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The Soul Crushing Death of Sinéad O’Connor, Who I Should Have Helped

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

July 26, 2023

Sinéad and I had been out dancing at a Dublin disco called The Pink Elephant. It was our first date. I remember how she laughed when we saw the heavy metal band Def Leppard in a corner booth. Word was they were living in Ireland as tax dodge. Dublin was not very metal in 1985 and they were delighted that someone recognized them. “Def Leppard?” I burst out with my big American voice. “You guys are my little brother’s favorite band!” They all looked immediately deflated. Sinéad let out a big laugh. “Jesus, you’re vicious,” she said.

With the news of the passing of Sinéad O’Connor, so many memories of our time together have come flooding back. Her pain is well known to the world, but her impish humor less so. I’m both unsurprised by the news and crushed beyond repair. So much that I can barely write this. Hers was a life of pain that seeped into her music and now that pain and music are silent.

I spent a large part of the summer of 1983 living in a squat in Brixton, England, on the south side of London. Thanks to an Atlanta connection, I was rooming with an Irish violinist named Steve Wickham, who had most famously played on U2’s War album. When he headed back to Dublin to play a U2 show in Phoenix Park (with The Eurythmics, Big Country, and Steel Pulse) I tagged along and fell in love with the emerald isle. The summer of 1984 was dedicated to becoming a Dubliner (with short trips to London and Paris). This included supporting his band, In Tua Nua, who was recording a song by a very young Sinéad O’Connor. I was their roadie when they opened for Bob Dylan at Slane Castle and was there when they signed their deal with Island Records in London. I was firmly in Sinéad’s world but it wasn’t until the following summer that we would meet.

Back in Dublin for the summer of 1985, my calendar was structured around some big concerts. First was U2 at Croke Park (29 June) with In Tua Nua and R.E.M. (and Squeeze) opening, and then the show of all shows, Live Aid at Wembley Stadium (13 July). I was camped out, as had become custom, with Steve Wickham and his American wife, Babs, now living in the Ranelagh neighborhood of Dublin. That’s where I met Sinéad. She would come over to work on songs with Steve in his kitchen, her singing to his fiddle. In fact there’s a recording in my cassette stash of her singing to the sound of me washing dishes in the background.

She was small but gruff, her voice often at some frequency unreachable by my American ears. But when she sang, everything stopped. People have written lengthy tomes about that voice, so I’ll just say that once she started singing, everything else in the world, even dish washing, seemed pointless. Her big penetrating eyes were easy to fall into as well. At the time she was working doing singing telegrams and would occasionally show up at Steve’s in a French maid costume. The juxtaposition was jarring, stockings and combat boots.

Steve and Bab’s roommate, Clodagh, whispered that Sinéad fancied a pint with me. For the first time, I had an actual girlfriend back home, a fellow Emory student named Starla. But I was so enchanted with Sinéad’s talent, I just wanted to know more about her. So Sinéad and I went to the movies. Eager to share “my culture” with her, I took her to see The Breakfast Club at the local cinema. She didn’t get it. Afterwards, we walked down to An Lar (the City Center) to see what would happen. Besides dancing to Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood at the Pink Elephant (and our encounter with Def Leppard), we immediately got into some very deep conversations. I had just graduate from Emory and was on my way to grad school, so I was anxious to get her take on the role of the Catholic Church in Irish culture. I had gotten some amusing anecdotes from Bono, so I was curious what the singing maid had to say.

At this point there had been murmurings about the abuse of children by Catholic priests but I got a first hand testimony of the reality of that sick norm for Irish families from Sinéad herself, just 20 years old at that moment. I won’t go into detail, but it was clear that she had a legitimate anger rooted in very real trauma. And her emphatic point was that her experience was widespread in her homeland. She told me about the Magdalene Laundries and the role the Pope, John Paul II, played in protecting pedophile priests. It was heavy, so the Guinness and dancing helped to keep our heads above water.

We stumbled out to Grafton Street and headed up Rathmines Road to my kip at Steve’s. She then, in her long low rumble Irish voice, asked if she could kiss me. I remember not being sure I heard her correctly and asked her to repeat herself. That was our first kiss and I’ve revisited it a thousand times. If I had followed her lead, how different both our lives might have been. Maybe she would be here now. I felt even in those first moments, she was asking to be rescued from her pain. I wish I was the person I am now when I was 21. I would have said let’s go far away from this place.

We had more of those conversations on Grafton Street and at Steve’s. She was at Steve’s one day when my mother called asking where I was and Sinéad did me a favor by lying that I was just “out.” I was up in Belfast, Northern Ireland and had been detained during a riot and missed my train back to Dublin. She showed kindness to my worrying mother when her mother had shown her only anger. Shortly after that, Sinéad moved to London, to advance her singing career. I followed a few weeks later for an In Tua Nua show and to stay for the epic Live Aid concert. The day after Live Aid, Sinéad and I met up for a day of shopping on Carnaby Street. She was full of confidence about the direction her career was going. The world was paying attention to the music coming from Dublin and she was on the cusp of finding an audience.

In the fall I headed home to start my work as a graduate student in Atlanta, and build a relationship with Starla. Sinéad stayed in touch and there are a box of letters somewhere full of chatter about Latin American politics and her work with The Edge on the soundtrack of Captive, a British film about a terrorist gang. 

I returned to Dublin the summer of 1986, after Steve had left In Tua Nua to join the Waterboys, who had begun work on their sprawling Fisherman’s Blues album. I had spent the first part of the summer in Copenhagen, staying with Starla’s uncle, but doubled back to London to see Sinéad. She had just shaved off her short cropped haircut and was completely bald. It was striking. I was starting to pay attention to the rise of the racist skinheads in the United States and was considering making that subject of my Master’s Thesis. “Are you going to study me?” she asked. Her intensity on social issues was undermined by her darting eyes which rarely made contact, which I now recognize as a marker of lifelong trauma.

Since it was our thing, we went to the movies. This time it was Return to Oz at theatre in Leicester Square. That filmed she loved, because Dorothy escapes a sanatorium to the magical realm of OZ. I think she felt London was her Oz. Later we went to a Russian restaurant with her roommates Spike and Clodagh. (I had to send my undercooked Chicken Kiev back – the things one remembers.) And then we headed up to their apartment, with Bob Marley pictures tacked on every wall. They smoked massive amounts of hash, while I listened to the Black Uhuru and Aswad records and watched Sinéad’s transformation in this London Bohemia. Things were coming her way.

