Benning Banner, November 25, 1998, the day after I shot myself.
Twenty-two years ago today I shot myself in the chest with a 9mm handgun. It has been an interesting journey these past two decades. I have learned a lot about myself and other people. Some days I am glad to be alive, but many days, honestly, I wish I had died back then. I have experienced love and friendships and seen some beautiful things… But, there has also been an enormous amount of pain… a lot of loss. I have come to understand that we humans grow the most out of our pain and suffering, not from our happy times. I have also come to understand that much of life is loss. In the past 22 years friends and family members have died. My Grandmother, my Nana and my father died, all leaving huge holes in my life. I fell in love several times and all of those amazing loves ended in pain and sorrow. Am I better for knowing these people, maybe. Would I give up the past 22 years to not have the pain I carry around every day of my life, probably.
Aging is an interesting thing. The older I get, the more calm I get. People who knew me in my youth would say that I was an intense nut. I still have some intensity, but nothing like I use to. I use to talk a lot, now I listen a lot more. I use to do stupid things not caring if I got physically hurt… living with chronic pain for 15+ years has taught me to be much kinder to my body. There is a wisdom that comes with age and I guess that I am thankful for that wisdom and the ability it gives me to live a contented life, but the costs have been high!
For many reasons I have not written on here for many months. I have been depressed. This whole COVID nightmare really brought some things into focus for me (and not in ways many people might think). I am hoping to write more now… and we people with “issues” often pay attention to anniversaries… and so today seemed like a good day to finally publish something.
It happens everyday Two lovers with the best intentions to stay Together, they decide to separate Just how it happens, neither is certain But it happens everyday…. Well, you make him a liar Turn him into a robber Well, it happens everyday.
I have had to go to two pre-trial conferences related to my divorce from Lena. I recognize that divorce is often ugly; it doesn’t need to be, but it is. Like the lyrics above say, “Well, you make him a liar. Turn him into a robber.” It’s very sad how two people who once were so much in love can twist history and try to tear one another apart. I have sincerely tried to not go down that road. It’s not what I want at all, but then again, I didn’t want the divorce either. In these two pretrial conferences Lena’s lawyer has said somethings that are just patently false. I don’t know if the false information comes from Lena or this is just a standard page out of her lawyer’s playbook; but it sucks.
I would much rather be told that I got fat and unattractive, that I was a lousy lover, that I was too grumpy or just a plain old asshole, than have lies said about me.
1st Lie
Lena’s lawyer claims that I was unfaithful throughout the marriage. This is plainly and simply FALSE. I never cheated on Lena. I never wanted to cheat on her. I never had eyes for another while I was with her. I was so in love with her and thought she was an amazing, smart and stunningly beautiful woman. I thought we were very compatible sexually and I never felt any reason to look for something anywhere else. Period. Seriously.
So, where does this lie come from? Is it merely a standard page out of the divorce playbook of lawyers? Maybe. It doesn’t make much sense in New York State as it is a no fault state — so infidelity doesn’t matter, if it were true, which it is not. Is Lena projecting? That’s a possibility, but I never thought she was cheating on me during the marriage despite the fact that she openly admitted to cheating on her first husband several times “after she knew the marriage was over but before getting out of it.” I was so in love with her and thought that she was so in love with me that I never thought either of us would cheat. But… maybe she did and now she is projecting; I just don’t know. I do know her mother often accused me of cheating because I spent time at the upstate home without Lena. During the marriage Lena said she knew her mother’s accusations were crap and just part and parcel of her soul cancer. I would have hoped that by now Lena would have realized that nothing good ever comes from allowing her mother’s psychotic mean spirited drivel into her head; again, I just don’t know.
2nd Lie
The second lie is that I never lived in Rivertown with Lena and her children. In last night’s blog post, I wrote how hurtful this lie is because it completely negates everything that I did there for seven years.
