Signs of Healing

Editor’s note:  I have been trying for THREE DAYS to get these pictures on here.  True to my style of organization, they are on here bass-ackwards, so you get to see the pictures ‘after’ and ‘before’ instead of the other way around.  To those of you who actually keep a clean house, it may not seem like the miracle it is.  When you see the ‘before’ pictures, you may have a better understanding.

 

I wanted to see if I could get the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of F’s cabin on here.  I am sort of a techno-idiot for simple things like uploading pictures.  But I feel like it is an important part of the story for people to be able to see what happens when you can stand up for doing the right thing by letting go of anger and animosity and holding peace in your heart.  Even when dealing with someone who is mentally ill.

F is a hoarder.  I really saw the reality of this, not only with the cabin, but when S got his metal filing box out of storage.  He had canceled checks in with his military papers.  Which wouldn’t be odd except the canceled checks were from 1968 on up. Why he felt the need to keep them shall remain a mystery to me.

The ‘cabin’ is a slope roofed one room shack my father-in-law and husband built over fifteen years ago.  It is slowly falling apart and F never tried to keep it up.  S was the one who put new tarpaper on the roof last year to keep it from leaking.

Beds made to military precision, give or take. Floor shoveled clean of the dog shit coated clothes. He threw those down on our burn pile. That’s will smell nice. Guess we won’t be roasting marshmallows this year….

Now, this is what the place looked like the day he left, after we had that two hour palaver the night before. Holy shit, is that floor I see?

Yes, the cans really ARE all gone! Double take! I can’t believe my camera.

Do I detect the tang of Pine-sol in the air? Amazing what a shovel and a little scrubbing can do for that can collection. They hauled them to the dump, too!

This is a view in the front door. You can see my father-in-laws wood cook stove that F used as counter space. There are cans and garbage all in front of it. The floor is coated in dirt, probably dog shit and who knows what else.

The ‘kitchen’ area to the right. Years of food cans and garbage. The linoleum under this all is white, honest.

His heat source and overflowing ash pan for the woodstove. Honestly, I don’t know how he didn’t burn the place down. That’s Cindy Lou sitting in the chair where she had given birth to her pups. S has taken her to live in town now.

Inside to the left. He always made his bed. That’s my dog, Copper, coming in to check out the one that is hiding under the bed. I usually don’t let my dog’s anywhere near this place but he is current on his shots. There is clothes, dirt and most likely dogshit on the floor here too. The bed across has F’s clothes and other crap.

Yet it is real.  I don’t know if you can understand how miraculous this was.  This man, who has never batted and eye at letting not only dogs, but livestock, and I am talking sheep and goats, geese and pigs, in the house to live, eat and shit without ever cleaning it up.  He did this.  He cleaned his house!

This is the same man who would sit in the living room of S’s house over east in a living room that’s rug was soaked so thoroughly with dog urine it squelched with every step, and watch television as the dogs shit on the rug in front of him.

To me, this is evidence that Divinity is at work.  There is a spirit at work here that is stronger than the shit.  This is the miracle that turns shit into black gold.  This is the proof.

S and my father-in-law B seemed a little stunned at F’s  abrupt departure.  I don’t think my mother-in-law quite knew how to deal with the reality. F has been a fixture in her life for over twenty years now.  She never wanted to deal with him, but never made a move to cut him loose either.  This shall forever be a puzzle to me. 

The night GM called to tell her F had gone with his brother, I could hear her voice on the other end of the line.  When she said “Oh.” it sounded higher than her usual speaking voice.  Tremulous.  I wondered.  Did this mean there was a part of her that was actually sorry to see him gone?  Even though this was the man who had told her the mountain wasn’t big enough for the both of them and she should go live with her daughter.  Yet, what was I supposed to do?  I will gladly take on burdens for my family when the cause is just, when the need is real, but I will not  enable someone to use and abuse my family.  I will not allow someone to latch on to us as a drowning victim dragging their savior to the depths.

When I told S he had cleaned to the cabin up,  that he had even used a cleaner (probably even on that one white floor patch!) her mouth actually dropped open.  She was honest to goodness stunned when I told her that.  Said he had never lifted a finger EVER in the twenty-some-odd years they had been together to help her clean.  Not even the animal pens.

I couldn’t explain to her the how or why.  We don’t see things the same way.  I couldn’t explain to her that you can kick someone in the ass and do it with love.  I just don’t think that is the language that they have ever known.  I don’t know if S will ever understand that showing someone you love them doesn’t mean doing everything for them until they are crippled with the inability to do for themselves.  That is not love.  That is something else entirely and it has dark origins, no matter the intent behind it.