We reconnected again in London in 1987. I was again in Dublin, after some time wandering the south of France and Italy. Sinéad let me use her London apartment as a crash pad. She had finally landed a major label record deal with Ensign and was starting the work on her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. We stayed up all night talking and listening to Joni Mitchell albums. There was a joy in her voice that was new. She was about to finally be heard and heard on her terms. This wasn’t the shy girl dressed as a French maid singing, “Happy Birthday.” This was a fully developed artist who was about to share the thing that made her her with the world. And that included her righteous anger. I remember falling asleep in her bed while she danced to the music on her stereo. I woke up the following morning and she was already up, dancing to the music. She grabbed my camera and snapped a picture of me wondering who this new Sinéad was. What I didn’t know was she was pregnant with her first child.

That album, and the follow up, I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got, of course set the world on fire. The next time I saw her was in May 1990 when she had a concert in Atlanta at the Fox Theater. We hung out in her downtown hotel room, ordered room service, and she showed my pictures of her son, Jake. My skinhead study was fully underway, so we talked more about fascism than music, but I shared with her some of the music of the Atlanta band that I had managed, Drivin n’ Cryin, who were signed to Island Records, U2’s label. She seemed good. Stable and confident, but lonely. Neither of us had been good at sustaining long term relationships. But her voice had opened up a door of adoration and she accepted it cautiously, like the love of an abusive mother who could turn on you in a flash.

And that’s what happened in 1992 when she tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. I knew exactly what it was about. I immediately remembered our conversations in Dublin about John Paul II’s role in protecting child abusing priests. But the larger public flipped out, seeing it as some type anti-Catholic action. It got ugly fast. Two weeks later I saw the audience at Madison Square Garden boo her off the stage at the Bob Dylan tribute concert, (I was watching it on Pay-Per-View.) and my heart broke watching this crowd, who was there to honor that greatest protest singer, scream their hatred at this young female protest singer. Maybe it was because she was bald.

By that time, Sinéad and I were on opposite paths and never met again. I bought her records and followed her ups and downs. A few years ago, when she was being very public with her mental health challenges, I reached out to her on Twitter and we reconnected. I told her that I had work through my own issues with suicide and wrote a book about how to climb out of that black hole. But she seemed to be slipping farther into that abyss and the death of her son last year was more than she could bear.

Now that she’s gone all of us that knew her are left with the sinking feeling that we could have done more. Yes, her brilliant music will live on, but so will the ache of guilt. As we focused on our own journeys, we assumed those around us would be fine when, in fact, they desperately needed us. I am far removed from the 20-year lass I met in a Dublin kitchen, but I can’t shake the feeling I could have been a better friend. I’m sorry, Sinéad. I will do better next time.

From Big Brother to Cancer Care Giver

~ Randy Blazak ~ 7 Comments

July 23, 2023

What’s the John Lennon line about how life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans? I had this vision of flying into Georgia (on my father’s dime), rescuing my brother from his shithole hobo camp, and delivering him to a Portland cancer treatment facility, then watching his recovery from a safe distance. It didn’t quite turn out like that. 

When I got to my dad’s after landing in Atlanta, my brother, Ronnie, was on the phone, telling me I had wasted my time and that he wasn’t going to leave his camp in Cartersville, Georgia. I could tell he was afraid of the incredible change he was facing. Instead of suffering from his rectal cancer in a hell he knew, he was looking at relocating in a place far away from the Georgia piedmont. And he had never even been on a plane. I told him I wasn’t going to force him to do anything, I was just headed to come hang out with him for a bit. He’d been held up in a Quality Inn for a few nights because his pain was so great. He was convinced he was on death’s doorstep and just wanted to be left alone. This would have to be his choice.

Finally seeing him after two years was a bit rough. I thought about the last days of Howard Hughes but without the billions. His hotel door was propped up open so the Georgia heat and flies could come in as he lay in the bed. I went into operational mode. Food, coffee, and whatever else he needed. Gradually he realized he would be better off in Portland. He wasn’t ready to die just yet. I got a room next to him and we made plans to strike his camp later in the day.

He had been living on a hill behind the Cartersville IHOP for seven years. How he survived, I’ll never fully understand. Another blistering summer in rapidly evaporating Georgia would have killed him. His camp was a tent, full of spiders, and a year of garbage hidden under tarps, and a dozen gallon jugs of urine that served as his bedpans when he was immobilized by pain. It wasn’t pleasant but that thought that there was something better waiting motivated us to clear the camp and head to Atlanta to catch a flight to the land of Obamacare. 

The journey home was a challenge. Whatever you do, don’t fly Frontier Airlines. It’s the nightmare airlines. Just getting a wheelchair to get Ronnie to the gate at Atlanta Jackson Hartsfield Airport was an ordeal. Then, because of cancelled flights, I had to race him to another gate on another concourse and hope that delayed flight would get us to our connecting flight in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas to Portland flight was cancelled and they told us they could get us on another flight home three days later. I told them he was a cancer patient who had an important oncology appointment the following day and Frontier Airlines ticketing agent just shrugged her shoulders. So we headed to another terminal (Ron still in a wheelchair) and bought a ticket for that night on Spirit Airlines. (I never thought I’d say this, but Frontier makes Spirit look like Delta.) We finally made it to Portland, but Ronnie’s backpack didn’t arrive until six days later, with all his electronic items stolen from the bag. Frontier sucks.

After a day of adjusting to West Coast time, my job driving my brother around began. First to an oncologist in Tualatin, south of Portland, where we found out his cancer was Stage 4. Then to a residential facility I was hoping to move him into, where they told us it would be a few weeks. This was happening the week I was driving Cozy to and from art camp, way out in the traffic hell of Beaverton. Endless calls to Medicaid to get his long term care interview moved up from late August, making CT scan appointments, preparing meals, and administering pain meds every two hours.

Suddenly, I’d become an in home care nurse.

It just seemed really clear that this was the obvious role to step into. What else should I do? My brother is battling anal cancer. He was doing it alone in the Georgia woods, and now he’s doing it on my couch in a state that has legal weed. 

The legal weed bit has blown his mind. It’s been hugely helpful with his pain and appetite (although it wasn’t helpful with the Taylor Swift video I tried to make after we got high and watched Yellow Submarine.) In the conservative state of Georgia, possession of less than an ounce of pot is an automatic year in prison, on the taxpayers’ dime. In the liberal state of Oregon, an ounce of weed just means you’re running low on weed.