When Lena and I were talking about getting married in 2010 and 2011, I was 100% open about my mental illness history and suicide attempt history. I told Lena that I needed to keep the home in upstate NY and spend some amount of time here because living full-time all of the time in Rivertown would not be good for my mental health. I agreed to spend 50% or more of my time down in Rivertown with Lena and her kids. But we both agreed to the idea that we would not necessarily be together 365 nights a year. The first couple of years I thought this arrangement was working OK and I did spend more than half of my time in Rivertown. I drove the kids to their before school program and picked them up from the same program after school. Later I drove the kids to and from school often. There were several times when I closed up the upstate house and spent 4-6 months 24/7 there in Rivertown. I was on the pickup list from the high school for the kids… Why would I be on that list if I never lived there or only came down on weekends? I can subpoena school officials to prove this.
I drove the kids to soccer/basketball/lacrosse/dance practices. I have photos from mid-week practices and games; not just weekend events. I attended dance and concert and play rehearsals; again, I have photos from all of these things. Again, these are mid-week practices; I wasn’t just around on “some weekends.” Dance teachers/coaches and friends can confirm that I was an involved step-parent. One coach wrote in a text message to me that for some period of time it was obvious to him that I was more involved in the lives of my step-children than either of their biological parents… because I wasn’t working (as both parents were) and I took the time to be involved. I was there. I was involved. I was part of a family. I was part of a community. Again, I have tens of thousands of photos proving I was there and that I was involved. I have a list of a dozen people willing to testify under oath about my being there and my level of involvement. I have doctors that I saw regularly down there with records showing visits etc.
It’s a bald face lie that I never lived down there. Did I sell the upstate home and move down there 24/7/365 when we got married? No. I did not. But I spent a significant amount of time there investing in the family, home and community.
Below is a slideshow of just a smattering of the tens of thousands of photos I have of the time I spent living in Rivertown:
I wasn’t looking to get married. I had been down that road before and I had
gotten burned, badly. I started to date
Lena in 2010 and I fell for her hard and quickly, but it wasn’t me that pushed
to get married. Lena wanted to get
married and so we did. I don’t remember when
this conversation happened, but we were sitting on a bark bench looking out on
the Hudson River in Rivertown. It was
either shortly before we got married or shortly afterwards. I remember Lena asking how long it would take
for my walls to come down and for me to fully trust that she loved me and would
always be there for me. Lena said disparaging
things about the women in my life prior to her… things along the lines of, “These
women really fucked you up. I am not those
women.” Lena went on to reiterate that
she would not hurt me and that she was in this for the long haul. Furthermore, she said, “I am going to love you
like no other woman ever has. I’m gonna
love you better.” That should have been
a huge red flag, and it probably was… but I ignored it because I did love her,
and I did want to spend the rest of my life with her.
Life happened and seven and a half years later Lena no longer wanted to be by my side. Lena no longer wanted to be married to me. Lena wanted a divorce; just like Ava and several of “those women from my past,” who had destroyed my heart and my trust in love. When Ava wanted the divorce, she told me point blank and it was over. Lena didn’t end things that way. Lena told me to leave and then things stayed that way for a few months. I had hired a matrimony lawyer to represent my interests in the divorce. The lawyer had Lena served with papers and Lena totally freaked out. How could I do this to her? Couldn’t we deal with this just the two of us without lawyers? Lena convinced me to fire my lawyer against everyone’s advice. I did fire my lawyer. Lena immediately started pressuring me to sign a legal separation agreement without the counsel of a lawyer; just weeks after the death of my father.
After the death of my father, asking me when I will be coming down to Rivertown next because she supposedly wanted to see me and spend time with me. It was all lies and manipulation. I fell for all of it.
Then Lena said that she needed a legal separation so that
she could rediscover who she was and who we were to each other. This was the first calculated vicious manipulation
towards getting me to commit suicide. I
didn’t understand what Lena was asking for.
Yes, of course I know what a legal separation is, but I did not understand
what she meant when she said that she needed this so we could rediscover who we
were to each other. I asked her, “What
does that mean? Are we going to sign a
legal separation agreement and then start dating each other?” She answered that she did not know…
maybe. Seriously. And I, the love blind idiot I was, agreed. Luckily, I did ad some language to the
separation agreement that made it non-binding.
