would walk on eggs, pins and needles, trying to avoid the inevitable confrontation I knew was coming eventually. I slept only a few hours at a time. My friend even woke me sometimes in the night because we had to talk. One night, he woke me up and asked me to leave the bed because I was giving off bad vibrations and it was disturbing his sleep. I was allowed to return to the bed after I explained that I had been having a nightmare.
I began to hear voices. I saw my dead husband, who came often to have conversations with me. He talked to me and told me that I had to get out, that my friend was going to kill me. I vomited on a regular basis. I had ulcers. My hands shook quite often. I was a nervous wreck. My friend informed me that God had told him I wanted to sleep with the Federal Express man. That was only one incident. There were many. I lost weight. I was falling apart. I began to hear many voices, all with the same message, "He is going to kill you". I began to fantasize about suicide. I prayed endlessly for guidance. I felt that my friend could read my mind. He picked up on the suicide thing quickly, and told me that he felt that was what prompted him to be physically violent towards me, that it was only his response to what he called my "death wish". I built a secret room in my mind and kept my escape plans in there.
I left and went to Iowa, returned to my parents home. At that point in time, I felt they were the only people I could trust. I doubted every other friend I had known by then. My parents drove me to the hospital where I checked myself in to the psychiatric ward. I was there for 3 weeks. During that time, my friend left. He returned to his mother's home. He kept in touch with me by phone. He agreed with me that we needed to get some help. We talked about depression, medication, and my mental illness. We decided that, upon those premises, we could make it work. We both returned to the cabin.
Upon his return, he told me that he would not allow me to use this "mental illness thing" as an excuse to treat him badly. I knew that things were not off to a good start. We went right into the tension building phase. We went on a camping trip with the kids a few months later. On our way home, I knew that a violent episode was on its way. I took the kids and left from the trailer while he was at the cabin. I rented a motel room in a nearby town. I called the next day, hoping that he would be gone. He wasn't. It did forestall the blow-up though, for a while; and he did agree that I needed my medicine. I went into the hospital again, through what I saw as a huge misunderstanding. My parents came and got all the kids. 3 days later, I returned home. We were there alone. He invited his ex-girlfriend to visit us. The visit went well, and I sensed in her a kindred spirit. She was very nice to me.
She went home at the end of that weekend, however. A few weeks later, we returned to Iowa to pick up my youngest son, as his grandparents refused to keep him any longer. There again, I had one child at home. There were times when my friend literally held the kids hostage. I was not allowed to take all of them with me whenever I went anywhere, because he knew I would not leave him without all of the kids. The major blow-up finally came. My friend almost killed me that night. He asked me to give him one good reason not to, as he had both hands around my throat. "Because you don't want to", I finally managed to croak out. It was the correct answer, apparently. He gave me his theory that he felt I was possessed by a demon, something that continuously pushed him to destroy it (and me along with it). He tried to get rid of the demon for me. I spent the next 3 days vomiting. He did not allow my son to go to school for 3 days. After that, when my son was allowed to return to school, I left to go to the store. Instead, I picked up my son at school and we ran. We left everything there. I went to his ex-girlfriend's home. She was the person who convinced me that I was not crazy. She told me of her own similar experiences with my friend. He had actually shot at her, tried to run her over with his truck, and made several other attempts to kill her. I hid with my children. I called his mother, and she somehow made him leave my property. I took a very large man that I knew and returned to the cabin. My friend called me from his father's home in Florida and proposed to me. He told me I had 7 days to decide, but he knew that was our main problem, that we were not married. He felt that I needed that piece of paper. At the end of the 7 days, he was going to come back to the cabin and marry me. I was worried that, if I did not agree to marry him, he would just kill everyone on the place. I ran again. I hid with the children. He went to my brother's home in California, looking for me.
I called and left a message for him to call me. I wanted to make sure I knew where he was and that I was safe. I would not allow people to touch me in even a casual manner by this point. I moved in to my sister's apartment, and I hid in the apartment most of the time. I did not date. I barely spoke to people. We rented a house.
My friend talked me into letting him come and visit me. He drove from California to Iowa to do so. We talked endlessly. His idea of us getting help was to go and sit with his mother for hours discussing our problems, in very general terms, who talked to me of astrology, angels, and paranormal experiences. During this time, he punched me and knocked me into the tub about 6 feet behind me. My sister got up and threatened him with a splitting mall. He talked me into doing things I would never have dreamed of doing and really did not want to do. He tried to run over me with his van. He choked me on more than one occasion.
