Life, Money, and the Largest Wound...Part II

Savannah, Ga. is a beautiful place to live. They call it the Garden of Good and Evil. It is full of beautiful gardens, old mansions, good old southern hospitality, and lots of alchoholic beverages. It also has one of the highest murder rates and lowest number of crimes solved. It's the place pirates called home when British law was in the Carolinas and Spanish law was in Florida. You can have a drink downtown and go watch a Voodoo ritual in a nearby graveyard. It is a town where there is always a party and you're always welcome there...and it's a custom for you to have to take a 'to-go cup' when you leave. It's a place of excitement, beauty, danger, and mystery. It was just the place I needed to recover from all the madness of the money and life's failures...

For a time in my life, I seemed to have it all with money and a beautiful wife with 3 beautiful children...but underneath I was fighting many demons. My corporation was much more than I anticipated and the pressures were just too great. My marriage had fallen apart over the money and I had made many wrong choices that I greatly regretted. I felt so much guilt over the break-up of my marriage and splitting away from my children. They were too young to understand and that seemed to make me feel even worse. I knew it was all my doing and that I could have been more selfless and stayed in a love-less marriage. The worst part was that it had not been love-less...I truly loved my wife and wanted a life with her. She had just become more and more distant and never wanted any 'us' time. I needed her more than she could know and just didn't know how to make her see that. She had become obsessed with the money...the one thing I despised more than anything.
I spent way too much time alone trying to sort things out in my new, bright red jet boat...the fastest, most beautiful boat on the lake. My family had purchased a very nice 2 story lakehouse and I spent many afternoons there trying to drink sanity back into my head. I had many friends...some were true friends...others were leeches looking to just hang out at a nice place and ride in the fast boat. I was simply running away from life and living life way too fast. I knew eventually I would burn out...and I did. I was doing too many jobs at the corporation and never knew if I was going or coming. I didn't sleep well and stayed tired all the time. On top of all of this, my marriage had hit the rocks, I started seeing a beautiful employee and my wife had started seeing a friend of mine that was actually a groomsman in my wedding...yes, a groomsman in my wedding. This particular slam became my breaking point. I quit on life and decided the humiliation was simply too much for me to stay in the same town. Alot of our old friends continued to hang out with her and my new replacement and I became taboo. It was a tough time in my life that took years to recover from.
I shut down the corporation and sold the equipment and myself to a company in Savannah. They gave me a high salary, unlimited expense account, and a free penthouse to live in. I moved there with my 6 month old dog named Blue. He was an Alaskan white Husky mixed with a Timberwolf and looked like a white wolf with blue eyes. He was my best friend in the world and we loved our new world in Savannah. We would go to Riverstreet every afternoon and go for a walk. The friendly people there would even let me take him into bars to get a drink. We didn't know anyone in town, yet, so we became a daily fixture at Riverstreet. We got to know all the basketweavers, artists, and musicians on a first name basis and they always loved seeing us. They all called me 'Doc' and called Blue 'Ghost dog' as the city had alot of tourists going on ghost tours all the time and one little girl had cried one night when she saw the 'ghost dog'. It was an eye-opening, self-discovering, and healing time in my life. I was finally happy...being away from the madness of the money and knowing that no one knew who I was or whose son I was. People loved me for who I was and it made me feel better about who I was.
My children were happier too. They loved coming to Savannah every other weekend with my girlfriend from back home and knew that we would go do fun things and exciting things every time they came down. They particularly loved Riverstreet. They felt like stars because all the people working there got to know them by name and we could bring Blue with us as well. I remember how excited my youngest daughter was when she learned how to make a flower out of reeds. We were regulars on the circuit and the magicians would always pick us out of the crowd to be a part of their shows because we knew their acts by heart. My kids felt like they belonged there and knew that their Dad was happy there...though at times I felt extreme guilt that they were having to travel 2.5 hours just to see me. I also felt bad that I couldn't be there during the week and had to miss ball games and beauty pageants because of work. I still remember the tears that would fall every time they left...I loved them and missed them so much!!!
I dealt with it as best I could, though, and tried to look at the bright side of things always. Being a good parent, at times, means you reflect on what you are doing and wonder if it's the right thing for them. No parent ever knows that what they're doing is really right...for themselves or their chilren's best interest...life is just a mystery and the answers to life are never easy to find.