After F had left, and in the middle of the night when the large drink of water before bed finally ran its course and woke me, I went outside.  I heard something that I didn’t know I would ever here.  A bull elk bugling.  Our mountain, years and years ago used to have a lot of elk.  GM said he hadn’t seen any for over fifteen years.  I heard it another night, then again last night, just about dusk.  His bugling set the dogs off up at F’s old place where they still stay.  Excited, I went in to tell GM.  He told me he had been watching one of the home movies he recently made with he and our big white dog Fen on it.  He said Fen was howling on the movie.  This annoyed me.  I can tell the difference between and elk bugle and a dog howl for shit’s sake!  I snapped at him a bit.  He got a little mad back and told me angrily that he hadn’t seen elk up here in twenty years.

As we are learning to do now, we went our own ways for a few minutes.  We are trying (slowly) to pick our battles.  When we passed each other again on the trail down to our outhouse I stopped and looked at him.  I knew what I needed to say.

“When you pray for healing to come to a place, when you pray for good things to come back, they do.”

I continued down the path, and he watched me in silence.

A Hard Look Within, Part Five

 

For about five months after I had broken up with Rich I drifted in this haze of aimless irresponsibility. After two months, Jessica moved back home with her parents. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I could drink a twelve pack of Keystone beer and not get a buzz. Wow. What an accomplishment.

 I was exhausted. Unemployed. I couldn’t see any point to my life or any hope in it. I was miserably lonely. My sleep schedule was so messed up I was staying up until after sunrise and sleeping all day. I felt wrung out, hollow and empty. My landlords had let me slide behind on my rent, but that time would be drawing to a close if I didn’t do something. That was the problem. I was sunk so low emotionally that I couldn’t see a way out.

 I spent my time wandering the streets of Kalispell while the town slept. There is a sacred stillness that descends in the wee hours between midnight and dawn. The quiet peace of a dreaming town. I always felt like I was looking for something unseen and impossible to lay physical hands on. I found some consolation in the night winds blowing through the branches of the giant willow in that yard on 3^rd Street on the west side where I lived. I called her the Grandmother Tree because she is over a hundred years old if not older. I would stand a her base, staring up at the huge branches, wind whispering among the leaves, feeling somehow that if something as huge as that tree had stood the test of time and man, I should somehow, some way, be able to as well. I would sometimes go into the yard to lay my hands on her bark, a nameless yearning tugging in my belly. I just couldn’t figure it out.

 I met a few cool cats out for their nocturnal wanders and we would stop an chat, their temporary companionship easing for a moment the hollow echoes in my heart and mind. Sometimes I would go down to Woodland Park to listen to the sleepy rustling of the ducks and geese at roost in the night. Listening to the night sounds in this sleeping mid-sized city, I could hear the whisper of possibility for something more. At the same time, those night winds blew through the heart of me leaving an empty, nameless ache.

 On particularly lonely nights I would wander to Finnegan’s restaurant to have coffee, flirt with the cute waiter and hope maybe someone I know would come in. Party buddies were better company than silence. Still, bars were never my thing. I seem to hold an unapproachable air about me when I do wander in to them. On the rare occasions that I found some main street dive with a blues band I would take up a table by myself and it would stay that way. On one or two occasions much older men asked me to dance. I danced, but I never invited company or conversation and always left soon after. I had seen the type of people that inhabited bars on a regular basis, and that wasn’t my thing. I never wanted to go into heavier drug use, and I had already reached the bottom as far as I was concerned.

 It was some faceless night. I was in my living room listening to Depeche Mode, which isn’t very uplifting music for happy people, much less people in the state of mind I was in. It was 3 a.m. and I wanted to die. My life was going nowhere. I hadn’t eaten in two days and I couldn’t seem to bring myself up out of this hole of despair. To top it all off, I was out of cigarettes.

 I had a small pistol my sister had given me in case Rich ever came back. A .22 Jennings. I had shells for it. I couldn’t stop crying and I just wanted it done.

 Get out of this house.

 That voice again. Call it intuition or Divine Guidance. I think of it as the latter. At least I do now.

 “I want to die! I hate this fucked up life! I can’t do anything right!” I said aloud, tears on constant leak.

 Call your Mom.“It’s three o’clock in the goddamned morning! She doesn’t need me calling! She‘ll be pissed.”