Once the pot and narcotic pain meds started to work, Ronnie started to feel human again. He’s got an amazing oncologist at OHSU’s Knight Cancer Center and wonderful palliative care coming. We’re still trying to find housing for him. Going through chemo on my couch is not an option. Keeping him in colostomy bags and diapers with an 8-year-old running around is a less than an ideal setting for him and my family, but he’s, literally, out of the woods. Sitting on our porch in the cool Portland night air (the opposite of Georgia), has allowed us to connect in a way we never did when we were kids. It started to feel like this experience was healing me as much as it was intended to heal him. 

It’s certainly a left turn from my normal summer, teaching on line and working on my side projects, but the support of Cozy, Andi, and Jaime makes it work. Watching Cozy and her uncle bond has been a thrill (Cozy is ferocious on the board games), and Andi has helped me remember how important this effort is. The moments I can escape with Jaime for a bit have kept my battery charged and her concern for my brother just fills my heart. And I’ve been able to show Ronnie some of the joys of my little town, like green tea at the Chinese Garden and way too much sugar at Voodoo Donuts.

Fifty years ago, everything was a constant fight between us. I never would have thought of trying to comfort him. Now my hand is on his back as the doctor tells him that his cancer has spread from his rectum to his lymph nodes and lungs. I don’t put him down for his assertion that he can “shred” his tumor with turmeric and sound waves. I just encourage him to listen to his doctors, who are among the best in America. This isn’t Georgia. Under Oregon’s expanded Medicaid, even the poorest among us have access to be best care.

Part of employing empathy is seeing this through my brother’s eyes. He has to be scarred shitless about this diagnosis, that is close to a death sentence, with a treatment option that will be a true test of his mettle. He’s lived as a hermit in the Georgia woods for ten years and now he’s in the hipster metropolis of Portland (Just the number of people walking around has shocked him. Nobody walks down the street in Cartersville, Georgia.), and, on top of all that, he has to trust a brother that has showed him more hostility than love in his life. I can’t imagine what’s going on in his brain. Thank God (Oregon voters) for legal weed.

Ronnie has been incredibly appreciative and acknowledges turning my living room into a cancer ward has been an imposition. But I thank him. This opportunity to help him has been good my for soul. If I can expunge a lifetime at anger towards him, I can deal with my anger issues for good. The other day he reminded of me when I knocked him out for calling me a “baby killer” in front of my girlfriend who had just had an abortion. He’s not the same person, and now I have a chance to be different.

Healing can take many forms. For my brother, it’s going to be regular radiation and chemo treatments, a bunch of pot, and hopefully a bed of his own. For me, just being here for him is the healing I needed.

Ron’s GoFundMe campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-house-my-brother-for-cancer-treatment?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Little Brother

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

July 7, 2023

My little brother, Ronnie, and I took sibling rivalry to a new level. In fact, I’m quite sure we sent each other to the Emergency Room when we were kids. Our constant fighting must’ve driven our parents crazy. I know it did for me. It was the cause of some desperation, at age 16, when I first thought about throwing myself into a lake and drowning. (To be clear, the lake was a Stone Mountain, Georgia pond that was maybe three feet deep.) As an adult, I stopped talking to him for 17 years after he threatened to kill our mother. He did some time for that one.

Things have changed with my brother.

We started to reconnect in 2012, when I was back in Georgia. We visited some of our old stomping grounds in Stone Mountain and I learned how to talk to him in a non-antagonistic way. Ronnie has had a challenging life and I think our sibling dynamic played a roll. I wasn’t exactly the best big brother. I think Ronnie was the first target of my rolling anger that was the result of my abuse. I relished in the fight as that was my standard mode. When I could have been protective and nurturing, I was combative and cruel. So the reconnect was a chance for repair, especially when my bother fell into homelessness.

For the last few years, my brother has lived in the woods in Cartersville, Georgia, north of Atlanta. Cozy and I had lunch with him and my father in 2021 at the IHOP near his camp and he was skin and bones. We didn’t know it at the time, but he had cancer. We didn’t talk for 17 years, but we talk pretty much every day now, unless he can’t make it down to Kroger to charge his phone.

Trying to find Ronnie adequate cancer care in a backwards red state like Georgia has been next to impossible. Dissertations have been written on how the Republican Party has conned poor and working people to vote against their interests to pad the pockets of elites, but suffice it to say, being sick and poor in Georgia is a death sentence.

So I’m bringing my brother to Oregon.

The assumption in Georgia is that every poor person who claims to be sick is only after OxyContin, so the insane amount of bureaucratic bullshit that is required to even see a doctor guarantees poor and homeless people are cut out of the health care system. Ronnie’s cancer doctor was 46 miles away at Emory University and he was routinely too sick to even organize a ride to the city. Tired of missed appointments, they dropped him from their patient roll, a cost cutting measure that shortened my brother’s life expectancy. Social scientists know we can predict your life span by the zip code you live in and the death gap for Cartersville, Georgia is as wide as the Tallulah Gorge.

Oregon, on the other hand, expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, making sure low income people have first rate health and dental coverage. It took a matter of minutes to get Ronnie signed up to the Oregon Health Plan and get him space in a residential facility and an oncologist to start his cancer treatment. My mother was dumbfounded by how easy it was to get my brother the services he desperately needed. “Well, I live in a blue state, Mom,” I told her. Now I just have to get him here.

Early tomorrow morning, I’m catching a flight to Atlanta (paid for my father) to collect my little brother. The nature of his cancer is among the ugliest, anal cancer. He hasn’t been able to access the health supplies he needs so he’s often sleeping in his own waste. I’ve been Amazoning him colostomy bags, but he needs so much more, including diapers and clean clothes.  Getting him in shape to fly back across the country is going to take some work. He’s in great pain, without access to any sensible pain medicine, often sure he’s not going to live through the night. I assure him Oregon also has legal weed to help him through those nights. I would bring a bag of THC gummies with me from the corner pot shop, but in Georgia that would get you a one way trip to prison. (The penalty for possessing less than one ounce of marijuana is up to one year in prison and up to a $1,000 fine.) Did I mention that Georgia sucks?

These may be his last days or the wonderful care given to low income people in Oregon may extend his life considerably. Anything is better than being poor and sick in the South. I’m banking on him being alive when I get to Cartersville and being in good enough shape to get on the plane. I’m looking forward to our cross country trip and getting to know the guy I didn’t have time for when I was a kid.