We made a few trips to Indian powwows. During one of these trips, we extensively discussed our fears. I told him that I felt that, if we stayed together, one of us would end up killing the other. I told him that I would fight to stay alive, one of my fears was that he would either kill me, or I would kill him in order to protect myself, the kids, or one of my friends. On the one hand, I felt that many of our problems were my fault. On the other hand, I felt that he had a problem, an illness, and he needed me to help him. If I deserted him when he needed me, I would be a bad person. One night we went to a birthday party. He grabbed me by my throat at the party. Other friends made him leave. His ex-girlfriend was there, and she drove me home. He was at my house when I got there, had terrified my babysitter with a machete, and the police had been called. He went to jail.
Another night, he sat in my backyard, he came into the house. We argued. He accused me of wanting to have sex with my 18-year-old babysitter, who was like a little brother to me. He went out the door. I locked it behind him. It was dark out by then. I raced around the house, locking the rest of the doors and windows. I ran to the basement and woke up the babysitter, made him get out of the basement. We raced up the stairs and stuck a big butcher knife in the basement door so it could not be opened from inside the basement. Sure enough, pretty soon, we saw the doorknob turning. My friend had climbed through the basement window and was trying to get into the house through the basement door. I called the police. When they got there, he was sitting at the picnic table in the back yard, very calmly, very cool. One of the policemen had been there the night my friend went to jail over terrorizing the babysitter with the machete. He asked me if I wanted to put my friend in jail. I told him I did not. I just wanted him to leave me alone. The policeman explained to my friend that he did not want to see his van in my neighborhood again, that he would go to jail if it was spotted within a 6-block radius of my house.
I called his mother and begged her to make him leave me alone. She somehow made him leave town. He went to her home in North Carolina. He began to phone me repeatedly. By this time, I was seeing a therapist on a regular basis. He volunteered to get help. I somehow
got the strength to tell him that, if he was going to get help, he needed to do so where he was. Once we had both gotten help, then maybe we could try again. He was angry with this solution. "If we can't be together, then there is no point to getting help", he told me. "Then you are not really getting it for you because you believe you need help, you are only doing it as a means to keep me", I replied. I stuck to my guns. He would not back down either. "So this is how it ends", he told me. "I guess so," I replied. "So be it." he said and hung up on me. I have never seen him again.
Worse than the nightmares, I also had other dreams of my friend, dreams in which he was loving and wonderful again. We would be back in a time that was fun, times that I missed. I would wake up filled with such longing, aching, missing him so badly that it hurt. I was convinced that he sent me these dreams. I grieved over the loss of my friend, silly as that may sound to other people. I believe (because he told me that he would do it) that he also ruined another friendship of mine, the girl I had gone to school with. I do not know what he told her, only that she refused to be friends with me because she did not want to play my "games". I grieved over the loss of her friendship also. On top of all that, I had finally accepted my grief over my husband's death, who had also been my best friend before his death.
When I finally accepted all that grief, I grieved over everything. I also grieved for the loss of my friend. He was my best friend. We did have a lot of good times together. I still had nightmares for months afterwards. I stayed in therapy. I wrote him long letters which I did not mail. I kept a journal. My therapist suggested that I write down a recurring nightmare, and write an ending to it that I could live with, a way of controlling my fears and nightmares. I turned it into a novel. I became fast friends with his ex-girlfriend, and she had her own chapter in the book. It was good therapy for both of us. The book was excellent. I made one attempt to get it published. When that was turned down, I did not submit it again. It was too personal an issue for me, and I could not handle a rejection of it. I felt that, within a year and a half, I had lost my husband -- who had been my best friend, my friend from school -- who had been my best woman friend, and my friend -- who had become my best friend over the months before the violence began and who had showed me intermittent flashes of that person in between.
I did not understand the grieving process at that time. I was still grieving over the death of my husband. I pushed most people away from me. I did not allow many people to get close to me. Rhonda (his ex-girlfriend) and I became fast friends, life-long friends. I learned that my friend had intercepted letters from family and friends at the cabin and my letters going out to them also. He had deliberately tried to convince me that my friends and family did not care about me any more, to isolate me from everyone but him. He had tried to convince me that I was crazy, then told me he would not allow me to use it as an excuse for my behavior. I became dependent upon him, isolated, and confused. I was sleep-deprived, nutritionally deprived, and began to hallucinate.
