PREVIEW - Opening pages of Brick Wall.
By John Peter Davis Copyright 2008 All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the
publisher.
ISBN 978-0-6152-4463-1
Description
Not knowing what tomorrow holds may be a blessing in itself. Had I known the drastic twists and turns that it would cause
in my life I perhaps would not have said “Hello” to a woman that I met on the internet.
What ensued was an almost 3 year, intense, pay it forward experience like none you could imagine nor would ever want
for yourself or wish on anyone.
We take chances in life on what we think is the right thing to do. The journey I embarked upon saving a woman’s life in the
process is an unforgettable one and I would do it again with no regrets.
Brick Wall shows what can happen when what we want collides with reality. While it could have happened to anyone,
most would never have pursued the path that I took without hesitation.
*******
Introduction
My head is spinning. I don’t know where to start.
I ask myself, “When does it stop? When will things ever be normal? What is God doing to us? There is only so much a
person can handle. Why Lord, why?”
This isn’t a story that I ever wanted to write but it is a story that had to be written and the responsibility fell on me.
If someone had proposed this as a plot for a TV reality series, no one would have believed it saying it was too far fetched.
If I hadn’t lived through it myself, I don’t think I would have believed it either.
It is about a very dear friend of nearly two years whom I met on the internet, my best friend Toni.
The identities and locations are unimportant. What is important is to share with you how much can and did go wrong for a
person by making one mistake. That mistake eventually reshaped my own life and future. You will see how devastating
the domino effect can be on everyone involved.
*
The adventure begins. This is a completely true story. Writing it was started before the final events unfolded so
relationships have changed during the almost three years that this took place.
I wanted to call it “Money Does Buy Happiness” because it was caused in most part by the lack of several thousand
dollars.
I met Toni on the internet in spring 2005.
I am a widower although it didn’t start that way. I had been married for over twenty years when I decided that I wanted a
divorce. Before the legal proceedings could finish, my wife died in a car accident during a freak snowstorm on the first
night of spring 1998. She was only a hundred yards from the driveway when it happened. Instead of getting divorced, I
became widowed.
Life takes some bizarre twists.
I lived near Buffalo and Toni was from The Shore (central east coast), a separation of some four hundred and fifty miles.
She also had been married for over twenty years and was trying to get out of the now unhappy marriage.
After we met, she lived through an almost devastating chain of events lasting well over a year.
Our relationship is intertwined throughout the story which is fortunate because she has told me all along that she doesn’t
know what she would have done through all of this without me by her side.
If I say I “took care of her,” I don’t mean it in any sexist way. We are equals in our destiny. I say destiny because our two
paths merged into one. I strictly mean it in the sense that I took care of her when she couldn’t do so herself.
Perhaps what I meant earlier when I said that “money does buy happiness,” was that the lack of money can create
unhappiness and in this case hardship causing extreme mental stress to the point of a near mental breakdown.
While this story will sound at times like it can’t possibly have happened, trust me it did. I wish it hadn’t, for her sake,
because I cared so much for her and it hurt to see what she was going through.
My memory isn’t the best so I may miss some important points or will have to intentionally omit some. At times it may
seem like I am bouncing around in time and I will be.
That was my greatest problem with writing this story - how to sequence it. It isn’t effective just writing individual chapters
on each different situation that arose. That would take away the intensity. The way I present it illustrates how confusing
and jumbled days often were and besides, the problems usually overlapped and so couldn’t be treated separately.
*******
Part One
Spring 2005. From the first day that we started speaking in a chat room Toni and I talked on the internet for hours every
night, some evenings as many as seven hours.
She was living unhappily with her husband but wanted to get out on her own and move to New England (NE) to be near
her son and her grandson who had been born the previous November. Her daughter still lived at home but was old
enough to be out on her own.
Toni’s son was not on speaking terms with his stepfather. The son was born in her first marriage when she was just
seventeen and her husband died just before his son’s first birthday. How traumatic this must have been for a young
woman.
Her son became her life. She carried him everywhere and together they faced the world.
I explain all this to show how much she has gone through in her life. The fact that she raised her son at the age of
seventeen, initially on her own, attests to how strong this woman is.
That is one of the things that I loved about her. Actually, there were many things that I admired – her strength, her
independence, her intelligence, her humor. Basically her everything.
It is important to state those qualities that were so evident and strong in her because over time they started to fade or
withdraw into hidden corners of her personality.
Seeing her strengths fading is what has made me realize the gravity of her situation.
Now without much analysis, here is what happened. I will let you make your own judgments based on the facts.
Perhaps afterwards Toni will be able to fill in the gaps or make corrections. I say afterwards because as I write this
(December 2006) she is on her way to the hospital to try and check herself in for some mental health care.
It hurts me to be stuck here over four hundred miles away from her and let her go through this alone. The fact that she is
doing it shows her strength of will and character to recognize the need and to take corrective action.
It would take great courage to go to a hospital under these circumstances. I doubt if I could do it, at least not on my own.
She is having her dad drive her there and just drop her off because she doesn’t want to put him through the ordeal of
waiting to see what will happen.
*
During the summer months of 2005 Toni visited NE to spend time with her grandson, son, and daughter-in-law –
weekends here and there.
She bought a used 2001 BrandX vehicle with less than 40,000 miles on it. Then in July 2005 her husband Joe bought out
her half of the house that they had lived in for over twenty years.
This gave her enough money to move to NE in August to be near her grandson and to have a bit of a financial cushion. In
addition she was expecting funds from a lawsuit Joe had in progress.
Initially she lived with her son and his family showering them all with gifts. She adored her only grandson.