DWM: Dating While Married

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

June 30, 2023

What are the rules of being separated? Nobody sent me the manual. Also, is there a handy guidebook to diagram the complexity of romantic love? I’m in the weeds out here.

The day A moved out the fall of 2021, I thought it would be a short term break while I figured my shit out. I was just at the beginning of understanding how my experience of childhood abuse had been controlling my brain. Therapy, some good reading, and quiet reflection, and we’d be fixed in a few months. A week after she moved out she told me she was “dating” someone (well, that wasn’t exactly the word she used) and that person quickly became her boyfriend, which didn’t help my intention to calmly become a better person.

In fact, it did the opposite. It unleashed my inner redneck. I’d go the bar that he frequented, order a double bourbon and imagine kicking his ass. Not exactly the practice of someone who leads workshops on mindfulness. Gradually, I came to accept her choice and focused back on my own work. If she’s happy, I’m happy. Blah, blah, blah. We were talking about divorce, but it always seemed to be on the back burner. And every time she’d breakup with this guy, she was back in my arms.

But by the end of 2022, I thought I should try this dating thing. I missed having a partner in crime. Someone to get out of the house with. Also, I was still angry my wife was spending all her free time with this guy. A friend suggested I go on the Bumble dating site. So I set up a profile and met some really great women; a flight attendant, an artist, and a movie producer, who I went to NYC to stay with for a week and is one of the most accomplished women I’ve ever met. But I felt like I was a performing a role; A and our fantasized reunion always on my mind. It just seemed like a hoax. So I cancelled Bumble and focused on winning her back.

Then all that changed.

Two weeks ago, I was feeling aggrieved because I felt like A was routinely disregarding me and I was all in my head about it. It was Friday and the start of her week with Cozy (and the end of her week with her boyfriend) and my Pisces brain was going to claim I had a date with a beautiful lawyer just to drive a splinter in. Then I took a left turn.

According to Facebook, I have over 2,800 friends. Some folks go way back to high school, some I don’t know how I know, and a whole bunch are dead. But there was someone in my feed who I didn’t know how I knew, I just knew she owned a Portland dress shop and was stunning. I found myself exploring her pictures, with her dogs, her family and friends, and travels. So I took a chance and messaged her.

Me: You’re always in my feed so I thought I should say hey!

Her: How are you doing? I’m rarely on Fb and miss a lot of messages so if I ignore you, I swear it’s nothing personal.

Me: Was just looking for some live music tonight. I need tunes.

Her: Ooh did you find anything good?!

Me: Usually I go to No Fun on Hawthorne for random bands. You should come out!

Her: Sounds fun! I’m down

And that’s how my relationship with Jaime started. She walked into a favorite SE Portland joint of mine, a bar called No Fun, and it was like a brand new chapter was about to unfold. We immediately clicked, like nothing I’d experienced before, while the band played TLC and Britney Spears songs. Sitting at the bar, we began to plan a trip to Paris and I said, “I’m going to kiss you tonight.” Then we ended up on the dance floor at Goodfoot, another local bar, for Soul Night, and by the second song we were already a couple.

I can’t explain what happened to my brain. All that bandwidth that had been taken up by my obsession with A, winning her back and/or hating that she was with this guy who I detested, just vanished. What did it mean? Was I not in love with her? My love for her had defined every day of my life for the past ten years. But my love for her was often about “my love” and not about her as a person. I was unable to repair that disconnect to lure her back. But now all I could think about was Jaime. It was like a channel had switched.

At first I felt the need to keep this new relationship on the down low. I didn’t know how to “frame” it. But after the April car crash that Cozy and I had been in (that totaled the RAV) and the cancer scare earlier this month, I know every second in this life matters.

Jaime and I quickly became connected at the hip. I wanted to learn everything about her. I wanted to not make the mistakes of the past. In a few days I was convinced that I could build something with her and finally release A from the crushing weight of being tied to my project. A seemed relieved that I had found someone, which was both nice and annoying. A week after our first meeting, A OK’d Jaime and I taking Cozy to a Portland Thorns soccer game. Seeing how wonderful she was with my daughter sealed the deal and I asked her to be my girlfriend.

I truly don’t understand the nature of love. My ten years with A, including the year and half separation, still carry a real meaning to me. She’s the mother of my child, but she has a boyfriend who I know she loves. I know there have been people rooting for us to reunite (and others who haven’t). When she told me a year ago, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” I laughed it off as the standard doldrums of marriage. But now I feel the same way.

All I know is that my heart has been kidnapped by someone I want to be with as much as possible. Cozy loves her madly and so do I. It came from out of the blue, but I know it’s real because she has me listening to Taylor Swift and thinking about my words before I say them. It may just be a summer affair or it may be something with some staying power. I don’t know and I don’t care and it feels damn good.

It’s nice not to worry about what people think. I just want to put all these lessons to work to keep this magic moment going that started on a Friday night in a bar called No Fun. As Taylor sang, “A string that pulled me, out of all the wrong arms, right into that dive bar. ” There is a golden string that now connects me to her and I can’t help but just say, “Yeah, well, it’s divine intervention.”

Tonight at 8:30 will be our two-week anniversary and it feels like I’ve known this person for a lifetime. Two weeks from now, I might be saying, “What the hell was THAT?” I have a feeling that we’ll be doing just fine. Love is a beautiful thing.

NOTE: I let Jaime read this before posting it. If she’s good, I’m good.

The Day I Found Out I Didn’t Have Cancer

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

June 8, 2023

I seem to be surrounded by cancer. My dad is in chemo therapy this week to treat his recurring bladder cancer. We’re trying to get my brother to Oregon to treat his anal cancer. (He lives in a red state where they just let poor people die.) My aunt died of breast cancer. My grandfather died of prostate cancer. The news is filled with news stories of 90210’s Shannen Doherty’s breast cancer spreading to her brain (making me feel guilty for all the “I hate Brenda”: stuff in the early 1990s). It’s everywhere.

For the past week I have been convinced I was joining their ranks.

After a routine blood test revealed extremely elevated PSA (prostate-specific antigen) levels, I high-tailed it to the urologist. Her finger up my butt informed her (and me) that there was an elevated risk of prostate cancer. I tried not to panic. She asked me if I was peeing more often and I said no. Then suddenly I noticed I was peeing more often. I was convinced I was the walking dead. In my line of work, I’m often tasked to map out worst case scenarios (like Trump trolls trying to overthrow the government), so I began to doom scroll myself down the back hole of oblivion.