All my friends and family said that I was being manipulated and that I was being an idiot. Part of me thought it was ridiculous and that I probably was being an idiot… but Lena had said that I was the love of her life. She said she still loved me. She still proclaimed that I was the love of her life as we were signing the separation agreement. I have hundreds of pages of texts between us filled with proclamations of love from her to me and me to her. In these texts she tells me she still loves me. She tells me that I am still the love of her life. She tells me that she needs this separation for herself so that she can rebuild herself and discover who she now is.
Just days before getting me to sign a separation agreement.
I went down to Rivertown a month or so before we signed the separation agreement and Lena and I met in a park down by the Hudson. We spoke for a couple of hours sitting on a bench. She put her arms around me. She put her arms around my neck. She held my hand… and when we parted, she kissed me passionately… I mean deep tongue kiss like we did when we first started to date… with tears in her eyes telling me that she loved me. This happened again on the day we signed the separation agreement… After signing the document in front of a notary, we were out in the bank parking lot and she hugged me… tightly… with tears running down her face and she kissed me deeply passionately again. As we parted, she told me that she loved me. I never saw her again until we both had to show up to divorce court.
The separation agreement clearly states that Lena had to
maintain my health insurance. Within a
few months she cancelled my insurance. I
no longer had access to doctors or prescription medications unless I could pay
cash out of pocket. Lena switched jobs
and claimed that her new employer wouldn’t cover me; I don’t know if that is true. Regardless, she was legally required to maintain
health insurance for me, and she did not.
She did buy some totally bogus health plan that supposedly covers 4 or 5
doctor visits a year and some medications.
Every doctor I showed the card to said it was fake and I had to pay cash
out of pocket.
When Lena and I first started to date I was 100% honest with
her about all my mental health issues and history. She knows all about my suicidality and
suicide attempts and anxieties over abandonment issues. During our marriage Lena experienced both my
depression and suicidal ideation. I was
totally honest and open with her more than I had ever been with anyone in my
life. When we separated, she used all of
what I had told her against me. I don’t
mean that she used it against me in court… she used it to manipulate me into
signing a separation agreement under totally false pretenses (that we would date
and that she still loved me). She used
my unconditional love of her and her children to convince me to fire my attorney. Then after the death of my father, which she
knew was devastating to me, she cancelled my health insurance cutting me off
from doctors and antidepressant medications and my pain medications.
How could anyone look at the lies and manipulations Lena
perpetrated combined with cutting off necessary medical care and not conclude
that she wanted me to kill myself? Being
a widow to a dead husband you no longer love, need, or care about, is certainly
easier than being a two-time divorcee. Yes, I think that Lena would prefer for me to
kill myself and that she has done her best to manipulate both my mood and my
access to health care towards that goal.
I won’t give her the satisfaction.
Knowing that she wants me to suicide has pissed me off enough that although
I have been suicidally depressed at times, I won’t give her the satisfaction! So, I am alive 😛
I have set some lofty goals for myself for this year and next. In order to get my goals achieved I will have to dig down and through some painful memories with Lena, Ava and some other people. I have to go back and read hundreds of social media posts by myself and these women whom I have loved more than my own life… I have to read hundreds of pages of saved text messages. This is going to hurt… worse than shooting myself in this chest, but it has to be done.
Came across these posts from Lena that she posted to Facebook and I just tear up and wonder what went wrong?
The past couple of weeks have been horrible. I have been in a deep depression that started building around Thanksgiving and just blew up my mind between Christmas and New Year. On January 2nd I started writing a post looking back on 2019 and talking about some hopes for 2020, but it has been too painful to finish on top of my depression and immense physical pain.
“Normal” depression whispers all kind of self defeating things in ones ear. Severe depression is like standing in front of a concert speaker stack, with these negatives thoughts of self, just bombarding all of your senses.
You are not enough.
You are not good enough.
You are not smart enough.
You are not driven enough.
You are not good enough to be worthy of love.
You are not enough to attract the type of woman you want.
You are not worthy of love anyway.
You will never find someone who loves you for you without intentions of changing or “fixing” you.
No one ever stays, so do not connect with anyone.
You aren’t good looking enough…
You are too fat…
too old…
too tired
Whatever good you may have had coming to you in your life has come and gone.
