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:
This afternoon there was a pre-trial lawyers conference related to my impending divorce from Lena. After the lawyers met, I talked with my lawyer at the court house. She relayed what Lena’s lawyer had said… and I just could not believe what I was hearing. When I got home I started to write a post in response to the claims being made about me and my life of the past eight years. While writing that post I had a kind of psychological breakthrough in terms of better understanding why I feel so much pain surrounding the loss of something that apparently was never what I thought it was.
One of the claims being made by Lena’s lawyer (which is a total lie being perpetrated upon the court) is that I never lived in Rivertown with Lena and her children. When I came home I brought up 10,000+ pictures, literally, that I had taken of Lena and her kids in Westchester. Pictures of Lena, pictures of the kids playing sports, pictures of the kids in school plays and concerts and pictures of me with Lena and the kids. As I looked at these pictures I started screaming inside my head, “I did exist! I was there! I mattered! It was real!.”
The lie being told in court today was that I never lived in Rivertown… which would then negate everything that I did do there… all of the times I drove the kids to school and picked them up from school… all of the sports practices and games that I attended and photographed… all of the concerts, plays and recitals that I went to and photographed… This lie negates all of the time I spent there as an integral part of a family. This lie has a gaslighting affect… Was I not there? Did I not do all of these things that I clearly remember? No! I was there, sometimes for extended periods of time (despite Lena and I agreeing when we got married that I would only be down there up to 50% of the time… I was often down there much more than 50% of the time and I have witnesses willing to testify under oath to that in court) and I did do all of these things… and I have PROOF! I have the photographs that I took that prove I was there. How do I have 10-20,000 photos taken of the kids and their friends and classmates if I was never there? How do I literally have thousands of photographs of Lena if I was never there? I was there!!!
In my Rivertown photo studio doing Samantha’s hair after she put mine into ponytails.
As this was roiling through my mind it struck me that this theme of being negated and feeling unimportant or even as if I did not exist, was one that has run through most of my life dating back to when I was four years old.
First let me say, unequivocally, that I loved my father and I love my mother and brother… I loved Ava, Aubrey and Lena. However, each of these relationships left me questioning if I mattered and feeling totally negated and worthless and at times as if I might not have even existed in the ways I remembered or thought I had.
Me with my mother and father as an infant.
When I was four years old my mother was pregnant with my brother when she was hit by a drunk driver. This accident caused my brother to be born twelve weeks early and very sick. Both of my parents had some serious emotional problems and both of them responded to the accident and early birth of my brother differently and perhaps, in retrospect, wrongly. My father withdrew further from the family unit and more into his work. My mother spend most of her time caring for my infant brother who was very ill. I don’t have specific memories of feeling negated or abandoned at the age of four, but I must have. Prior to my brothers birth I am not convinced that my mother and I had a “normal and healthy” mother-son relationship; but afterwards we definitely did not. Many first born children find it difficult to adapt to life after the next sibling is born and they have to share the love, affection and time of their parents with the newborn. Add on to this the fact that my brother was so ill and the affects must have been much more… and how would my four year old brain deal with those feelings of negation and abandonment?
Me with my father, mother and brother.
From the ages of four to fourteen my emotional problems only got worse. I got into trouble at school. I was often in trouble at home. I acted up to get any attention that I could from whomever I could. Then around the age of fifteen my parents separated and got divorced. By this time my mother and I were not close at all so I stayed on Long Island with my father and his new wife, who was horrible to me for many many years. My mother and brother moved into New York City and I did not see them often (both my fault and my mother’s).
Whatever sense of belonging or feelings of mattering were blown apart by my parents divorce. My father’s new wife never accepted his children as part of the “package” when she married him. When I was sixteen years old my step-mother told me point blank, “I married your father, not his children.” And, my father allowed this to stand! Can you imagine how negating that felt? My own father, whom I loved so dearly and looked up to for so many years, allowed his wife to push me off to the side.
Me with my father and step-mother in 2013.
From the age of fourteen to twenty-four I moved something like 11 or 12 times! I had no roots. I did not have a sense of belonging anywhere. My therapist at the Austen Riggs Center said that I had “homelessness syndrome.”
