Just Say Hello: The Ordinary Dates of My Sometimes Difficult and Sometimes Remarkable (But Always Interesting) Days (And Nights)

By Paul Orshan

The book is autobiographical. It is about many things, including family and growing up, raising and losing a child with special needs, marriage and divorce, single fatherhood, addiction and recovery, coming out after fifty, professionalism, bankruptcy, changing bad habits, and looking for love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546223528

Paul Orshan

Paul Orshan is an attorney living in Miami, Florida, where he was born and raised. He is the father of three. His oldest daughter, Amanda, who had severe special needs, passed away in 2015, and she was the impetus for this book. He raised his other two children Max and Emily mostly full-time following his divorce in 2008. He is a recovering person (twelve step) and clean for over thirty-three years. Following his divorce, he embraced his truth and came out as a gay man. Orshan has received numerous accolades and honors as a prominent bankruptcy attorney in his community. Unfortunately, facing a difficult financial situation after his divorce, he ended up having to file his own bankruptcy case. He loves to travel and is looking forward to exploring the world as he approaches the next phase of his life.

Book preview

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2018 Paul Orshan. 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 01/17/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2354-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2353-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2352-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018900082

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

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

Prologue

Chapter 1    March 12, 1992, or What to Expect When Your Baby Doesn’t Smile

Chapter 2    January 31, 2015, or Goodbye, Sweet Amanda

Chapter 3    August 24, 1992, or Saint Andrew?

Chapter 4    May 25, 1993, and November 27, 1995, or Family Matters

Chapter 5    November 7, 1956, to June 6, 1984, or Did a Cherry Cola Kill Grandma Anne? and Other Childhood Nightmares

Chapter 6    June 6, 1984, or Sometimes You Can’t Save Your Face and Your Ass at the Same Time

Chapter 7    August 1985 to May 1988, or The Paper Chase

Chapter 8    April 1, 2009, to May 31, 2009, or Whack a Mole

Chapter 9    December 29, 1990, to February 6, 2008, or The Deponent

Chapter 10  October 27, 1988, to the Present, or Knowing What I Don’t Know

Chapter 11    Today, or Living the Principles and Breaking Bad (Habits)

Epilogue: Undated, or Where Do I Go From Here?

This book is dedicated to my sweet daughter, Amanda, to my amazing other children, Emily and Max, to our family, to my parents who nurtured my love of words and books, and to all those special families like ours, who struggle in silence day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year to love, protect, and help their own special children and families. It is also dedicated to my dear friends and family who have shared parts of my journey in recovery and in life.

Prologue

I guess I am just a regular guy who has been through a lot in one lifetime. I am not famous (although a Google search will reveal some of the events described in this book). My friends have often told me that the many things I have been through in my somewhat ordinary life might make for a worthy story to share with others. So I have decided to tell that story, which may (or may not) help another person (or persons) who may (or may not) be just like me, namely, a gay man who struggled with his sexuality and came out later in life; a person recovering from addiction, as I have been since 1984; a parent of a child with special needs who passed away at the age of twenty-two; a newly out gay parent who raised two other teens mostly on his own following a divorce; a bankruptcy lawyer who ended up filing his own bankruptcy case; an out gay man trying (and usually failing) to navigate the world of online dating; and a man who started falling in love, maybe for the first time, with another man at sixty and began making plans to possibly move to a foreign country to start a new life with that man. I hope that this story might resonate with others who have lived through similar experiences (although it would be rather shocking to find another man who has been through all of the same things I have experienced).

I wrote this book with no expectation of it ever being published or read by anyone. I started to write (and lost) the beginnings of what would become this book sometime between 1995 and 1998, to the best of my foggy recollection of that period in my life. I began the now decades-long journey of creating this book back then for the hopefully cathartic purpose of exploring and sharing my feelings about being the father and family member of a child with severe special needs. The working title then was a takeoff on the What to Expect … series of books for new parents, and is now the subtitle of chapter 1. The original five or six chapters I wrote disappeared in the computer where I had saved them, before there was a cloud I could use for that purpose. The second attempt began shortly after the death of that same child in 2015. I tried to recreate the early chapters I had written almost twenty years earlier, and I began adding the events that had happened since, including the emotional funeral service and its aftermath. I reworked the potential title a few times once I began to work on this project again two years later, and I came up with this final version of the title for this book in the early morning hours of April 22, 2017, when I also wrote this prologue. The story about where the title Just Say Hello came from is told in the second chapter, about Amanda’s passing. But as I continued with this project and dream of writing a book, I realized that my process of learning about myself did not begin and end with Amanda and our difficulties with having a child with severe special needs. Being the father of both Emily and Max has also shaped and molded me in ways that I cannot begin to describe. Emily, my second child, has always been a beautiful, creative, street smart, caring, stubborn, tough and sometimes wild young person. Max, my youngest, is handsome, intelligent, loyal, organized and an amazing friend. I see a lot of myself in both of them. I am an incredibly proud dad.

