I never talked much about my divorce. Not to friends or family or even my three daughters from that marriage. There was so much of what followed that I did not understand myself. If someone doesn't understand a thing themselves, then they cannot explain it to others.
The marriage was clearly over. I think we both knew that. I was actually the one who eventually left, taking the children with me. After many false starts and stops, I got an apartment for us, and he actually helped me move out of the place we had shared. He was clearly relieved. I think being married and being a father was never a good match for him.
The real mystery is not in the divorce. The thing that cannot be explained is why it is that after that, he chose to completely abandon his entire family. Take me out of that equation. He had a mother who had been so good to him and loved him. He had a brother. He had three children. Nieces and nephews. But he left without explanation. He did not even come back for his mother's funeral.
After the divorce, on Christmas day in 1979, I took the three girls to Grandma's house, because their father was going to be there and of course, they wanted to see him. I have checked with them, and they have little memories of that. Only the oldest has some memory, which was not positive. He did not really interact with any of us. At any rate, that was the last time that we saw him.
Then came the phone call all the many many years later, out of the blue, that he had died.
We had all speculated about where he had been, what he had been doing. His brother Robert may have had some insight into that. But our speculation turned out to be spot on.
I thought maybe he could have re-married, worked, had more children. When he "retired" from the Army he was only 43 years old! There was no evidence of any of that.
But the trail of paperwork in his car confirmed our suspicions. He had been traveling from military base to military base, staying at guest housing. He would occasionally catch a military flight, and go to Hong Kong, Thailand, Germany, Costa Rica. There was an assortment of coins from various places.
When he was not at a military base, he would stay for six months or so at the equivalent of a Motel 6, only it was called Studio 6. He had a permanent address in San Antonio, so he could register a car, do his income taxes. The permanent address was actually a UPS box, that gave a street address and "Suite 101" as the 'permanent' part of the address. He had been a counter-intelligence agent in the Army, so he knew how to do those things, be invisible, not traceable. Also, he always dealt in cash, with a debit card. He had no credit card.
I didn't know what to say about the children's father. About our divorce. About where he was. And so mostly, I said nothing. After a while, you can just push away all those memories from a time long ago, that has nothing to do with your life now.
His death brought a lot of that back. Opened a floodgate.
For a while, following his death, he re-entered with a vengeance and dominated everything.
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