“He’s just doing this for fame and fortune,” someone recently said about me after learning I’d been writing a book for the past year. But that just isn’t true. I’m speaking and writing now because I have something important to share. The truth. And what I’ve come to learn about my late wife, about depression, PTSD and mental health — including my own.
Setting My Past on Fire 6: My youngest sister, who is still one of my eight older sisters, has always…
Setting My Past on Fire 5: I had driven the route hundreds of times. The roughly 110 miles of I-69…
Setting My Past On fire 4: It’s been a year since I sold and/or gave away everything we had owned…
Jennair, There were times over the past 731 days when I could’t imagine making it to this day, much less…
Let me be very candid and as clear as I know how to be. I was unfaithful to my wife and I make no excuses. In no way am I dodging the responsibilities for my flawed, immoral decisions, my weakness and my abject failure to be loyal to someone to whom I had made promises and loved dearly for twenty-eight years. I lied to her. I betrayed her. There is no justification. She deserved better than that.
I sat up in bed last night, unable to sleep. After a few frustrating minutes of looking around the dark…
Together they were the perfect couple. The perfect marriage. The perfect children. They went to church, ran a successful business, owned two beautiful homes, a Range Rover, a BMW. They had it all.
I am not okay. I may seem like it, projecting a public persona of someone who has their shit together and their emotions in check. During media interviews it may even come across as cold indifference. But it’s all an act, not for television audiences, not the general public, and not even for my friends. It’s for me.
It was Mental Illness Awareness Week, and I could think of no better place to be to tell my story and share the uncomfortable truths I uncovered over the past eighteen months, not only about my wife’s mental health condition, but my struggles to navigate my own grief and come to terms with my overwhelming feelings of guilt.