I accept that I have lived an extraordinary life in many ways, shaped by a number of specific events that occurred (or began or ended) on particular dates. Many of the dates, which I have used as the chapter headings of my life’s story, are exact dates, and some are based on my best recollection (and perhaps a review of calendars for the years in which I think these things happened). The events and my reactions to them are all true. As someone in twelve-step recovery, I remember how much it bothered me when James Frey, allegedly a recovering person, wrote a book featured on Oprah’s Book Club (A Million Little Pieces) and later had to face the humiliation of admitting to an unhappy Oprah that some of the events included in his book were not true. I strongly believe in honesty, which is perhaps the main tenet of recovery and the spiritual principle behind the first of the twelve steps.

I have never really understood what someone means when they declare they are being 100 percent honest, or even simply that they are being honest. When I hear that, I immediately become suspicious that everything l just heard (or am about to hear) will not be truthful. For me, honesty should never be declared, and it can never be a degree or percentage; a person is either being honest or is not. I may need to apologize, or even make amends, for some of my behaviors or things I write about, but I will never have to apologize because I have not been completely truthful. My insistence on total honesty is the likely reason I am unable to write fiction, although it could also be my lack of imagination.

I have used only first names or descriptions of people, mostly to protect the anonymity of some friends and of the many amazing recovering people who have been involved in the events of my days (anonymity being another vital underpinning of recovery).

I struggled with whether or not to include some unflattering stories about my ex-wife and the mother of my children. I chose to write about some of them because omitting them would feel dishonest, and there would be important pieces missing from the jigsaw puzzle that is my life. I don’t intend to hurt her or anyone, but these things happened—and the truth is the truth. Unfortunately, my publisher demanded that I get a release from her, which she agreed to sign, then refused to sign, then agreed to sign, then refused to sign, and so on. I finally got that release, in exchange for agreeing to remove some of the events from this narrative, but rather than deleting those stories, I have told my truth without all of the details. Perhaps I can write about them down the road.

I have also changed some of the dates (or the dates are just wrong) because I have misremembered them (my second favorite word ever, used by the baseball pitcher Roger Clemens during his testimony to Congress about his alleged use of steroids). My favorite word, actually a non-word, also comes from a sports figure. The boxer Mike Tyson once said he was going to fade into Bolivian, although it seems he was in oblivion for a while there. I may misremember some dates due to my creeping case of what I call sometimer’s disease, as I have arrived at that age where my formerly sharp memory has begun to slip and I sometimes don’t remember all of the details. The dates used as chapter headings are intentionally not in any particular order, because when I think about the events of my lifetime, those thoughts never appear in any chronological order; they are rather random.

I have long thought about becoming a writer, but I never really knew exactly what I wanted to write about. Rather than just writing about something, or anything, which is what real writers are supposed to do (I think), I did nothing (other than writing the ten- to twenty-page books and plays I wrote in elementary school). I finally started the process of trying to become a real writer when I made those earlier attempts to write about the birth, life, and death of our sweet Amanda. Although those are among the most significant events that I (and my family and friends) have had to process, and although those events shaped my perspective in many ways, writing about only those events would paint an incomplete picture of me and my life, who I really am, and the influences that have molded and shaped me into the man I have become.