I immediately made an appoint for the biopsy. One should not wait on these matters. “Maybe it was just something I ate, errrrrrgh…” The date wasn’t until July, so I had weeks to freak myself out. Andi wisely urged me to get on the phone and demand an earlier appointment to get my ass poked. She’s generally right about everything so I moved up the date to the following Monday. Then she headed off to Lake Tahoe to do a fundraising bike ride for leukemia research.

My date with the anal probe was this past Monday (June 5). It wasn’t fun but it wasn’t horrible. I had to take an enema while I got Cozy ready for school. “Dad, I need to brush my teeth!” “Just a minute, honey, I’m crapping my brains out.” Everyone at the doctor’s office was cool. In sociology we call it, “studied nonobservance.” No cracks about buttholes allowed. I joked with the nurse that she probably sees a lot of ass. “All day long,” she dryly replied. The doctor came in, turned me on my side and went to work. The inserted probe took 12 samples from the many splendored parts of my prostate. After that, she informed me that I can expect to pee, poop, and ejaculate blood for the next week. Jesus. The appointment to return for the results was June 23. I figured I’d be dead by then.

I didn’t want Cozy to know what was going on because who wants your kid to worry, but I did mention that I had a “procedure” done that might have some side effects. She was home from school and I came out of the bathroom looking white as a sheet. “What’s wrong, Dad?” “Because of that procedure, I’m peeing blood,” I said, feeling weak in the knees. “Oh, so you’re on your period,” she said. I might be OK.

Over the next few days I dipped deeper in the doom pool. The blood, the family history, the twice as high PSA numbers. There was no way I was getting out of this alive. The anger brewed. The world is unfair! Wah! “They say these things come in threes; cancer, divorce, and a likely IRS audit.” I stopped sleeping and got bitchy toward Andi, even though she was only supportive. Wednesday morning in the dentist chair, while getting my teeth x-rayed, I burst into tears realizing how scared I was at the prospect of the Big C. Andi encouraged me to get my results meeting moved up. Right again.

My therapist also helped me to better communicate my fears with Andi and it worked. I apologized for turning my anxiety into resentment towards her and she assured me she would be with me every step of the way, no matter what the verdict. Later, I had a drink with a friend who works at OHSU, known for their cutting edge cancer research, and she offered to plug me into the best resources available. I started to feel like I wasn’t alone.

This morning I got a call from the doctor’s office. Not the doctor but her scheduler who called because (at Andi’s urging) I had been calling asking for the results. No cancer. No cancer. No cancer. All that weight lifted. I ran to tell Andi and apologized for being so stupid. She held me closely and said, “I told you that you were going to be OK.” Like I said, she’s always right. I can’t say what this feeling is like, this sudden clarity. I know the hell that my father and brother are going through. I don’t have to go there now, so I can keep my focus on them and my Portland family. I don’t want the, “me, me, me” anymore. The cascade of misery is, for now, not racing towards me.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here, other than live in a blue state with broad health care coverage. I feel like I’ve been given a second chance. I want to not waste time on anger. I want to people I love and the people I don’t to be happy and live with ease. I want to eat tomatoes and other healthy foods. I want to drink green tea and meditate in the sun and rain. I want to focus on the positive energy that is there for us to tap into whenever we need it, and I need it.

June 8, 2023 will be one of those days. After I got my news, the stories about the death of Christian hate monger Pat Robertson and the federal indictment of Donald Trump hit the national news stream. Suddenly, it seemed like I had a door open to hope and light in the world. I can weather peeing blood for a few more days. Today is yet one more reminder to live, not in the past or the future, but the vivid present. And let’s support our friends and family who are on their cancer journeys.

2022 in Review: No Thanks

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

December 31, 2022

I knew this year was going to be hard, but it was a real test on all of us. From mass shootings in Buffalo, Ulavde, and over 600 others, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, there was death all around us. Throw in the carnage from the accelerating climate crisis and it felt like we were in last days of humanity. If it weren’t for the sizable wins by Democrats and the World Cup performance of Lionel Messi, the year might have been a complete write off.

The lowlight of 2022 was American women losing their right to choose but the highlight of the year was the hearings of January 6th Committee that deftly presented the case to the American people that Donald Trump employed multiple tactics to overthrow American democracy. It was must-see TV and we can only hope 2023 gives us indictments for the orange traitor and his inner circle of enablers. Watching him flail after his November 16 campaign announcement has bordered on high comedy. (Do you know anyone who has bought his “collectable” NFTs? I don’t.) Maybe he and Elon Musk can compete over who has the lamest social media platform.

All that informed my own year, which included heading to Ukraine to help resettle refugees, spending a day at Auschwitz, working on a federal DHS grant to find ways to interrupt extremist violence, and talking to the media about the rising threat of Kanye West. It was a great distraction from my personal life which I struggled to make sense of my domestic circumstance. I started the year in the depths of despair and I’m ending it with a healthy dose of “I don’t care.” A great somatic therapist allowed me to connect the dots from my childhood abuse to the problematic patterns in my history and finally take agency in my life. I know I’ll be fine.

The thread through this all has been the complete joy of watching my daughter move from being a silly second grader to a chess playing third grader (still pretty silly). Her growth as a person has been both challenging and inspiring. Particularly interesting has been watching her negotiate the encroaching gender norms and fairly successfully smashing them. Gen Z will have its own relationship with patriarchy, but it’s not your mother’s Riot Grrrl feminism.

I didn’t blog much in 2022. I got 26 posts out, mostly about my trip to Ukraine, which I am still processing. The posts about my separation reflect how hard I was working to fix things, but it takes two to tango and I’m starting to think I should find a better person to dance with. When I hosted poetry readings in Atlanta, I used to make fun of middle-agers who read poems about their divorces. I’m not going to be that guy. Besides, 2023 has much to offer. There will be baseball and birthdays (Disney turns 100). Russia getting the hell out of Ukraine and maybe the last Daylights Savings ever. Great music I don’t even know about yet. I have tickets to Springsteen’s February 25th show in Portland. (But who will I take?) And maybe I will blog about the Trump family in custody. Who knows?

I’m ending the year on a melancholy note but there has been immense joy in 2022 between the crushing moments of sadness. We can use the year push us to keep our children safer and our democracy stronger.

