We’ve reached the turning point. The peak is in our sight, and we’re about to discover if our path to it is clear, or if we have to find a longer route up. I’m in Oklahoma right now at the cancer treatment facility with Samantha. She’s getting pumped full of a dye, and then getting scanned. Tomorrow a doctor will tell us how it looks and if the chemotherapy did its job. If it has, she’s a month and a half away from being done with this.
With the way shit has gone over the last year, I’m just going to walk into the room with a blank slate. Positive, yes. I’m not owed anything, this building is full of so many sick people. Some more so than others. I guess I would just word it as, I know my wife and I and the personal battle we’ve fought during all of this, and I want to have a life and peace with this woman. This has been a journey that has caused a lot of change, amazingly good change despite the pain that’s come with it. In a few weeks I’ll have known my wife for 4 years, and I can honestly say that in some ways she’s at her best since I’ve known her.

The dusty country roads that cross the South all go through a kind of middle of nowhere that isn’t quite like the rest of the country. To say its all the same or less interesting scenery than some of the more exotic parts of the world would be missing the point. I encourage anyone that has to traverse this region to take a route off the beaten path and away from a major highway. Trust me, you’ll surprise yourself with how serene it can get on those lonely country roads, passing through towns that time seem to have forgotten in the blink of an eye.

Recently I’ve had to take two long road trips through the deep South. I retrieved my wife from Arkansas so that we could be together while she continues her chemotherapy. That took us from northwest Arkansas down through Memphis and into Mississippi. This past week I had to make a thousand mile loop up to Savannah and over to Huntsville, passing through Athens and Tuscaloosa along the way. My wife accompanied me on the trip.

I remarked to my wife about how its been said that you will find out a lot about your relationship from traveling together. I’d agree. Four years in and countless miles together, I look back at our first two years or so worth of traveling and its easy to see how we’ve both matured and become more patient. I feel like we compliment eachother now and its really hard to envision seeing some of the sights you take in, without the other person there to enjoy it with you. Like it seems hollow. I’m glad we were able to go on these last two adventures even though she is so sick. The road makes things seem more normal to me.

Your promised land divide,
That’s where the world lies

I am a firm believer of the minds power. Where muscle, speed, and cardiovascular strength expires, the mind is there to push us past the farthest of limits. Running the super distances is probably the most valid example of this. All but the most conditioned athlete will experience pain and emotional trauma during an ultra marathon. It takes a strong mental effort to push through those moments of self doubt and bodily pain and complete the race. I jokingly said I ran the 50K race last Sunday on the beach because the Seahawks had won the Super Bowl, but in reality I knew the physical aspect of the race was all I had to worry about. After the mental challenges I have had to deal with the past year, I knew I was ready to handle this.

There is no reason to think finishing an ultra marathon is even the tip of the iceburg though, when put in terms of mental and physical duress. They say only one tenth of one percent of the US population has done an ultra marathon. Small number. During last years race, I was lucky to hear a speech the day before given by a former prisoner of war named Ed Hubbard. Surviving an ordeal like the one he described made dragging my busted leg 50 miles up and down a beach sound like a leisurely activity. That is true mental power. Armed with a story like the one he told, I will never quit in my life’s trials and tribulations, and certainly not during something as mundane as a race. The phrase he kept repeating during his speech was “Hold On”. That is what he kept telling himself in that tiny concrete cell in Vietnam. So every time it felt like I could go no farther, I looked out across the waves and imagined that old man telling me to “hold on”.

This obviously stuck with me, as I found myself during the summers bullshit stopping and saying his phrase to myself. So when this years race rolled around and I wasn’t barely two months out of hernia surgery, after all of this, I wasn’t hesitant about anything. Yes I may have expressed caution on the outside, and it was just being smart, but deep down inside I knew I was going to fight until the end. 23rd out of the 61 people that actually did finish the race ain’t bad.

You just can’t leave the door open for awful people in your life. They will come right in and fuck things up for you, regardless of what your situation is. People are shit, cruelty is unavoidable. I haven’t written in a while. Its because things just got to real, I would sit down to try and formulate thoughts and just get chocked up. Even now it feels like I am just foggy headed, watching all of this shit carry out underneath my consciousness. I had a staff meeting earlier and it was embarrassing, I couldn’t even say my employee number that I literally type multiple times every single day at work. That’s how blown up my mind is right now. However, I am not a proponent of keeping things bottled up inside so I am going to attempt to spew some words out on this blog and hope for some sort of release and clarity. I’ve been living at the house all alone since the beginning of December. My wife is living in Arkansas to be near the cancer treatment facility up there. I am responsible for every single bill my family has. Things that were left unpaid by my wife, that would result in suspensions, fines, or bills sent to collections, those are all in my lap now. I got fired from the coffee shop that first day in December. So that much needed cash flow is long gone. 