I must make a couple of admissions and share some thoughts about my writing style, to the extent I actually have one. As can probably be gleaned from this prologue (unless some editor became involved in the review of this book and forced me to stop doing some of these things) I am a huge fan of sarcasm, long sentences, parentheses, the ellipsis, and beginning sentences with the word And. First, I always hope that my sarcasm is the witty kind rather than the caustic or mean-spirited kind. Second, I admit that I am a fan of what many people from my generation will recognize as the R.O.S. (run-on-sentence), and in my mind I can still see the R.O.S. written by many teachers in large red letters on essays or papers I wrote in elementary and junior high school. Those dreaded initials in red ink clearly had little effect on me. And although I do like long sentences, I also believe in the adage less is more, which comes from years of legal writing, reading the way-too-long legal submissions of other lawyers, and hearing many judges at seminars advise lawyers to stop writing so much. When I am writing, I can almost hear those judges urging lawyers to just get to it. Third, I guess my use of parentheses is the product of nearly thirty years of legal writing and reading, where explanation and persuasion are key. Fourth, as I think about it, my use (and admitted overuse) of the ellipsis seemed to evolve while writing long texts to guys I was communicating with on some dating or hook-up site during my failed online predatory hunting years. Fifth, I have no idea why I like beginning sentences with And … I just do. So I will take the advice of those judges and just get it to it.

This is my story, borne during the ordinary dates of my sometimes remarkable and sometimes difficult (but always interesting) days (and nights).

Chapter 1

March 12, 1992, or What to Expect When Your Baby Doesn’t Smile

On March 12, 1992, Amanda was born. The subtitle, What to Expect When Your Baby Doesn’t Smile, was the working title of this book when I started it twenty years ago. I begin this journey with Amanda’s birth because, in many ways, that singular event and its effect on all areas of my life and the lives of my family has shaped me more than any other. And since Amanda was always the inspiration for this book, it seems like a good place to jump off.

It was the first pregnancy for Amanda’s mom. Only later, when she was pregnant with Emily and Max, did she realize that Amanda’s movement in the womb was very limited. Perhaps if we had understood what a baby’s movement should feel like, we might have sought medical help and considered terminating the pregnancy, as an amniocentesis would have revealed that Amanda had a deletion of bands 13–22 on chromosome 5. We did not learn about that deletion until Amanda was about four months old. Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t know. Make one change in your history and it snowballs into all areas—like It’s a Wonderful Life. I would not be the person and dad and friend I am today had I not been Amanda’s father. I would not have learned that the only truly important thing is health. Everything else is secondary.

When Amanda was five months old, we received the diagnosis that she would likely be profoundly impaired for life. At that time, we learned that both our families had a relative in the distant past with some sort of special needs or impairment. In the 1950s and 1960s, a child such as Amanda probably would have been raised in an institution. [Children like her were warehoused and hidden, not to be seen or heard, as in the movie Rain Man.] In the 1970s, there was a shift to community-based care for children like Amanda, followed by a shift to homecare in the 1980s and 1990s. There was never any doubt that she would stay with us. But had we known about those family secrets, we likely would have had an amnio and learned about Amanda’s diagnosis. We did have all the testing done with Emily and Max in utero, and those pregnancies were treated as high risk. So although there were untold secrets in both families, I harbor no ill will for not being informed.

The big day came after the actual due date. We were so excited—or at least the one of us who did not have to pass a child through his body was excited—but Amanda refused to come out, and we later understood why. Her birth was induced, and the labor was long. Although I had been to all of the classes and seen the films, nothing could have prepared me for the fact that my daughter was born purplish blue. As soon as she was pulled out, things immediately became chaotic. She was whisked away quickly, with a high Apgar score (a method to quickly summarize the health of a newborn) of something like 9 out of 10. I was momentarily a proud dad, because I thought that seemed like a pretty high score. Since I was always pretty good at tests, I wanted to pass that on to my offspring. But I heard almost no sound from her, not even crying—nothing.

Amanda was taken to the neonatal intensive care unit, where she spent the first week of her life. No one said she would be impaired. In fact, no one at that time said there was anything seriously wrong with her. All they told us was that there was a pinprick-size hole in her lung that needed to heal. Months later, my mom told me that she knew right away something wasn’t right with our baby. My mom had four kids of her own, and Amanda was the seventh of the eleven grandkids she would have. She could see it in Amanda’s eyes. She couldn’t tell us then, but I know her heart was breaking.

Shortly after Amanda was born, I went into a bathroom in the hospital, hit my knees, and through streaming tears and sobs asked God to please make Amanda okay. At this point, I had been clean and in recovery for nearly eight years and had developed a relationship with a higher power of my understanding. I had adapted the daily habit of dropping to my knees and praying to this undefined power. I asked for help to stay