2022 WTW Posts

I Became a Teacher Because of Sydney Poitier (January 15, 2022)

Represent! Why We Need a Black Woman on the Supreme Court (January 30, 2022)

La Historia de Cómo Encontré mi Corazón (para el Día de San Valentín) (February 13, 2022)

My last hours of 57, when I grew up. (February 19, 2022)

In the Toilet Paper Tube of History: Watching the Battle for Ukraine in Real Time (February 27, 2022)

Psychoanalyzing the Attraction to Chaos, or Why I Want to Go to Ukraine (March 13, 2022)

On the Polish Border with Ukraine: Watching the World Change from Up Close (March 25, 2022)

The First Two Days on the Polish-Ukraine Border, as Bombs Fall on Lviv (March 26, 2022)

One Night in Lviv (Makes a Hard Man Humble) (March 28, 2022)

Panic in Auschwitz: Putting the Present Moment in Context (April 2, 2022)

Where I’ve Been, What I’ve Seen, Who I Am: A Brief Reflection of My Time in Ukraine/Poland (April 6, 2022)

The Rescue of the Girl in the Red Coat: Gratitude for One Ukrainian Dad (April 17, 2022)

Seriously, What’s Wrong with Men? Lighting Fires in Post-Roe America (May 12, 2022)

It’s All Too Much: You Don’t Want to Arm This Teacher at the Moment (June 6, 2022)

Talking to My 7-year-old Daughter About Abortion (June 25, 2022)

My Jim Crow Marriage: MAGA Co-dependency (July 21, 2022)

Gender – Nature vs Nurture 8: The Looking Glass Self (August 7, 2022)

To Escalate or De-escalate, That is the Question (August 23, 2022)

“Where did my friends go?” Wives as Unpaid Therapists (September 14, 2022)

The Catch-22 of Trump 2024, or, How Donald Trump’s Comical Death is Democracy’s Great Hope  (September 19, 2022)

Sept. 26, 2012: My 10-year Reconstruction Begins (September 26, 2022)

Ukraine Days: Reflections During a DakhaBrakha concert (October 1, 2022)

The Complexity of the Game: Making Sense of the World Series (October 28, 2022)

I Was a Third Grader (November 15, 2022)

Foreshadowing Fascism: The Spike in Anti-Semitism is Bigger than Trump and Kanye (December 7, 2022)

Dad’s Top Discs of 2022 (December 14, 2022)

A Room for Andi: Creating Space in the House of Patriarchy (December 25, 2022)

2022 in Review: No Thanks (December 31, 2022)

A Room for Andi: Creating Space in the House of Patriarchy

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

December 25, 2022

Christmas Eve

It was a challenge to come up with the right Christmas present last year for my wife, Andi. We were a month into our separation and I definitely couldn’t half-ass it. Half-assing it through the marriage is what got me in this horrible situation. I got her a LSAT study book (which she used) and a trip to Paris (which she didn’t use). So, a year later, I really wanted to show up. It was time to center her instead of my idea of her. We’re back under the same roof, but still separated. I want her to know I’ve learned something this year.

There are always “things” we want. (If I don’t get The Beatles Get Back DVD from Santa, I’m buying it myself.) But things are transitory. They matter and then they don’t. What if there was a gift that was both lasting and reflected a partner who pays attention? A gift that recognizes the personhood of the recipient, not just their role as a gift receiver.

One of the great works I read in grad school was Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). If the home is a metaphor for society, it’s the man’s house. Rooms for women are assigned specific gendered tasks; the kitchen, the laundry room, the nursery, the sewing room. Men get their den to just exist in. What is women’s equivalent of the man cave? Woolf argued if women are to write fiction, they need a room of their own. If they want to live outside the constraints of their proscribed roles, they must have a safe space inside their own homes to explore their options. Like men do every day.

I bought my house in 1999 and turned every room into my own. That included a room for my vinyl collection and a separate room for my CDs. When Andi moved in in 2013, we had to shoehorn her life into my space. My closet for her clothes. My kitchen drawers for her pans. My walls for her paintings. She was a lodger in Randyland. How could she ever feel like she truly belonged here?

So that could be my gift; a room of her own. Andi plans on going to law school in the fall and will need a study space, or just a “be” space. My CD room was upstairs with big east-facing windows. It was the perfect candidate to be de-Randified and transformed into a comfy study. I had to build shelves in another room to store my thousands of CD. It had to be all her room, no Blazak artifacts. Since it was upstairs, I could work on in while she was at work or “out,” without her knowing what I was up to.

So I got to work, painting, fixing cracks in the wall, finding a desk and a comfy reading chair, and framing the book cover of Woolf’s classic for the wall. Cozy helped too, contributing a plant and a framed picture of her and her mother. Oh, and a white furry rug she found at IKEA. A bottle of mescal and a note in the desk and the job was done. I purposely under-decorated. It would defeat the entire idea if I filled her room with my ideas. She can create the space in her image.

I wrapped a copy of A Room of One’s Own (sans cover) after inscribing in it, “The rest of this gift is upstairs,” and placed it under the tree. I put Cozy to bed (after watching Home Alone) and hoped she’d be home in time to open presents in the morning.

Christmas Morning

Like Santa, Andi arrived in the wee hours and we opened presents. Cozy was most excited about the Minecraft Lego set. (Mr. Claus went through the ringer for that one.) Andi’s present for me was a Joni Mitchell biography. The last gift was her Woolf book and then Cozy and I led her upstairs to see the room I’ve been working on for several weeks.

I think she liked it. “It’s probably the most thoughtful gift you’ve ever given me,” she said. I want her to have her space in this male owned house. I want her to want to stay.

OK, now I have to go get my Beatles DVD.

I Was a Third Grader

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

November 15, 2022

I guess it’s a normal thing to compare yourself to your kids. “When I was your age I had to walk three miles to school, in the snow, and barefoot, and uphill, and backwards!” I remember when I was in high school we all took our shoes off on a snowy Georgia day and walked to school so we could foist that same flex on our kids.

I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. There seems to be some clear differences between 3rd grade Randy and 3rd grade Cozy. In 1972, I loved to play outside in the woods, she loves to be inside playing Minecraft. I had brain-numbing Saturday morning cartoons, she has brain-numbing YouTube videos on demand. But much of it is the same. Our aversion to any food that is good for us, or to going to sleep, or to getting up. I loved Elvis Presley (“Burning Love” era), and she loves Dua Lipa (“Levitating” era), but other than that, not that dissimilar.

So, as I drop her off at school each day, I’ve been trying to remember what I remember from my 3rd grade experience at Atherton Elementary.

