I have no idea of the length that we will go tonight. As you probably found out from Facebook, Dana's ex-husband, our house guest for the past nine months, succumbed to his previous illnesses and passed away early Monday morning. Boom today.
To say the relationship was complex underestimates that by several degrees. John left Dana and Catie when Catie was just a few months old. I met them about a month before the divorce was final, about a year after he walked out. After we were married, I was pretty much the buffer between the rest of Dana's family and John. Dana and I both felt it was important to include him in Catie's life and we sometimes had to defuse the potential explosions. He had earned a lot of animus for the way he left, and their circle of friends all split in the direction of the toddler, but he never wavered in his love for his daughter. As his family drifted away from him and passed away, we became the last people he could turn to.
I can't shake the feeling that the decision to leave was the same decision that ultimately doomed him. He left for another woman in 2008. Before Dana and I married, we would take Catie over to their house for alternate weekends, until Catie asked not to. I think that moment permanently stained his decision with regret. Then he got his own place, she kind of vanished from the scene, and Catie felt safer.
He came through in a big way when I got sick, taking care of Catie for whole weeks, so Dana could get me back to wellness. But after COVID hit, the nagging injuries and diseases began to accumulate, and get names: diabetes, MS, torn rotator cuff, pinched nerve in the neck, sores on the heel. And unlike my general disposition to revenge myself against whatever caused my illness, he couldn't fight back against what ailed him. Each of those took a toll on his mobility, and that just added frustration to his symptoms.
It didn't help that he was trying to hide that he had financial trouble. She had come back, and coincidentally there were months where he couldn't afford his medication, or his car, or sometimes food. Then there were a couple months there where Catie didn't want to go over there, because she was there. The week before he got to our house, he had been thrown out of his apartment for non-payment, and he didn't want Catie to know. And then I got a call that he had been dropped here with the clothes on his back, and his car went with her, and Catie found out the whole thing.
These past nine months, I'd seen him try to get it back together, but he still was in very slow decline. I had attributed his recent reduced energy to his mobility issues, but now I think it was depression. After he went in the hospital, we found out that the car was gone. Totalled, and the driver didn't have her own insurance, so he was on the hook for all of it. Not that he had much left, he had quietly liquidated his pension to cover her expenses. So if you're asking, John made one bad decision in life, and then he made it repeatedly. And I think the repeated application of that bad decision's effects definitely took a toll.
The tough part of this for me is this, I have been the secondary beneficiary of that bad decision. I don't have a wife, if he doesn't have an ex-wife. I don't have a stepdaughter, if he doesn't have a daughter. And because I've always discounted that decision, and reduced him to an amiable screw-up in my mind, I never called him to task to get it together. It might have hit differently coming from me, might have stuck, might have extended his life.
So I'll promise you this, John, same promise I gave Catie's Pappap. I'll take care of them. I know you never stopped caring for them, but things just happen and you end up in a place you never expected. And I'll try to have them remember all of you, good and bad, but that may take a while.