Chapter 1 - Know the Beginning From The End
Clarity of distance on the worst of days.
It’s an oft repeated truism that hindsight is 20/20. One might think of it as the “clarity of distance”, whereby we lose some of the detail, but gain a broader understanding of the wider picture. Some four years later, I’ve gained some of that wider perspective on what was the worst day of my life, so far. So, first, let’s take that up close look because almost all of the subsequent articles will add clarity.
Out of necessity, this will be a longer one, so buckle up. It’s a gonna be a bumpy ride.
The End
It was 4:03 AM on a Friday morning, just a few days before Christmas, and only a few days past our 16th wedding anniversary. Like every other night for the past four months, I was exhausted from being up for 22 hours, 12 of which had been consumed with being screamed at by Anne for offenses mainly imagined. I was laying on the floor next to the bed for the sin of refusing to be gaslit on this night, physically bruised from her attacks, but emotionally numb from it all. It was at this moment that I decided to take my life back and finally step away from a marriage that had become mentally, emotionally, financially, and physically abusive, come what may.
The question of walking away and leaving my home and marriage had been on my mind many times over the past 16 years, but on this night the camel’s back had been broken. Keep in mind that for at least half of our marriage, Anne had been chronically ill, so I’d been working my day job, taking care of the kids, the house, and all of the errands that come with domesticity.
“Who’ve you been fucking when you go to shopping for hours??”
“I know you’ve been having an emotional affair with that friend from the third grade.”
“I’ve always thought there was something weird about how you hug your sister. It’s probably incest. Probably your mom, too.”
“I’ll tell the cops that you’ve been hitting me.”
“I’ll tell the cops to check for any Peeping Toms in the area because it’s probably you.”
“You should just kill yourself. You’re garbage; not even a man.”
And the newest and final straw: “I’ll tell the cops that you’ve been abusing my daughter.”
Of course, none of these things were true in the slightest, but we live in world where the allegation is more important than the actual fact. Standing at 6’1” and around 200 pounds with years of martial arts behind me, the police will arrest first and ask questions later “for safety”.
I finally admitted to myself that Anne’s connection to reality had come completely untethered and she existed now to do everything in her power to break me. There was nothing I could say, or do, to right the ship. It was time to go.
For the next three hours I laid awake staring at the ceiling and planning my next steps and movements in order to leave the house quickly, quietly, and with key items that could not be left behind. Around 07:00 AM, I got up and started my day as if it were any other, but rather than sitting down to work I cleared out my gun safe, packed up some sentimental books, a few tools, and a bag of clothes selected more or less randomly from a laundry pile. The electronics took a little more finesse because I’d allowed Anne to control most of them in her search for evidence of affairs and other nefariousness that I knew didn’t exist (a whole article in itself down the road) but by 10:00 I’d loaded my truck, said my goodbyes to our puppy, and slipped out the door.
The next couple of days were mostly a blur. I numbly settled into a little space my brother had carved out for me in a camp trailer on that first evening. I helped him unload a storage unit and some other busy work over the weekend. Anything to stay busy and not sink into my own thoughts.
A friend, to whom I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude, knew something of what had been going on and had purchased me a prepaid phone that I kept hidden for emergencies such as an abrupt split from Anne, and this I used to communicate with my attorney and others that needed to know.
I kept my regular phone off except to occasionally check for any messages from work or other key people. As I did so, two things jumped out at me. One, I had a bunch of alerts from the home security system which led to my seeing at least a half-dozen deputies had been at my house on the Friday evening after I’d left. For another, Anne had been leaving messages that started out demanding and imperious, then business-like, then pleading, telling me to just come back and that we could work this out before it became “messy”. I answered none of them, trusting my instincts and refusing to reengage or return home based on what I knew was crass manipulation.
The weekend came to a close and Monday morning I went back to working remotely like nothing had changed. I arranged things with my attorney to get a divorce going. But that peace I’d felt on Sunday was gone, replaced with a slowly rising sense of dread throughout the day. I chalked it up to anxiety over the pending divorce but it seemed bigger than that, and by late afternoon the dread was practically screaming at me. And I had no idea why.
Through the haze of that dread, I nevertheless decided to travel the hour north to pick up a package at a shipper’s office a few towns over from my home and, never one to waste a trip, run a few shopping errands while I was at it. Of course I managed to leave my phones in the truck when I went into Walmart so when I got back I discovered I had a voice mail.
Timestamp: 21 Dec 2021, 19:55
“Hi this is Deputy <X> with the Sheriff’s department. Um, I need you to give me a call back on our non-emergency number as soon as possible. Thank you, Bye.”
Now at this point something was drawing me me inexorably toward home, but intuition was screaming at me not to go anywhere close to the house. So I drove past the end of my street where I could see that there were half a dozen or more emergency vehicles in front of the house. The dread that had been building all day all coalesced into a pit in my stomach and I knew in my gut that something terrible had happened.
Confused, concerned, scared, I’d started away from the neighborhood and back toward town when I got a call from “Unknown”. Sure enough, it was the Sheriff’s deputy calling to let me know they needed to talk to me in person. I told them to meet me at my friend’s house (the same one that had gotten me the spare phone) a few miles from my own and then called ahead to update my friend on the situation.
Ten minutes after I got to my friend’s house, the deputy arrived. Not unkindly, he proceeded to let me know that my step-daughter had found Anne and called 9-1-1; when paramedics arrived she was declared unresponsive, a detestable euphemism for what I later found out was suicide by hanging.
Notification made, the deputy also insisted I stay put as a detective needed to speak with me even as I was reeling from the news. I was sitting on the tail gate of my truck, wrapped in a blanket to shield me from the December cold and shock, when the detective arrived and let me know that my step-daughter would be staying with some friends that night while Anne’s family drove down from another state to pick her up.
