In the Dim Light of the Day: A Novel

By Lou DeCaro

He was diagnosed with a life threatening disease, and then he found himself alone. His life suddenly became a race against Time. This is the inspiring story about one mans courage and determination to overcome adversity and find happiness in life. Poignant and thought provoking, In the Dim Light of the Day is an unconventional love story with universal appeal that will capture the readers interest from the very first page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479752546

Lou DeCaro

Lou DeCaro is the author of In The Dim Light Of The Day (Xlibris, November 2012), Marshmallow Dreams And Bitter Tangerines (Xlibris, October 2013), Anthony (Xlibris. January 2014), The Blind Eye of Love (Xlibris, October 2014), Once A Widow, Ever A Wife (Xlibris, January 2015), The Champion of Love (Xlibris, April 2015), Forever and a Day (Xlibris, August 2015), The Rose of Cuba (Xlibris, November 2015), The Writer of Lies (Xlibris}, January 2016), The Lonely and the Disabled (Xlibris, March 2016), Like Father, Like Son (Xlibris, July 2016), Maria (Xlibris, October 2016), The Pharaoh Club (Xlibris, January 2017), The Love Armada (Xlibris, May2017), Infirmed (Xlibris, October 2017), The Anger of Love (Xlibris, January 2018), A Moment in Time (Xlibris, March 2018), Johnny Reb's (Xlibris, May 2018), Jar of Broken Hearts (Xlibris, September 2018),Tears from the River of Love (Xlibris, September 2018),and False Love (Xlibris, June 2019).

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

I never imagined I would get Parkinson’s disease. But, that’s exactly what happened. Then, my wife filed for divorce after thirty-one years of marriage. I didn’t want a divorce. I loved my wife. And, I thought she loved me. Maybe she didn’t want to be burdened with taking care of a sick person for the rest of her life. I really wasn’t sure.

I didn’t want to get sick. Sometimes, things just happen. At the time, I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I didn’t complain about it. I kept it a secret from the rest of my family and friends. I certainly didn’t want anyone’s sympathy. I was never in denial about what was happening to my body. Even worse, I didn’t look sick. I always took care of myself. As a result, people had a hard time believing I had the disease. In the beginning, the medication worked well, so no one saw me shake.

I was actually diagnosed eleven years ago. About a week earlier, while playing softball, a teammate noticed my left arm shaking. I was sitting in the dugout waiting for my turn at-bat. He happened to be a doctor, and told me I should have it checked out. A couple of days later, I met with a neurologist. He told me I needed to have a brain and a cervical spine MRI.

One week went by. Finally, I received a phone call from the neurologist’s office. I was told to meet with him as soon as possible to go over the results of the MRI’s. He had a strange look on his face when he came into his office. After a few moments, he sat down and gave me the news. It didn’t take long for me to feel things were about to change. I got that feeling when my wife started asking people what it was like to care for someone with the disease. She was with me when I got the results, and sat there without saying a word. Shortly afterwards, she went back to work. Later that evening, she said very little. There were hardly any words of encouragement or support. My son’s reaction was even less comforting. When he found out I had the disease, he told a friend it was the last thing he needed to hear. I was sorry if I caused him any inconvenience. I was told I got the disease from overexposure to toxic fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides. In addition to being a full-time teacher, I had a small landscape maintenance business while my son was in college. I had to work two jobs because I needed the extra money to put my son through medical school.

When my son graduated, I stopped working two jobs. But, according to neurologists in the United States, China, and India, it was too late. Nothing could be done. The chemicals had permanently damaged my brain. Still, I would have done anything to help my son at the time.

CHAPTER 2

Parkinson’s is a hideous disease. I experience tremors, loss of balance, chronic pain and fatigue, impaired mobility, difficulty swallowing, and even depression. When my wife announced she wanted a divorce, I became very depressed. I did everything I could to convince her otherwise, and even took her on a weekend getaway so we could be alone and try to work things out.

That Monday, the day after we returned, she came home from work claiming she had a migraine headache. I made dinner, and then sat down to watch some television with her as she lay on the couch. The doorbell rang at nine o’clock. It was a process server. As I was served the divorce papers, my wife got off the couch, walked upstairs to get a few things, and left the house. She came back the following day, but ultimately left for good in December on the same day my mother died twenty eight years earlier.

I remember staring out of the bay window in my kitchen that morning. I kept on asking myself what went wrong. As the day progressed, I realized I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit around. I decided to call some friends who lived in the city. I wanted to meet them at mass the following morning. I loved the city, and wanted to move there someday.

