The Second Shot Heard Around the World- Part 1

At the end of the month it will have been exactly two years ago I heard, as clear as a bell in my mind, as I was gaining speed, walking, then striding, then running out of the place we had named Fools' Paradise,

?This will be the second shot heard around the world?.

Survival is only the first step.

It is only the first phase of a recovery process one goes through to pass from death to life again.

It is the thing you do. When you decide to fight for life.

It is the natural outcome the instinctive intelligence, the primal force a woman discovers when cornered, trapped & lured by an intimate betrayer, a spouse, who has taken the marital vow "until death do us part" literally.

When the sense of entitlement that goes with that vow hearkens back to old testament times. A man "takes a woman" to be his lawful wedded wife.

And from that moment on, believes that this means she is his property. He is the exclusive owner of his property. To be owned, to be manipulated into doing whatever he pleases, like an "I Dream of Jeanie" genie, who comes at his bidding & does magically whatever he wants her to.

This story is a victory story. It is at last, the gift I give myself & all other women & men who cherish life, to commemorate the titanic struggle I underwent on a quiet, wilderness tract of land my husband & I had named, ironically several years ago "Angels' Landing".

While the drama on the California coast was unfolding surrounding the disappearance of Lacey Peterson, 3000 miles away in New England another insidious tale was uncurling itself around my own feet. A power struggle was building a head. A titanic struggle, a clash of wills was about to reach an apex in New Hampshire.

It was the spring of 2003. Another year?s cycle had brought Daniel & I through a season of sadness & grief. The year before we had lost an adult daughter. His first born by a previous marriage. On the heels of two previous deaths that year, it devastated him. So much so, that caring for him, ministering to him, became my full time job. He had lost his brother suddenly to a heart attack. They had not been terribly close, but as is often the case, Daniel had believed there was still more time for that relationship to grow warm again. The mother of this cherished daughter, this vibrant, fiery, little Italian woman who sold security systems all over the central Florida region also had passed away in the winter of that year. First the mother of his two adult children. Then his brother. But the final stroke, the devastating blow that threw his world spinning out of orbit, was the horrible news we were called to hear from a detective in that Florida county. We were enjoying the retreat & quiet of our cherished Angels? Landing, working as we had been in our spare moments at clearing it & envisioning where we would build a main lodge for our retreat center, when the closest neighbor to the wilderness clearing where we had situated our first camp, ?Fools? Paradise?, came hurrying down the path to get us. A detective from Orlando is on the phone. Needing to talk to Daniel.

Marilyn had been discovered lifeless in her home.

Previous to this fateful chapter in our marriage, nearly a year before, I had been employed at the local community hospital working in geropsyche. I am a nurse. I worked the evening & night shift in a small locked unit, receiving the most difficult & perplexing of patients who were aging & behaviorally had trouble living with others; in homes or extended care institutions, they were not people others could live with. So they were delivered to us.

As a team, we worked with combinations of therapies & medications to assist the transition back out again. Sometimes extremely tough, exhausting work, sapping every ounce of reserve we might have to keep all of us safe & intact. Yet rewarding too, as the amazing creativity of the group who dedicated themselves to this area of healing often gave new inspiration & a sense of gratitude for the blessings we enjoyed in our freedom & sanity when we were able to walk out, knowing the combination to press on the numeric pad that released the lock on the door at the end of the night, as dawn broke into the rooms, spilling rosy light in, & bringing more help, smiling, courageous day staff who would take over the watch of our precious charges.

When I reported three times a week to stay with my flock from 7pm until 7am, Marilyn & Daniel would keep the phones sizzling with conversation. That?s Italian!

But on the fateful day just short of her 33rd birthday, Marilyn gave up. The shining spark plug attempted to drive herself into heaven in the seat of a car that had been the bane of her existence the month before, the car that was the vital link to her success as an independent broker of security systems. The weather had turned foul too. Sales were down, & she was floundering. Too proud to come home for a time, to regroup, in over her head financially.

Rejecting the counsel to seek a group, a counselor, the helps we offered she rejected. She did it her way instead. She carefully selected music, & holding a picture of herself & her brother sitting on her mother?s lap, she sat in her lemon of a car in a closed garage & left the engine running. Listening to Christian rock music. She had struggled all of her life with asthma, with having a body with no spleen. The feminist fire was not enough to sustain her longer. She was going home.

Our lives plunged into the surreal nightmare that ensued after that call. Daniel had thrown himself on the living room floor, writhing in agony, deep sobs, anguish as he absorbed the news.

From that point on we were never the same.

