From Happiness to Tragedy; to Bliss on the Borderline: (Lamentations of a Fool)

By Nicholas E. Cleveland

Bewildered, she exclaimed, Did she have psychological problems? I was stunned. I had just told my real estate agent I was selling my house because my wife left me nine months ago.
A few years ago, we bought a house in the Akron area. My wife rode around town with this real estate agent looking for a home. When I told the agent she had left me, the she said, She talked you up so well, I honestly believed she thought you were a god! I replied, I used to be, but now Im a demon from Hades. Neither me or my wife had spoken to this agent before or since she sold us our house.
Thats just a small sample of the paradox I had lived the previous twelve years. My first wife died, suddenly, leaving me alone with our seven year old boy. A year later, I married my second wife. Now, my second period of grieving was to begin.

Through the course of the following pages you will cruise along the path of a man who laments the loss of his first wife and tries to make sense of life in general. Suddenly however, in the midst of the book, his present wife leaves him. This devastation twists the book into a peculiar direction as he expresses his grief in the loss of his second wife, then in Part III, tells his story of the agonies involved in living with a Borderline wife. In Part IV, the book produces evidence that convinces him she has Borderline Personality Disorder, then elaborates further on how it affected him and his son. Finally, in Part V, as an afterthought, he discusses the fact that he may be narcissistic after all and this narcissism may have drawn him to his BPD wife and helps explain how they stayed together for so long.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781496966377

Nicholas E. Cleveland

The author was happily married for twenty-seven years until suddenly his beloved wife died, leaving him with a seven-year-old son. A year later, he remarried. Then, a second period of grieving was to begin in From Happiness to Tragedy; To Bliss on the Borderline (Lamentations of a Fool). The author, after marrying his first wife, became very involved in church life. He soon became a teacher, librarian, and officer in the church. He also gained his education and entered the field of information technology. While progressing through its ranks, and gaining a wonderful son, the author had lived a wonderful life. However, this bliss was cut short by a dark secret that did not reveal itself till it was too late. Conclusions are drawn in this book as to the whys and the hows this could happen. Nicholas E. Cleveland Chair, School of Information Technology at a major technical college Associate of Commerce (Computer Operations) Bachelor of Arts (History, Philosophy, Education) MBA (Business Management) IT Certifications (A+, Net+, MTA Net/OS/SrvrAdmin/Security, MSWindows)

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© 2015 Nicholas E. Cleveland. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 2/03/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6636-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6637-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015901691

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

Author’s Note

Part I My First Love

A Rude Slumber

The Incident

It’s Over

How Things Change

The Dash Counts

But Flowers Still Fade

Divorce Not An Option

Stepchildren

I Want My Mommy!

Is Life Just A Crapshoot?

No, No, No!

The Stone

Twenty Minutes Of Grieving

You’re My Mommy Now!

I’ll Fix You Dinner

She Was …

God Gives. God Takes Away.

Part II She Left Me Again

It Was The Happiest Day Of Her Life

The Episodes Become More Frequent

Those Bastards!

If I Only Had A Brain

What Do I Do Now?

Another Turn

Life’s Lessons

Hypocrisies

The Saga Continues

Once Upon A Time

Part III My Second Love

Once Upon A Second Time

An Honest Woman

The Wedding

The Honeymoon

The Whale Episode

Trying To Make A Normal Life

Everyday Life

Trust

Girls

The Password

That Darn Pool

The Family Reunion

Vacations And Not

Working From Home

Twenty-Four Hours

Her Odd Dreams

Walking On Eggshells

Sex, Preachers, And Hormones

The Separation

Dating Again

Divorce, No Divorce, Divorce, No Divorce

Now, My Head Is Spinning

The Return

Beginning Of The End

The Neighbor Lady

Then Snap

The End

Divorce

My Life

Part IV On The Borderline

Marriage On The Borderline

Unfulfilled Intensity

Eggshells

It’s A Mystery

Getting Inside Of Her Head

Afterword

Conclusion

Conclusive Note

Part V (Afterthought After The Afterthought)

I Am A Narcissist

Notes

To those who have experienced bliss

only to have it

turn into pain and misery.