I left the house at eight o’clock. My friends always attended ten o’clock mass. I remember getting in very early, and went into the church to escape the cold. Suddenly, I began to cry. A few moments later, I felt a hand on my left shoulder. It was a priest. He asked me if everything was O.K. When I told him my wife filed for divorce and left me the day before, he looked into my eyes and told me I had done nothing wrong. I suddenly felt a sense of relief, and shortly afterwards I was joined by my friends.

After mass, we went out to brunch, and then I drove back home. As I drove home on the parkway, the sun began to shine. I figured this was a good sign, but the reality of the situation set in as I went into my house. Instead of being greeted by a familiar voice, I heard nothing. Then, the phone rang. It was one of my wife’s coworkers. She called to ask my wife something about her schedule, and at the same time she asked me where I was the night before. Apparently, my wife attended a Christmas party and told everyone I wasn’t there because I had another party to attend. I guess she didn’t want everyone to know she left me. As I got undressed, I noticed some pictures on my desk. They were pictures I had taken on our weekend getaway two days before I was served with divorce papers. One picture was really nice. It was a picture of me and my wife having dinner at the inn. It was the last picture ever taken of us together. Both of us were smiling.

It was now Monday in mid-December. I woke up at five o’clock, and got ready for school. As my world began crumbling around me, I took comfort in the fact that I loved my job as a teacher. I began teaching right out of college. Unlike some of my colleagues, I wasn’t burned out after thirty-two years. In fact, I loved to teach more than ever. But now things began to change for me at school as well. My condition was getting worse. I considered myself lucky because the disease had leveled off for several years, but now my tremors began to spread down the entire length of the left side of my body. My balance was very poor, and even my mobility took a turn for the worse. The pain and chronic fatigue became almost unbearable, and it got to the point that hiding the disease was almost impossible. My neurologist saw signs that my condition was worsening about six months ago, and predicted this would happen. In order to keep the disease a secret, I would hide during my free time at work. I simply went into an empty classroom, closed the door, and graded papers. People began asking me where I was all the time. I never went into the faculty room anymore, and kept my classroom door closed when I was teaching. I stopped attending meetings, and didn’t stay after school longer than I had to. I also sat behind my desk in class so my students wouldn’t see me shake. Every once in a while a student would notice the tremors. I would say I had a pinched nerve and leave it at that. It didn’t take me long, however, to run out of excuses.

Just before the Christmas vacation began, I decided to see my neurologist. I explained what was happening, and to my surprise, my neurologist told me I should consider retiring. I was very close to retirement anyway, so that was definitely an option for me. He reminded me that Parkinson’s was a degenerative disease. Once you take a turn for the worse, there’s no turning back. And taking more medication wasn’t necessarily the answer. One major side-effect of the medication is extreme fatigue. I was already on four different drugs at the time, and had to take a narcolepsy drug to offset the fatigue side-effects of the other drugs. But even that wasn’t the answer. The narcolepsy drug caused problems sleeping at night. In fact, I never slept through the night, and always woke up in the morning exhausted. If it wasn’t one thing, it was the other. I had to decide what to do before vacation was over.

I also had to deal with my wife’s divorce. Our first court appearance was just before the vacation began. It snowed that morning, and I wound up being a bit late. But so was everyone else. My lawyer showed up ten minutes late, and my wife arrived with her attorney five minutes later. She was represented by a childhood friend who was once kind enough to write a recommendation for me when I applied to law school. I remember saying hello to both of them and asking her what she was doing for Christmas. She said she didn’t know. Neither did I. Somehow, I didn’t think I would be spending it with her even though I desperately wanted to. I loved my wife very much.

CHAPTER 3

My neighbors were in their late twenties when they bought the house next door. I really liked them a lot. They were two angels. The husband owned a construction company, and the wife was a hair dresser. They had a young daughter, and two dogs. I met them one afternoon in late August on their daughter’s birthday. When they found out my wife left me, they took pity on me. But as Christmas approached and the weather turned colder, I saw very little of them.

Christmas was always a difficult time of year for me. Christmas had become too commercial as far as I was concerned. It lost much of its meaning. As a result, I found the whole shopping experience very frustrating, and was very uncomfortable receiving a lot of gifts. I always believed it was more important to give rather than receive. My wife and son agreed, although sometimes it didn’t seem that way. I felt the best gift I could receive was being with my family. That was worth more than any material gift to me. I can still remember sitting for an hour watching my son open all his presents. After a while, they all began to look the same. Some people measure love in material terms. If you didn’t give a lot, it meant you didn’t love a lot.