 

 I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I had done wrong. I couldn’t even keep a job! I was a failure. I shouldn’t be alive.

 Get out of the house. Call your Mom.I should be dead! It’s not worth living, living like this!

 

 It’s not your time. Get out of the house. Call your Mom.There is nothing worse than being nagged by the voice in your head telling you to live when you are trying to find a way to die.

 

 I felt I had to do something, anything, and the voice was winning.

I left the house and walked across town to Finnegan’s. I had enough change to use the payphone.

 “Hello?” her voice was groggy. And concerned.

“It’s me.”

“What’s wrong?” fully awake now as only a mother whose kid calls in the middle of the night could be. I started to cry. That was such a loaded question.

“I’m sorry. I can’t explain right now. Could you just please come and get me?” I couldn’t keep the tears out of my voice.

“Where are you? Are you in Kalispell?”

“Yeah. Finnegan’s.”

“See you in a bit.”

 I picked a seat at the counter. Lit up the half smoked butt I’d dredged out of the ashtray outside the door. The graveyard waiter I normally flirted with cast me a few odd glances. I tried to smile and pretend nothing was wrong but I know I must have looked like train wreak. I know the smile on my face looked like it didn’t’ belong. It felt like it didn’t belong and I’ve never been a very good liar. I must have presented a fairly odd picture, pale, eyes red and bloodshot from crying. I stared into my water glass and stole a glance down the counter at the balding fat man four seats down from me. He looked like someone who had just crawled out from under a rock. I had the discomforting impression that we could have shared the same rock just then. Inward, I cringed. Another voice in my head, one that wasn’t so nice told me;

 

Look. That’s you. Different face, same broken interior design.

 

Fuck you, I thought.

Soon, the door of the restaurant opened. I was quite amazed, actually. Beside my mother stood my father. The man whom I knew didn’t even like me. My stomach lurched.

We rode in silence which was a second shock to me. I expected him to launch into a tirade at any moment. He didn’t. What was more is, I caught him glancing at me once and I was stunned by the expression in his eyes. Concern. I had seen many expressions on my father’s face before in life, concern was not one I recognized.

But I was never one to ask for help either. How could I? If I did I was either told I wasn’t trying hard enough or I was a lazy user.

 They didn’t smoke, but bum that I was then I must have gotten a couple bucks for a pack somewhere along the way. The nicotine helped me feel a little better for a moment.

 For a moment.

 For a moment I was safe. For a moment I was small again under my parents protection. For a moment time could stop it’s downward spiral.

For a moment, the demons were held at bay.

 

 

 

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Four

I knew Rich was sick. Mentally. I had just been too young and naïve to know it. Dealing too with my own issues I couldn’t see it. I didn’t really know how severe his mental health issues were until about a month after I broke up with him.

 

By then I had gone on my own sort of rebellious path of self discovery/destruction. Mostly it involved men and booze. Then one of the boozing men introduced something I had only tried twice with ill results: marijuana.

 

I guess back then what happened was that I had felt so repressed growing up in high school, then in that relationship with Rich that I just took sowing wild oats to a whole new extreme. At least an extreme for a shy, introverted girl raise by Depression Era parents with a religious background. What I did would be nothing for most people, but for me this was extreme, over-the-top behavior.

 

I had been reputed to be a bad ass in school. I didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted to do, like sneak out of my parents house because my Mom for years had told me how much my sisters doing that had hurt her. I didn’t want my parents to be any more ashamed and angry with me than they were. Really, I only wanted them to love me and actually enjoy my presence in their lives. I didn’t want to hurt them. I, save for a handful of times, always went where I said I would be and always came home when I was supposed to. Looking back on it now I really wish I had snuck out more. Perhaps it would have saved me a headache later.

 

After Rich I turned for the first time in my life hardcore to the party life. My friends Jessica and Mona moved in to room with me and we started drinking a lot. I lost my job at the dairy because staying up all night screwing some guy I used to go to school with was more important to me. The truly sad part was that the guy told me not to tell anyone we slept together because he didn’t want to ruin his reputation. That made me laugh because everybody in school thought he was a fucking putz. It also hurt me a lot. I convinced myself that I was using these guys instead. And more guys there were. With no job I didn’t buy food but somehow we always had money for beer and coffee. I lost 40 pounds the first month after I broke up with Rich and for the first time in my life discovered the power of my own sex appeal. Which I used like a common slut, I might add. I found a smorgasbord of men for one night stands. Well, it was a smorgasbord for me anyhow. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty in a very short period of time.