Introduction

Bewildered, she exclaimed, Did she have psychological problems?

I was stunned. I had just told my real estate agent that I was selling my house because my wife had left me nine months earlier.

A few years ago, we’d bought a house in the Akron area. My wife rode around town with this real estate agent looking for a home. When I told the agent she had left me, she said, She talked you up so well. I honestly believed she thought you were a god!

I replied, I used to be, but now I’m a demon from Hades. Neither my wife nor I had spoken to this agent since she’d sold us our house.

That’s just a small sample of the paradox I had lived the previous twelve years. My first wife died suddenly, leaving me alone with our seven-year-old boy. A year later, I married my second wife. Now, my second period of grieving was to begin.

Through the course of the following pages, you will cruise along the path of a man who laments the loss of his first wife and tries to make sense of life in general. Suddenly, however, in the midst of the book (Part II), his second wife leaves him. This devastation twists the book into a peculiar direction as he expresses his grief in the loss of her, his second wife. Then, in part three, he tells his story of the agonies involved in living with this woman (second wife) whom he realizes has borderline personality disorder. In part four, the book produces evidence that convinces him she has borderline personality disorder and then elaborates further on how it affected him and his son. Finally, in part five, as an afterthought, he discusses the fact that he may be narcissistic after all and this narcissism may have drawn him to his BPD wife and helps explain how they stayed together for so long.

Author’s Note

So the reader better understands the flow of the following pages, I must explain the sudden changes in tense from past to present and back to past again. As I reflected upon my life, I thought it good to put to paper my understanding of why I had experienced the things I had over the past 59 years. As I pondered these things, trying to make sense of them all, I mixed in tidbits of my own wisdom, if it can be called such. Nonetheless, my understanding of the way things are and the way things should be are in much conflict.

My major and most horrifying experience starts the book out. It occurred years ago. I then pen the way things were, during better days. Then I go off on a moral tangent, then flashback again. At times, I reminisce the way things presently are, while penning the pages below. This is the confusing part that needs explanation.

Whenever you read present tense, it is my experience, right then and there, while writing this book. I write my thoughts as they happen, then flashback to a day in the past, then flip to my philosophical understanding of life, and back again. I sincerely hope you can follow; but this is my life: Confusing, complicated, trying, yet wonderful.

Please enjoy the ride.

Nicholas E Cleveland

PART I

My First Love

A Rude Slumber

"Honey. Honey! Honey!"

I shook her.

She was cold.

I looked at her face, not expecting the worse. She was still as death. I felt her arm. It was cold. Her skin had begun to turn blue. It was clammy.

Just a couple of months earlier, on Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and I experienced the worse argument we had ever had in our lives. The holidays went fine. They were the usual. My wife and I, along with our seven-year-old son, went to her family’s home for our first of two heavy holiday meals.

My mother-in-law was a traditional, down-home southern lady. She believed her mission in life was to overstuff her family with good food. She succeeded. I recall my first holiday meal there. It was an experience for wide eyes and a large stomach. I don’t recall the number of courses, but there must have been a dozen. Ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, scalloped potatoes, corn, green beans (the beans always had large pieces of bacon), baked beans (with large strips of bacon), cranberry sauce (the kind that still looks like the can when it is served), home-baked bread, home-baked dinner rolls, butter, apple butter, honey, jelly, and other foods I don’t presently recall. For dessert, it was usually the same thing every holiday. We had the best homemade apple pie made from scratch and the freshest apples this side of the Pacific, cherry pie, cherry cheesecake, chocolate pie, and banana pudding. As for drinks, we had milk, cranberry-apple juice, and strong coffee.