Ave and me, Dec 23 1994
At the age of 23 I married Ava… and started to develop roots. At the end of our second year of marriage we moved to Georgia and bought a house. It wasn’t a great house, but it was ours. I really started to nest and foster the growth of roots both in our “family unit” and in the community. We made friends and were active in the community. I was building a successful business. I loved that home and even though I had no idea back then about anything construction related, I did do my best working on the house and making it ours.
Me and Ava dressed to the 9s for one of Ava’s work events.
In 1998, after shooting myself but before the overdose and ensuing stay at Austen Riggs, I wrote an essay entitled “Borderline Diaries.” This is an excerpt from that essay…
When I packed up my little car and left Georgia I was leaving more that just Ava. But let’s start with that. I left my wife. Despite the fact that I did not always treat Ava as well as I could have, I loved her more than I had ever loved any one in my entire life. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, and still doesn’t, she was the center of my universe. She was the lone bright star in an otherwise dark and dismal life. I was not able to be the man… the husband… that she needed me to be. But I would have done anything within my power to make her happy. Unfortunately, I was so mentally ill at the time that I was not able to be the husband that she desired. So, she asked me to leave. And not knowing what else to do and not wanting to cause her more pain than I already had… I left.
Like I said before, when I left Georgia I lost a lot more than Ava (as if that weren’t enough). I also left behind the house I loved and the lawn and gardens I had worked so hard to make beautiful. I don’t think that most people realized how much that house meant to me. You see, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four (10 years) I had moved eleven times. I almost felt homeless all of those years. I did not have roots anywhere. Then when I was twenty-four Ava and I bought the house in Georgia. I came to realize after we bought the house that is was a piece of junk. But that did not matter to me. It was finally a place I could call mine; a place I could call home. Additionally when I left Georgia and moved to Vermont I left behind my friends, my business, and a way of life. In one seventeen-hour car trip I lost every single indicator of who and what I was in the world. I was stripped of everything. I was nothing. I had nothing. I felt so lost that mere words cannot make one understand what I was going through.
As soon as I moved out of our house in Georgia, Ava’s boyfriend moved in; she was literally cooking dinner for him in “our” home the next night. They got married shortly after our divorce was finalized. Due to the way that the marriage ended, for years I wondered if Ava ever thought about me. Had she really loved me? When did she stop loving me? Was any of it real? The same theme of negation was a constant undercurrent in my consciousness.
A year or so after I was out of Austen Riggs, I started to date Aubrey. She and her three daughters moved into my mother’s second home with me where I was living at the time.
Aubrey and me at a wedding in NYC.
Aubrey and I were probably doomed from the start… I was only a year out of Austen Riggs and 18 months out from shooting myself. She left a severely abusive husband and moved right in with me. These are not the best circumstances to start a relationship. But we tried. I went from living alone to living with a woman and her three children. Instant family! Instant responsibility! Aubrey and I had some amazing times… and some very bad times… but I loved her and her children fiercely. After living together for four years, Aubrey and her children moved out. Here one day, gone the next… negated yet again. Unfortunately, the circumstances surrounding our breakup really fucked with my head. Again I found myself wondering what was real. Was any of it real? Had I made the intense love I thought we felt for one another up in my head? When did she stop loving me? Would I ever be loved? Was I just not lovable? Was I just defective on some very core level?
Aubrey and I stayed in touch until shortly after I married Lena. I loved Aubrey’s girls and probably loved her for several years even after we broke up.
Me with Aubrey and two of her girls on a Halloween a couple of years after we broke up.
Five years after Aubrey and I broke up, I started to date Lena in March of 2010. We dated for 9 months and got engaged on New Year’s Eve 2011 and married 7 months later in July of 2011
Me, Lena, Samantha and Daniel on our wedding day. July 11, 2011
Lena and I had a good life and a good marriage for a while. I loved her and her children dearly. I would have done anything for them. I tried everything for them. I risked everything, including my very life and sanity, for them… and then it was over. Here today, gone tomorrow. Negated once again. I lost another family, home, business and all of the groundings that held me in life. Once again I was asking if I was just so damaged that I could never be loved. Once again I was made (and manipulated) into questioning my sanity and my very memories.
Me with Lena, Samantha and Daniel on the day of Daniel’s bar mitzvah.
So… I am almost 50 years old. In some ways I am a huge “success.” I have lived 20 years longer than anyone thought I would. Statistically speaking, I am a Deadman Living. I am constantly working on myself… looking at myself, my motivations and my actions and the consequences of those actions… to the point of neurosis probably. I have made huge progress on issues such as my temper, my serpent’s tongue, my patience with other people and on forgiveness, both for other people and for myself.