 

I picked a hitch hiker up that ended up being my boyfriend for three months. He was the one that introduced me to the joys of marijuana. Jessica was my partner in crime. We soon ran Mona off, I think the wild life scared her.

 

We had no phone service. One night my hitch hiker, Terry had stayed over. Early in the morning there was a pounding at the door and Jessica answered. It was Rich. She gave me an odd look when she told me he was there. I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. I came out to see what the hell he wanted. He walked into the house. I had to either walk backwards or be stepped on. He was talking non-stop the whole time. He wanted to know who was in my bedroom, what I was doing with someone in my bedroom. I told him it was none of his fucking business. He started to babble at me that he had walked the seventeen miles to Kalispell from Columbia Falls and he had counted every one of his steps. I asked him if he was fucking drunk. He then started to tell me all his friends had turned against him and it was all my fault, that I had turned them all against him.

 

I told him I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about and told him to get the fuck out of my house. He shoved past me to the kitchen and I asked him what the fuck he was doing and continued telling him to get out. When Jessica heard me yell, “What the fuck are you doing with that knife?!” she was out the door to try and call the cops from the neighbors house.

 

Rich grabbed one of my kitchen knives and proceeded to try stabbing himself in the chest through his shirt and coat. I freaked out and tried to grab him. Ironically, the only though in my head was, What the hell am I going to tell the cops about a dead body in my house?

 

He and I struggled by the counter, he jerked away from me and I heard a pop noise and felt warmth flood over my hands and legs. I froze in shock and he reeled away from me.

 

For a brief moment I felt myself truly teetering on the thin edge of sanity. My mouth was open, but I couldn’t breathe. I expected him to collapse thinking I was watching a man die. He’s stabbed himself in the heart! I thought. Then I realized he was not only not going down, he was still trying to stab himself. I felt a rush of confusion then dared to look down at my hands. It was then I noticed the paper biggie sized soda cup on the counter laying on it’s side. It had held ice the night before which had melted. Knocking it over in our struggles was what made the sound and it was water dousing me, not his blood.

 

In a snap my paralyzed fear was consumed in towering fury. I was consumed in some unholy rage right then. In two steps I was over to him and yanked the knife out of his hands, by the blade, not even caring at this point. I knew he was over the edge. Somehow we were back across the dining room and he had me shoved up against t he door, pinning me while simultaneously trying to open it. It was then I saw Terry standing casually in the doorway, one arm propped up, looking for all the world like he was watching us play a friendly game of darts.

 

“Terry! HELP ME!” I screamed as Rich began striking at me. Terry sauntered over and made a half assed attempt at putting Rich in a full Nelson. Rich, suddenly realizing there was another person there seemed to revive from his animal state and ran out the front door. Jessica came back, none of the neighbors had been home.

 

I have never been so pumped on adrenaline in my life. I knew we had to make a police report. I stood there in the dining room and we talked about going to the police station, when I rubbed my forehead.

 

“You’re bleeding!” Jessica said, alarmed, pointing at my head. Confused, I reached for my forehead, thinking I was bleeding from there and noticed the blood in my hand. I had forgotten I grabbed that knife by the blade and all for of my fingers were gashed open and oozing blood. I couldn’t even feel it right then. I stared at it for quite awhile, in complete disbelief, waiting for the pain that didn’t come until later, then went in the bathroom to wrap my hand.

 

We went to the police station and Terry took off. There were large, half-dollar sized drops of blood on the walkway in front of my house. The animal had wounded himself after all. We wrote out the police report. I told them how Rich tried to kill himself with the knife, about our ensuing struggle. Before we even left the station the dispatcher informed us the police had him in custody. They had arrested him as he was heading back to my house.

 

For the first time, I was truly scared. He was obviously off his fucking rocker. That he held me personally responsible for his friends turning against him pissed me off and worried me. He had been heading back to my house. Why? Not for anything good, that much I knew. Either the next day or the day after, I called the Violence Free Crisis line at my mother’s suggestion. The advocate suggested I try and find out when he would be released so I could get an order of protection.

 

I called the police station and got the female dispatcher. I asked if he was still incarcerated. The dispatcher asked me if I was a family member.

 

“No. I am his ex-girlfriend. The one in whose house he tried to kill himself.”

 

“We don’t release that information to anyone but family.” the dispatcher informed me.

 

“But he has hurt me before and may try to hurt me or himself again! He tried to stab himself in my house!”

 

What I heard next I still have a hard time believing, but this is what I was told by this dispatcher.