Then something truly remarkable happened. It was Christmas Eve, and it began snowing lightly. Suddenly, there was a knock on the front door. It was my neighbor. He asked me what I was doing, and when I told him nothing, he insisted that I come over to his house for dinner. When I walked into his house, it was like entering another world. My loneliness and depression disappeared. His wife greeted me with a big hug, poured me a glass of wine, and introduced me to her entire family. Her mother, father, sister, and brother-in-law were there. Then she asked me what I thought was the best way to cook a fifteen-pound lobster her husband bought. I left their house around ten-thirty with a very full stomach, and decided to attend midnight mass. I was hoping no one I knew would see me alone.

I decided the best way to avoid being seen was to sit in the back row on the right side of the church. That section of the church was always dark at night. As mass began, I started to think about my neighbors. They really were angels from heaven. But the loneliness returned as I walked into my house an hour later. I was really tired at that point, so I decided to go to bed. My son was supposed to stop by tomorrow, and I wanted to get a good night’s rest.

CHAPTER 4

I came from a blue-collar family. My father worked for the post office. My mother worked in the school cafeteria. As a result, I learned at a very early age that if I wanted something, I had to earn it. So, when I was old enough, I got a job. There was nothing wrong with that. I learned the value of a dollar and to appreciate what I had.

When my son was born, I did the opposite. I gave him the best of everything, no matter what the cost. My son was my life. I didn’t want him to work as hard as I did. We were real buddies. We did everything together. My son was the first grandchild in my family. My mother and father adored him. My brother and sister loved him dearly. My mother was able to enjoy him for only two and a half years. She died of breast cancer at age fifty. My father was very kind to his oldest grandchild. When he died from mesothelioma several years ago, my wife and son did not attend his funeral. That broke my heart.

My son told me he would stop by at ten o’clock. It’s hard to describe the strange feeling I had that morning. Even though the sun was shining brightly, everything appeared cloudy. I remember sitting on the same couch my wife was resting on with her migraine headache the night I was served, and wondered if somehow she would be with my son when he finally arrived. Ten o’clock came and went. So did eleven o’clock. Finally, my son walked into the house. It was twelve noon. He was alone.

I asked him if he saw his mother. He said yes. Then I told him it would have been nice if he brought his mother over so we could be together on Christmas. He didn’t say anything. I got the feeling he didn’t have any choice in the matter. Maybe his mother just didn’t want to see me. I was always very proud of my son. He was ambitious, and had a really good head on his shoulders. Back in January, he borrowed forty-thousand dollars from me to use as a down payment on an office building where his practice was located. I thought it was a great idea to buy the building, and gave him the forty-thousand dollars without hesitation. A couple of months later, I asked my son if he had signed a real estate contract. He told me he was still in negotiations with the owner. Another couple of months went by. This time he told me there were structural problems that had to be dealt with. Something was wrong. Several weeks later when my son came home for his birthday, I asked him give back the money he borrowed. I told him I wanted to buy some stock with the money if he wasn’t going to use it. He didn’t give me an argument at all. That seemed very strange. I’ve often wondered why he really borrowed that money from me, and if it had anything to do with his mother’s divorce. The real reason still remains a mystery.

It was now twelve-thirty. We exchanged some gifts and drank a cup of tea. After he finished his tea, he got up and told me he had to leave. I thanked him for coming, and then I told him I loved him. As he walked out of the house, he told me I had to call him if I wanted to be part of his life. That afternoon, I decided to go to my brother’s house. I always considered my brother a special kind of person. He was the person I wanted to be like as a child. And, he was the closest thing I had to a hero. One year older, and a thousand light years wiser, my brother was always there for me. When I was five years old, he saved me from an oncoming car as we walked home from school. When I was seven years old, he came to my rescue when my foot broke through the ice while sledding near a lake. When I was in high school, he kept tabs on me in school. He was a tough act to follow because he was such a good student. Ironically, I admired my brother the most for his conservative values. If he was the protagonist, I was the antagonist. If he was the conformist, I was the rebel. And if he walked the straight and narrow, I walked the crooked line. He was my best man, the godfather of my only child, and most of all a brother and a friend. That’s why he was the first person I called when my wife told me she wanted a divorce. He was genuinely saddened by the news, and offered to help me any way he could.