I later learned that this is all a part of a pattern of abuse, the pattern of domestic violence. I learned that over 50% of the women who die in this country are victims of domestic violence. A woman is beaten about once every 30 seconds in America. A woman dies as a victim of domestic violence about once every 3 minutes.
I got married in 1994 to a very large man. He turned out to be an alcoholic, and we later got divorced. I learned from a therapist that this is typical and very common of women who have been abused also, to marry quickly and to get married to extremely large men, regardless of how compatible they are or what their backgrounds are. A large husband is a built-in body guard.
I have remarried since then, in 1999. My husband is someone I have known for
16 years now. He is not a violent man. He has a temper, sure, and sometimes he yells. I do not feel that everything is my fault when something goes wrong now. We have an equal relationship. He is kind to me, respectful, and a very nice guy. He also has been married to an alcoholic. He too was raised in a Pentecostal/Baptist environment. We have tons of things in common. He is very protective of me, but not overly jealous. He does not try to isolate me or convince me that I need only him in life. He never tries to make me feel like nobody else in the world could possibly love me. He never tries to undermine my self-esteem. He is not verbally, physically, or emotionally abusive. He is a good guy.
Before I was actually in the situation myself, I did not understand why other women "stayed" in abusive relationships. It seemed simple to me, "leave the bastard". I learned that it was not nearly as simple as it seemed. There are multitudes of reasons, which are all difficult to explain to outsiders. There is fear, anger, guilt, money concerns, all sorts of reasons. There is the feeling that he needs help and can only get it from you, that it is your duty to help him. It's so hard to explain to someone who has not been there. It's hard to explain the humiliation, the degradation, the lack of self-esteem, of self-worth, the feeling of being to blame, at fault, for all of it anyway.
I have kept track of my friend over the years, in passing, through mutual friends and his uncle. I know that he spent some time in an intentional community in Alabama. I know that he traveled extensively. I know that, eventually, he settled down to work on a ranch in Montana. I do not know if he still thinks of me, if he still blames me. I do not know if he knows that I do not blame him, do not hate him. When I finished the book I wrote, I put all the letters I had written to him over the months into a large envelope and mailed them to his father's address. I do not know if he ever received them. After our last phone conversation, I never spoke to him again. I would have loved to sit down with him and talk about the whole thing, as friends, explore and explain. I probably will never have the chance to do so. I know that part of it was my fault. He only had control over me because I allowed him to have it, no matter what the reason. I could have stuck up for myself, could have been more honest, rather than trying to "keep the peace" (which I did often). I could have done a lot of things different, and I regret that I didn't. Until he actually decided that he was in love with me and wanted to settle down, he was never a violent person with me.
However, I also know that I had no control over him whatsoever, no way that I could have "helped" him or "fixed" him. I took a lot of blame that was not mine. That was another mistake I made. I did learn to love again. I did learn to allow people close to me again. It took a long time, but I got through it. I learned not to live in fear, not to wander around the house at night checking doors and windows, not to suspect every phone call, every knock on the door. I learned not to flinch when someone touched me. I became whole again, maybe scarred, but still whole.
This may sound strange to some people, but there will always be a place in my heart for my friend. I used to think it was all black and white, either I was all to blame or he was all to blame. In my mind, either it had to be my fault or his fault. Either I was the bad guy, or he was. I know now that none of that is true. Life is made up of many shades of gray, and all other colors too. Nobody is always the bad guy or always the good guy. Nobody is always right, and nobody is always wrong. He taught me many things. We shared some very good times together, before, during, and between the bad times. He is not a horrible person, not a monster. To me, falling in love was a good thing. To him, it was a bad thing. Falling in love meant you had to worry about whether your partner was faithful or
not (which women are definitely not, he believed). You had to worry about betrayal. He was and is just a regular guy who has some problems, but we all have problems. I am just a regular person with problems also. He just made different choices, choices that I could not live with, as I'm sure I made choices he could not live with. I could never handle violence. I may have passively wished for death at times, but I found that I really did not want to die.
That episode in my life has long been over. I rarely have nightmares any more. It was certainly a wild dance, though, and one I will never forget.
I wish for my friend to find peace and happiness.