As the years went by and my kids got older, so did my parents. My father had been doing ok and was getting around in his air-chair and living a functional life. My mother was hit with the heavy burden of caring for him though. She did everything for him and never did anything for herself.
She began to hate the prison of life with him. He could never be alone for long and could only sit up for about 2 hours at a time. This left her with a small amount of time for herself. Though she had all the money to shop with she could need, she didn't have the time to shop or go and do and travel like many people dream of doing when they have plenty of money.

She called me in 2006 and told me she really didn't know how much longer she could take it. My father was demanding and didn't think about all he asked her to do on a daily basis. On top of that, she was not feeling well. She confided in me that she had spells where she didn't know what was going on and was confused. She also said she had fainted a few times and did not know why this was happening. She had always had cystemic Lupus and also high blood pressure...and since my father's accident, she had gained back around 100lbs. that she had always proudly kept off for 30 years since her last child. She hated it, but was stuck laying in a bed next to my fathers eating and feeding him and taking care of him the best way she knew how...with her cooking.
She told me she needed me....something that always grabbed my attention and was something I always took seriously. She knew I would always be there when she needed me and I would not let her down. I was the athlete in the family and she proudly went to every basketball game, football game and track event to yell at the top of her lungs. I was her pride and joy and she was the first to let you know this. She loved my brother and sister too, but always loved me a little too much. I think it's because I brought her flowers all the time when I was a little boy growing up on our farm. I loved my mother and was never ashamed of it either. If she needed me, she knew all she needed to do was let me know...and this time she was in bad health. On top of that, she said my siblings were talking about putting my father in a nursing home...and that was all I needed to hear.

I decided that it was time to go home. The Prodigal Son would return. I let my employers know I had to go and reluctantly said goodbye to my friends in Savannah. I took a job making significantly less money and moved in with my folks back at the farm to help take care of them both. Blue would at least now have hundreds of acres to run on and I could also spend more time with my kids and they could also spend more time with their grandparents as well. It appeared to be a good plan...

It seemed like such a happy ending. The trouble with happy endings is that they are never an ending...just a time in life...and time changes everything. Things would change for sure...and the road would never be as easy as I would think it would be. It never is, though, is it?..

Stay tuned for part 3, folks...

Life, Money, and the Largest Wound...Part 1.

Money is said to be the root of all evil. It is also a necessity of life.
The world today is obsessed with money. It makes people greedy. People steal, cheat, lie, and kill for it. Some people would die for it...
It is said that people who win the lottery usually are NOT happier because of it and that most of them end up miserable. Why then, does everyone I know WISH they could win the lottery? Why can't people realize that true happiness comes from within?

Psychologists say that people need 3 things to be happy...1.something to do, 2.something to look forward to and 3.someone to love. None of which have to do with money...

My life has been filled with ups and downs. I have been very wealthy at times and been very down and lonely. I have also been very broke at times and been very down and lonely. I can honestly say that having money helps with paying bills and making you feel better about tomorrow, but I know that it doesn't help at all with being lonely or depressed. Though it does bring around more friends and helps with finding a date, do we really want friends and a mate that are around because of it?...

My family is very wealthy. The money came from an accident my father had 13 years ago. It is blood money. He worked for the railroad and one day a co-worker sent a rail car without radioing ahead. It rolled over him from behind and cut him in half. He also lost his hand. He had 2 hours to live when he arrived in Charleston, SC via helicopter and they weren't even sure how he made it there alive. He received 40 units of un-matched blood on the 5 minute ride there and the wound was so large they didn't have any idea how they would stop the bleeding. I remember the doctors telling my family to go see him one last time to say goodbye. We entered the room to find blood everywhere and his whole body swollen to 3 times it's size, which is a body's defense mechanism to a limb or part being severed. We told him goodbye and as we departed from the room, the doctors took us aside to let us know that because of what we had just seen, we all would suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is normally gotten by military personal who witness friends being killed and maimed in war. It was all a terrible nightmare from which none of us could awaken from.