I had learned to strengthen my coffee from two level scoops per pot when I was a young man to seven heaping scoops per pot. To this day, I use seven scoops. After all, seven is the perfect number,¹ and the Bible named a book² after this ritual. Shortly after I had finished that home-cooked southern feast, I sat on the couch, staring at the wall for the rest of the afternoon. I couldn’t move. I believe it was the first time I had experienced such a swelling sensation in my stomach that froze me in my tracks. First of all, I couldn’t believe I’d eaten that much, and second, I couldn’t stop thinking, Oh no, am I going to explode?

For the second part of the holiday, we visited my parents. My mom and dad were more traditional in the sense I understood it. They were from the northern part of the country—Michigan. My dad’s parents came from French-speaking Canada around the turn of the twentieth century. They were farmers who believed in birthing farmhands in addition to hiring them. Dad had eleven brothers and sisters of which he was the youngest. I recall as a youngster visiting my cousins and hearing them call my dad Uncle. Dad was younger than they were, and it took me some time to realize that a grandmother could have a child after her son had one. He had a few nieces and nephews who were older than him.

Anyway, his parents were very old by the time I came along. I fondly recall as a child how the family would climb into our 1959 Chevy—Mom, Dad, and six kids (baby on Mom’s lap, second youngest in the middle, and the rest of us in the backseat). We’d travel an hour and a half to the hilly country of Hillsdale, Michigan. I was mesmerized by the mountains on the way there (actually, they were small hills, but I lived in the flatlands west of Lake Erie and south of the mouth of the Detroit River). Finally, after what seemed like a large portion of my young lifetime, we turned down a gravel road. After traveling it for approximately a mile, we’d spot the green-shingled farmhouse. Everyone in the backseat would shout at the same time, We’re here!

The long driveway led up to a barn, and before we could get out of the car, Grandpa and Grandma would run from the porch exclaiming, They’re here! Before we knew it, they were hugging and kissing each of us as we entered the old farmhouse.

Once in, Grandpa would say to my dad, I told your mom you’d be out today.

In the kitchen was a manual-pump faucet on the edge of the sink, a large dining table, and a wood cooking stove alongside a gas stove. My dad had purchased the gas stove for Grandma, but she didn’t want to get it dirty so she continued to cook on the wood stove for a very long time. The kitchen sink hand pump was attached to a well. Hanging on the wall was a drinking scoop (a cup with a long handle on it) and next to that was a white towel. It took me years to understand the wisdom of my grandfather when he told me I washed my hands on the towel instead of in the soap and water.

In the next room were two rocking chairs, a potbellied stove, and another large dining table with many chairs around it. This is where I would beat my grandpa in arm wrestling when we weren’t enjoying a homemade chicken-and-dumpling dinner. Speaking of dinner, let’s get back to my parents for the remainder of the Thanksgiving holiday.

My dad cooked the turkey in a fryer outside. He purchased a gas fired fryer, which he filled with peanut oil, to burn the turkey in one year. We all decided, although very crispy, it tasted wonderful! Mom wasn’t a southern cook, but her holiday meals were also great. Everyone brought a dish to pass, and my middle sister always made home-baked cream donuts. My favorite was peanut butter cream. Needless to say, by the time we made it to my parents on a holiday, my appetite was petite. The 254-course meal I had at my in-laws was just beginning to debloat. But I did force myself. Then after another good meal and good times, we headed back to the house.

The Incident

It was two days later (the Saturday after Thanksgiving) when I told my wife I was going to clean the master bathroom. I was always one who liked a clean house. However, I believed it was the wife’s job to do it. Not if she worked full time, necessarily, but if she worked part time, she had plenty of time to do housework. After all, I built the house. She should keep it clean!

I had gone back to college for approximately a year after taking a short ten-year break after high school. I was already tired of sitting in the classroom, so we purchased a wooded lot in a small farm community in southeastern Michigan. A couple of years after this purchase, I hired a contractor to dig a hole, and a mason and I installed the footing. After the basement block was laid, I built a conventional brick fireplace. A carpenter built the shell, but I installed the electrical, plumbing, heating, drywall, and wood trim. My wife and her dad installed the insulation.