You will always be alone.
You don’t deserve to be happy let alone content or at peace.
It’s not just negative and self defeating thought… you can feel the thoughts all around you. You hear them in random movie lines or music. In a state like this thoughts and memories from the past fill my being. I am filled with a lifetime of sadnesses that I can recall as if I was right back there… I remember the good and then the bad. It’s all always there, right below the surface. In times like this these memories take over my existence.
And the whole time I am walking through the playback of my life, I am thinking of various things I should be writing down here for a blog post… the experience is draining, emotionally and physically. Imagine living the collection of your whole life’s best and worst moments all in the matter of a few days or weeks. A lifetime of great moments and a lifetime of pain and loss… all converging and pouring through your mind in the briefest of periods. I spend half the day crying… the other half of the day in excruciating physical pain.
I think it’s dark and it looks like it’s rain, you said And the wind is blowing like it’s the end of the world, you said
And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead And you smiled for a second
I think I’m old and I’m feeling pain, you said And it’s all running out like it’s the end of the world, you said
And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead And you smiled for a second
Sometimes you make me feel Like I’m living at the edge of the world Like I’m living at the edge of the world It’s just the way I smile, you said
I recognize that many people do not believe in spirits or ghosts or any kind of “paranormal” activity. I, personally, do believe in these things. I have seen ghosts in my life time. I was once visited by my Nana when she had an out of body experience a few days before she died.
I woke up this morning at 4:30 AM from a very disturbing dream. In the English language we don’t have a word for a sad dream. It wasn’t a nightmare, as it wasn’t scary, but I woke up in tears.
In the dream, my mother and I were visiting Stony Brook University (where she and I both have our college degrees from and where my father worked for almost 40 years) for some reason. We decided to go visit my father’s old office. When we got there the door was open and several graduate students were working in there.
The office did not look the same as when my father used it…. except one corner still had some of our family photographs on the walls. I tried to speak to the graduate students but as I talked my tongue swelled and my words became incomprehensible, so they just looked at me weirdly and then went back to work. I started to pull down the family photographs and started to cry. I was sobbing and not able to speak at all.
Then my father appeared in the dream… looking the way he did about 20 years before he died. He hugged me and said, “It’s OK. I’m OK.” Then I woke up.
Professor Stephen Cole in his office at Stony Brook University.
I am glad for the visit from him. I am glad that he is OK. It’s sad to me that he had to die to be OK. The last 10 years of his life were not very good ones due to his health and social isolation. My father had many many flaws, but I loved him dearly. I loved him fiercely and I miss him.
My next open and free public talk on issues of mental health, PTSD, bullying, suicide and the stigma of mental illness will be December 9th at 7 PM at the Hampton Volunteer Fire Company #33 in Hampton, NY.
Yesterday was a very hard day for me. I have been trying to work on my book a little each day. Yesterday morning I was writing about a relationship I had where I was repeatedly lied to, used and manipulated… much to my significant detriment.
As I was writing I found myself getting angry… muttering things like, “Fucking Bitch!” or worse. However, in typical fashion for me, my outward anger quickly turned into inward anger… anger at myself and feelings of wanting to hurt myself. I had errands to run after writing which had me driving more than 80 miles from here to there.
As I was driving and interacting with various people I looked fine on the outside. I drove the speed limit. I wasn’t driving erratically. I smiled at people when I met them in stores and asked them how they were. On the outside I looked perfectly “normal.” But on the inside… I was dying, or wanting to die or hurt myself. I had thoughts of burning my arm with cigarettes, or cutting my arms with razor blades, or crashing the car, or asking a friend to literally beat the shit out of me. Externally induced physical pain is much easier to “process” and heal from than the emotional devastation I was feeling. A physical bruise heals… my heart, not so much and certainly not nearly as quickly!
So why write about this? Because much of the stigma of mental illness comes from the fact that it is “hidden.” Most of the time it’s an internal condition unlike a broken arm or even cancer that can have visible symptoms. Someone can look perfectly “normal” on the outside but truly be struggling to hold on to life on the inside. You never know what someone is feeling inside by their outward appearance… so maybe cut someone a break once in a while.
