Better Man

And it’s always on your terms. I’m having on every careless word hoping it might turn sweet again like it was in the beginning.

Three years ago today, a very good friend of mine had the balls to tell it to me straight. Right to my face, he told me that people don’t know what to say to me because watching me be with Mark was like watching an abused woman go back to her abusive husband over and over again.

What sparked this conversation was an incident with Mark, of course. That friend and his wife had some cash stolen from them just a few days prior. They were close with Mark; his wife was one of the people Mark called in his last twenty-four hours alive. They even took a photo of him with one of their sons from the very same day, probably the very same hour, that he took the cash right off their counter. I hate that photo. Mark looks old in it, which is weird because he was practically a child at the young age of twenty-three. But he had aged so much in his last year alive.

It must have been awful for those friends to have to go through the experiencing of turning their friend in. No doubt they knew it would have impacted me, but it also impacted Mark’s ability to continue participating in a prestigious leadership program he was in. Of which I was the coach. The head coach. In a community of the few remaining friends I had in San Diego. Talk about embarrassing. But I’m glad those friends spoke up and didn’t hide the truth about Mark’s actions.It was sort of the beginning of the end, but the issues of his gambling, lying and stealing needed to be brought to light. Very few people ever told me the truth about Mark’s stealing. In fact, I can only think of three right now - one is mentioned above, one is currently my roomy and the other is my besty, Shaela, who started it all and opened the gate for me to confront Mark about all the lies and confusion.

Real friends stab you in the front. I’ll never stop appreciating them for telling me the truth; they made me brave enough to stand for myself when I’d finally had enough.

Believe me when I say that I know there are far more people from whom he stole than I will ever know. Yeah, yeah, I get it. People mean well and don’t want to speak poorly about the dead guy. All joking aside, I do appreciate when people keep it to themselves for the sake of not adding insult to injury, but I don’t think I’d mind all that much if they told me. In fact, one of the first questions I tend to ask people when catching up about Mark is whether or not he owed them any money, so don’t feel bad if you ever end up revealing that type of information to me. I’m usually shocked to discover that you never had money or electronics go missing when Mark was around.

I also assume you’re lying, but that’s probably because I’m all traumatized from marrying a liar.

I don’t miss our marriage. I really don’t. I’m not exaggerating when I say that my marriage with Mark wasn’t what I’d call a good one. That’s not me being bitter or refusing to remember the good times because it’s too painful. Simply put, when we got married, Mark got weird. I very quickly wanted to go back to how things were before. It wasn’t until after his suicide that I had even a clue what that was all about, but it all makes more sense now. It just wasn’t fun being married to Mark. Jekyll & Hyde come to mind. I don’t know which is which, but whichever one of them was not so great, that’s who I was married to. The good one was who I dated before we got married.

Knowing what I know now about pathological gambling, and reflecting on what I know really mattered to Mark, I am clear that his desire to provide for those he loved was at the source of his gambling. If you’ve never been in a relationship with an addict, this can be hard to understand, but it’s really quite simple. I grew up with an addict, so my view is a bit skewed, and there are undoubtedly things that I put up with in my marriage with Mark because I was so used to putting up with them in my formative years. (Disclaimer: My mom is quite open about her history with alcohol, so this isn’t gossip, nor is it intended to be.) Simply put, I always thought chaos was normal. I still default to that; I’m just better at catching it now. The silver lining is my compassion for addicts. Nobody wakes up one day and just decides to become an addict. It doesn’t work that way. Addicts hurt and just don’t want to hurt anymore, so they take actions (or substances) that make sense to them at the time, however convoluted that might seem to a non-addict.

People do the best they can with what they’ve got at any given moment; it’s just that, in some moments, some of us seem to be missing information or perspective that would likely lead us down a more workable, rational path. Mark had LOTS of those moments. If they weren’t so awful, they would almost be funny. In fact, I assert that most good comedy is born from the insanity of human beings during misguided and misinformed moments. Sometimes, once his gambling came out in the open (at least to me and very few people in the very small circle of friends that remained), I relied on my years of working with children to know how to talk to someone who was functioning at the maturity and cognitive level of a preteen.

Me: Why do you need me to write another check for rent?
Mark: … because something happened to the first check…
Me: Did YOU have something to do with what happened to the first check?
Mark: ... … … I spilled water on it…
Me: Okay, so there you were with the check on the counter. Show me where the water was.
Mark: …. It spilled like this…
Me: *Blinks quickly while breathing slowly in an attempt to restore my own sanity.* Okay then. Are you sure there wasn’t anything else that happened with the check?

Ya know, just for example.

When I finally got him to cough up (some of) the truth and he told me he had been gambling, my response was, “Well, you can’t be very good at it because we don’t have any money.”

I laughed. Mark did not. That night and conversation was the first time I had to resort to my teacher voice when talking to Mark. It was the only way I knew to be that would have him actually SAY something that made even a modicum of sense and seemed minimally plausible. But he never did own up to sneaking cash from our friends. Nor did he fess up to stealing from Shaela, our best friend and the only witness when we got married. No confession about our laptop, a wedding gift from my dad and stepmother. Nothing about Shaela’s laptop, or all the cellphones that went missing on our trips to the beach with friends. TVs, DVD players gone missing. No real explanation or even attempt to defend himself when I found out he hadn’t paid a penny for the very expensive car he got in MY name because his credit was too shitty to be approved on his own. He couldn’t even handle being home on the day that the car was voluntarily surrendered, which is a nicer way of saying I turned myself in before its inevitable repossession.

Ahem: I’m one of a small percentage of people to ever voluntarily surrender a car about to be repossessed. I think I deserve some brownie points for my honesty and general good-person-ness. Or perhaps just brownies. You pick.

There was rarely any truth. Instead I got random “gifts” from friends that we apparently didn’t need, so “let’s just sell them”. Dramatic tales about being mugged at knife-point to justify why my card got declined at the grocery store or the gas station. Sob stories about made-up friends dying unexpectedly to explain a disappearance. Heroic deeds to “help a buddy out”, or earthquakes in the Philippines leaving family members in need of financial support.

Visits with long-lost friends and family members always seemed to happen while I was at work. Marine buddies from bootcamp somehow always seemed to live within an hour of any place we visited and were mysteriously only available to catch up late at night. I never got to meet any of them; I know now they were just people he found to gamble with. I was stuck with tired Mark the next day.

While we were stationed in Camp Lejeune, immediately after we got married, I almost never got to spend time with his Marines. That would’ve been too risky for Mark. If I’d known them better, I’d have been able to ask questions. He wouldn’t have been able to pretend he was out with them when he was actually gambling. I would’ve been able to confront them about their crazy adventures at Waffle House or in the barracks, and then I would’ve found out that those things had never actually happened.

Mark would’ve been screwed, so he lied and kept me sheltered from just about everyone. It was isolating and confusing. It made me feel like I was crazy. I spent most of the time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. What I could do better. How I could fix it. THAT was my marriage, peppered with a few good times, most of which have been clouded over by the energy I drained myself of while trying to keep it all together and have it seem like we were just fine. Clearly, I was missing something. I just had no idea that he was already too far gone.

When I remember good times with Mark, I remember when we were dating. I’ve been grieving the loss of that man, my best friend, since we got married. I lost Mark long before his suicide.