Speaking of her dad, just a few months before we began construction on the house, he had experienced pain in his chest. During this episode, he drove himself twenty miles to the hospital. While in the ER, they told him he had just had a heart attack. He was immediately sent to intensive care. He came out of it fine but was told he needed a multiple bypass. During the interim between his heart attack and his bypass surgery, he helped me build my house. My wife wouldn’t let him do anything strenuous, but I didn’t pay much attention as I was solely concerned with getting the house done. Whenever people came to help, I would crack the whip and get as much work out of them as possible.

I didn’t realize till years later what an idiot I had been when people, out of the goodness of their hearts, came to lend me a hand. I was solely concerned with getting it done. My life was one big get-it-done episode. Don’t look at the cost to the individual. Just get it done!

This brings me to a lesson I have learned over the years. When I was younger, my sole vision in life was to pursue a goal. It didn’t matter if I had fun pursuing it; I just needed to meet that goal. In my later years, I took a different approach. I began to enjoy the ride and not worry about pursuing goals or preparing for the future. That was also a mistake. I have presently found it is important to strike a balance. We must have goals and prepare for the future, but it is just as important to enjoy the pursuance of those goals and preparations. Certainly, we can’t always do what we want and still gain the prize at the end. But, at the same time, we shouldn’t be miserable all the time in trying to gain that prize. It’s often the case anyway, when we reach our goals, that we find out they aren’t quite as pretty or enjoyable as we thought they’d be. Sometimes it takes awhile for this reality to set in, but it always does. We need to set our destination and enjoy the ride on the way there.

Our house was about fifteen years old when my wife died, so some areas were in need of redecorating, things like wallpaper and paint. It had two and a half baths. The half bath was off the mudroom at the garage entrance. A full bath was between the living room and the bedrooms, just off the hall. The bathroom in question was the master bath.

When we built the house, we had no children. It was my wife’s fault, we figured. She was the one who had polyglandular autoimmune syndrome. This is a disease where the antibodies in the blood think that the glands in your body aren’t supposed to be there. As a result, they continuously attack the hormone-producing glands. These attacks, in turn, cause the glands not to produce or not to produce the proper quantity of hormones.

We found out about this disease a year or two before we built our house, which was also immediately after taking a two-week vacation in Michigan. Our travels began south of Detroit, then up the eastern coastline along Lake Huron and on to Mackinac. After visiting the island, we proceeded over the bridge on to the Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie. From there, we traveled west to many and various waterfalls. Some of the waterfalls were quite a hike into the woods. I noticed she didn’t keep up with me as well as I would have liked, but I wrote it off to the fact that she was a girl. After visiting these waterfalls, Picture Rock, and the Iron Mountain iron mine, we headed back home. We traveled along Michigan’s western coastline along Lake Michigan, through the Sleeping Bear sand dunes, and then the Silver Lake sand dunes. It was cherry season, so we always had sweet cherries to munch on that we purchased at the many roadside stands.

For dinner, we stopped at a restaurant on the water. The dock extended over the Lake Michigan shore, making a very nice dinner scene. Afterward, we drove south to Holland, Michigan. There we admired the beautiful tulips and the famous windmill in the middle of the miniature Dutch town. We then proceeded to cross Michigan eastward. We stopped at a few book manufacturers, including Baker Books and Erdmann’s, for I had become quite the bookworm. In high school, however, I hated to read.

I embarrassingly recall my senior year English composition class, where I ignorantly selected the book Dracula to give a book report on. I had always enjoyed horror movies and figured I’d like this book, even though it was very thick. I soon found that reading horror was nowhere near as enjoyable as watching it. I recall standing at the front of the class giving my book report, but the only thing I really remember about the whole episode was the teacher asking me if I read the book. My answer was one of the most embarrassing moments of my young life when I replied, Some of it. I got a D for dumb as a grade.

When my wife and I finally made it home, she began complaining of her extreme fatigue. After a day or two, it was so severe that I decided to take her to the clinic. The doctor told us she had the flu and just needed to rest. Two days later, when I came home