Somehow my father denied the odds and survived. He also set a few records along the way. He is in the medical journals as the largest wound survivor and also the largest wound covered with skin grafts. His settlement with the railroad was also the largest out-of-court settlement in the history of the railroad. I remember wishing that my father was rich before the accident and how guilty and bad I felt that now he was a millionare many times over...and how I wished we could give it all back if he could be the way he was before the accident. Money would never pay back for all he lost and all the suffering he had gone through. It became our family's curse...

I helped nurse him back to health in Charleston. We had around 100 people come to pray and support the family at first, but as the weeks went by, people had to go back to work and back to their lives. One by one, everyone departed until one day it was my dear mother and myself looking at one another. I saw the sadness and despair in her eyes...and she looked so very tired and lost. I knew she would never leave his side. She had loved him since they married right out of high school and she would stay by his side till she dropped dead from fatigue...this I knew. She also had many health problems and was in total shock as well. As the oldest son, I felt it was my duty to be there for them both. I owned an equipment brokerage and knew I was the only child in a position to help. I remember how stubborn my mother was about leaving his side...and knew I was probably one of the few people in the world she would trust to be there in her absense. I told her she needed to rest and take care of herself in order to stay healthy and fight this thing we were faced with. I told her I would stay with him through the nights while she went to the hotel across the street to rest and she could stay with him during the day. She was reluctant to leave his side at all, but agreed that she was tired and could not continue to stay at the hospital 24/7. I spent the next several months in hell fighting by his side in Charleston at night. Not only were we fighting infections from the large wound, the anti-biotics were expected to shut down his body organs eventually and on top of that, they were stripping large pieces of skin from all over his body to cover the wound as fast as possible...and my family was fighting to keep our sanity. My father was a cross between Daniel Boone and John Wayne growing up. He was always working or hunting or fishing or farming and was always the strongest man anyone had known in our community. To see him cut in half and fighting to live was one of the hardest things for me to see in my life. I knew life would never be the same...and it wasn't.
Against all odds, my father survived. The doctors still don't know how he survived. They say he is a miracle man...and he truly is. He is the strongest man that ever lived without a doubt. I am proud to be his son.

My family thought maybe the money would help heal things in some way. It didn't. My sister and brother and I received large sums of money as well in the beginning. We ALL have divorced since. The marriages all were victims of the money. My sister bought her 8 year old son the nicest 4 wheeler money could buy and it would kill him less than a year later. I opened a large service corporation with 20 employees and ended up divorced and lost. The money made life confusing and the fact that it had come from my father's blood made life a paradox. I became lost in the world and didn't like the world the money had made for my family. Everyone had nicer toys, but everything seemed to be about money. The family had more relatives and friends than ever and it seemed that business proposals and the need for loans from my father seemed to come from everywhere. People my family had known all our lives took advantage of my father and received loans that would never be paid back. My faith in people dropped to an all time low.

I began to hate what I was seeing and hate my life of money and being an heir to the fortune. I closed the corporation and merged with a company in Savannah, Ga to get away. It worked for awhile...for a few years I lived in a town full of people who didn't know about the money and accepted me for who I was. Unfortunately it didn't last. A few years later my mother called to let me know she was not doing well and she needed my help again. She was having fainting spells and was the primary care-giver for my father. They refused to have home-health as my mother babied him and took care of all his needs. She was wearing down...and she was beginning to hate life as well.
She told me my siblings were talking about putting my father in a nursing home and that was all I needed to hear. I had 3 children in town as well that I missed desperately and I decided to come home and help take care of my parents and get to see my kids more often. I took a much lower paying job and bit the bullet and came. Life was not about money. It was about family and taking care of one's own. I could help take care of my parents and also get to coach sports to my kids and make it to all the beauty pageants and events in their lives that were important to them. It was not a hard decision to make for me...I had been there before for my parents and had always told them they could count on me...and meant it.

Though I knew it was not an easy road I had chosen, I had no idea how hard the road would become...

Due to length of content, this post will be in several parts...check back for parts 2 and 3.

Over my head

Kinda hard to hide your true feelings when your world shatters...
Better to embrace emotions rather than deny the feelings.

This song is dedicated to those courageous enough to carry on when our world shatters and everyone knows...