My teacher was Mrs. Weldon and we were supposed to get candy bars for completing our times tables, but I never got mine. I did a presentation on Boston by building a version of the U.S.S. Constitution from a huge cardboard box. The teacher read us James and Giant Peach and we had discussions about the 1972 presidential election. (I supported Nixon because I liked his funny-looking face.) My best friend was Keith Harrison and we focused our arguments on Elvis, Hank Aaron, and how to make the best go-cart. And I definitely thought girls had cooties.

For me, third grade was my introduction to Southern culture. Like many Slavic-rooted Americans, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. My family fled the rustbelt for the sunbelt after the steel industry crashed, and after year in Boca Raton, Florida, we ended up in Stone Mountain, Georgia (for reasons I still don’t understand). Red clay, black-eyed peas, thick accents, and one classmate who took a dead possum home for “supper” presented me with an alternate reality that was both dreamlike and hostile to a “damn Yankee” 8-year-old. A neighbor named Kenny called me “Polish monkey,” which I later figured out was because of my non-WASP name. Church was king in Stone Mountain, so that was the vehicle of assimilation, although it always felt unwelcoming.

So I wonder what my own 3rd grader is collecting to be reflected upon 50 years from now, in 2072. Will she remember the names of her friends and practicing make-up application, like I remember playing in the creek with Tico and Kip? Will she remember the insanity of MAGA, like I remember the madness of George Wallace and Lester Maddox? Will she remember binging on Takis, like I remember seeing how many Little Debbies I could shove into my mouth? Will she remember her parents living apart and then together again (but still apart), like I remember my father gone on extended sales trips?

Eight seems like such an in-between age. I see my daughter carry herself like she’s 5 minutes from college, but she’s still a child (who wants to set up a spy-cam to catch Santa in action this Christmas). Her peer culture has gained power. She just got her ears pierced and is starting to use slang, like “That’s suss, Dad.” She calls me, “bra” like I’m a bro. How do I tell her to eat her vegetables?  Was I that the age when I started separating myself from my parents? (I staged sit-ins in protest of their demand that I eat canned beets, I do remember that.)

If I could go do 8 again, there are certainly things I would do differently, besides buy stock in IBM. I would be kinder to my little brother, and pay more attention to the marginalized kids in my school. But much of 3rd grade seemed to not be about finding your direction, but finding that you could have a direction, any direction; that, at some point, you’d be able to do your own thing. I see that in Cozy, the potential to do really big things if she wants to.

What I needed from parents at 8 was a message of assurance, that they had my back even if I made mistakes. That they’d keep me safe but allow me to see how far I could walk across the ice. And I need encouragement to match the curiosity I had in myself with a curiosity in others. That’s the least I can do for my 3rd grader.

Ukraine Days: Reflections During a DakhaBrakha concert

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

October 1, 2022

Last night Andi and I went to see the brilliant Ukrainian band, DakhaBrakha. They were playing a sold out concert at an art center in Beaverton, Oregon before they head back to Europe. (Their November 11 show in Krakow, Poland will be one for the ages.) They’ve chosen to tour the globe while their homeland burns under the continuous assault of Putin’s invasion to share the need for the world to act. Their music is so other-worldly, the best way I can describe it is, imagine Kate Bush joins Radiohead and they are kidnapped by Cossacks and taken to Neptune. They call it “ethno chaos.”

As Andi and I let the exotic sounds wash over us, animations of Russian missiles falling and photos of bombed out apartment buildings in Irpin and Mariupol filled the screen behind the four-piece band from Kyiv. Occasionally slogans, like “Russia is a terrorist state” and “Arm Ukraine” would flash across the screen as the music crescendoed. The one male in the band, Marko Halanevych, implored the audience to do what they could to support “Free Ukraine.” The audience, made up of Ukrainian-Americans, recent refugees, and Portland music fans, responded to his “Slava Ukraini” with “Heroyam slava!” – Glory to the heroes.

The message of the music was magnified that day because Putin had just held a dog & pony show in Moscow to declare the regions of eastern Ukraine as formally annexed into Russia, to be defended as a part of Russia. Adding to the significance of the day, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy submitted Ukraine’s application to NATO. It felt like the last moments before World War 3. Andi clutched my hand as the music and the moment consumed us. Children, like our daughter, were being killed or driven from their homes while we sat in a brand new arts center half a world away.

The concert is certainly in my top ten now, but also helped Andi understand why I had to go to Ukraine this past spring. “When white people are at war with each other, things are really serious,” she said, only half-joking. I bought us DakhaBrakha shirts after the show, proceeds going to Ukraine, and talked with some local Ukrainian residents about the power of the night’s performance.

I will always reflect on my trip into the war zone to provide what little help I could. Portland and Lviv, Ukraine are now “friendship cities,” soon to be sister cities, partially because my experience championing Ukrainian coffeeshops as air raid sirens blared in Lviv. I feel a deep connection to the local Ukrainian population and Andi, Cozy, and I often have our fill on pierogis in the basement of a local Ukrainian church most Saturday afternoons.

I wanted to post the eight blog posts I wrote before, during, and right after my trip to Poland and Ukraine in one place as a chronology. I was briefly a hot topic in the local news when I was there, but now, as we pass the 6 month mark, the war in Ukraine becomes just another story as the world seems to turn upside down. It’s still raging (although Ukraine is advancing and Russians are fleeing their country to avoid conscription) and the lessens I learned there still resonate.

UKRAINE BLOGS

Entry 1: In the Toilet Paper Tube of History: Watching the Battle for Ukraine in Real Time (February 27, 2022)

Entry 2: Psychoanalyzing the Attraction to Chaos, or Why I Want to Go to Ukraine (March 14, 2022)

Entry 3: On the Polish Border with Ukraine: Watching the World Change from Up Close (March 25, 2022)

Entry 4: The First Two Days on the Polish-Ukraine Border, as Bombs Fall on Lviv (March 26, 2022)

Entry 5: One Night in Lviv (Makes a Hard Man Humble) (March 28, 2022)

Entry 6: Panic in Auschwitz: Putting the Present Moment in Context (April 2, 2022)

Entry 7: Where I’ve Been, What I’ve Seen, Who I Am: A Brief Reflection of My Time in Ukraine/Poland (April 5, 2022)

Entry 8: The Rescue of the Girl in the Red Coat: Gratitude for One Ukrainian Dad (April 17, 2022)

Sept. 26, 2012: My 10-year Reconstruction Begins

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

September 26, 2022

Everything changed on September 26, 2012 at 10:15 AM (maybe 10:17, she was late). But first, the backstory. And it’s messy.