Unfortunately, those negating questions remain: Will I ever be truly loved? Am I lovable? If I am not in love/being loved, do I exist? Is there something so broken inside of me that I should just accept and embrace being alone the rest of my life? Was I born this way with some fractured psyche or did the events of my toddler years set the stage for this?
I don’t know the answers to those questions, but what I fully realized today while working on another post is that I do exist… in this world…And, I do matter… in this world… regardless of whether my parents and then lovers could see it or express it.
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?
When I was in my teens and 20’s, my paternal grandmother, Nana, use to always tell me this, “Don’t worry Richard. You have plenty of time to figure out XYZ.” I know Nana meant well and that she loved me dearly, but there was and is no worse advice that can be given to a young person, in my opinion.
Time is the most valuable thing in our lives because it’s the one thing that we can never get back. We can always earn more money, switch careers, go back to school, marry, etc. Even though I was suicidal by the age of 10 and never looked forward to much in life and thought my time here was short, I still did not value time and wasted soooo much of it.
My advice to young people would be to get as many experiences as possible because at some point life will bog you down and you may not get the chance again. Now I am not talking about getting experiences like getting drunk or doing drugs… take it from someone who has been though some shit… nothing good comes from drugs or alcohol; and this most definitely includes marijuana. Period. (The occasional artist who claims to have found inspiration through drugs and alcohol is almost guaranteed to also be a miserable SOB or now dead.)
No, I am talking about meeting different kinds of people. Experiencing different ways of life. Looking outside the bubble you are growing up in and open yourself up to all of the possibilities of the universe. And yes, you are growing up in a bubble regardless of whether you are growing up in NYC or east bumfuck redneckville. I grew up on a college campus in a college town an hour outside NYC and thought it had offered me insight to a wide range of life; and perhaps it did, but it was still a bubble and there was so much more to the world and life than I experienced growing up at Stony Brook University.
Figure out what you are passionate about, because you may not have the chance later in life. Pursue your passions. If you want to paint, then paint. If you want to write, then write. If you want to help people, then help people. Pursue multiple passions. Don’t pigeonhole yourself (life will try to do that on its’ own). Do it now! Tomorrow may be too late. Life happens… we go to school, we get jobs, we get married, we have kids, we have jobs, we take on enormous stupid debt and then we’re stuck and may not have the chance to figure out what truly makes us tick. If you think this sounds too negative or unrealistic… log onto an online dating site and read the profiles of people in their late 30′ and 40’s! These sites are filled with people who let life get away from them and find themselves alone and unfulfilled as adults… at ages where it may be too late.
Now I am not talking about finding your passion in terms of figuring out what you want to do in life or as a career. Not everyone works at a job associated with a passion. Perhaps your passion will be a life long hobby or interest, regardless, figure it out as earlier as possible. Passions can support us when life gets hard, and life will get hard.
Also, and perhaps more importantly than passions, value the time you have with people whom you care about and love because we never know when those people will no longer be in our lives. Be appreciative of the teacher that takes the extra time to explain something to you or check on you when you obviously are struggling. Tell the people you love that you love them — don’t assume they know — tell them and tell them often… whether it’s a parent or grand parent or cousin or friend or lover. If you love someone don’t hold back and don’t be afraid to tell them. Don’t be stingy with your heart because you think that you have more time. Seriously, if today were the last day of your life who would you want to know that they were loved by you? Tell them. Show them in not just your words but in your actions. Don’t assume you will have time to make up for being an ass; we often don’t.
Plan for a future but don’t assume there will be a future. There is something to the old cliche, “Live each day as if you are dying,” because whether you are imminently dying or not, we are all dying all of the time, so make the most of every moment. Please.
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain. You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking Racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older, Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, Thought I’d something more to say.Home Home again I like to be here When I canWhen I come home Cold and tired It’s good to warm my bones Beside the fireFar away Across the field Tolling on the iron bell Calls the faithful to their knees To hear the softly spoken magic spell
I have been talking about the gut-brain connection for years. In addition to my depression and suicidality, I have had gut issues for most of my life. Some of my fondest memories of my marriage to Lena (who is a neuroscientist) were discussing the possibilities of this linkage… and now it’s proven!!!
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.