 

“Unless you are family I cannot release that information. Besides, you WERE caught in bed with another man!”

 

“WHAT?!! He’s my EX-boyfriend!” I shouted. I couldn’t believe what that bitch had just said. I hung up the phone in tears. What had that waste of skin told the police? He was my distraught boyfriend come home to find me in bed with another man? Seriously? He hadn’t lived with me in over a MONTH!

 

When I called the crisis line back and relayed the conversation I had with the woman dispatcher my advocate blew a gasket.

 

“SHE SAID WHAT??!!! I’ll take care of this. I’ll call you back.”

 

I don’t’ know what that wonderful woman told that bitch dispatcher but when she returned my call we found out he was going to the state rehab/mental health center in Great Falls for a month for evaluation.

 

I didn’t have a phone but he began calling my parents house. He was so sorry and he was getting help, etc. etc. He had a hang-up about my tattoo, the one I had gotten to cover his name. It is a collage. I told my tattoo artist I wanted a half-Elf woman and a sword or dagger in the collage. I told him to use some artistic license to put something else in it. So what I ended up with is a half-Elf woman’s face, partially obscured by hair. Over the hair on her face is a dagger. To the left of the dagger, coming out of the hair is the head of a snarling demon. The demon was my friends idea, I was 18, what the hell and whatever. Rich called my mother to ask if the demon in the tattoo was supposed to symbolize him.

 

Since the demon was my tattooist’s idea, and this tattooist was the guy that told me about Rich hiding from me at friends houses and he knew it was a freedom gift to myself, it could have been what he had in mind. I don’t know. But I still HAVE that tattoo.

 

Rich talked about getting back together. I made non-committal noises. I still didn’t want to hurt him. I knew he was sick and wanted him to get better. He informed me that before we got back together I had to go get an HIV test and be tested for STDs.

 

I ran into his father in the restaurant. Frank informed me that his son needed healing and I needed to stay away from him since I was the one who had driven him to suicide. Like having parents who raised him telling him he was so smart and could do no wrong or take no responsibility didn’t help get him there. Not to mention the genetic propensity for depression. I couldn’t believe it. Frank was telling me his fucked up son was all my fault too. It was like something Rich himself would have said.

 

Needless to say, I had no interest in getting back together with him. After getting out of Great Falls he came back for awhile and kept a low profile, eventually finding true love and a sugar mama in a cousin of a mutual friend. He and his brother Donny got drunk together, stole their other brother’s car and plowed it into a bunch of trees. Rich had his jaw wired shut. I saw him in the restaurant and to try and prove to him and myself everything was water under the bridge ( I still had nightmares then) I went over to chat with him. Soon his knew girlfriend, Pam, who was about ten years older came in. He began to tell me how wonderful she was. What a miracle what with all her health problems she had. How happy they were together. When I looked at her, it was the strangest thing. She seemed to have this darkness around her. That voice came back again.

“She’ll be dead in three months.”

 

Two and a half months later I ran into her cousin. Pam had died of a sudden heart attack from complications to do with diabetes.

 

I had nightmares about him for about two years. He would be coming to kill me. I knew this was some process of unresolved emotion I needed to work on. At first, in the dreams, I was helpless and at his mercy. As time progressed, I was able to fight him. Then fight him to a draw. Each dream I made more progress. The last dream I ever had of him, The fight ended quickly, and he was naked, cringing. In the dream I told him to leave and never bother me again. I never dreamt of him after that.

 

Sometime after Pam’s death, unable to sponge of someone else, Rich moved to Livingston with his mother. I saw him once years later and it took me a minute to realize who that scruffy, fat guy was. He was bullshitting with some guy he and his mother were having coffee with, trying to tell him his expert opinion on the guys own field of work.

 

I saw him notice me and the look that came across his face was priceless. Like he just took a big bite out of a cat shit sandwich. I suddenly realized that he was way more disturbed by seeing me than I was at seeing him. It occurred to me that the bastard still wanted everything to be my fault! I looked at him, his appearance. The years hadn’t been kind. He was pathetic.

 

He got up at one point to pass by my table. He looked like he had a stick shoved sideways up his ass and the wave he gave me looked more like an epileptic twitch response. I gave him my best condescending smile, vindictive bitch that I am. With the pot-gut, striped shirt and unkempt hair he looked like a fat hair twelve year old.

I went back to reading my book. I never saw him again.

 

Two years ago, his sister-in-law told me they found him dead in the motel room he lived in in Choteau. Heart attack, they say. He was forty-one.