She then needed to get out on her own so she rented a studio apartment several miles away with a ten month lease. It
was a block from the ocean. She had lived near the ocean all of her life and greatly loved it.
From the apartment you could often hear the waves. It uplifted her spirit to hear them.
Out of the house settlement she ‘loaned’ friends money and gave money and gifts to family as well, throwing money
around, the way people do with new found wealth, although it was not a large sum she had received.
Being by the ocean in NE the rent was relatively expensive even though her lease ran through the fall and winter months.
In addition to the rent and necessities she had large expenses in a monthly vehicle payment and two anti-depressant
pills that were very costly (she had been taking them for five years). She of course didn’t have any insurance to cover their
cost.
*
Now let me remove the stigmatism of the term “depression.” Toni has suffered from it for a number of years. It is very
prominent throughout all that happens and seems to be THE illness of the 2000s. I am amazed at how many people I
meet who tell me they are on anti-depressants.
Perhaps it was always there and I didn’t notice it until it directly affected my life.
I know what the term “depression” conjures up in my mind and let me say it is not like that at all. People who need to take
anti-depressants are normal people like you and me but with chemical imbalances. They are not filled with gloom and
doom who are to be avoided because of their unpredictability. They are just regular people.
We are all human and deserve respect.
*
I must point out that what will surface in this story is the selfishness and indifference of many people including friends
and relatives when troubles arise.
Most help surprisingly comes from strangers and areas least expected.
By selfishness I mean that people mainly worry about themselves and if something doesn’t fit into their lifestyle they
would rather block it out.
I have run into that myself.
Try becoming unemployed and asking supposedly good friends for assistance. It is amazing how broke and busy
everyone suddenly becomes. But they all sure have a lot of free advice. I did have one friend help once but with a lot of
lecturing – you would think the unemployment had been my idea the way he carried on.
And, if you decide to look for employment in areas such as writing or starting a business, jobs that are outside of what
people perceive as acceptable employment (standard nine to five jobs), people absolutely turn their backs on you.
They listen to the initial story and offer a bit of sympathy but once the situation moves outside of their comfort zone they
smile, nod and hope you go away. Emails are initially answered and then support dwindles. Suddenly you are pushed
aside and ignored.
People are either envious that you are trying things they don’t dare, feel you are stupid for trying something out of the
ordinary, or just afraid that somehow you will disrupt and taint their lives.
The world is full of fair weather friends and relatives.
I must stress at this point that I am simply stating the facts to the best of my recollection. Nothing I write is meant
maliciously. This is simply what happened as remembered.
For obvious reasons I must temper down descriptions of certain people and events.
*
Other than the above large expenses that added up every month there was another of which I wasn’t aware until I had
known Toni for almost a year – an addiction that had grown over time to a well known very powerfully addictive anxiety drug
called DrugX.
The way she described the effects of DrugX to me afterwards, it made her feel invincible which explained a lot. Now I
understood why some things had seemed odd at the time.
Starting in late 2000, she was prescribed DrugX over a six month period to help relieve her anxiety through her
grandmother’s slow decline from a terminal illness.
At the same time Toni was taking her regular anti-depressants.
DrugX apparently helped soothe her anxieties and not that long afterwards another stress caused her to start taking it
again.
Her ex-husband-to-be Joe had sustained serious injuries in an accident several years earlier that resulted in him filing a
lawsuit.
He had to undergo very serious surgery and during the stress of this period she started taking DrugX again.
She saw nothing wrong with that, after all she had been previously prescribed to take it. She was easily able to obtain the
medication through the internet but it was very costly.
After moving to NE Toni started taking DrugX a bit more frequently. It was caused in part by a deteriorating relationship
with her son and family. It was very difficult for Toni because her grandson was her life.
I don’t think it helped being away from where she had lived most of her life, leaving behind her daughter, mom and dad,
and the business that she had successfully run for twenty years.
This is how Toni described the relationship with her son:
“My son and I have always had a special bond. I believe it's because his father died a week before his first birthday. If it
weren't for my son I don't think I would have survived that horrible ordeal of his death. Besides our special bond my son
and I share similar beliefs and personalities.
My son's relationship with his step-dad has always been strained.
In 2004 he met a girl online and fell in love. He was making plans to move to NE to start a life with her. He got a job there
and gave me more news that I was going to be a grandmother. That was truly one of the happiest days of my life.
We attended their wedding that July and my grandson was born in November.
December 2004 was one of the worst months of my life. Out of the blue my son disowned his step-dad and forbade any
communication with him or his grandson only saying that he has tolerated him all these years for my sake.
Besides this devastating me, it totally destroyed my husband and caused him to make my life miserable.
I moved in with my son August 2005 after leaving my husband. September I got my own place three miles from my son.
The time I spent at son's was mostly wonderful but I discovered what I felt was not a good, healthy environment for an
infant. I called family services concerned for my grandson's safety. They can’t help. I called the police and they went to
their house. Then the police came to see me.
I had only tried to protect my grandson. I was advised to not have any contact with my son or his family.
My son and his mother-in-law brought everything I had given to my son and personal things I had left at my son's and left it
on my porch.
It is now almost nine months since I saw them. They threw me out of their lives. I do not know what my grandson looks
like now. I do not know how my son is.
I am dead to him.”
*******
Part Two
As I write this I am very worried about when I will hear from her again. If she does get signed in to the hospital tonight and
she really needs it, perhaps there is a period during which outside contact is forbidden - a day or a week, or...
But I must continue writing - I do this for her.
END OF PREVIEW
Brick Wall ISBN 978-0-615-24463-1 Order now - click below Amazon Barnes & Noble Lulu Other online stores |
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