I walked through those days with the imperative to hold it all together. To navigate 900 miles of investigating all of her friends & haunts, of identifying her body in the morgue, of seeing the pictures of her as she was found. Poignantly, it was apparent that she had at the last moment, changed her mind. The car door was opened, she had thrown one leg out. But it was too late. She had died from not having enough viable air to breath.

All of this happened just one month short of being at my post in geropsych a year. So I lost that post, without the protection of the Family Medical Leave Act that would have, by law, compelled my employer to hold my position until I could return to work.

I became Daniel?s everything; nurse, social worker, wife, friend, driver, travel agent. Coordinated the trip down for the final rites & rounds, packing a household of furniture & belongings into a U-Haul to make the long journey home. The heavy-hearted arrangements, the negotiation that no parent ever wants to go through.

My husband too distraught to drive, I drove the 17 foot truck, dealing with a tire blow-out at the perimeter of the Orlando area at 65 miles per hour, & later,just 45 minutes from home, the assault of a drunk driver who hit us broadside at dawn as we were just over the border at last in New Hampshire. We returned with her belongings, & received her ashes via the postal service. We organized a memorial for her at home in our little town too.

I negotiated with insurance companies, with local emergency assistance workers in the town welfare department. We found a grief counselor to work with who was not affiliated with the professionals I worked with at the hospital. We went to a group once or twice of other survivors of traumatic & unexpected death of loved ones.

He needed sinus surgery, procedures to check his own heart & other vital systems. He was a full time patient. I was a full time wife & nurse. At home which was a farm house we had been renovating together. Tending a small flock of farm animals we had in town, while working on Angels? Landing where we eventually hoped to build a larger homestead model of self-sufficiency, several miles down the road, up a hill, far away from the small area we lived in of the town proper, the center of a town which boasted nothing more than a local pizza joint, a Cumby?s, and a few local businesses. Not even a bank or a grocery store. We commuted to the next town over for that.

This was how my life shifted for the year before the spring of 2003.

My spouse changed too. Over the course of our 7 years together a power struggle had been an undercurrent. There was love but it bordered at times on obsession & possessiveness. We shared a common passion for a lay ministry, a missionary calling we both responded to; to serve.

People ?got used to seeing us both together? as the James Taylor song goes, all over the southern seacoast of New Hampshire & Maine, where we visited churches & delivered practical help in the form of household items, food, & necessary health care to those without insurance. We looked after the elderly & the newly separated. We each had our own talents which we combined together to help; he could build handicapped access ramps, I could play piano at a small church gathering, he labored over cars & trucks, I negotiated with care providers for glasses, for dental care for other basic needs of food & shelter for women & children escaping abusive situations.

We settled in our town after convincing my father to help buy an older farmhouse we would rent to own from him as we improved it. While still working in psych nursing at night, before arriving in Milton, we had purchased the land, the 5 acres of wilderness I had discovered in a tiny print ad in the Fosters Daily Democrat while working one night a couple winters before the turn of the millenium. My parents, both thankfully alive & healthy, lived closer to the seacoast, & this was a comfortable 40 minute drive from them. I am their oldest of three siblings. It appeared it was a good arrangement all the way around.

But there was an undercurrent, a shadow stalking & lurking behind all the good works, & the public displays of coupledom. Both of us had sprung from families dominated by fathers trained in the military. Both fathers had been strong, traditional patriarchs. Daniel the first had passed on, my own father however is still very much alive & well.

When we first got together, two cultural living icons circled & tested one another. My father was born in Sweden. His was from Sicely. We had parents who revered education. His Dad was a trained Green Beret Marine. Both inherited the tradition of heavy drinking from the military training. Both of us as adult children were haunted with memories of many a dinner becoming a battleground between mother & father, increasingly contentious with each drink.

It is what bonded us.

We understood we had been affected. We were struggling to create a different reality. Being adopted into my family is a baptism of fire when it comes to the men who loved us daughters. But once you were in, you were in. And after the fireworks, Daniel was IN, solidly with my Dad.

They say a daughter is attracted to men who have traits like their father. Certainly this had been my experience in a series of relationships with significant others who each had some character traits that I both admired & loathed in my own father. I hero-worshipped him as a little girl, as he could walk out our door & fly away, leaving for days at a time, then to return for days at a time too.

Much concentrated togetherness alternating with a great deal of independence when he was not there to ?rule the roost?. I loved his love of animals, nature, exploring in the woods, & eventually farming. I simply could not stand his unending need to control & dominate us all.