My forties were emotionally confusing. I had successfully risen up the academic ranks to a tenured full professor position but my love life was always in turmoil. I hadn’t yet connected the abuse I experienced as a child to the bad patterns I had perfected in adulthood. And work and romance tended to overlap. Pew research reports that most Americans meet their spouses at work, and I had habit of dating former students (with the emphasis on “former.”) While the university had no policy against relationships among faculty and university students, that line mattered to me. After grades were turned in, two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want. It never was an issue, nor should it have been. There were several respected professors who were married to former students. Let love rule.

About a dozen years ago, I had a brief relationship with a former student that started off fun but, as new relationships sometimes do, quickly hit a dead end. It was clear that not only were we not a good match, there were red flags popping up all over the place. (The university would later deem this woman “unstable.”) I tried to end it amicably but she was not having any of it and went into full Glenn Close/Fatal Attraction mode. She found allies in the administration to champion her cause. They’d drag me into regular administrative tribunals and lecture me about “power dynamics.” (One of these administrators was having a “romantic, amorous, and/or sexual” relationship the administrator who had appointed her to her six-figure job.) I hired a lawyer who shut it all down and I recorded her confession that she made all her accusations up. Hoping to expedite my return to normalcy, I offered to sign an agreement that I wouldn’t date anyone who was enrolled at the university. Although I did briefly date an administrator after that. Because irony won’t be lost on me.

September 24, 2012 was the first day of the 2012-2013 school year and I had asked to teach a Sociology 101 class that started on Monday mornings. I wanted to be the first professor a fresh batch of college students would encounter. So I put a lot of work into that first class. It was a true performance, a sermon on the salvation of critical thinking. There’s always a few students who blow off the first class because they think nothing important happens on Day 1, and it always annoys me because everything important happens on Day 1. I make note of their absence and develop a grudge. One of those absentees was named Andrea Barrios.

So before she walked in late on Wednesday, I already had a bias against Ms. Barrios. Then she walked through the door. I’m not being overly dramatic when I say it felt like being struck by a bolt of lightning. It was an out-of-body experience. (She has told me of a similar experience.) My first clear thought was, “Oh no, universe, do not put this woman in front of me. I signed a contract!” as she sat in the front row and smiled. I was on the tail end of a two year relationship with a wonderful woman that was sputtering because I didn’t have a basic understanding of how to be in a relationship. But I was a good professor and stayed perfectly professional the entire term (while my teaching assistant routinely hit on Andrea). I stayed focused, as hard as that was.

At the end of the term, I posted on Facebook that I was going to see local singer Storm Large at dark club to celebrate the end of the quarter. It was a rainy December night and I was sitting by myself at the end of the bar when Andrea walked in. Of course I was thrilled to see her. She was probably the smartest person in a class of a hundred students and she radiated. She bought me a shot of tequila and said we should hang out sometime. I told her I didn’t date students. She bought me another shot of tequila and we ended up making out at the bar.

A mature man would have stopped right there. I began building my career as sociology professor at 17 as a freshman in college.  It didn’t make a lot of sense to risk it over a woman in her twenties, as fascinating as she may be. I invited her to dinner the next night so I could explain the situation, that I had signed a contract with the university and if I dated her I could lose my job. “Maybe nobody will find out,” she said. That’s all I heard. I was already head over heals in love. I just wanted to be near her. She tried to get into another school to avoid the conflict but that didn’t happen. We were two adults who just wanted to be together. Two years later we were married with a baby.

But it wasn’t easy for her. I was only just starting to figure my shit out. The first lesson was how I tended to keep old relationships on the back burner in case the current relationship went south (a product of deep abandonment fears). I learned that only burned the person I was with and I almost lost Andrea. Fortunately, it was a surprisingly easy fix. So many of my other issues, wrapped in my narcissistic tendencies, made her feel invisible. But, as a tenured professor, I represented the stability she craved. Then all that changed.

This is the part of the story that involves a psychotic inmate in an Oregon prison. (“Psychotic” isn’t hyperbole. It’s in his medical records.) He was a “former” racist skinhead who I had worked with before his incarceration. He had decided, for some stupid reason, that I had aggrieved him. He made it his personal mission to destroy me and found allies in the university who were endlessly annoyed by my role as a faculty union agitator. I was dragged back in before the administrative mob, with our daughter in her baby carrier, and asked me if my wife was a university student. “Yeah,” I said, “She’s taking an online Women’s Studies class.” That was it. They had me. I was toast.

My long career was successfully destroyed, not by a nazi skinhead, but my failure to make better choices. I could blame Glenn Close girl, psychotic skinhead, or a university administrator who was banging her boss, but it all came down to bad decisions I made over the course of years. I just wasn’t ready to accept that fact.

Who was I without my career? Certainly not the stable provider Andi and our baby needed. My issues began to cascade. I thought I was one of the good guys, but I centered my anger, creating less and less room for her in the relationship. To her credit, she not only finished her undergraduate work but earned a Master’s Degree and began teaching her own classes. All while I tried to pick up the pieces of my life and figure out how the hell to be a good father and husband.

There are numerous details but suffice it to say she told me in very clear terms what she needed but I was so wrapped up in my pain and anger that I repeatedly failed to deliver. It was when things were at their worst, that I started remembering the experiences of early sexual abuse. But it’s not like one has a realization that leads to an immediate change, “Oh, I was abused. Now I can stop being a self-centered prick.” I still had a ways to fall before I hit the bottom. And that happened on last New Year’s Eve when Andi told me she was in love with someone else. The floor opened up and I was ready to cease to exist. I felt beyond repair. Beyond redemption. There was nowhere to go but oblivion.

After that, as I have written much about, I found a wonderful therapist who helped me not only connect the dots from my trauma to my behavior, but who gave me practical tools to start to change the patterns. My trip to Ukraine to resettle refugees this past spring encouraged me to be a source of healing instead of pain. And Andi’s patience helped me to see how childish my behavior tended to be. I’ve learned that love is more than a feeling but behavior in the small moments; a comforting look, a curious question, a snarky text not sent.

I’m marking this ten year point for two reasons. First, that psychotic skinhead is out of prison and still threatening me. I need a public record of my journey. But the main reason is that this ten year effort to deconstruct myself and build a better version of me may not be enough to be Husband 2.0 to Andi, but it’s been worth the attempt. We all can repair harm and fix ourselves to reduce harm to the people we love. I’m proud of who I am becoming.