I was still reeling from my son’s comment when I got into my car and began driving to my brother’s house. I was having a hard time dealing with the fact that I had to call him if I wanted to be part of his life. I asked myself where that came from. What caused him to change his attitude towards me? It took me almost two hours to get to my brother’s house. There were a lot of cars on the road. I felt very awkward going over there alone. I was having a very hard time getting used to doing things by myself. After spending thirty-one years with the same person, I felt I had lost half of my body and soul. I smiled most of the time I was there. I had dinner, and then I left. My brother did everything he could to make me feel comfortable. But while I was there, I felt like I should be somewhere else. Fortunately, I didn’t have to answer too many questions. I probably didn’t have the answers anyway.

I did tell my brother what my son said just before he left my house that afternoon. My brother looked at me for a moment, and then just shook his head. From day one, my wife tried everything she could to get me to sign a separation agreement. She really didn’t appear to be interested in anything else. When she left in December, she took only a few things and left everything else behind. All her clothes were still in her closet. All her personal items, makeup, and collectibles were in their place. It was like she disappeared into thin air. When I told this to my psychologist, he told me it was all very simple. She was running away. I asked him why. She stated in her divorce papers that she was happily married for thirty-one years. Did it have anything to do with my health? Was she having a midlife crisis? Was she tired of the same old routine and felt she needed to reinvent herself? Or was she afraid to see me deteriorate from a degenerative disease? She wouldn’t be the first person in the world to feel that way, if that was true. Of course, there was one other possible reason she left all her things behind. She was leaving the door open in case she suddenly changed her mind and wanted to come home. I saw more evidence of this over the course of the next few months. In my opinion, she was testing the waters and trying to determine if the grass was really greener on the other side of the fence. I was hoping she would quickly see it wasn’t.

When I finally got home, I decided to turn on the radio and listen to Christmas music. Then I thought of something I hadn’t thought of before. My wife left me just as my health really started to deteriorate. Was this cold, calculating, and callous like my psychologist said it was? Or was it coincidence? Coincidences, they say, require a lot of planning. Maybe my psychologist was onto something. Or, maybe it was just bad timing on my wife’s part. I was still wide awake when I got undressed, so I decided to watch some television. I started watching a movie about a Christmas party. For some reason, it made me think about a Christmas party my wife and I attended a year earlier. It was at the home of one of her coworkers. He had a partner who was a hair dresser. My wife was very friendly with both of them. Shortly after we arrived at eight o’clock in the evening, my wife became ill. I guess she had a little too much to eat and drink. That’s O.K. It happens to the best of us. When I saw she was getting ill, I asked the host to help me bring my wife out to my car. We managed to get my wife out of the house without being noticed by the other guests. Then she really got ill. When I arrived home, I carried her up to bed, cleaned her up as best as I could, and started to clean her mink coat. When she woke up the following morning, she was very concerned about the condition of her mink coat. She said she was sorry. I told her not to worry about it. We all make mistakes.

We also attended a number of parties at another coworker’s house. My wife was very friendly with him and his partner as well. Aside from family gatherings, coworker parties were the only parties we attended during the last three or four years we were together. She always talked about these men. One day I found a framed picture of a woman in her closet. The woman was holding two small dogs. The picture was taken in November about a year earlier. When I asked my wife who it was, she didn’t answer me at first. Then, she said the woman was a friend, but moved somewhere out west. She claimed she couldn’t remember the exact location. I thought that was pretty odd. But, I didn’t give it any more thought at the time. It was now midnight. I decided to call my wife to wish her a Merry Christmas. There was no answer, so I left a message on her voice-mail. My wife never returned my call. When I went to sleep, I looked at my wedding picture hanging on the wall next to our bed. Before I closed my eyes, I said merry Christmas to my wife.

CHAPTER 5

I had a friend who was a great guy. He was one of my best friends. We taught together for many years, and never hesitated to do each other a favor. Next to my brother, he was the one person in the world I could count on.

The following morning I decided to pay him a visit. He lived about seven miles from my house. He built his own house practically by himself. I’ll never forget the surprised look he had on his face when he saw me. Naturally, he asked me if everything was all right. Above all, he was a family man. If anyone could help me, it was him. He understood the importance of family.

When I told him what had happened, he couldn’t believe his ears. We decided to go out to breakfast at a small diner. For the next two hours, I told him everything. He listened very intently. I concluded the conversation by asking him if he would call my wife. I knew she would listen to him. If there was any chance of reconciliation, he could facilitate it. I thanked him, drove him back to