I didn’t pay my child support for the months of July and August. Shit was just spiraling out of control and the details would make for a pretty shocking account of things I will have to save for another day. I was supporting myself, my wife living apart from me, and my wife’s habits. The saddest fucking thing about that is that I was so desperate (and clueless), that I was scared that I didn’t have a shot at saving my marriage if I didn’t do these things. And I guess I just finally cracked. Two months out of over six years but there it was; I had left the door open for the biggest scumbag imaginable to slip her claws further into my life than I needed. When I got back from Estonia and my now pregnant wife worked things out with me (again, I’ll just leave things at that for now) I immediately was able to reel in my finances and start paying child support again. I told my daughters step father I would settle up the missing amount when I received my tax return in 2014. Fast forward to October and after a miscarriage, I got a letter from the department of revenue asking me to submit all kinds of paperwork on my earnings and assets. In November, my wife was diagnosed with lymphoma and had to quit her job, making us a single income family. The bills from the emergency room visit in October were starting to come in. My daughters stepfather was made aware of all of this, but I guess I was an idiot for ever thinking they would back off with the back child support situation.

Last week I received yet another letter from the department of revenue saying they were going to garnish my wages and add on an additional $100 for the back child support. There was no total amount listed and the letter didn’t say how many months she was claiming I had missed. So immediately I was worrying about how she had proved this, and knowing what a piece of shit she is, if she had not simply said a period of time that was grossly exaggerated. Funny how when you assume the worst about a horrible human being, you usually are spot on. Today I got an email from my company’s payroll with a document attached detailing what was going to happen. And sure enough, the amount listed was close to three THOUSAND dollars, meaning not only did she lie about how much I had missed, she went way overboard with it. Of course I almost had a heart attack and immediately called the department of revenue. They told me she had submitted a court order, signed by a judge, stating I owed that amount. A fucking judge. I had zero knowledge that this went to court. And the fucking date was for the first week of January, meaning she knowingly went after three fucking grand from me despite my wife being out of state and out of work due to having cancer. Class act, bitch.

So this is an unfortunate truth and some very disgusting consequences. Please cover your ass in every scenario, because someone that may not be at the forefront of your problems is almost assuredly willing and ready to hit you with the knockout blow from the other direction.

My wife has cancer. There is no conspiracy against my life or my family. This is simply the hand dealt down. There is no time for woe is me, the eye of the bitch does no one any good in these situations. While yes, of course, I cannot believe the situations lined up in a chaotic row of tragedy that I’ve encountered the last year of my life, I will hold it together here. What alternative does a man have? It could be worse. I have a comfortable home for her. I have excellent health insurance. I have the ability to make a terrible situation have some sort of solution that can be sought out. Some people don’t have that. There is no woe is me, because someone always has it worse off. My wife is shell shocked right now, understandably so. I feel similar to when the miscarriage occurred, like I’m having an out of body experience. The words I say to rationalize this, the cliche lines of “it will all be ok” even though no one can no for sure what is going to happen…it all just seems like I am watching myself say these things and do these things while looking over my own shoulder. There is a haze around everything, thick with worry. I rebuilt my life majestically through a ton of pain and effort, only to choke on the smoke of its burning palace.

Is it selfish that a part of me wishes my little girl would never grow up? My greatest worry with my child is that one day all of this going on around her will finally strike her as being odd or “not normal”. Every year I say the same thing, how lucky I am to have such a perfect daughter despite the set of circumstances we are forced to deal with. But as the years go by, she remains happy, loving, and seemingly oblivious to any sort of tension between her mother and I. Not that there has ever been anything confrontational, but the stories she tells me about her moms bad moods are always cause for concern. She always tells me them just like its a normal part of her day, same as her other siblings play habits or what she ate for lunch that day. She even took what happened with the miscarriage in stride. I can tell shes disappointed, but like everything else she experiences, she simply adapts and remains a smiling little child. Who’s comforting who? I wish she could teach me her secret to handling every day with a smile, because I could definitely learn a thing or two about holding up after she has to leave me for two weeks at a time.