And so it was with Daniel. The struggle was open with us. We were often like that old Reunite wine ad, ?I love you, I hate you? struggle, loud, angry confrontations, followed by equally passionate make-up sessions. The creative tension which is the stuff of the dance of life, whether it is a wild tango or choreographed opera, or a quiet, bear hug, circling slowly in the privacy of our own kitchen depended on the seasons, the phases of the sun & moon, & the circumstances we were challenged with year by year.

But this final year together was heading south. He could not pull out of his grief. Misery loves company & he was bound & determined to engulf me in it with him. He could not allow me to have any life of my own anymore. He crept up the stairs & listened in on my phone calls. He turned to alcohol not occasionally but every night. No, it began earlier & earlier in the day, starting at lunch. His need to dominate & control intensified, out of his fears & loneliness, which was not touchable, even when I was practically joined at the hip with him.

I had no room for me there anymore. No space to grieve myself for this first child I had ever lost in all my years in nursing. It was not as amplified as his own, but there was nobody , no place for me to turn to for the necessary process I too would go through in losing Marilyn.

The arguments became more frequent, the creeping intuitive chills up the spine signaling danger were coming more regularly each night I remained in the same house with him. What had perhaps been possible to work out in counseling or in peace prior to these deaths with issues of domestic abuse were no longer tenable after these shocking losses. A certain knowing grew in the early spring, that in order for us both to live, I would have to separate from him, at least for a time. As difficult a situation as this is, as heart & gut wrenching, I could read the signs. They were ominous.

Daniel was drowning in his sorrow. He was determined to take me down with him. Having given him all the best of me, of what I could offer or suggest, support him in, & drive him to, there came a juncture where he would only find healing by reaching out himself to grab the life-preserver. Otherwise his iron grip around my neck, desperately clinging to me, would submerge us both.

I had done it before. I had left another abusive man by waiting & planning the escape. I had left HIM before. Twice. Hoping with the separations he would develop more insight, more skills in being a life partner, instead of insisting on being the little emperor. Each time for a summer. Like summer camp. Not times when it is hard to get through the season, but when the weather itself does not demand as much of New Englanders. We are less isolated & in the season where ?it is never too late to have a happy childhood?. As before, it was under the cover of ?going to do laundry?.

When I had dirty clothes piled in a hamper, hiding more clothes in duffel bags & vital documents needed to live elsewhere, to pick up an independent life again, as a traveling nurse. As before I had said clearly, in a no nonsense tone of voice usually reserved for rowdy boys pond-side, that if he did not cease & desist with the verbal abuses, & the stalking, the invasions of natural privacy & the confidences that nurses keep regarding our work, I would be leaving.

Not once, but several times. He knew it was coming. He know it was inevitable with his own effort to get help for his issues, but when he stomped his feet, & insisted the situation bend toward his will, I no longer engaged in any struggle at all for equality. I was already gone in my mind.

I remained aware & up-to-date on the statistics concerning domestic violence, the signs, the cycle of abuse, the danger I was in as I prepared to leave. It is when, statistically, attacks & violence escalate. A woman leaving an abusive man is risking her life & she knows it.

It is a pandemic. Women have been open season hunted & haunted with alarming increase these last years of this past century & into to this new era. A paradigm shift is underway, the final battles being waged in the guerilla home front. It requires wisdom & stealth to make a clean getaway. But I did. I moved out in May of 2003. Just over a 2 hour drive away, Just into the border of a contiguous State.

I was fortunate. I had a profession which was portable. Friends I had made. Another agency to pick up work with. A car. Many other women are not as blessed.

I made the break. I got back into my own natural rhythms again. I ate when I wanted to, shook off the echoes in my head of incessant reminders to wipe my feet at the door, the obsessive comments & directives which had become the living home incarceration my home life had become. I set clear boundaries, & began to crack & deprogram some of the lies & twisted spins of tales he had been spinning with my extended family to divide & isolate me from them.

I made it clear I would not speak to him on the telephone. I would dialogue with him via email. Or regular mail. I resumed work, now in demand in this, my other community, that which I had returned to, as an evening/night RN supervisor.

Eventually I began to go fishing & spending time with another younger man. I was moving on, getting healthy again, regaining my center & balance. And anticipating the most joyous event of the coming fall a mother nearly fifty looks forward to; the wedding celebration of my first born son & his beautiful & beloved bride. At our family farm on the seacoast. On the Columbus day weekend holiday.

Home from the army on leave, they had earlier eloped, & planned the marriage party & feast for this quintessential fall weekend. The first official holiday of the academic year.

check back soon for part 2....

The original link to these articles...

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/2922