Also, I was under arrest for domestic abuse.
I can’t say I was completely surprised by this turn of events, despite being the one carrying the bruises, but I was catalyzed in that moment. All of the pain, anger, fear, concern, sadness, exhaustion, and more coalesced into a tight little ball of determination in my gut.
Still rocked by the events of the night, I nevertheless sat silently through the ride to the county lockup and as COVID tests were administered in the secure garage area outside the jail.
While I waited to be processed in, the arresting detective decided to pull me aside and start asking questions. Adamant but polite, I nevertheless refused to answer without an attorney present, much to his consternation and annoyance. [1]
Then, I waited. And Waited. And while I waited, I noticed the detective talking to the prison nurse. Not long after they’d finished, the nurse called me in and talked to me, too, plying me with some basic questions about my current state. I answered none too enthusiastically, but generally my tone was that I was understandably in shock, but not a danger to myself or others.
When I finally got called back to be processed into a cell, though, it became clear what was going on. I was strip searched and placed naked in a “turtle shell”, an extremely stiff cordura nylon and velcro horse blanket shaped like a massively oversized tank top that hangs down to your knees. I was then locked alone in a cold, glassed in cell rather like a fish bowl with nothing but a blanket and a sleeping pad, and left to my thoughts.
This was the cherry on top of everything - it seems that the detective didn’t like that I wouldn’t answer his questions without legal representation present, so he decided to make the process the punishment and colluded with the nurse to get me placed on suicide watch. Eventually, this would take an additional 13 hours, with “psych evals” to get out.
As bad days go, this one was epic. Upon release I couldn’t go home. Did I mention there was also a temporary restraining order keeping me away from my own house, even though nobody was there? No? Ya…
I was extremely fortunate to have a best friend and mentor who stood by me through out all of this. He’d seen Anne’s decline over the years, seen the bruises, heard the stories and phone conversations and took me into his home for Christmas and New Years to keep an eye on me and give me a quiet place to decompress safely. Never have I been so grateful. I owe him a debt of gratitude I’ll never be able to repay in this life.
Some Clarity
Looking back now with that “clarity of distance”, a few things stand out to me about the situation I found myself in on that December night. Doubts I’d told myself were inconsequential or wrong that turned out to be significant harbingers of what was to come and yet I papered over them in an effort to not rock the boat and avoid confrontation.
First and foremost, I had not been honest with myself about the concerns I’d had during our courtship, any one of which should have been a deal-breaker. Doubts based on small arguments we’d had that presaged much larger issues. Doubts from interactions I’d seen between Anne and others, including her parents, that were troubling to say the least. Doubts, because her general approach to people was often a mask, hiding her contempt for those she saw as lesser in some way (which was just about everyone) but then trash talking those same people in private. I swept those all under the proverbial rug. And then there were the things that Anne had kept well hidden or camouflaged when I was around. Until we were married, that is.
Once married, the mask came off and I began to see behaviors in the open that had previously been hidden away. I at once began to see just how dysfunctional Anne’s relationship with her mother was. All too often I had allowed myself to be used as a proxy for her mother to be yelled at or as the scapegoat when her mother justifiably called out a bad behavior. “Why didn’t you defend me over such and such?!” was a common refrain, even when we both knew she was in the wrong.
Anne considered herself an expert in any field that she decided to speak on, be it finance, employment, male psychology, and many more. If I could only count the number of times I was told my own emotions were “wrong” and they needed to be some other way that served her…
And as for the hidden and camouflaged things, her sexual history sits high on that list. She’d been very circumspect about things like her prior body count and previous partners while cultivating an image of innocence and repentance. As it turned out, her count was rather high for her age and locale, at least in part because, as she admitted in the last four months of the marriage, that she’d been a “sex worker” for some period. And yes, my language here is deliberate and context matters; we were both Mormons and living in a relatively small, strongly Mormon town.
Early on I was concerned about some of the men on her social media friends list but was told they were “just friends” so I consciously decided to trust Anne and leave it at that. It wasn’t until near the end that I learned several of those had, in fact, been past sexual partners who reached out and attempted to rekindle a relationship with her during the last four months of our marriage. Of course, she only admitted it then as a means to manipulate and control me.
Lessons Learned
So, what can we learn from all of this?
Among the many lessons to be taken here, I think the foremost is this: I OWN THE MESS I FOUND MYSELF IN. Yes, Anne was a covert narcissist and did innumerable bad things in and to our relationship. But she also gave me plenty of warning signs, both overt and covert, that I failed to pay attention to. Because I was not honest with myself, I was willing to subvert my own intuition and even what I would call divine counsel (see my intro article) to continue down a path to something I thought I wanted.
Second, over the 16 years we were married, I failed again and again to defend boundaries that should have been written in stone, all in an attempt to avoid an argument. There is nothing more important to a narcissist than breaking down your boundaries in any way they can. Do not let them.
Third, people often tell you who they truly are without really meaning to if you pay attention to what they DO, versus what they SAY. When actions and words do not agree, they’re telling you something. Believe them.
Finally, living through bad times can be the greatest learning experience of your life. No, I don’t recommend putting yourself through 16 years of hell, but if you make time in your life to contemplate the smaller lessons, very quickly larger lessons will become apparent as well, if you let them.
In the five years since this story ended, I’ve implemented these lessons in my own life. I’m particular about who I let into my life but I’ve also found great joy, tremendous peace, and love that goes beyond words. To the extent that you take these lessons into your own life, you can, too.
Be well.
-Fritz
1. Note to cops out there - don’t try to hide intentions from someone that’s been living with a covert narcissist for 16 years. We can read you and your intentions like a billboard.